Pirate Bay publishes mysterious ‘encryption’ key

Reverse countdown: A digital clock at thepiratebay.se marks the amount of time since The Pirate Bay has been out of action. Photo: Screenshot: thepiratebay.se

Renegade torrent site The Pirate Bay has added a digital clock and a line of scrambled text, which may be an encryption key, to its website at thepiratebay.se.

On Monday the site, shut down by Swedish police on December 9, showed the first signs of a potential resurrection when it added a looping video of a black pirate flag.

Now a digital clock has been added, showing roughly the amount of time the site has not been available to search for pirated files 14 days and counting.

Another addition is a line of jumbled characters at the bottom of the screen: "JyO7wNzc8xht47QKWohfDVj6Sc2qH+X5tBCT+uetocIJcjQnp/2f1ViEBR+ty0Cz".

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Exactly what it means (if anything), or what it's doing there, is anyone's guess.

The URL of the image of the text is "http://thepiratebay.se/aes.png", which may be a referenceto Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

AES is aninternationally agreed-upon standard for encrypting transactions, and is widely used by secure websites such as online banking services, among other things.

If this is an AES key, one theory is that it could be a way for people involved with The Pirate Bay to communicate with each other, or send data including pirated material privately.

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Pirate Bay publishes mysterious 'encryption' key