Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-finds-safe-haven-in-iceland-switches-to-is-domain-130425/

by Heliosmaster • 13 years ago

197 120 13 years ago

sorenbs• 13 years ago

I have been reading up on sub marine cables lately as the cable cuts in Egypt has reduced our international data transfer substantially here in Bangladesh.

This add from one of the companies in that market got me thinking that TPB should start a fundraiser to establish fiber connection to such an independent island and thereby gain greater independence.

http://www.buysellbandwidth.com/groupbuying/deals_detail.php...

Nursie• 13 years ago

Ooops, we accidentally dropped our anchor right on your cable! Sorry about that....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

It seems the switch to a new domain name has broken the ISP censorship in the UK. thepiratebay.se redirects to a site blocked page. thepiratebay.is works.

I'm sure it won't be long until they block it again but this domain change as well as the numerous proxy sites setup to bypass the block go to show that it's a waste of time to even try blocking stuff like this.

Does anyone know if the ISP's will be automatically required to block the new domain or if it would have to go through court again?

Edit: I'm using TalkTalk

danpalmer• 13 years ago

I'm on Virgin Media (UK) and thepiratebay.is doesn't work here. This implies that they don't have to go through the court.

I suspect if the new domain is being run by the same organisation they are required to block instantly. I wonder what the legal issues are if The Pirate Bay splits into multipel organisations hosted on different domains.

EwanToo3• 13 years ago

There's now a (court approved) process that doesn't involve going to court for each domain, it's simply added to the block list.

MattBearman• 13 years ago

I'm using BT Broadband in the UK and thepiratebay.is is not responding for me. Although I don't get the "Error – Site blocked" message that I get when trying to access priatebay.org, it just never loads.

Traceroute stops working somewhere in the BT network (just getting * * * after ukcore.bt.net) so I'm guessing it's being blocked.

losvedir• 13 years ago

American here using "The Cloud" wifi in Barbican Center in the City of London. Same deal: never loads. However, after connecting to my VPN back home in the U.S. it loads immediately.

Agreed, they seem to be blocking it.

DanBC• 13 years ago

If I go to kat.ph I get an almost blank page with "Error – Site blocked".

Going to either (http://thepiratebay.is/) or (http://thepiratebay.se/) gives me an "Oops! Google Chrome could not find thepiratebay.se" (or .is) error.

I'm using BTWifi-with-Fon in England.

> this domain change as well as the numerous proxy sites setup to bypass the block go to show that it's a waste of time to even try blocking stuff like this.

Yes, it's trivially easy to still get to these sites. And all the other sites with this content.

rwmj2• 13 years ago

You should probably switch to an ISP that doesn't filter. Mine doesn't.

livnev4• 13 years ago

May I ask which one you're with?

belorn5• 13 years ago

The censorship in the UK is only there to discourage new or computer inexperienced users. Tools such as Tor has always worked, and will continue to work for a predicted long time into the future. Access to a indexing site of a few hundred MB is close to impossible to censure, and quite hard to even make inconvenient.

Morphling• 13 years ago

Same in Finland. .com and .se just show "Website not available", but .is works just fine, but we'll see if it gets blocked as well or not.

lectrick• 13 years ago

Wait... Pirate Bay is blocked (out of the box) in the UK? That's rather draconian for a first-world nation...

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

The modern UK is essentially a police state.

wmf• 13 years ago

There's a lot of cultural disagreement within the first world. Check out UK libel law, the official secrets act, etc.

darkhorn• 13 years ago

Does thepiratebay.se. blocked too? With dot at the end.

fakeer• 13 years ago

Can they actually hold off collective might of media houses and billionaires who actually call the shots and make politicians dance to their tunes, mostly because of they have taken the dirty money? What if the bullies resort to proxy arm twisting?

One must remember Iceland was invaded[1] by the British during WW2!

PS. An invasion is an invasion even if it was said that the invasion was to pre-empt another invasion.

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

[update: invasion in a sense as to coerce a country to achieve desired result by hook or by crook]

cbg0• 13 years ago

I doubt anyone's going to invade Iceland because of TPB.

arethuza• 13 years ago

I'm sure something more subtle would be used - like delaying their application for EU membership, which is currently in the works.

archgrove4• 13 years ago

I'm not really sure it's bullying per se, to try and stop the mass illegal downloading of your content. It's not like they've got thugs at the door, they're just trying to shut down a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading, and who has no interest in co-operating with even nicely worded, fair requests. I'm not a great fan of the entertainment industry, but if people were doing this to YC startups who focus on IP production, would the level of "support" be the same?

I mean, what alternative do people suggest for these companies? That they ignore it, thus tacitly approve it, until everyone uses and doesn't bother with legal avenues? I hear a lot about "Well, find a new business model!", without explaining why a company should be forced to change based on clearly illegal activity. Even accepting the pragmatic argument that "It's going to happen anyway", I'm curious as to what business model people are suggesting?

nitrogen7• 13 years ago

I hear a lot about "Well, find a new business model!", without explaining why a company should be forced to change based on clearly illegal activity.

This is begging the question. The activity is illegal in the first place because of lobbying by the recording industry starting in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

belorn5• 13 years ago

Im going to try to keep it short, but its hard given the many different topic you touched on.

Any company that solely depend on government granted monopolies for their businesses model will have a hard time to claim a moral high ground or demand that the sovereign of foreign countries should be violated.

The business model I would suggest is one that do not solely depend on government grants. That would likely be to produce a product or rendering a service that others are willing to pay for.

betterunix3• 13 years ago

Why should a law that has its roots in 17th century censorship continue to be clung to in the 21st century? Times have changed, get over it and develop a business model that is more appropriate for this century.

generalseven• 13 years ago

Look back at what's happened to the music business since Napster for past lessons on what has and has not worked.

To say "a site who's sole purpose is enabling the illegal downloading" is not completely true. File sharing has more legitimate uses than illegal ones. See Dropbox for details.

publicfig• 13 years ago

"[update: invasion in a sense as to coerce a country to achieve desired result by hook or by crook]"

That's not even close to invasion if that's what you meant. I really can't imagine that anyone would come close to invading Iceland just because they host a domain.

etvmueller2• 13 years ago

I agree that an aggressor is unlikely to invade Iceland for resolving The Pirate Bay domain, but there remains the possibility for all states that a farcical reason is used to obfuscate the real reason for an invasion.

nitrogen7• 13 years ago

What do you mean? It's already been done in response to Wikileaks: https://www.google.com/search?q=fbi+iceland

etvmueller2• 13 years ago

It would be more likely to interfere with Iceland's connection to the world financial system, for example to burden that connection with regulatory hurdles or to even suspend it, than to use overt military force, because that strategy could be hidden from the average citizen of the aggressor, whereas an invasion would ultimately require an explanation and much political capital.

spoiledtechie• 13 years ago

What I wonder about, is they should be the "creators" and steering committee for the worlds own PnP DNS servers... I would gladly host a small portion of DNS spaces on my machines running at home...

livnev4• 13 years ago

I know nothing about this but given that DNS is quite low volume, distributed peer-to-peer DNS services sound really promising. It would definitely be interesting to hear someone with knowledge in this to chime in.

TPB could (inadvertently) change the structure of the internet.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Hosting DNS is already mostly distributed; that's not the hard part.

The difficulty is setting up a distributed system that can allocate domains and prevent others from tampering with the records (e.g., what if I reply to a query for gmail.com with my own IP, pointing to a phishing site?)

One possible solution is namecoin[1], which is based on bitcoin's proof-of-work protocol.

But TPB's influence is not so inadvertent: http://digitizor.com/2010/12/01/the-pirate-bay-co-founder-st...

[1] http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

fghh45sdfhr3• 13 years ago

I knew AlterNIC would be back some day.

zimbatm3• 13 years ago

In the UK Virgin Media goes further and blocks the IP address of the black-listed domains. Distributing the DNS wouldn't help.

Btw implementations of distributed DNS already exist, eg: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

AnthonyMouse4• 13 years ago

DNS is probably the wrong word. You want some new method of name resolution, not DNS.

The thing with DNS is that it actually works pretty well as a distributed system. There are a bunch of different people responsible for different TLDs. If the operator of one TLD is censoring you, you can use a different one.

There are really two primary concerns with DNS. The first is that even if you have a domain using a TLD whose operators are unwilling to censor it, local DNS resolvers can still try to block it. This is not that hard to fix; either use a DNS server in a different country or (if your network blocking non-local DNS) do your DNS queries over Tor or some other secure proxy. It's also one of the things that DNSSEC or DNSCurve are supposed to prevent, if anyone would ever get around to implementing either of them. So this is solvable but non-ideal because it requires all the individual end-users to do something.

The second problem is that ICANN doesn't allow just anyone to operate a TLD, which means that the TLD operators themselves become choke points. Then censorial entities who see a TLD operator refusing to censor can put pressure on them (or their home country's government) to try to force the censorship.

So what you want is really to replace ICANN and the TLD operators with something more distributed, but the question is, with what? If you want a memorable but globally unique name then you need some method for everyone in the world to agree who it is that name should refer to. Right now the method is "if the name ends in .com, it refers to who Verisign says it does" and so on for other TLDs. You have trusted entities who can authoritatively determine who controls the domain.

I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that namecoin is trying to fix this with something along the lines of bitcoin, where whoever uses a name first gets to keep it. The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment.

Just thinking out loud here, but how about this: Create a version of ICANN that works like IETF. No relationship to ICANN other than to refuse to issue TLDs that have already been issued by ICANN (and hopefully vice versa). Then, if you want a TLD, you can go to this group of people (who are maybe people like EFF members or well-known security researchers or activists) and they come to a consensus about whether you should get the TLD. So if EFF asks for ".eff" they get it. If ACLU asks for ".aclu" they get it. If La Quadrature du Net asks for ".lqdn" they get it. If Debian Foundation asks for ".debian" they get it. FSF gets ".fsf" on and on. But if some scammer asks for ".bank" they can go pound sand. Maybe make them sub-domains, so you end up with ".eff.foo" and they all end in ".foo" (insert whatever you like) to reduce possible collisions with ICANN. The idea will be to have domains outside the control of ICANN or anyone in particular and issue several hundred to generally well-known and trustworthy entities who are likely to resist censorship efforts. Then those entities can issue "wikileaks.aclu" and "wikileaks.eff" to wikileaks etc., so censoring them requires censoring all the anti-censorship organizations.

Once the working group assigns a TLD, they no longer have any involvement. They don't operate any technical infrastructure. All they do is publish the name of the domain and the public key of the entity it's assigned to (which can be used to sign domains in the TLD), to serve as the authority for resolving namespace collisions. Once an assignment is made it's permanent and irrevocable. The assigned organization's public key gets published and browser and OS vendors start including it and using it to authenticate domains in the TLD, resolved using whatever distributed system you like (that part is basically a solved problem) to map names to addresses.

livnev4• 13 years ago

I suppose you could have an even less centralised system to resemble Tor hidden services. This transcript of Assange and Schmidt's meeting discusses this at a certain point, just grep for 'hash'[1]. That way the domain name itself is proof of its authenticity.

Couldn't you also have something akin to bitcoin's blockchain, where the identity of a domain is agreed upon by the majority of the creators of the blockchain? I don't know what the equivalent of mining would be though. Assange also suggests how domains could be made hard to make, so that they can be 'mined', creating scarcity so that "some arsehole" doesn't "register every short name themselves"[sic].

[1] http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt

spiritplumber2• 13 years ago

This is good, the problem is "and hopefully vice versa". ICANN can break this by grabbing contested names and counting on the fact that 99% of users will see what they want them to.

smokeyj• 13 years ago

Could something like Namecoin address these concerns?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Namecoin

desireco42• 13 years ago

I was thinking about this for a while and I suspect many others as well. We don't really need icann in the current form. I appreciate your thoughts as they provide insight into ways to go about it that I wasn't thinking much.

What others said, something like a service behind tor, which would be immune to government interference (to a point obviously) and that would provide flexible name resolution. I think you touch on that quite a bit by saying you would give tld to anyone who asks first. I think ability to get name that is yours without affecting others who would like that name is essential.

ZeroCoin3• 13 years ago

re: "The problem there is that you need a way to make sure when it becomes popular you don't end up with a land grab and all the reasonable names end up in the hands of scammers and squatters, and I'm also not sure how they're addressing transferability and abandonment."

.bit domains do expire approximately every 9 months I believe, unless you spend more namecoins to re-register them using your private key in which case you re-register said domain for 9 more months.

Abandonment happens if you no longer own the private key used to register the domain and/or you no longer make payments into the network.

jokoon• 13 years ago

already switched to kickass torrents.

people might one day share their bittorrent sync keys, it will be oh so fun

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

Congratulations to Iceland! Keeping the dream alive!

ZeroCoin3• 13 years ago

I wonder when they'll switch to thepiratebay.bit ?

To help make that happen, take a look at Namecoins and the dot-bit.org project.

ancarda3• 13 years ago

Is the TPB accessible over Tor?

andreasvc2• 13 years ago

Yes.

ancarda3• 13 years ago

To clarify, I meant if there was a hidden service. Not if there was functioning exit nodes that can access the website.

belorn5• 13 years ago

Pirate bay gateway through hidden service: http://jntlesnev5o7zysa.onion/

you and try it out through the tor2web.org site: https://jntlesnev5o7zysa.tor2web.org/

duskwuff• 13 years ago

Is there any more to this "move" than any of their previous moves, including:

  * Sealand - proposed only (2007)
  * Netherlands - hosting (2009?)
  * Sweden - domain only? (Feb 2012)
  * North Korea - elaborate hoax (Mar 2013)
  * Greenland - domain only, quickly switched back (Apr 2013)

Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

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