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If you’re having trouble accessing The Pirate Bay this week, the reasons is very simple: You’re still unnecessarily adding in the www prefix when you type in a URL. It appears this prefix requirement has been dropped from The Pirate Bay’s domains, and because there is no redirect, users are getting errors.
We say “domains” in plural because The Pirate Bay recently started redirecting users from its infamous thepiratebay.se domain to six other domains. Update: The following four still work: thepiratebay.mn, thepiratebay.gd, thepiratebay.vg, and thepiratebay.la (In addition to .gs, the .am domain is dead as well). This was a reaction to a Stockholm District Court decision last month ordering that the domains thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se be seized.
This redirect sometimes breaks, but you can just pick one of the four and go there manually. Just remember not to type in www.
Otherwise, you’ll get errors like these (Chrome on the left, Firefox on the right):
If you click on Details in Chrome, Google’s browser correctly explains the DNS lookup failed. “DNS is the network service that translates a website’s name to its Internet address. This error is most often caused by having no connection to the Internet or a misconfigured network. It can also be caused by an unresponsive DNS server or a firewall preventing Google Chrome from accessing the network.”
Firefox gets a bit closer to a solution, at least in the first point: “Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com.” Mozilla may want to update that part to suggesting removing www entirely.
If you still have www in any of your bookmarks, update them. Most websites don’t require www anymore, and they simply redirect users that still include the extra characters.
As noted by TorrentFreak, the problems are only affecting URLs with a www prefix. It’s currently unclear why the corresponding DNS entries were updated to make the www links inaccessible.
If you want to make sure The Pirate Bay is working correctly, you can always visit SuprBay, The Pirate Bay’s forums, and check the status page.
