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The Pirate Bay floats onto the cloud. Too high for authorities?

by Alistair Lowe on 18 October 2012, 11:15

Tags: The Pirate Bay

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Spurred on by a police raid back in 2006, Swedish Torrent indexing site, The Pirate Bay, has moved its database into the cloud, in hopes that it'll make life much more difficult for authorities, should they attempt to block or shut-down the service once again.

The new set-up sees TPB's transit router remain on-site in Sweden, whilst load balancing hardware now sits at a secondary site and, databases rest encrypted on a multitude of cloud servers.

"If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images." stated a TPB representative.

The approach is multi-pronged:

  • A large multi-national policing effort would be required to seize a significant proportion of hardware.
  • With no evidence present on either the routing or load balancing hardware, obtaining a warrant would prove a challenge and nothing would be gained from its seizure.
  • Separating computational components from storage allows for cheap, cloud-based file storage, whilst routers and balancers remain portable, quick and cheap to replace.
  • Likely, TPB has sleeper hardware/databases already in-place to go-live when any piece of the puzzle is compromised.
The Pirate Bay has already seen its domain-name blocked in the UK, though several simple workarounds to access the site are available and the site continues to see high-traffic.

We've previously reported on the prospects of low Earth orbit satellites providing access to distributed data, perhaps we're witnessing first steps?



HEXUS Forums :: 31 Comments

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Can't help thinking if the authorities want to get you they will one way or another.
I just like their mocking attitude to the authorities…makes me giggle :)
jnutt
Can't help thinking if the authorities want to get you they will one way or another.

Can't help thinking that every time the authorities put the squeeze on, the pirate bay comes back more determined and stronger than ever.
Jimbo75
Can't help thinking that every time the authorities put the squeeze on, the pirate bay comes back more determined and stronger than ever.

Can't access the pirate bay on a number of ISP's now. - guessing the authorities have had some luck.

Although plenty of other sites that offer the same service that aren't blocked.