The Pirate Bay in the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#61

Post by chimeracoder » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #38

andr wrote: post #4

In practice this probably means several replicas of the site dormant in different cloud providers. The providers won't have a clue until they go live. In effect, they are replacing their current legal protections with a game of cat and mouse as they switch between clouds.

i wonder if this would becomes some sort of internet nuclear arms race which can only end poorly.

> i wonder if this would becomes some sort of internet nuclear arms race which can only end poorly.

Thinking back to Napster... you mean it hasn't already?

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#62

Post by unreal37 » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 9:03 PM UTC

I think this all goes to underscore the fact that TPB doesn't actually HOST anything anymore. Not .torrent files, and not trackers. Not sure on what grounds authorities would have to raid them in 2012. There are no files there any more, just HTML web pages containing magnet links (which are specially coded URLs). The entire site can be downloaded in a few hundred MB...

It's like TPB has achieved Nirvana. It no longer has a physical presence...

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#63

Post by toyg » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 9:18 PM UTC

dholowiski wrote: post #59

toyg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually etc/hosts, even on Windows -- no .txt.

Technically i's c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows. And it's hidden by default too.

I know, hence the absence of initial slash :)

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#64

Post by chrissnell » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 9:35 PM UTC

andr wrote: post #4

In practice this probably means several replicas of the site dormant in different cloud providers. The providers won't have a clue until they go live. In effect, they are replacing their current legal protections with a game of cat and mouse as they switch between clouds.

I don't think they will have much of a problem from the cloud providers. To the provider, this just looks like a steady stream of traffic from one of their instances to another server somewhere on the Internet: something they see from so many of their customers. It will attract very little attention so long as they pay their bills.

The transit and load balancer servers are another story. It will become a game of cat and mouse with colocation providers, the same game that spam purveyors played in the days before botnets. They will get raided and have to set up a new server at some provider elsewhere. Eventually they will run out of decent providers and have to move somewhere on the fringes of the hosting industry and performance will suffer.

A better approach, in my opinion, is to take the whole thing into the cloud and to come up with some sort of P2P protocol that is capable of determining where the transit server(s) live entirely without the aid of centralized DNS.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#65

Post by rorrr » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 9:58 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #46

avar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They already added it. It's called encryption.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#66

Post by PsyVisions » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 11:23 PM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #64

andr wrote: post #4

In practice this probably means several replicas of the site dormant in different cloud providers. The providers won't have a clue until they go live. In effect, they are replacing their current legal protections with a game of cat and mouse as they switch between clouds.

I don't think they will have much of a problem from the cloud providers. To the provider, this just looks like a steady stream of traffic from one of their instances to another server somewhere on the Internet: something they see from so many of their customers. It will attract very little attention so long as they pay their bills. The transit and load balancer servers are another story. It will become a game of cat…

Something like Namecoin, maybe?

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#67

Post by belorn » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 11:30 PM UTC

cpeterso wrote: post #50

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.

I suspect that it is easier to teach people tor than to teach them how to change the host file. Not that we need to, there are plenty of anti-censor browser plugins nowdays.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#68

Post by elliotanderson » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 1:17 AM UTC

mbq wrote: post #47

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?

Only if they get to them within 8 hours, per the TorrentFreak article - after which they shut down and require an encryption key to restart. Add in any level of geographic distribution and it would take more than 8 hours to find, subpoena and confiscate rendering that technique useless.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#69

Post by stock_toaster » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 3:57 AM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #27

ericcholis wrote: post #23

I'm sorry, am I the only one that isn't impressed by this? I'm actually quite stunned that they are treating this like some new discovery. Pop onto HN any day and see thousands of people talking about cloud. Hell, some local IT staffing agency in my area has a billboard about cloud servers. Cloud is mainstream now, why did it take TPB so long to catch up? //Sorry if it sounds like trolling

We see lots of stories about people running on EC2 and similar services, but the big players are all pretty straight-laced; witness the speed with which Amazon kicked off Wikileaks [1] - within about three days. I don't know how many cloud hosing providers there are - to judge from the way people talk here there's only EC2 and maybe Linode. You'd need a lot of providers if you need a new one every 3 days! [1] http://…

There are quite a few. Many offer "private clouds" too. If you additionally consider "hardware clouds" like softlayer, Hertzner, etc... there are even more possibilities.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#70

Post by andrewmunsell » Thu, Oct 18, 2012, 5:02 AM UTC

Couldn't TPB do something like Silk Road with Tor and a .onion domain? I'm not exactly sure how that works, but from the limited knowledge I do have, it seems like that sort of approach would be slightly more difficult to access but also more difficult to take down...