Hey, something’s happening in China vis-à-vis piracy! The country’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has been fiddling with downloads there for the past few days, and people are complaining that they’re not about to access the content they were once able to.

Pretty big news to share with y’all today: The Pirate Bay is no more. Well, “no more” in the sense that the site’s admins have decided to kill the tracker once and for all. The site will continue to serve the BitTorrent community, but will instead rely upon trackerless technology, such as DHT and PEX.

Apologies for the headline, but it was too appropriate to resist. It seems that there is a feature of uTorrent 2.0 now in beta that automatically detects network congestion and self-limits bandwidth to lessen it. This might provide some much-needed relief to ISPs that feel a disproportionate amount of traffic is P2P. I’m not sure whether to call this self-policing action capitulation or accommodation, but either way it probably needed to happen.

Hey, remember Hulu.com? It was a Web site that sort of came out of nowhere, and offered streaming TV shows from NBC and other networks. It was ad-supported, and free. People liked it. And then, one day, in October, 2009, a completely bonkers TV executive all but killed it with one sentence: “It’s time to start getting paid for broadcast content online.”

More news about The Pirate Bay to bore you all! (Seriously, it’s not like people are still talking about the old Suprnova or Torrentspy anymore, yet the TPB has stuck around.) Some time ago, a Dutch court ordered TPB to delete a number of torrents and block Dutch IP addresses from being able to visit the site. Using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, yes. Then TPB protested, as it does all the time, saying that it had no idea about the court case to begin with, so it couldn’t make a proper defense, etc. The Dutch court agreed to give TPB a a little bit of time to work out its issues, and has now reached another, similar verdict: remove the torrents, and block Dutch IP addresses. Fun all around, really.

I think we’ve all had our fill of The Pirate Bay stories, but here’s one more in the interest of killing five minutes. The site moved its servers from Sweden to Ukraine last week, and rather than have its servers being stored in some random server farm, they’re being stored in a former NATO nuclear bunker. So we think, at least.

What’s wrong with sites like Hulu? Well nothing, per se, except for the fact that they can’t be used anywhere outside of the Unites States. As if other countries don’t want to watch… um, really great shows like “Extreme Makeover” and “The [American] Office”! Perhaps that’s why, then, BitTorrent site EZTV has seen traffic double, mainly from non-American IPs, in the past year? For whatever reason, people want to watch these shows, but since there’s no legal outlet to do so, well, it’s not exactly hard to configure uTorrent or Transmission, now is it?

At ease, soldiers. The Pirate Bay is back in the Google search index. I understand this was eating at your very soul for some time now.

The Pirate Bay just can’t catch a break these days. I won’t bore you with the past, but today’s juicy gossip is: Google has removed The Pirate Bay from its search index because of a DMCA complaint!

Lost in all the Apple hoopla yesterday: the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay was just thrown off the Swedish stock exchange. Still think the deal is going down?

Social this, social that. Looks like everything is being socialized these days—but not the American health care system, zing!—so it only makes sense for someone to try to socialize BitTorrent. It doesn’t hurt when that “someone” is the people behind IsoHunt, who just launched Hexagon.cc, a message board/social network hybrid built around sharing content.

It’s not even a story any more that Apple loves to reject Apps from the App Store. Today’s entry in the Big Book of App Rejections is µMonitor, an App that monitors µTorrent that you have running on your PC. Apple rejected it because “this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights.”

Years from now, when the history of BitTorrent-related Internet piracy is written, there will have to be at least one chapter devoted to The Pirate Bay. It showed up just as the likes of Suprnova and LokiTorrent were being shut down, and quickly became the go-to place for, shall we say, the less savvy BitTorrent user. It also became a symbol of the copyright reform movement, though the site’s cavalier attitude toward any sort of authority ultimately led to its undoing. (The whole “we’re untouchable!” gimmick the site had played up was, we can now say, ill advised.)

Oh, God. Well, it looks like Global Gaming Foundation X, the company that wanted to buy The Pirate Bay, has approved the acquisition. All the financing is in place (the deal will be financed by GGF itself, which means that nobody else wanted anything to do with the deal), and GGF is ready to roll, officially. Total price: 60 million Swedish kroner, or about $8.3 million. In the immortal words of Greg “Opie” Hughes, “Good luck, bro.”

Scratch one Web site off that “alternative to The Pirate Bay” list. Mininova has been ordered by a Dutch court to remove all links to copyrighted items from its servers, or face fines to the tune of €5 million. You get the feeling that the era of BitTorrent as we know it is about to end, don’t you?

You need only one word to describe The Pirate Bay. It comes from the Ancient Greek, is six letters long, and entered the English language in 1884, some 120 years before the Web site’s founding. When The Pirate Bay starts to compare its struggles to those of Western Europe during World War II—you know, the struggle against Nazi Germany—only one word is needed. That word is hubris, and if it were possible to die from hubris, The Pirate Bay would have already expired. Hopefully there’s no such thing as copyright in Heaven (or Hell).

You know how on the Internet, after something particularly stupid happens, someone says, “I lol’d”? Well, I lol’d after reading the following two sentences: “There is uncertainty surrounding the purchase of file-sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) by Swedish-based Global Gaming Factory (GGF). Trading in GGF shares has been suspended and there are reports that the firm’s chairman—Magnus Bergman—has resigned.”

This goes to show you just how quickly someone will replace The Pirate Bay if it ever goes “legit.” As you’re probably aware, someone downloaded every single torrent fie hosted on TPB’s servers; that torrent file was the uploaded back to TPB, where it’s now being seeded from hundreds of sources. What’s new is that someone took that copy of TPB and uploaded it to another Web site, creating, in essence, a copy of TPB.

You might like to know that The Pirate Bay has been ordered to shut down in the Netherlands. That is, courts there would like to prevent people from inside the land of orange from accessing the site. Of course, The Pirate Bay, when they found out* about the case, denied all wrongdoing.

Not for nothing, but it looks like the sale of The Pirate Bay may well be in jeopardy. You’ll recall that the site announced last month that it had found a buyer in Global Gaming Factory. The deal was predicated on the ability of GGF to come up with nearly $7 million, which now doesn’t look all that certain.