The Pirate Bay has been around for a long time; the first incarnation of the site appeared in November 2001. It has undergone more than a few hosting and Web address changes, but like the proverbial Ship of Theseus, TPB lives on, and is hosting some seriously vintage torrents.
TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay’s oldest active torrents are just over 10 years old — the oldest is ‘Top Secret Recipes E-books’, uploaded by a user called Wallis; it was his or her only contribution to TPB under that name.
When TorrentFreak first reported the news yesterday, the torrent only had seven seeds and zero leechers, but by now it’s slightly more popular with 217 people sharing a complete copy of the file.
Other decade-old torrents in The Pirate Bay’s listings include what is probably porn — ‘Italian Teens Home Video’ — and the Revolution OS documentary, a film charting the birth of GNU, Linux and open source software since the late 1970s. This news actually comes as Demonoid, a BitTorrent tracker brought down after DoS attacks and/or police raids on its servers, has come back online under Philippines hosting. [TorrentFreak]