Popular BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay is one of many joining in with today’s “blackout” protests against a new media law approved in Hungary. The law allows Hungarian publications to be fined for violating public order, which could require journalists to reveal their sources.
The blackout campaign is being publicised through blackout4hungary.net, which encourages other sites to take part in the protest by adding black banners or stylesheets to their sites. The blackout4hungary.net site appears to have taken the blackout concept a step further and is currently offline, although this may just be a consequence of the large amount of traffic being driven to the site through hyperlinks and hotlinked stylesheets.
The Pirate Bay is currently hosted in Germany and uses the lighttpd web server. The site has nearly 5 million registered users and claims to be “the world’s most resilient BitTorrent”; however, the site’s availability has been somewhat choppy since Tuesday.