[svandamme]

piratebay still works for me.
something is up, as many of the torrents are listed with 0 seeders, but they still work, does take some time before they start ticking though..
They are probably moving some gear around, or rebooted something , so the tracker now lists 0 for most of the torrents..

I don't see how they can shutdown bittorrent completely, it can run on any port, and the trackers can be switched over in no time... put one down, 5 others take their place... Big effing deal.
All they need is a backup of the DB... and some other hardware in another location via another uplink...

I expect that in the very near future, somebody will bring out a way to have a site like TPD run distributed as well... A bit like Seti at home..
Then all that's remaining would be a DNS record with a low TTL, with a simple http page pointing to the distributed parts...

The only thing they can really do to stop it, is to block the DNS name at the end user's ISP. Which is a commercial problem, since for many , if blocked, they will change ISP.
And it only work for now, with the distributed model, a user would still be able to snatch the current IP's or http page from a mirror...
(and with the current model, torrents are quite often found on multiple trackers at the same time anyway)

If all that doesn't float yer boat... then encryption can be brought in as a core functionalty ( it's there now in the BTclient , but optional , and not used for the trackers yet).

That's the internet for you, a product of the cold war, designed to work when a hot war came about...
It's designed with redundancy in mind, designed to workaround blockages, crashes and sabotage...