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Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#61

Post by lumberjack »

jakejake wrote: post #52
maeon3 wrote: post #10

It's like robin hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his motives are pure, depending on how you look at it, and robin hood can continue this as long as the governing body who wants him dead is inept at catching him. The pirate bay, like robin hood, cannot live forever. SOME of us will only be stronger than ALL of us for brief moments in history. The only way TPB is to survive is for it to make good on it…

Well perhaps they are arguably robbing the rich, but they're certainly not paying the poor. The reason I don't like TPB is not because of pirating, but rather they are making money from others' work while pretending its about freedom. It especially annoys me to see fellow programmers getting extremely upset when a software authors work is copied or used in violation with their chosen license. Yet musicians are not al…

>but they're certainly not paying the poor.

How so? A lot of the stuff on TPB would be too expensive for the lowest class of working Americans and much more so for most of the rest of the world. It's true that the TPB are profiting out of it (though they are offering a service and covering a market in their own right) but you make it seem like the users are getting nothing out of it. That's blatantly false. A significant part of the 3rd world's technological infrastructure is built on pirated software.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#62

Post by cabalamat »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #48
res0nat0r wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The future of our species is at stake here and we are trying to paint a bright future for your great grandchildren. I didn't know being able to watch Game of Thrones 30 minutes after it airs on HBO via your computer without paying was such a dire thing.

The threat isn't not watching Game of Thrones . The threat is not being permitted to own and modify open general-purpose tools at all, because they happen to be able to play Game of Thrones .

Correct. And even if copyright disappeared completely, GoT would continue to be made: it costs $50M/series and I'm sure they could crowdfund it with 5 million people handing over $10 (or some other multiple).

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#63

Post by chimeracoder »

Toshio wrote: post #7
mariusmg wrote: post #2

Isn't it enough to take down the DNS servers to make TPB unusable for sharing (at least to add new torrents) ? Achieving fault tolerance using a few cloud providers is nice (and expensive) but they're still far from raid proof (all it takes is some coordination from police in multiple countries).

In the case of a DNS takedown, all it would take would be for The Pirate Bay to publish a browser extension that stores a few IP addresses and "drops in" whenever the user attempts to acces thepiratebay.se.

Savvy users in parts of Europe (Denmark, I believe) are already just adding an /etc/hosts entry to do exactly this.

That doesn't solve the problem of the IP address itself changing, but then you need some system of distributing the updated IP addresses whenever they change. Which would require inventing a distributed lookup system....hmm... this is starting to sound familiar....!

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#64

Post by jlgreco »

mayneack wrote: post #56
peterwwillis wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who told you that? Any cloud provider can at any time inspect what's running inside a guest, so they'll definitely know it's piratebay (not to mention the metric fuckton of obscure network traffic that make torrents easy to spot). As far as data, cloud providers usually have functions to administrate guest VMs, which would allow a law enforcement agency to peer into the box as well, nullifying any benefit of data enc…

I may be misinterpreting your comment, but the massive amounts of data associated with torrents don't actually go through the trackers. The trackers just manage peers while the data goes directly from one user to another. (or at least that's how I understood it)

TPB doesn't even run trackers anymore. My impression is that these servers only serve up magnet links (not even torrent files) and textual descriptions of them.

Provided they spread it out even a little, nothing about that traffic should appear out of the ordinary.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#65

Post by mylittlepony »

adambyrtek wrote: post #26
chii wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be a real sad day when the world regresses to such a state - i mean, why did the free world win WWII for then?

What free world? Soviet Union was on the winning side of WWII, and the result for many European countries (including mine) was decades of communist repressions. History is more complex than a Hollywood movie, with good guys vs bad guys.

For a moment I thought chii was being sarcastic. I had that hope.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#66

Post by smokeyj »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #46
tatsuke95 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for. So, the Robin Hood analogy works perfectly then. The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before…

"The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before. The whole piracy issue is overblown." In real world economics, you argument actually supports the exact opposite. When supply increases and demand…

> The piracy issue is overblown only to those who have never experienced it first hand. It's not just the artist and the big music companies you're hurting, there's a ton of lower level people who work in the industry who are suffering because of piracy.

The argument seems to be that file-sharing is bad because "potential" jobs are destroyed. This doesn't seem like an argument formed in principle because the internet has destroyed many "potential" jobs (see blockbuster, b&n). Innovation kills jobs (and creates them) and I'm okay with this. But I'm not okay with killing innovation by means of legislation.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#67

Post by Achshar »

peterwwillis wrote: post #49
Achshar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also they don't get any useful data as all data on cloud providers is encrypted. So providers won't even know they are hosting piratebay.

Who told you that? Any cloud provider can at any time inspect what's running inside a guest, so they'll definitely know it's piratebay (not to mention the metric fuckton of obscure network traffic that make torrents easy to spot). As far as data, cloud providers usually have functions to administrate guest VMs, which would allow a law enforcement agency to peer into the box as well, nullifying any benefit of data enc…

TPB only serves torrent text info and magnet links, encrypted, so to cloud providers, it will look like any other site but whose data it cannot read. It is not impossible however, for example, they can use a few workarounds, like making a lot of requests for a specific page of TPB and then monitor the call spikes in their system but that requires for the providers to be aware that at least one of their VMs are hosting TPB. TPB does not even have a tracker now, so no obscure network traffic that makes torrents easy to spot because there are no torrents involved at all.

As for the second point, yes, much like youtube's approach, they can give law enforcement agency access to all VMs but again, they must know what cloud provider is hosting the site at any given moment.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#68

Post by waqf »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #46
tatsuke95 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for. So, the Robin Hood analogy works perfectly then. The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before…

"The movie and music companies aren't suffering, artists aren't suffering (in fact, in can be argued that artists embracing the new media world are flourishing), software companies and developers aren't suffering. There is more music, movies and software than ever before. The whole piracy issue is overblown." In real world economics, you argument actually supports the exact opposite. When supply increases and demand…

> the ability for an artist to sell enough music to live on gets exponentially harder.

For that argument to make sense, you have to assume that an artist has a right to make a living selling music. If you believe that then the status quo ante was failing miserably (because almost all artists were never signed by a label with the marketing power to make them economically viable).

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#69

Post by JamesLeonis »

smiler wrote: post #30
maeon3 wrote: post #10

It's like robin hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, his motives are pure, depending on how you look at it, and robin hood can continue this as long as the governing body who wants him dead is inept at catching him. The pirate bay, like robin hood, cannot live forever. SOME of us will only be stronger than ALL of us for brief moments in history. The only way TPB is to survive is for it to make good on it…

"It's like robin hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor" No, really, it's not. For the most part it is encouraging people to consume something for free they should have paid for. I really don't get the love for TPB and copyright infringement in general on HN when most are dreaming of starting businesses where you need people to hand over money.

What I see here are two larger issues at work of which "Piracy" and TPB happens to be the battleground. The first is the level of control large media conglomerates have over both culture and government. This concept is a dead horse, so I won't beat it here. The other, in more generic terms, is the interesting fight between a service that wants to exist (and the people who want it to exist) and those entities that want that service destroyed.

On a more generic level, the fight between governments and media corporations and the Pirate Bay are interesting from a technological and ideological standpoint; How does a service stay operational against a large and well financed fight that wants to shut it down?

While "Piracy" is the very visible fight, this question is likewise relevant to activists and protesters as well as free speech in repressive governments. It is also relevant to providers that are attacked by malcontents, black hat organizations, and less-than-egalitarian governments that are attempting to disrupt their services.

Whatever you think of TPB, you have to give them credit for being both nimble and technologically savvy in solving a problem of service disruption against what many would see as long odds. They give us an interesting case study of how to deal with service disruption and how it can be dealt with. All the companies that pass through HN have to deal with the problems of Uptime, especially in the case of adversarial situations that are beyond our control.

This particular case is interesting because the service is dealing with a well organized and deliberate attack against it as well as it's users. Downtime due to malicious hackers and automated attacks is a thorny problem. It becomes trickier when we want to protect sensitive customer data.

While I don't expect a detailed technical breakdown of their systems, I would love to read their whitepaper.

Re: Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof

#70

Post by chii »

ianburrell wrote: post #50
chii wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that quote was made because the writer was confused about what happens during live operation, and what happens during the time when communication was cut. The host could potentially sniff the traffic during live operation by sniffing the memory of the vm. But when the vm's communication is cut, the whole disk is encrypted. I expect this encryption to be done using some sort of public/private key encryption sc…

With whole disk encryption, the disk is always encrypted. While running, the decryption key is stored in memory and used to decrypt/encrypt blocks. When communication is cut, they are presumably purging the key from memory. The password would need to be entered to produce the key. This means that while the system is running, the key can be read by the host. It doesn't matter is the key is later purged. Changing the k…

I guess there isn't enough detail to raelly work out what would happen - its not clear that they meant whole disk encryption in the way you described. I thought they encrypt the disk _only_ after loss of communications. The private key is not on the VM anywhere. Thus, the vm once encrypted, is useless (without the passphrase, which presumably only exist in the head of the operator of tpb).
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