The Pirate Bay in the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#41

Post by synctext » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 1:08 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #16

shadowmint wrote: post #12

obscure announcement is obscure. basically seems like they've got a virtual setup now that lets them essentially deploy "the pirate bay" on anything that runs virtual machines. Now if they had distributed user run VMs running this private server VPN they might have something to talk about, but is basically just a hosting change. Makes it easier for them to move around as hosting get wise and shuts them off (as it wil…

The description on torrentfreak says their archictecture is basically: 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country. 2. Load balancer which is a disk-less server with all configuration in RAM that connects via encrypted VPN to two separate sets of VMs at two separate cloud providers in two different countries. 3. Said VMs using encrypted disk im…

> 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country.

To reduce cost this "border router" is probably also running an in-memory cache such as memcached or varnish. So they simply re-created what SuprNova.org did in 2003.

9 years ago this was really novel. SuprNova was the first to introduce a load balancer for both HTML and .torrent hosting.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#42

Post by tubbo » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 1:18 PM UTC

"The cloud, or Brahman as the hindus call it, is the All, surrounding everything. It is everywhere; immaterial, yet very real."

Oh, it's only a server..

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#43

Post by Grepsy » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 1:37 PM UTC

synctext wrote: post #41

vidarh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The description on torrentfreak says their archictecture is basically: 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country. 2. Load balancer which is a disk-less server with all configuration in RAM that connects via encrypted VPN to two separate sets of VMs at two separate cloud providers in two different countries. 3. Said VMs using encrypted disk im…

> 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country. To reduce cost this "border router" is probably also running an in-memory cache such as memcached or varnish. So they simply re-created what SuprNova.org did in 2003. 9 years ago this was really novel. SuprNova was the first to introduce a load balancer for both HTML and .torrent hosting.

If SuprNova did this 9 years ago it makes me wonder what went wrong there what couldn't go wrong with the PirateBay today?

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#44

Post by belorn » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:16 PM UTC

In the end, I think it will fall on the dns system to decide if the site will survive or not. Currently, most TLD's just redirect any request of censoring by saying "go where the server is and solve the issue at the source". When that is no longer an option, the political pressure will increase.

Hopefully, TLD's like .se will stand fast and refuse to use the DNS system for censoring.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#45

Post by alz » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:30 PM UTC

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

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#46

Post by belorn » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:32 PM UTC

avar wrote: post #11

morsch wrote: post #7

The announcement is rather nebulous, as is their way. TorrentFreak has a more detailed explanation: http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-become... It's pretty much what you'd expect, though: The web site is now running on VMs on two unnamed cloud providers, accessed through a load balancer. All traffic is still routed through servers they control. The cloud providers apparently don't know that they'r…

I wonder how vulnerable this approach is to timing attacks similar to the ones you can use to smoke out onion routed machines. If you know the physical and network location of their routing boxes and you keep polling some (e.g. static) resource on their servers you can eliminate all cloud providers that are further away than the response time as being the hidden backend. Let's say you narrow it down to 10 candidates…

Even if they find them all, they would have to have a system that automatically finds them when they reappear.

Imagine trying to detect copyrighted songs from Youtube if users could upload code bundled with the videos and load balance requests.

I will assume fingerprints of detected instances will travel between cloud provides, and that pirate bay will then add code to prevent that.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#47

Post by mbq » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:44 PM UTC

Aren't the cloud providers capable of simply hibernating a VM on their machine to get VM's RAM contents and salvage all the config and keys/passwords/network topology info they want from this dump?

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#48

Post by BCM43 » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #35

Too bad their search feature is absolutely horrendous. Searching for a simple term like "The Matrix" doesn't return any results at all.

What do you mean? I get a lot of results.

http://thepiratebay.se/search/the%20matrix/0/99/0

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#49

Post by oneandoneis2 » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 3:15 PM UTC

It's a nice advance and all, but I still think it was cooler when they were talking about putting masses of micro-servers into orbit to make their hosting truly impossible to take down :)

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#50

Post by cpeterso » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 4:03 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #44

In the end, I think it will fall on the dns system to decide if the site will survive or not. Currently, most TLD's just redirect any request of censoring by saying "go where the server is and solve the issue at the source". When that is no longer an option, the political pressure will increase. Hopefully, TLD's like .se will stand fast and refuse to use the DNS system for censoring.

There's always hosts.txt.