Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-becomes-raid-proof-121017/

by anons2011 • 14 years ago

148 71 14 years ago

mariusmg• 14 years ago

Isn't it enough to take down the DNS servers to make TPB unusable for sharing (at least to add new torrents) ?

Achieving fault tolerance using a few cloud providers is nice (and expensive) but they're still far from raid proof (all it takes is some coordination from police in multiple countries).

kennu• 14 years ago

According to the article the main vulnerability would be the load-balancer, which is hosted separately. Traffic between it and the cloud instances is encrypted, so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay.

moe• 14 years ago

so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay.

When the IP addresses of the 'loadbalancers' are known then it takes any cloud-provider the better part of 5 minutes to determine which of their instances are exchanging how much traffic with those IP addresses.

However, if a country really wants to go ballistic on TPB then it'd be much easier to just knock their public-facing IPs out at the IX-level[1]. A fairly low-cost operation (if your legislation enables it) and the only circumvention is then to proxy through a different country - a significant barrier for most users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_point...

fragmede• 14 years ago

It's an increasingly technical digital game of whack-a-mole, and the mole has completed another burrow.

There are still technical measures that could be taken with-in one country. Eg. automated null-routing of A records for thepiratebase.se (and then do it N-times a second).

jacquesm• 14 years ago

All it takes is for some political body to lean heavily enough on the TLD registry. .se and .org are no more invulnerable to this than .com

Toshio• 14 years ago

In the case of a DNS takedown, all it would take would be for The Pirate Bay to publish a browser extension that stores a few IP addresses and "drops in" whenever the user attempts to acces thepiratebay.se.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

Savvy users in parts of Europe (Denmark, I believe) are already just adding an /etc/hosts entry to do exactly this.

That doesn't solve the problem of the IP address itself changing, but then you need some system of distributing the updated IP addresses whenever they change. Which would require inventing a distributed lookup system....hmm... this is starting to sound familiar....!

sgt• 14 years ago

Unless they raid the cloud...?

rmc3• 14 years ago

(a) You have to find out what cloud provider

(b) You have to raid 2 cloud providers

(c) what if they have 4 backup cloud installs ready to go live? You take out the 2 there, and then 2 more in a different, unknown hosting company go live.

Achshar2• 14 years ago

Also they don't get any useful data as all data on cloud providers is encrypted. So providers won't even know they are hosting piratebay.

maeon32• 14 years ago

It's like robin hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his motives are pure, depending on how you look at it, and robin hood can continue this as long as the governing body who wants him dead is inept at catching him. The pirate bay, like robin hood, cannot live forever. SOME of us will only be stronger than ALL of us for brief moments in history. The only way TPB is to survive is for it to make good on its invisibility promise and make both the users and and distributors invisible to those who want it dead. There needs to be a creative mechanism to render the service invisible to those who disagree with its existence, and to render it visible to those who crave data.

It won't matter that TPB is distributed, clouded, encrypted, PTP, or whatever. When the governments are successful in getting SOPA, ACTA or whatever through congress, the ISP's and companies like Google and Apple are going to be made responsible for cooking into their devices preventions for unauthorized copying and unauthorized distribution of 3d schematics for weapons that pass through their ISP's or their hardware. As elite as TPB thinks they are, a few elite hackers can't fight an army of mediocre hackers.

An important factor in TPB living forever is preserving its image in the hearts and minds of ALL hackers everywhere, worldwide, collectively we can outsmart those who wish to catch us, a small group of us will eventually be defeated, as all robin hoods must be. We have to have the hackers on the ground floor who wish TPB to live forever inside Google, Comcast, Apple, HP, MPAA, RIAA, and everywhere else. The battle for control what you can think, what you can do inside the comfort of your own mind is under attack. The battle begins here, with the ownership of what can take place in your computer. Soon these computers will be our minds, and the governments will rule over the thoughts that take place inside them. We will wake up as directive following slaves on the land our fathers conquered. We have to have a 10 and a 50 year plan.

gambiting• 14 years ago

And then they will move exclusively to TOR. And then TOR will be outlawed and anybody using it will be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

S4M• 14 years ago

It's gonna be hard to identify who is usung TOR, and doing so will require to take measures that will be against freedom, like controlling what people are installing on their computers.

SquareWheel• 14 years ago

Somehow I don't think bittorent under TOR would catch on. Unless you don't mind waiting two weeks to watch your new movie.

chmodd• 14 years ago

A handful of countries attempt to block Tor and only two (China and Iran) do it seriously, using deep packet inspection (still doesn't work because of obfsproxy, duh). Even though, not even China and Iran outlawed it.

smiler2• 14 years ago

"It's like robin hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor"

No, really, it's not. For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for.

I really don't get the love for TPB and copyright infringement in general on HN when most are dreaming of starting businesses where you need people to hand over money.

tatsuke95• 14 years ago

>For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for.

So, the Robin Hood analogy works perfectly then.

The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before.

The whole piracy issue is overblown.

maeon32• 14 years ago

The solution is NOT to make the mothership government and computer under your desk the sovreign ruler over what you can and cannot do on your computer, your mind. We are thinking on a decade and century level timescale here.

I don't care if some artist or some coder somewhere doesn't get paid for some work well done. The future of our species is at stake here and we are trying to paint a bright future for your great grandchildren.

A future where your children rule over the machine, not where the machine rules over you. In my machine, I may break the law if I choose to do so. the machine under my desk shall not be made into an iron fist of the government. I will fight this to the death. we have your best interests in mind. the internet is going to become a mind, and we need to protect this baby. It is still an infant.

the government has no idea how to raise it, it only knows how to bleed it and tax it. I give this baby a voice.

strathmeyer• 14 years ago

Actually, it's encouraging people to pay more for entertainment items, such as music, movies, or television.

Retric• 14 years ago

A lot of things on TPB are not up for sale in the first place. It's much like YouTube a tiny slice of content is vary popular and much of that is pirated, but for every "Battle at Kruger" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM theres a lot of Let's Play Unreal World 10(1/2) Buy a Boat http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JOeQJGDgNw.

As to TPB specificly it's think anime fan subs for nitch shows that are never going to be released in the US.

omegaworks2• 14 years ago

>For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for.

You act as though people's consumption of media is this black hole, this void that feeds but produces nothing of value. It can't be further from the truth. People actively market the things they listen to and enjoy. They remix and create new content. They integrate it into their culture and social networks (both the virtual and meatspace ones).

This is value creation at its finest, and yet no dollar amount is placed on it (yet).

JamesLeonis• 14 years ago

What I see here are two larger issues at work of which "Piracy" and TPB happens to be the battleground. The first is the level of control large media conglomerates have over both culture and government. This concept is a dead horse, so I won't beat it here. The other, in more generic terms, is the interesting fight between a service that wants to exist (and the people who want it to exist) and those entities that want that service destroyed.

On a more generic level, the fight between governments and media corporations and the Pirate Bay are interesting from a technological and ideological standpoint; How does a service stay operational against a large and well financed fight that wants to shut it down?

While "Piracy" is the very visible fight, this question is likewise relevant to activists and protesters as well as free speech in repressive governments. It is also relevant to providers that are attacked by malcontents, black hat organizations, and less-than-egalitarian governments that are attempting to disrupt their services.

Whatever you think of TPB, you have to give them credit for being both nimble and technologically savvy in solving a problem of service disruption against what many would see as long odds. They give us an interesting case study of how to deal with service disruption and how it can be dealt with. All the companies that pass through HN have to deal with the problems of Uptime, especially in the case of adversarial situations that are beyond our control.

This particular case is interesting because the service is dealing with a well organized and deliberate attack against it as well as it's users. Downtime due to malicious hackers and automated attacks is a thorny problem. It becomes trickier when we want to protect sensitive customer data.

While I don't expect a detailed technical breakdown of their systems, I would love to read their whitepaper.

Karunamon• 14 years ago

>An important factor in TPB living forever is preserving its image in the hearts and minds of ALL hackers everywhere, worldwide, collectively we can outsmart those who wish to catch us, a small group of us will eventually be defeated, as all robin hoods must be.

Heh, reminds me of the Hacker's Manifesto..

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html

grecy• 14 years ago

> a few elite hackers can't fight an army of mediocre hackers

Current events prove otherwise.

jakejake• 14 years ago

Well perhaps they are arguably robbing the rich, but they're certainly not paying the poor.

The reason I don't like TPB is not because of pirating, but rather they are making money from others' work while pretending its about freedom.

It especially annoys me to see fellow programmers getting extremely upset when a software authors work is copied or used in violation with their chosen license. Yet musicians are not allowed to speak up when their work is copied or else they're labeled as greedy and out of touch.

lumberjack• 14 years ago

>but they're certainly not paying the poor.

How so? A lot of the stuff on TPB would be too expensive for the lowest class of working Americans and much more so for most of the rest of the world. It's true that the TPB are profiting out of it (though they are offering a service and covering a market in their own right) but you make it seem like the users are getting nothing out of it. That's blatantly false. A significant part of the 3rd world's technological infrastructure is built on pirated software.

arocks• 14 years ago

So we can expect Cloud Computing Regulations to be framed later this year?

m0skit0• 14 years ago

Nice article, I absolutely agree!

smogzer• 14 years ago

They have to do it like this:

- emule like dht.

- keep a cache of 1000 of ips that had trustworthy content in different ip neighbourhoods.

- provide a pub-sub of new content + hot/top files.

- seed one-to-download one file. Host encrypted content, freenet style to have faster speeds on other files. Never allowing a file to go seedless.

- the software could be provided as a chrome+firefox sandboxed addon or something like that.

Go hackers go.

chii5• 14 years ago

basically, truly distributed DNS servers, where your domain name->ip maps are shared and voted on iteratively and continuously. Its synonymous with bitcoin in that sense, where the only way to break it is to have control of X% of the computers involved in the entire cluster (and then make X a really high percentage so that it costs prohibitively high to undermine the system).

jdangu• 14 years ago

Check out NameCoin http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

dhx• 14 years ago

  and even in the event they [cloud providers] found out
  it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users.

The encryption key that is providing disk encryption on the VM instances would be accessible to the VM host. The VM host could also directly access the memory of the VM instances to read the disk cache, etc.

chii5• 14 years ago

I think that quote was made because the writer was confused about what happens during live operation, and what happens during the time when communication was cut.

The host could potentially sniff the traffic during live operation by sniffing the memory of the vm.

But when the vm's communication is cut, the whole disk is encrypted. I expect this encryption to be done using some sort of public/private key encryption scheme, such that without the private key, you can't actually unencrypt the disk. THis is what is meant by gathering data on the user i suspect.

ianburrell• 14 years ago

With whole disk encryption, the disk is always encrypted. While running, the decryption key is stored in memory and used to decrypt/encrypt blocks. When communication is cut, they are presumably purging the key from memory. The password would need to be entered to produce the key.

This means that while the system is running, the key can be read by the host. It doesn't matter is the key is later purged. Changing the key requires re-encrypting the entire disk which is a slow operation.

zllak• 14 years ago

Something that could be "funny", if that governments, when they don't understand something, they just call it outlaw/illegal, as they almost did for P2P. That's not because someone make a bad use of something that the whole thing must be considered as dangerous. How long before the "cloud" is declared illegal by governments ? :)

antidoh• 14 years ago

They could require licenses, so that corporations can make money while individuals have less freedom.

cake• 14 years ago

Any more info on the encrypted VMs and how they work ?

Do they use TrueCrypt volumes ? What are the alternatives ?

alz• 14 years ago

how do they manage their databases, this would be interesting if the system is truely distributed

Fando• 14 years ago

Long Live The Pirate Bay - An icon of revolution and internet freedom!

Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

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