Hours after the popular Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay was shut down last week, the MPAA and Pirate Bay's owners issued nearly-simultaneous statements. The MPAA's was a press release celebrating the raid, while The Pirate Bay's owners vowed to quickly return. Someone (it may even have been your humble geek editor) wrote, "The MPAA, still basking in the masturbatory afterglow of their gloating press release, will have to clean up and go back to playing whack-a-mole in a few days."

That sound you just heard is the MPAA picking up thousands of rubber mallets, because The Pirate Bay is back in business.

All is not smooth sailing, however. Users report that most trackers are not working, and there is much speculation that the trackers are being filtered or otherwise tampered with, at the MPAA and RIAA's behest, though this is denied by at least one of the site's admins, who gave himself the really cool hacker nickname "Peter."

"Peter" told Wired News that the Pirate Bay's admins have been anticipating this sort of action for quite some time, and as a result made frequent backups of the site so they'd be prepared to move it when the eventual shutdown happened.