The Pirate Bay in the cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#51

Post by pyre » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

Grepsy wrote: post #43

synctext wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

According the Wikipedia, Suprnova shutdown due to legal threats, but never was taken to court. Basically, they just caved to the pressure. On the other hand, ThePirateBay has survived police raids and criminal proceedings.

Aside from that, it doesn't sound like SuprNova's setup was quite as intricate as this. I think that the post above was suggesting that the "caching border router + encrypted VPN" setup was what SuprNova used, but that's not everything that ThePirateBay seems to be using. Also, ThePirateBay only has to host magnet links, which didn't exist (IIRC) back when SuprNova was active. SuprNova had to host all of the .torrent files.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#52

Post by pyre » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 5:03 PM UTC

dagw wrote: post #36

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

You missed the interesting bit. It's not that they're hosting on a cloud service that is interesting, it's how they've set up a completely transient hosting solution. Non of their cloud hosts know what they're hosting. There is no traceable connection between the IP number of www.thepiratebay.se and the cloud host. Any single cloud hosting service can kick them off their servers without it affecting the web site. If…

  > the cloud image encrypts itself and becomes useless

Sounds more like they are using full disk encryption, and the system just shuts down, requiring a password to boot up again.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#53

Post by pyre » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 5:10 PM UTC

Sami_Lehtinen wrote: post #40

I would have preferred fully distributed solution. This one is easy to take down. Also memory snapshots can be take from servers, so disk encryption doesn't help. Not best possible solution afaik.

Disk encryption helps if the load-balancer is taken down before the back-end servers. Unless they are all taken down without 8 hours, then the servers shutdown and require a password to unlock FDE.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#54

Post by pyre » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 5:11 PM UTC

frozenport wrote: post #31

"reboot into a deadlock if not used for 8 hours" Sounds like a bug to me!

Full disk encryption that requires a manual password. Nothing fancy. A reboot requires human intervention.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#55

Post by pyre » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 5:16 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #10

daurnimator wrote: post #6

sure "thepiratebay" as we can define it is linked to wherever the DNS entry points to? That is the single point of failure, even in a move to the cloud.

There are many failure modes for a site like TPB. This move removes many, not all, of them. One important failure mode that has been removed is the one where the servers are seized and information on them is used to go after users.

Lessened, but not removed. Cloud-providers could be forced to take memory snapshots of the servers as they are running rather than just shutting them down, which negates the "shuts down to password-protected FDE" and "only operates with everything in memory" aspects. It would be much more difficult to capture memory on a stand-alone machine, but a VM makes it easy.

If authorities are able to figure out the topology of the network, they could coordinate this.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#56

Post by toyg » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 5:19 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.

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

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#57

Post by dholowiski » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 6:52 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…

It's surprising that they only went with 2 cloud providers. I would assume they probably have other dormant VM's set up just waiting to be activated.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#58

Post by dholowiski » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 6:59 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.

Although it's not an option for most sites, I don't think DNS is an issue for TPB. They can just register a new domain name and publicize it, and the word will get out pretty quickly.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#59

Post by dholowiski » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 7:00 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #56

cpeterso wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always hosts.txt.

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.

Re: The Pirate Bay in the cloud

#60

Post by IsTom » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 7:01 PM UTC

mike-cardwell wrote: post #34

yk wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some detail to your claim: Some clients use UDP and write the IP address into the body of the message. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-go...

Yeah, if you're going to use Bittorrent over Tor, you have to assume that the Bittorrent client will leak everything it knows about you, and therefore work to make sure it knows nothing about you. If you're using a Linux box, you can use iptables to force all TCP traffic through Tor, dropping everything else. Then make sure the box doesn't know it's "public" IP address, only it's NAT'ed one. Even if it does a call ou…

Every packet passing to Tor is passed through a few hosts, this effectiviely multiplies the traffic, so with your throughput you'll be hogging everyone out.