After nearly two weeks of downtime the official domain of The Pirate Bay is showing signs of life. For now ThePirateBay.se is only waving a pirate flag, but that's good enough to give many Pirate Bay users hope for a full recovery.

On December 9 The Pirate Bay was raided at the Nacka station, a nuclear-proof data center built into a mountain complex near Stockholm.

Despite the rise of various TPB clones and rumors of reincarnations, thepiratebay.se domain remained inaccessible, until today.

This morning the Pirate Bay’s nameservers were updated to ones controlled by their domain name registrar binero.se

A few minutes ago came another big change when The Pirate Bay’s main domain started pointing to a new IP-address (178.175.135.122) connected to a server hosted in Moldova.

Thus far there’s not much to see. The domain only displays a waving pirate flag, but the recent changes will give many estranged Pirate Bay users hope that the site will be restored to its former glory

The DNS changes haven’t propagated everywhere yet, but soon most people should see the following landing page.

Whether a full comeback is in the works remains a mystery for now. Interestingly, the source of the page shows that the pirate flag is hosted by Isohunt.to’s “Open Bay” site where it serves as a background.

TorrentFreak asked both the Pirate Bay and Isohunt.to crews for a comment, thus far without a response. It could be that TPB and Isohunt.to are collaborating on something, hopefully we’ll hear more on that soon.

A few days ago Isohunt.to launched “The Open Bay” initiative, which allows anyone to run a “copy” of The Pirate Bay. The TPB crew previously said that it would like to see as many clones as possible, so perhaps the domain will link to that for the time being.

“We’ve always lived by Kopimi. We love being cloned. It would be amazing if, like in the classic movie Spartacus, everyone could stand up and say “I am The Pirate Bay,” TPB’s Mr 10100100000 told us earlier.

Time will tell whether Pirate Bay’s “comeback” will be a full one, an encouragement for people to start their own clones, or something completely different.

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Update: Thepiratebay.se A records now appear to be empty.

Update: The page also includes and ad code, so people may see popups and other nasty stuff.

Update: Isohunt.to responded and says it has nothing to do with the ‘comeback.’

“They simply included the video from our domain. And right now we have no idea what the TPB crew want to say by this,” Isohunt.to tells us.

Update: TPB added a clock/timer to the site now (using Flipclock) counting the time that’s passed since the raid (approximately, as the counter is relative to the visitor’s time).

Update: The JyO7wNzc8xht47QKWohfDVj6Sc2qH+X5tBCT+uetocIJcjQnp/2f1ViEBR+ty0Cz AES string looks ‘promising’ http://thepiratebay.se/aes.png (yes someone may have created a BitTorrent Sync key with the same characters. This was almost certainly created after it appeared on TPB, so nothing official).

Update: And there’s a Hydra image now… “/pipe.png” class=”sneakyhint” A reference to TPB’s previous hydra mentions.

Breaking story, updates may follow.