Strange developments are afoot at The Pirate Bay, the torrent site that went down after its servers were seized in Sweden nearly two weeks ago.

Yesterday, the site sported a looping video background of a black pirate flag. Today, The Sunday Morning Herald reports that a digital clock has been added, showing the amount of time since The Pirate Bay last went down. More interesting, however, is a string of characters at the bottom of the home page.

The string reads ‘JyO7wNzc8xht47QKWohfDVj6Sc2qH+X5tBCT+uetocIJcjQnp/2f1ViEBR+ty0Cz’ and is a graphic overlaid on top of the video. The graphic’s file name is ‘aes.png’, which is interesting because AES is an encryption standard that requires the use of complex digital keys to lock and unlock data.

The Sunday Morning Herald speculates that the string is intended for people involved with The Pirate Bay to communicate privately or to share data securely. However, if this string is indeed an encryption key and can be seen by the public, it’s possible that these users are on a private network of some kind. It’s also possible that the key is there simply to confound and mislead visitors.

When we visited the site ourselves, the string of characters was still there, but the clock had been removed. Secretive as they are, we’ll have to wait and see exactly what The Pirate Bay has up its sleeve.

Update: It appears that the character string is a BitTorrent Sync key, that grants access to a bunch of folders, along with a text file that reads thusly:

“=========== W A R N I N G ===========

I’m setting up a script to move all files at the root of this directory to “__Unsorted”. So make sure you stick to the README.txt. That is: – Try to keep everything organized, as TPB used to. With categories like Video, Music, Games, Software, and so on. – Anyone willing to help organize stuff is welcome to do so. However, if you want to do so, you guys should use a VPS with highspeed Internet, there’s lots of GB of stuff being deleted and uploaded at the same time.”

That could mean that someone is trying to rebuild The Pirate Bay’s torrent directory, with the help of others who are in the loop. We’ll keep an eye on things and update the post when we know more.

Update 2: Another character string has been added to the left side of the homepage, which is a magnet link to download a 1080p copy of The Interview. A cartoon image of what appears to be Kim Jong-Un is also overlaid on top of the flag on the homepage now. The Pirate Bay site currently looks like this:

➤ Pirate Bay publishes mysterious ‘encryption’ key [The Sunday Morning Herald]

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