

Pirate Bay hosting machines on cheap, small drones - moizsyed
http://thepiratebay.se/blog/210

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PedroDiogo_
I'm having a hard time believing this.

Such devices would need to return land on a regular basis even if helped by
solar panels. The costs of maintaining a significant number of this nodes
floating would be considerable.

Also the delay on the communications would also be significant compared to a
normal server. If you take the low computational power of a Raspberry Pi and
put it with a 100Mbps radio (effective data rate would be less), the result
would be a very slow website.

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viraptor
Agreed. I wonder if the low orbit solution could be actually more achievable
than a standard drone one. Both because it doesn't have to fight the wind all
the time and because it can be powered by sun more easily. You need enough
power to maintain ~6mph (depends on the area, but I believe that would be the
long term average in many places). Sure, there's lift and everything, but
you're going to drift in one direction most of the time.

I'm not sure about their availability claims either. "With modern radio
transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away". With modern
radio transmitters, I think you can also quickly localise the earth-bound part
of the system and either close it down, or create enough interference to make
the transfer almost impossible... I'm not an expert on radio though - can
someone confirm/refute this?

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cleverjake
This reminds me of their plans to buy Sealand and become a sovereign nation

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dlikhten
Problems:

\- power needed

\- weather situation can screw things up

\- a node needed on the ground. while servers cant be seized, the ground
station and local laws still needed.

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morellon
This is Cloud Computing! :D

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Radzell
If they actually do this it could revolutionize the internet. If everyone gets
a internet drone we could build internet networks in the harshes place in the
world.

