All sites like the Pirate Bay have the problem of either being banned by Internet providers or shut down by countries which host them.
I believe they have even started looking into putting a Bittorrent tracker (or index) in orbit, which does not help immensely since something on the ground needs to connect to it.
I propose an alternate method which (in a very half-baked fashion) works as follows:
1) User/Client searches ThePirateBay.org (or similar site) for content, uploads public key as part of its search
2) Server locates content and IP addresses of peers that contain pieces of it
3) Server uplinks IP addresses from previous step to satellite or shortwave broadcast system (some sort of out-of-band communication which does not employ the Internet)
4) Satellite (or shortwave radio broadcast system) globally broadcasts IP addresses of peers hosting desired content, encrypted with the requester's private key (in order to prevent real-time blacklisting by third parties/censors)
5) Client receives and decodes list of peers via inexpensive (preferably home-built) shortwave or satellite receiver attached to the computer
The protocol could be refined to eliminate single points of failure by having multiple index sites for clients to connect to that have full Internet connectivity and some way of reaching the out-of-band communication point (satellite, SW tower, etc.). The protocol could be designed to scale globally since radiowave component of the protocol only needs to transmit very small packets of information (lists of peers)
This, of course, is a very back-handed way of getting to new Linux ISOs ...-- cowtamer, Oct 23 2010 The problem with this, which by the way i've bunned, is that you need a licence for short wave radio and the signals can be triangulated so Babylon can still get you. Satellite transmission - isn't there a problem with big chunks and long pauses or something?
What i was going to say, because i looked into this recently, is that you can at least do this via UHF frequencies with very low bandwidth and local-ish networks.-- nineteenthly, Oct 23 2010 Low bandwidth or high latency shouldn't be a problem if all we're doing here is tracking. Perhaps steganography is the answer.-- Spacecoyote, Oct 23 2010 Maybe steganography embedded in sound or video files?-- nineteenthly, Oct 23 2010 Maybe someone burns a disk and ships it to you.-- Alx_xlA, Oct 23 2010 If you're going to broadcast globally, maybe you could substitute a simple IP multicast for bittorrent?-- NoOneYouKnow, Oct 25 2010 random, halfbakery