
Swedish Police Raid the Pirate Bay, Site Offline - jalan
http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-police-raid-the-pirate-bay-site-offline-141209/
======
mrkickling
The organisation that reported Thepiratebay and therefore is the reason for
this raid is called Rättighetsalliansen (The Alliance of Rights). The Alliance
of Rights is the same organisation as The Anti Pirate Bureau but with a new
name. This is what they say on their website (roughly translated):

"The police raided The Pirate Bay today inside an Internet company in the
Stockholm region. Rättighetsalliansen is behind the report against The Pirate
Bay.

\- Pirate Bay is an illegal commercial service that makes great sums of money
by putting up other peoples movies and music on their site. The producers wont
get payed for their work and the legal services growth gets prevented, says
Henrik Pontén, lawyer at Rättighetsalliansen."

In other words they don't now what they are talking about. Thepiratebay is not
putting up any files on thepiratebay.org, the users are (of course nothing is
even uploaded, only seeded from user to user). I can recommend the documentary
about The piratebay, TPB AFK where you will meet Henrik Pontén from the Anti
Piracy Bureau among others.

Rättighetsalliansens website and article about this:
[http://rattighetsalliansen.se/nyhet/118](http://rattighetsalliansen.se/nyhet/118)

EDIT: I think their website crashed.

~~~
draugadrotten
It's a common mistake by techies to think that technical details make a
difference in (Swedish) court. They don't. Technical details are rarely
important in Swedish court, where the court is free to consider all evidence,
even if it's obtained illegally or just is weird.

So called "technical evidence" is rarely "technical" for techies. It's often
just HTTP logfile print-outs or a screen shot of a file sharing program.
That's as technical as it gets. The judges don't know Excel from Word, and the
prosecutor don't know HTTP from UDP. The defense have to work on the judges,
not on the truth.

And in the end, they judges judge people based on emotion and political
opinion anyway. After all, isn't a law but a formal moral opinion?

~~~
gcb0
now explain how that is different from anywhere in the world...

~~~
bjornsteffanson
It's not different, and I believe that was the point. There is a weird
stereotype that I've encountered about Sweden that I wasn't aware of until the
first time I lived outside of our country...whenever something like this comes
along, there's a notion that some people think "Oh it's Sweden, they'll do the
right thing," as if our laws or courts are somehow "more right" or "more just"
than others. I think what the preceding comment was trying to point out is
that that is not always true.

~~~
jbaptiste
That's very true. In Europe, Sweden is in our minds like one of the two or
three countries where everything seems to be "good". Economics are good,
people are nice, unemployment seems low and somehow those countries act as
"The goods and respectables guys from the north". That's a very common feeling
in EU.

~~~
meowface
The same sentiment is held by many in the US. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway are
viewed as more modern and civilized societies.

------
andor
Here's a statement from Peter Sunde:

[http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-
foreve...](http://blog.brokep.com/2014/12/09/the-pirate-bay-down-forever/)

Discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726110](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8726110)

------
josteink
New URL: [https://thepiratebay.cr/](https://thepiratebay.cr/)

A .ac mirror should to be coming up. We'll see if this has the desired effect
or is just another whack-a-mole effort.

~~~
mrkickling
Could anyone care to explain how this works?

~~~
eloisant
It doesn't actually. That's a proxy, not a mirror; designed to make TPB
available from countries where it's blocked. Try a search, it won't work.

[https://proxybay.info/](https://proxybay.info/)

However, there's a script where you could download the whole TPB, it's only 90
Mb. That's possible because now they're using only magnet links, so a torrent
is pretty much just a URL.

[http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-
it...](http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-its-
only-90-mb-120209/)

So if someone have a recent copy, it would be easy to setup a mirror.

Or people could just use one of the dozen torrent site still up and let the
whack-a-mole game continue.

------
drpfenderson
So....what happened to the "raid-proof" server array they were talking about
in September? ([https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-
proo...](https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proof-
virtual-machines-140921/))

~~~
tlrobinson
I'm imagining a Daemon (as in the Daniel Suarez book) like system that gets
paid by web advertising companies in Bitcoin, and automatically spawns it's
servers on cloud providers who accept payment in Bitcoin. One or more hot
backups on a single VM would silently wait for the live system to go down,
then respawn itself and switch over the DNS. Namecoin could be used in place
of, or augmenting, traditional domain names.

The only really tricky bit is "raid-proofing" secrets (Bitcoin/Namecoin
private keys, DNS credentials), but Amazon and presumably other cloud
providers are starting to offer HSMs. Or perhaps some combination of Shamir's
Secret Sharing and multisig wallets + voting pools.

~~~
pavel_lishin
You might be interested in Charles Stross's "Accelerando", where he posits a
similar system of python scripts acting as decentralized companies, constantly
shuffling ownership of themselves among themselves.

It's been too long since I've read it, so I forget what the actual point was.

~~~
sdrinf
Ironically enough, sub-second music IP rights swap between the shell corps, so
as to dodge any lawsuits getting anything out of them.

Worked great too, unless you discount the whole "convert the earth into
computronium" in later chapters implying it's origin from the same subsystems.

------
wyager
Honestly, I think the pirate bay getting busted would be a good thing, as it
would probably lead to the creation of more distributed, robust filesharing
platforms.

The actual bulk data distribution is already quite P2P; the only remaining
centralized part is the part that distributes the magnet hashes.

~~~
Joona
I'm pretty sure you can actually download the magnet links as an archive,
which shouldn't be too big either.

~~~
dfc
You can download "an archive" that has all of the magnet links at the time of
the creation of the archive. This is not helpful for finding new content. Most
importantly downloading a 9 gig archive of magnet links is not a workable
system for average users; Bittorrent is only as good as the number of peers in
the swarm.

~~~
runn1ng
I actually made a magnet link archive a year and something back (
[http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/](http://www.karelbilek.com/piratebay/)
), mostly as an experiment

Only the magnets and names - 76 MB; all the magnets + descriptions + comments
- 631 MB

It's not that workable for any particular usage (other then statistics I
guess) and I never upgraded it since then. There were some attempts by other
people to regularly archive TPB (and semi-mirror sites like torrentz.eu and
bitsnoop were "mirroring it" by reposting its torrents until the very end) but
I am not sure if somebody actually dumped it online regularly in an archive

------
gargantian
In an internet-ubiquitous world, the idea of restricting the flow of data --
any data -- is basically a magical fantasy of those who understand neither the
technology nor its sociology. The Pirate Bay will be back in a day or two
tops.

I wonder how much longer people will keep trying to put the information genie
back in the bottle?

~~~
Thimothy
Ever heard about Demonoid?

------
arenaninja
Funnily enough, for the past year I've been using TPB pretty much for finding
very specific versions of Linux distros

~~~
eyeareque
Do they come with very specific pieces of malware too? kidding aside, I hope
you check the ISO checksums.

~~~
bigphishy
I would hope most linux users knows how to use checksum.

------
sz4kerto
That's probably not the RAID level they planned to use to ensure maximum
availability.

------
throwvpn
I noticed weird behavior on multiple VPNs lately (those that should protect
torrent users using OpenVPN) as the IPs given by VPN provider upon connecting
were suddenly located in the US (Massachusetts) instead of Sweden, Finland
etc. where you intended to connect. Always check the location of the IP
address you get to be sure you aren't MitM-ed...

~~~
gcb0
vpn for anonymity? are you making a joke that i didn't understood?

------
mrkickling
Will be interesting to see if this will influence the Swedish parliament
reelection in march.

~~~
eli
Is Pirate Bay & file sharing really that big an issue among the general public
in Sweden?

~~~
johansch
No, not really. The somewhat associated Pirate Party used to be a big thing
here, but then the party was hijacked by a new leader who mostly seemed to
care about LGBT issues. Said leader just resigned last week, and the Swedish
Pirate Party is now in a reboot phase.

~~~
A_COMPUTER
Anna Troberg stepped down? I can't find documentation of this.

edit: found it.

[http://piratetimes.net/leading-swedish-pirates-step-
down/](http://piratetimes.net/leading-swedish-pirates-step-down/)

------
jason_slack
I dont know a lot about the organizational structure anymore, but having just
watched "TPB: AFK" I assume that Peter Sunde isn't involved? I think Gottfrid
and Fredrik are still in prison?

~~~
cpach
Correct.

------
jason_slack
Does anyone have any good technical info on the hardware/software architecture
for TPB? When I watched "TPB: AFK" it looked lean, just a handful of 1u
servers and only one of them public facing/entry point.

------
yc1010
eztv.it is down too (imho much more useful than tpb) interestingly enough
seems they used cloudflare.

~~~
Thimothy
Many filesharing and streaming services are down in Spain, too. Seems it's an
european scale raid.

------
happyscrappy
I thought file sharing was recognized as a religion in Sweden.

~~~
mrkickling
Yes it is, kopimism is a recognized religion. But it is a minority religion
treated quite badly.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism)

~~~
happyscrappy
They should file with the UN for religious persecution.

------
Lward
I scouted some sites and found out that TPB will be backup soon and they also
say that it had happened before. Ttuely I hope the best

~~~
crypto235
Good to hear that, I hope this police issue will be resolved soon.

------
Lward
Had this been happening before? I've been searching the sites about it and I
found out that TPB will be back up soon but they don't know exactly when it
will happen.

~~~
Lward
Yes, they can't prove anything.

------
runn1ng
The last uploaded torrent, from what can I tell (from what Google indexed)

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v346Sjm...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v346Sjm9naMJ:thepiratebay.se/torrent/11671306/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&strip=1)

State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION

magnet link:

    
    
        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9d12bfa80f937b7fbed3601ebda9d725d483a2de&dn=State.of.Affairs.S01E04.720p.HDTV.X264-DIMENSION&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.istole.it%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337

~~~
apetresc
I'm sure TPB gets torrents added faster than Google caches.

