Missing Pirate Bay founders tracked down

IDG News Service - Illness and legal advice stopped two founders of The Pirate Bay from speaking at the Hack in the Box security conference on Wednesday.

Neither Peter "brokep" Sunde nor Fredrik "tiamo" Neij made the trip to Kuala Lumpur for the event. Sunde was ill with a stomach bug and Neij was advised by his lawyer not to make the trip, according to Hack in the Box founder Dhillon Andrew Kannabhiran.

"We did manage to reach Tiamo, who told us that due to his recent passport situation, his lawyer advised that perhaps it might not be the best idea to head over to a high-profile congregation of the world's hackers so soon after," Kannabhiran said.

It's the 10th year that Hack in the Box has been held and more than 1,000 people are attending this week. Two days of technical sessions are followed by some of the world's top security gurus speaking on Wednesday and Thursday.

Sunde told the file-sharing blog TorrentFreak he had been ill since a recent trip to Lebanon. Neij only recovered his Swedish passport last week after the country's embassy in Bangkok revoked it. TorrentFreak said he was reluctant to travel just yet.

"While we're of course disappointed not to have two more friends join us, we're thankful that their non-appearance is not due to more dire reasons and we'll party with them on our 15th anniversary instead," Kannabhiran said.

Sunde and Neij were both key figures in The Pirate Bay, a website that indexes "torrents," or small information files that allow users to download content circulating on the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing system. They both received jail time in Sweden for copyright-related violations.

Despite legal efforts by the entertainment industry in a number of countries to shut the site down, The Pirate Bay is still alive and well.

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