Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-police-raid-the-pirate-bay-site-offline-141209/

by jalan • 12 years ago

375 164 12 years ago

torrentfreak.com

josteink• 12 years ago

New URL: https://thepiratebay.cr/

A .ac mirror should to be coming up. We'll see if this has the desired effect or is just another whack-a-mole effort.

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

Could anyone care to explain how this works?

nodata• 12 years ago

Proxies to mirrors.

sauere• 12 years ago

A while ago someone from TPB guys explained their setup. Their web-facing webservers connect to the actual backends via a VPN that does some fancy routing to hide the real location. On top of that, they have a ton of mirrors and proxies running.

eloisant2• 12 years ago

It doesn't actually. That's a proxy, not a mirror; designed to make TPB available from countries where it's blocked. Try a search, it won't work.

https://proxybay.info/

However, there's a script where you could download the whole TPB, it's only 90 Mb. That's possible because now they're using only magnet links, so a torrent is pretty much just a URL.

http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-it...

So if someone have a recent copy, it would be easy to setup a mirror.

Or people could just use one of the dozen torrent site still up and let the whack-a-mole game continue.

300bps• 12 years ago

It's called Whack-a-mole. Anyone waiting for Pirate Bay to inevitably come back up can use:

http://www.torrentz.eu

http://www.kickass.to

etc, etc.

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

Will be interesting to see if this will influence the Swedish parliament reelection in march.

eli2• 12 years ago

Is Pirate Bay & file sharing really that big an issue among the general public in Sweden?

colechristensen• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_of_Sweden#Politica...

Joona4• 12 years ago

I believe around the founding of the Swedish Pirate Party, they got a lot of attention (and votes) because of TPB being featured heavily in the news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_of_Sweden#2009

johansch• 12 years ago

No, not really. The somewhat associated Pirate Party used to be a big thing here, but then the party was hijacked by a new leader who mostly seemed to care about LGBT issues. Said leader just resigned last week, and the Swedish Pirate Party is now in a reboot phase.

sandstrom2• 12 years ago

Swedes were early internet adopters, and at that time there were no other [online] means to get music and movies.

Among my friends, almost everyone use Spotify for music, and the paid-for streaming-services for movies/shows. File-sharing is too much hassle.

I still think people care about internet-freedoms though (surveillance, monitoring, etc).

wyager• 12 years ago

Honestly, I think the pirate bay getting busted would be a good thing, as it would probably lead to the creation of more distributed, robust filesharing platforms.

The actual bulk data distribution is already quite P2P; the only remaining centralized part is the part that distributes the magnet hashes.

Joona4• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can actually download the magnet links as an archive, which shouldn't be too big either.

toomuchtodo4• 12 years ago

Could the magnet links be served as a torrent?

draugadrotten2• 12 years ago

Could the magnet links be distributed by adding them to dummy transactions using the BitCoin "coinbase" blockchain method?

dfc• 12 years ago

You can download "an archive" that has all of the magnet links at the time of the creation of the archive. This is not helpful for finding new content. Most importantly downloading a 9 gig archive of magnet links is not a workable system for average users; Bittorrent is only as good as the number of peers in the swarm.

aaren5• 12 years ago

Could a way around the centralisation be to encode the magnet hash database (like btdigg) as metadata in the distributed hash table? Then we just need a seed to get at this somehow, which could be spread around forums. Offload searching of the database onto clients.

Talking in vague terms because I'm stretching beyond my knowledge here.

btdigg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTDigg

Raphael2• 12 years ago

Gnutella has p2p search.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Haven't read the technical details, but http://www.tribler.org/ already offers decentralized torrent search.

runn1ng4• 12 years ago

Fully decentralized P2P networks are probably older than bittorrent (Gnutella, eMule, and their similar clones).

The fact is people don't want 100% decentralized P2P network; people want the fakes and the viruses removed and so on.

murbard22• 12 years ago

Sure, then just have trusted third parties (such as TPB) sign the torrents. It would be pretty hard to shutdown someone signing hashes from an unknown location.

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

I thought file sharing was recognized as a religion in Sweden.

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

Yes it is, kopimism is a recognized religion. But it is a minority religion treated quite badly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism

happyscrappy2• 12 years ago

They should file with the UN for religious persecution.

Raphael2• 12 years ago

I'm not familiar with Swedish law, but assuming it's similar to the USA, then it would be pertinent to know if The Pirate Bay is registered as a church or as a company.

Jhsto• 12 years ago

The religion was not found by TPB, but rather its users.

thisjepisje• 12 years ago

Why would that even matter?

sandstrom2• 12 years ago

I think it used to be a bigger thing before Spotify and other streaming-services came along.

These days I don't know a single friend who download music (either illegally or legally), Spotify is so convenient.

drpfenderson• 12 years ago

So....what happened to the "raid-proof" server array they were talking about in September? (https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...)

nols• 12 years ago

The site's still up, just has a different URL.

https://thepiratebay.cr/

sarciszewski• 12 years ago

Slow, 500 errors everywhere, and doesn't seem to have the blog. Are we sure this mirror is legit?

eli2• 12 years ago

Despite the headline, what that article describes isn't "raid proof." Instead it describes a system that can be recreated at a new hosting provider even if the current accounts are terminated or hardware confiscated. A disaster recovery plan.

tlrobinson• 12 years ago

I'm imagining a Daemon (as in the Daniel Suarez book) like system that gets paid by web advertising companies in Bitcoin, and automatically spawns it's servers on cloud providers who accept payment in Bitcoin. One or more hot backups on a single VM would silently wait for the live system to go down, then respawn itself and switch over the DNS. Namecoin could be used in place of, or augmenting, traditional domain names.

The only really tricky bit is "raid-proofing" secrets (Bitcoin/Namecoin private keys, DNS credentials), but Amazon and presumably other cloud providers are starting to offer HSMs. Or perhaps some combination of Shamir's Secret Sharing and multisig wallets + voting pools.

nmjohn• 12 years ago

I think you will find this interesting then: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents

pavel_lishin• 12 years ago

You might be interested in Charles Stross's "Accelerando", where he posits a similar system of python scripts acting as decentralized companies, constantly shuffling ownership of themselves among themselves.

It's been too long since I've read it, so I forget what the actual point was.

undefined0• 12 years ago

The same thing that happened to the low orbit server drones (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/pirate-bay-plans-...). They make such statements because they enjoy the media talking about them.

Lward3• 12 years ago

Had this been happening before? I've been searching the sites about it and I found out that TPB will be back up soon but they don't know exactly when it will happen.

Lward3• 12 years ago

Yes, they can't prove anything.

Lward3• 12 years ago

I scouted some sites and found out that TPB will be backup soon and they also say that it had happened before. Ttuely I hope the best

crypto235• 12 years ago

Good to hear that, I hope this police issue will be resolved soon.

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

The organisation that reported Thepiratebay and therefore is the reason for this raid is called Rättighetsalliansen (The Alliance of Rights). The Alliance of Rights is the same organisation as The Anti Pirate Bureau but with a new name. This is what they say on their website (roughly translated):

"The police raided The Pirate Bay today inside an Internet company in the Stockholm region. Rättighetsalliansen is behind the report against The Pirate Bay.

- Pirate Bay is an illegal commercial service that makes great sums of money by putting up other peoples movies and music on their site. The producers wont get payed for their work and the legal services growth gets prevented, says Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Rättighetsalliansen."

In other words they don't now what they are talking about. Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are (of course nothing is even uploaded, only seeded from user to user). I can recommend the documentary about The piratebay, TPB AFK where you will meet Henrik Pontén from the Anti Piracy Bureau among others.

Rättighetsalliansens website and article about this: http://rattighetsalliansen.se/nyhet/118

EDIT: I think their website crashed.

wvenable• 12 years ago

The piratebay hosts no content and even the torrent files themselves are all served from other users. That's the technical side whether that has any legal bearing is a different question.

agumonkey2• 12 years ago

So being an illegal content link index (categorized magnet URI lists) is not illegal ? honest question. Isn't that why Google was forced to unlist torrents from results, otherwise they'd be in the same position as TPB.

draugadrotten2• 12 years ago

It's a common mistake by techies to think that technical details make a difference in (Swedish) court. They don't. Technical details are rarely important in Swedish court, where the court is free to consider all evidence, even if it's obtained illegally or just is weird.

So called "technical evidence" is rarely "technical" for techies. It's often just HTTP logfile print-outs or a screen shot of a file sharing program. That's as technical as it gets. The judges don't know Excel from Word, and the prosecutor don't know HTTP from UDP. The defense have to work on the judges, not on the truth.

And in the end, they judges judge people based on emotion and political opinion anyway. After all, isn't a law but a formal moral opinion?

gcb02• 12 years ago

now explain how that is different from anywhere in the world...

wuliwong2• 12 years ago

I seriously doubt that all judges in Sweden do not know the difference between Excel and Word. I know you are trying to make a point but you are doing it poorly.

Moru• 12 years ago

Seriously, why is people pirating that crap? Throw out the TV and stop going into that what is just a bad copy of every other movie out there already. The same goes with games. They just get more and more shallow as the grafics get pumped up. Every shared movie/game is another proof for the producers that they are creating something that people wants. If people finally would vote with their wallet instead of going for the latest crap all the time, mabe we would have quality games and movies?

GuiA• 12 years ago

Relevant link:

"We record the judges’ two daily food breaks, which result in segmenting the deliberations of the day into three distinct “decision sessions.” We find that the percentage of favorable rulings drops gradually from ≈65% to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to ≈65% after a break"

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889

baddox3• 12 years ago

It's a common mistake by techies to think that technical details make a difference in (Swedish) court.

Or, you could say that it's a common mistake by courts to think that technical details shouldn't matter.

gear54rus• 12 years ago

And that is exactly why they should never even be allowed to handle something they don't understand.

Gosh, it's like a fundamental obvious thought: don't make decisions about something you don't understand.

How to solve this is another story.

hasenj4• 12 years ago

Technicalities aside. They're still making money by helping people "pirate" stuff. Assuming ads on their site do actually generate revenue, and that revenue gets forwarded to them.

Though I kinda expect the average piratebay user to have adblock installed.

LLWM• 12 years ago

Whether they are making money doesn't matter. Crimes aren't suddenly legal just because you do them for reasons besides profit. Otherwise the only murderers in jail would be professional assassins.

api5• 12 years ago

Exactly. They may or may not have actually broken the law, but they are certainly in spirit a service that makes money through the unauthorized monetization of other peoples' works against the wishes of those works' creators. Even if it doesn't make them criminals, it certainly makes them assholes.

It's already hard enough to make a living as an artist, musician, etc. without being kneecapped by opportunists. We've gone from the old pre-Internet system, which screwed artists most of the time, to a new system that screws artists all the time.

I don't understand why there's so much sympathy for industrial-scale piracy -- especially for-profit industrial-scale piracy -- among people who make a living from creative work (programmers, entrepreneurs, engineers). I guess only certain castes of people and professions deserve compensation and respect, and everyone else can suck it...?

tomp3• 12 years ago

You mean, like Google? Of course, they remove the results that are DMCA-d, but in the mean time, 10 new links appear.

soci• 12 years ago

ExoClickπ[1] was one of the ad networks (if not the only one) used by The Pirate Bay to monetize.

[1] https://www.exoclick.com

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

The court ruling in NL (which lead to a (temporary) forced block from ISP's of the website) was that despite them technically not hosting anything illegal, they are definitely an, let's call it, "accessory to piracy", a middle man so to speak. You know, like how Silk Road was just a middle man for drug deals - the website itself didn't host any drugs. Not that that's technically possible (yet), but you get the idea.

vacri2• 12 years ago

Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are

Knowingly and willingly facilitating crime is usually a crime in itself. As a clear example, if you pay a hitman to kill someone, you didn't do the killing, but you facilitated the crime.

dil83• 12 years ago

Cassettes were used to copy music in the past, are you saying that cassette manufacturers were committing a crime?

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

Yes, but if you pay a hitman to kill someone, you don't blame the phone company for which you used to contact the hitman.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

In other words they don't now what they are talking about. Thepiratebay is not putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are (of course nothing is even uploaded, only seeded from user to user).

If someone were to say in conversation "Yeah, I downloaded Casablanca from Pirate Bay last night," would you immediately reply, "You don't know what you're talking about! You didn't download it from Pirate Bay, but from dozens of different peers, idiot!"

You must be fun at parties.

(And while we're nitpicking, torrents certainly do involve "uploads" and "downloads". Get your pedantry straight.)

mrkickling6• 12 years ago

No I wouldn't, but this is not a party so you're making a really weird comparison. This is about an organisation with great power in Sweden that tries to stop piracy, they should know what they are talking about. Let me make a comparison instead; saying that The pirate bay uploads illegal files to their site is like saying that google uploads thousands of porn sites and torrents to their site, when they are just uploading links. Should google stop displaying links to thepiratebay, streaming sites and Bittorrent and god knows what?

runn1ng4• 12 years ago

The last uploaded torrent, from what can I tell (from what Google indexed)

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v346Sjm...

State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION

magnet link:

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9d12bfa80f937b7fbed3601ebda9d725d483a2de&dn=State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

apetresc• 12 years ago

I'm sure TPB gets torrents added faster than Google caches.

throwvpn• 12 years ago

I noticed weird behavior on multiple VPNs lately (those that should protect torrent users using OpenVPN) as the IPs given by VPN provider upon connecting were suddenly located in the US (Massachusetts) instead of Sweden, Finland etc. where you intended to connect. Always check the location of the IP address you get to be sure you aren't MitM-ed...

gcb02• 12 years ago

vpn for anonymity? are you making a joke that i didn't understood?

sz4kerto• 12 years ago

That's probably not the RAID level they planned to use to ensure maximum availability.

jason_slack2• 12 years ago

I dont know a lot about the organizational structure anymore, but having just watched "TPB: AFK" I assume that Peter Sunde isn't involved? I think Gottfrid and Fredrik are still in prison?

cpach• 12 years ago

Correct.

arenaninja2• 12 years ago

Funnily enough, for the past year I've been using TPB pretty much for finding very specific versions of Linux distros

eyeareque• 12 years ago

Do they come with very specific pieces of malware too? kidding aside, I hope you check the ISO checksums.

bigphishy• 12 years ago

I would hope most linux users knows how to use checksum.

arenaninja2• 12 years ago

At the height of my paranoia I installed and used an md5 checker for Windows 7, yes.

lectrick• 12 years ago

Which is a perfectly legitimate use of their debatably legitimate search engine

andor• 12 years ago

Here's a statement from Peter Sunde:

http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-foreve...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726110

gargantian3• 12 years ago

In an internet-ubiquitous world, the idea of restricting the flow of data -- any data -- is basically a magical fantasy of those who understand neither the technology nor its sociology. The Pirate Bay will be back in a day or two tops.

I wonder how much longer people will keep trying to put the information genie back in the bottle?

Thimothy2• 12 years ago

Ever heard about Demonoid?

Umn55• 12 years ago

" is basically a magical fantasy of those who understand neither the technology nor its sociology."

Ever hear of steam, MMO's, F2P? They've started with backend chaining of software, they are going to try to turn everything into "cloud based" bullshit to as much as they can do it.

jason_slack2• 12 years ago

Does anyone have any good technical info on the hardware/software architecture for TPB? When I watched "TPB: AFK" it looked lean, just a handful of 1u servers and only one of them public facing/entry point.

yc1010• 12 years ago

eztv.it is down too (imho much more useful than tpb) interestingly enough seems they used cloudflare.

Thimothy2• 12 years ago

Many filesharing and streaming services are down in Spain, too. Seems it's an european scale raid.

Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline

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