The Pirate Bay Sails To a New Home

the monolith writes "Back in August, the company supplying bandwidth to The Pirate Bay was forced to disconnect them. Quoting TorrentFreak: '"It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay," commented Patrik from the ISP which had been indirectly supplying bandwidth to TPB. Despite initially putting on a brave face and standing strong, Patrik's company continued to feel the heat. It is not a large outfit and doesn't have the resources to fight the entertainment industry and its threats. Last night, Patrik could hold off no longer after receiving mounting threats from the entertainment industries, which culminated in threats of a court summons. Having come this far, there is little doubt that IFPI and the MPAA would litigate if necessary. ... On the heels of several rumors today, Patrik said he could confirm news of the move, saying that he believes The Pirate Bay is now hosted in Ukraine.'"

Comments

The pirate

[Anonymous Coward]

The pirate bay will never die.

Re:The pirate

[D Ninja]

Oh, there's some companies out there who would like to arrrrrrrrrgue that point with you.

Sorry. Couldn't resist. I'll just let myself out...

Re:The pirate

[sleigher]

The pirate bay will never die.

Now they are like zombie pirates which are way cooler than just pirates.

Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[D Ninja]

What happened to the article "Google purges Pirate Bay from search results?"

It's listed on the front page of Slashdot, but when I click the link, I can't get to it. I want to know what that is about, dang it.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[Per Wigren]

It's about this.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

I noticed this too, so I instinctively took a screenshot of my RSS reader to prove it did actually exist.

Anyone from Slashdot care to explain what the hell happened?

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[straponego]

Interesting. I'd thought Google's revenue streams centered around providing the most accurate and relevant search results. Looks like they've punted on that. So there are opportunities for new search providers after all.

In fact, this could go a long way to explaining why they haven't gotten serious about semantic search, which would be the next giant leap in relevance. it's because they'd rather give you pseudo-relevant (but profitable) answers first. This is why when you're searching for reviews on a product, you get sales crap instead. And it also explains why the count the whole page, even navigation/spam crap, as relevant, rather than grouping articles/sections/comments as logical units.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.

I'm sure I don't need to explain further.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[drinkypoo]

Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.

Wrong. Google is both of these things. They noticed that geeks respond better to advertising when it is true and assembled their company accordingly. A lot of good stuff is coming out of Google and a lot of Google geeks contribute to Open Source. Sure, they're not in the same league as IBM, Novell, Red Hat, or Intel, but they don't have to be.

Re:Google Purges Pirate Bay?

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.

Wrong. Google is both of these things. They noticed that geeks respond better to advertising when it is true and assembled their company accordingly. A lot of good stuff is coming out of Google and a lot of Google geeks contribute to Open Source. Sure, they're not in the same league as IBM, Novell, Red Hat, or Intel, but they don't have to be.

The "technology tinkerer" part is Google's equivalent of a regular advertiser's department of coke-snorting-idea-generators.

They don't stand to make much money from geeks, we're the sort of people who learn how to filter out what they make money from. Text-only Adwords was a stroke of genius, when you look at what other advertisers were like at the time. Adverts that are relevant, and not so annoying that geeks will make tools to block them. Especially when the geeks might make that tool easy enough to use that the public do so.

And yes, you're right they've done a lot of interesting and good tech. Plus released quite a bit of it under liberal licenses. It makes for great PR, allows their techie people who develop these things the satisfaction that it's out there - even if the advertising company can't see a way to use it to sell ad space.

What does the next gen filesharing tech offer us?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pirate Bay is the first place everyone I know goes for their torrents. Without tpb most people would be lost. What will we do when tpb goes down for good??

I only hope the next major technology in file sharing has some feature that is built in for anonymous use, and can offer single click access to load media files.

Dealing with .rar files for a movie that could have been downloaded as one file is so 1990's...

Something that could combine the best parts of usenet and p2p would be the best long term solution I think...

Ahhhh, but Ukraine is Weak

[CodeBuster]

Ukraine is game to you!?

host the servers in antigua

[circletimessquare]

they are invulnerable:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/business/worldbusiness/21iht-wto.html

PARIS -- In an unusual ruling Friday at the World Trade Organization, the tiny Caribbean nation of Antigua won the right to violate copyright protections on goods like films and music from the United States - worth up to $21 million - as part of a dispute between the two countries over online gambling.

The award comes after a WTO decision that Washington had wrongly blocked online gaming operators on the island from the American market at the same time it permitted online wagering on horse racing.

Antigua and Barbuda had claimed annual damages of $3.44 billion. That makes the relatively small amount awarded Friday, $21 million, something of a setback for Antigua, which had been struggling to preserve its booming gambling industry. The United States had claimed that its behavior had caused only $500,000 damage to the Antiguan economy.

Yet the ruling is significant in that it grants a rare form of compensation: the right of one country, in this case, Antigua, to violate intellectual property laws of another - the United States - by allowing them to distribute copies of American music, movie and software products, among other items.

i mean of course its all bullshit. the concept of intellectual property makes no moral, financial, logical, or philosophical sense in the internet age. but i guess we have to wait a few years for the vanguard of ignorant dinosaurs to die off

Re:host the servers in antigua

[FlyingGuy]

i mean of course its all bullshit. the concept of intellectual property makes no moral, financial, logical, or philosophical sense in the internet age. but i guess we have to wait a few years for the vanguard of ignorant dinosaurs to die off

Of course, you could not be more wrong if you tried. Those "dinosaurs" as you call them are being very quickly replaced by young 20 somethings that are creating new and interesting content. They need capitol to do this, they need to hire good coders, designers, graphic artists, admin's the entire gamete of people it takes to pull something like that together and get the attention of the audience, not to mention the cost of rendering farms and big internet pipes to distribute all this content. Like it or not, those people don't live on being "elites" or whatever the current cool phrase is for those with the drive and talent to create all of that content, they have mortgages to pay, insurance, you know like people who have actual lives

Rampant theft of the programs they write causes more then just people not making HUGE "profit" it causes the VC people to look elsewhere to invest which in turn causes all this new and interesting content to be still born.

Put yourself in the VC's place. You have the cash to invest, and someone comes to you with an actual business plan, backed up by a decent demo, with realistic projections for sales. The VC asks, "How are you going to control distribution?" The problem is there is no good answer to give. The VC thinks about it and simply decides that the risk outweighs the possible return and says, "Hey great idea, but with all the pirating out there, how many copies do you realy think you are going to sell? Sorry kid, great idea, but just can't risk the money."

There are a great many things that can be produced from the effort of many people working small amounts of time, and over along period can produce something worth using. GIMP is a fine example, It took the efforts of a great many people, mostly working part time, a great deal of time to come up with something that comes close to challenging Photoshop. Unfortunately things likes games have a far shorter lifespan, whats col today might not be so cool 6 months from now and then its on the scrap heap but not because it was executed poorly or the writers and designers had poor imagination but because peoples taste in entertainment changes just that fast. When it coasts millions of dollars to put that one really cool game together, the people that made it happen want to make money and more then just breaking even because the risked a LOT to get it out the door.

So give me an actual reason why they should not profit from the efforts, why they should not earn whatever the market will bare on EVERY copy sold, and why they should expect people to buy one and then post it on TPB or some other equivalent?

Real actual reasons, not "information wants to be free" rhetoric but actual concrete logical reasons.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[EdIII]

the concept of intellectual property makes no moral, financial, logical, or philosophical sense in the internet age.

Uhhhh, that is a little bit of bullshit right there.

1) Morality -- Are you really bringing copyrights into the realm of Good, Bad, Evil, and Virtuous? Really? Copyrights themselves are intrinsically evil? Copyrights lack character and fail to conform to current standards? Are you going to tell me there are passages in the bible about how thou shall not create intellectual property and restrict distribution and sale of thou works?

I am not buying that. Current copyrights are of course way off balance and are clearly corrupt tools of a few mega-rich groups of people. However, the idea of myself being granted a temporary group of legal protections under the law to ostensibly allow me to make a living off my creative works is not immoral, evil, indication of bad character, incorrect behavior, or outside of the norm.

2) Financial -- Huh? It makes perfect financial sense. Without the copyrights there is no incentive to be paid at all for your works unless you are DIRECTLY the one performing them or distributing the media they are contained on. Point of sale or performance only. What would stop a megacorp from just copying your works and using their existing infrastructure and wealth to distribute your creations? Nothing. Nothing at all. Put bluntly, the only way to get paid for your work outside of charitable contributions and direct performances is copyright.

3) Logical. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The thinking behind copyright is valid and reasonable. It's implementation may be horrifically flawed and may be arguably harmful to society, but that hardly justifies calling it illogical.

4) Lacking any philosophical sense -- Who the hell are you? No, seriously, not trolling here.. Who the hell ARE YOU?? WOW. You're going to sit there and make absolute statements about philosophy like that? Sorry, you don't get to state absolutes like that.

Owning ideas is as valid a philosophy as not being able to own ideas. There IS a "sense" to it. The idea of copyright is reasonable. You're idea of how our creative works should be treated and expressed, is also reasonable.

Now, I don't mean to make any assumptions about you, but you clearly fall into the category of "Imaginary Property" IMO. That's okay. You can argue for a society in which there are no copyrights or patents, or protections on creative works of any kind. That is a philosophical exercise and I will leave it you without denigrating your position (your presentation leaves a heck of lot to be desired).

However, although your little ditty may sound good, it was neither reasonable nor valid. If you want to argue that intellectual property is not a good thing for society than make some cogent arguments. Not the trolling that you are doing here. It does not serve copyright reform, nor does it serve to promote your ideas either.

Your post makes you sound like a bigot.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Morality -- Are you really bringing copyrights into the realm of Good, Bad, Evil, and Virtuous?

Freedom of speech is good and virtuous.
Copyrights are restriction on freedom of speech, ergo they are the opposite of good and virtuous.
You connect the dots.

2) Financial -- Point of sale or performance only.

Bingo was his nameo!

What would stop a megacorp from just copying your works and using their existing infrastructure and wealth to distribute your creations?

Absolutely nothing. So don't give it away at the point of sale for less than it is worth. Then it doesn't matter if megacorp spends their own money to distribute a million copies, the creator's been paid and all those copies megacorp has distributed are just free advertising for the creator's next work.

3) Logical. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. The thinking behind copyright is valid and reasonable.

Maybe that was true before the internet made copyright enforcement impossible, now -- under current conditions -- is quite logical to say that copyright is entirely unreasonable.

Owning ideas is as valid a philosophy as not being able to own ideas.

Yes indeed, just as sensible as legislating pi to be exactly 3.14. With out billions of dollars spent on lawyers guns and, er, money, copyright could never even pretend to exist. But the free distribution of ideas, well that takes exactly zero dollars to make happen, its the natural state and has been since the dawn of man sitting around campfires reciting oral traditions.

Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[bzipitidoo]

Copyrights are monopolies. Monopolies are evil.

The goal of encouraging science and art is worthy. The means is not. Since you reach for philosophical points, let's ask the question. Does the end justify the means? Specifically, does the tiny portion of profits that reaches artists justify copyright? Does the gaining of information justify torture? If one plot that would have killed one innocent was supposedly found out through torture, shouldn't we employ torture at every opportunity?

The trouble with such arguments is they're too narrow. They don't admit that there are other means and other ends. There are other ways to compensate artists, other means to the same desirable end. Perhaps those ways are better. And, there are additional unintended ends that are usually bad. Yes, some artists may see a little something from their efforts. But the Chilling Effects arguably stops more art than it encourages. No one can know whether something they do violates some Intellectual Property, and too often opt to avoid trouble and just don't do it at all. Who knows what great works we could have had? What inferior junk we're pretending is good because every messenger to the contrary was shot? How about a good LoTR live action series? (Sorry, but Peter Jackson's movies were a sad butchery of the story.) We might even discover that a team of people actually can produce better art than any one individual, however talented. For instance, I always wondered how David Eddings managed to portray his female characters with incredibly appropriate feminine behavior. Could any man be enough of an expert to pull that off as well as he did? As it turns out, his wife helped him write the stories. We should move away from this unhealthy concentration on and worship of the One. Just another messy thing about copyright, trying to credit everyone on a massive team effort. Vested interests waste resources on DRM and laws and lawsuits in pursuit of very anti-competitive goals that are bad for everyone else. Locking ideas up for eternity minus 1 day is robbing Peter (all of us) to pay Paul (copyright holders). Are we to shut down used book and record stores? Abandon the ancient and highly respected and beneficial tradition of the public library? That such extreme consequences of upholding copyright are possible is a strong argument against copyright. That is, we should stop using copyright lest people actually start to think that public libraries are bad, that the mere act of reading a library copy of a book is theft. As for torture, the unintended consequences are obvious, and all bad.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.

Try again.

Copyright is a social contract between the creator, and the general public, that they are granted a limited monopoly on their creation. The arguments for that, pretty much boil down to it being in the public's interest for people to have a chance to profit from their creations and thus create, and be able to create again in the future.

Saying, "Gee, just get paid what it's worth and don't bother if a megacorp rips you off to sell millions of copies" is breathtaking stupidity. You can't charge five million pounds each to an audience of 20-30 people just in case one of them works for the aforementioned megacorp and will copy your work.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[Shark]

If getting paid is your primary reason for writing the computer program. Don't write it until you find someone willing to pay you for writing it.

If you write it because it is useful to you, profit from its use either through the time it saves you or the things it allows you to do/make.

From a customer standpoint here's how I approach it. I have a project, it uses open source software but some functionality is missing for me to turn it into a profitable venture. I will gladly pay someone to add that functionality, even if I don't *own* that extra functionality.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[SanityInAnarchy]

Small correction:

If this were the actual case then Jay-Z could indeed make whatever remix he wanted from the White Album, publish that and he would then enjoy the protection of copyright for the prescribed amount of time.

Actually, neither Jay-Z nor the Beatles wanted this to happen. It was someone else mixing both of them together.

Anyway...

Does this mean that on June 26th, 2014 an individual or company would then start selling copies of Windows 98?

I don't see why not. In fact, I don't see why Microsoft wouldn't open source Windows 98.

Now what about Microsoft Windows 98SE? It was first published in 1999, but one can argue that it is simply and updated version of the original. Should it be treated like the nth version of "The Joy of Cooking" and granted a new inception date for the protection of copyright?

I don't see why not, so long as that doesn't apply to 98 (or the first edition of Joy of Cooking). Kind of like how id software has released the Quake 3 source code, and have almost certainly used that to build the Doom 3 engine, but have not released the Doom 3 source code.

Now all things being equal, how far should the government go in the prosecution of those violating the protection granted under copyright?

Well, that's the thing -- copyright used to be a civil matter, not a criminal matter.

whatever the eventual conclusion it has to be enforced vigorously.

Still doesn't work.

I mean, we can argue all day that old movies should be up on Archive.org, but that's not going to stop new movies leaking onto The Pirate Bay before they're even in theaters.

So, I do agree that copyright should at least be reformed. But as we move forward, there are really only two options:

Either we, as a society, somehow find our way past this idea that someone needs a monopoly on their work to create that work, and we find a way to reward people without these restrictions...

Or we start locking things down to the point where the free Internet is a memory.

I don't really see a middle ground. The only way to vigorously enforce copyright that isn't laughably easy to defeat is pretty totalitarian -- you'd have to only allow approved communication over approved channels with approved devices. Even here, it's possible to defeat, it just gets harder as the tools for reverse engineering and free communication become rarer and less legal.

The only real solution I see is to trend towards business models which don't presuppose that you'll be able to eradicate piracy -- which, in fact, compete with piracy as though it was a legitimate competitor.

A simple example, via music: Just go on tour. Even playing bars, you'll likely actually make a living, compared to how little money you'd make working with the RIAA. And the best part is, you're providing an experience which cannot be duplicated -- people can record you all they want, all it does is give you free advertising.

Another example: MMOs. It's much more difficult to reverse engineer the protocol and write a server from scratch than it is to simply strip DRM out of a single-player game. And even if you can do that, someone has to run the server, and it's likely to be a less populated, less enjoyable server than the legitimate ones.

Re:host the servers in antigua

[shaitand]

"yes I want to charge what the market will bare; however, if someone out there decides they don't like the price I am charging, happens to work for a company that has acutely purchased said product then takes that product and slaps it up on TPB or some equivalent what is my recourse?"

None. In a free market you have no right to restrict copying and distribution in the first place.

Your only recourse is what god/nature/the universe provides and that is your ability to enforce your will WITHOUT the government and courts doing it for you. You have no moral or ethical right to a copyright in the first place, ideas, images, and sounds naturally flow from one mind to another without restriction they don't belong to anyone.

There are plenty of reasons people make creative works. Profit incentive is only one of them. And even within the realm of profit incentive there are numerous ways to profit that don't require an artificial IP. Is there some reason a writer, musician, painter, or programmer can't be paid for the individual act of performance? What is so wrong with that?

Re:host the servers in antigua

[shaitand]

"As to you assertion that I have "no moral or ethical right to a copyright in the first place, ideas, images, and sounds naturally flow from one mind to another without restriction they don't belong to anyone" is specious as markets for knowledge and creative works have been around for centuries."

Your assertion is false. Your premise that markets for knowledge and creative works have been around for centuries supports my own argument since these markets flourished and supported creativity without intellectual property. A free market does not rely on artificial copy protection constructs to create artificial scarcity. Without such constructs it is creative talent that is in limited supply, not copies of previously created works.

"Your assertion is a simply a fundamentally flawed idea that because you have an internet connection you have the right to obtain, by any means available, the creative works of anyone and then distribute them as you see fit, to anyone you see fit."

Not at all. My assertion is rather that once the owner of a work has sold that work to someone they have all the same rights the person who created it has because it now belongs to them. If its a sculpture they can make castings, impressions, photograph it, or give it (or any of those copies) away. The sculpture is property owned by the creator until he sells it or gives it away. The copies are owned by whoever makes them in turn not by whoever created the original. The abstract idea of the sculpture that would be covered by copyright is not property in the real world it is not a natural right. It exists only because of government interference in the market.

TPB still in .se

[kokoko1]

The 'host' command says TPBay is still in Sweden
host thepiratebay.org
thepiratebay.org has address 194.71.107.15

whois says this IP belong to some provider in .se
whois 194.71.107.15

Re:TPB still in .se

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to dig a little deeper.
TPB has it's own provider independant IP addresses that can be moved around the world. The fact that a Swedish company operates them doesn't matter. Neither does the country part below, because that is not dependant on actual physical location.

  inetnum: 194.71.107.0 - 194.71.107.255
  netname: DCP-ANYCAST-DNS
  descr: DCP-NEWORKS
  country: SE
  status: ASSIGNED PI

Why bother?

[Hailth]

People trying to get rid of the pirate bay act as if removing a tool for sharing will put an end to the desire to share that drives the ability to find new tools to do it.

Re:Why bother?

[palegray.net]

The industry will be satisfied when they gain the ability to monitor everyone's net connection for signs of "illicit filesharing activity." If you think I'm joking, watch the kind of legislation the entertainment lobbies put their weight behind.

Re:Why bother?

[sqrt(2)]

The legal department of the RIAA has to look like they are doing something. They have to try and make some accomplishments, even symbolic ones.

Re:Why bother?

[AlgorithMan]

The industry will be satisfied when they gain the ability to monitor everyone's net connection

which will cause anonymous p2p to catch on (like frost in the freenet). And if that happens - and nobody ever has to be afraid to be caught again - then the content industry is dead...

so to rephrase your statement: the industry will be satisfied when they commited suicide...

Re:KOMMIES TO THE RESCUE !!

[palegray.net]

Ukraine isn't Communist. Go back to school, starting with the fourth grade.

Oh for godsakes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would the obvious just hurry up and happen? Clearly we need Jack Thompson to go after the Pirate Bay. Which'll preferably be running on servers made of code stolen from SCO, and rumored to play the secret beta of Duke Nukem Forever if compiled backwards.

Anything else? Will that put our Stories That Just Won't Die together?

Re:Keep fighting...

[russlar]

Last I checked, one of the "A"'s in MPAA and RIAA stood for "America". Also, last I checked, neither Sweden no the Ukraine were in America.

Re:TPB now hosted on the moon

[sqrt(2)]

The US has never made any claims of ownership of any part of the moon. There are small Soviet markers made of metal up there too that were placed by their various unmanned probes, so the US is still the only country with a real flag on the moon. The US and Russia also have a treaty that says both will treat the moon the same way we handle international waters, and forbids military use.

Re:Keep fighting...

[tsm_sf]

No, what's going to happen is that file sharing tech will shift to an even less centralized system, and the **AA will be once again left holding their dicks. The death of the original Napster showed us that these organizations don't really have the first idea as to what they'd like to accomplish, and they will constantly be playing catch-up.

What we're watching is the painful transition of these media organizations to, basically, advertising agencies. Production and distribution have gone from hugely costly endeavors to something you could do in your bedroom. What's left for them?

Re:Use SKIs

[The MAZZTer]

I don't know it kinda fits if you consider TPB the guy on SKIs and whoever is trying to shut them down the guys on snow shoes.

Re:What does the next gen filesharing tech offer u

[sqrt(2)]

Isohunt usually has a comparable or better selection depending on what you're looking for, they largely mirror each other anyway. If TPB ever dies for good the community might splinter, but there will be replacements and word will get around what they are.

Re:The Powers that Be

[turing_m]

So if you value your country's sovereignty in the least, consider the threat real. Many want to eliminate The Pirate Bay's every chance of asylum.

I think it's relatively unlikely that there won't be some sort of movement by those with power to counter the lack of control caused by the internet. We are seeing that now. It would not surprise me if the media mafia kept up the full court press until every last country folds. They have plenty of money and power.

OTOH, their enemies are getting something they formerly paid for, for nothing. Not much money to fight with there. Do they have any allies with an income stream? ISPs are a natural ally - they are not stupid. Without media downloads, porn is the only thing really driving large cap high bandwidth accounts. Sure, a lot of people download a lot of porn, but I'm sure the ISPs would be giving up a large chunk of income if the MPAA were able to shut down torrents of movie downloads.

If the MPAA were to succeed with shutting down torrenting, it's not even the end of technological improvement. We just head towards some sort of darknet. But I suppose that the longer torrents are fairly easy to find and download, the more people come to expect media for free, the more entrenched is the file sharing culture, and the more potential Bram Cohens there will be to code up technological solutions in their spare time. So I suppose this delaying action does serve a purpose.

If the MPAA could even defeat that somehow, cost/GB keeps dropping and local transfer rates keep increasing. We'd have a scene kind of like a souped up version of 1980s tape copying. Except you'd be able to copy the entire year's output of the entertainment industry in a few hours. The only real problem then is converting the media to a DRM free digital version and assembling it in one place.

Re:Keep fighting...

[MBGMorden]

There are already decentralized systems out their (Gnutella and KAD for example). Those however suffer from the serious problem that all decentralized P2P systems suffer from though: lack of speed.

The simple truth is that SOME level of centralization will always provide a huge boost in speed, and as such there will always been someone like TPB looking to get a centralized server somewhere that can't be touched. And so far that has worked. The decentralized model already exists, and has for many years, but like always it will simply be a last resort that we likely won't have to use.

Re:Keep fighting...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Last I checked, one of the "A"'s in MPAA and RIAA stood for "America". Also, last I checked, neither Sweden no the Ukraine were in America.

Yeah, but the OTHER 'A' stands for Ass. and there are Asses in ALL countries!

Re:KOMMIES TO THE RESCUE !!

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

"Always the hell holes of the world attract the sleeze of the world, like flies to shit."

Is that why we have so many corrupt, bribed, traitors in our US Government?

Re:Keep fighting...

[trytoguess]

Hmm? From what I've seen as a user of both bittorrent and eMule (the major client that uses KAD), the reason the latter is slow is not because of decentralizing, but because of a different philosophy in data sharing. With bitorrent you only share a file if you're trying to finish a download, or seeding. In eMule one shares dozens or even hundreds of files not related to the thing(s) you're trying to get. Bittorrent only shares data relevant to a persons download relatively quickly, and eMule shares lots of files slowly so one can get a larger variety of files (eventually).

Unfortunately, eMule has become less popular thanks to file sharing sites like rapidshare. Well, at least that's my guess.

Re:Is it legal

[KlaymenDK]

The question is not whether it's legal, the question is whether the small guy can afford to raise that concern...

Upstream

[sopssa]

Before more and more people jump in with their stupid whois links domain->ip links saying "look, their ip is 194.71.107.15 and its in sweden"...

TPB is hosted on their owners own AS and ip block "DCPNetworks" which is one of the couple ones they have. It's info is registered to be in Stockholm, Sweden, but its manual info given to RIPE. It doesn't mean its physically there. More so, it could had been there but moved elsewhere later. Lots of people seem to think these geolocations are some magical system to determine exactly where ip location is, but it's all based on manually typed in info when you register with RIPE or other registreries.

What you have to look at is their upstream providers. robtex shows still the old info too. More so, my own look up goes to amsterdam and leaseweb as their last upstream provider.

Actually this seems to be a fail over system of theirs. PatrikWeb, their only upstream besides DCS and SPACEDUMP, stopped providing bandwidth so their fail safe system kicked in and started providing bandwidth in Ukraine when one of their upstream providers stopped routing. They probably have more providers in place too to pick up quickly.

It's an intelligent system and not a surprise that those who haven't looked into BGP and routing more dont understand what's going on and just point out that the IP space is registered in sweden and dont see it can actually be located anywhere.

Re:Upstream

[Krneki]

Stop giving information. Let the music/film industry think they are still in Sweden. :)

Re:Upstream

[zoloto]

I haven't seen a more impressive post on slashdot regarding networking on this level in a long time. You wouldn't happen to belong to NANOG would you?

Still wouldn't work, probably

[Mathinker]

Unless they manage to outlaw one-to-one encrypted communications, people will still be able to use the net for organizing personal transfers of enormous amounts of content (just think about how many songs, or even non-HD movies, fit on one microSD chip now). Eventually it will be possible to tracelessly exchange enormous amounts of content in person, and social networking sites which enable this as a side-effect can easily be set up.

TPB will morph into "The Pirate Get-together Organizer", and as long as they are attentive-yet-ineffective to the demands of the content groups, as opposed to militantly "in your face", they will survive for a long, long, time.

Re:Still wouldn't work, probably

[palegray.net]

Unless they manage to outlaw one-to-one encrypted communications ...

The vast majority of Internet users (a) wouldn't understand that concept if you spent an hour trying to explain it, or (b) wouldn't bother to implement it even if they did "get it."

I'm a huge fan of encryption, and I actively promote its use wherever possible. That said, the much larger issue is very simple: at what point will our government start allowing private corporations to instantly determine guilt or innocence? What's to stop them from outlawing "illegal" encryption using mechanisms like the DMCA, i.e. only allowing crypto they have keys for on their networks? We're getting uncomfortably close to that point (some would argue that we're teetering on the brink), and there's probably no going back once that bridge is crossed. It'd be easy to simply inflate prices for "unchecked" connections to the point where no ordinary person could afford them, making them only accessible to business interests.

All the good intentions and solidarity in the world won't get you anywhere if you're sitting in a jail cell on the whim of some company that decides you're a criminal worthy of confinement.

Re:Still wouldn't work, probably

[Mathinker]

the much larger issue is very simple: at what point will our government start allowing private corporations to instantly determine guilt or innocence?

I totally agree with you here; that has to be one of the more insightful comments I've seen in the copyright-wars-subthread at Slashdot.

What makes it even more insightful is that one's actual ability to know if you are violating copyright will be more and more in question. If I see a file which is claimed to be: "First half of New Blockbuster Movie" which claims it is legally licensed for redistribution for publicity, I don't see it being a strong case in court that I would knowingly be violating copyright by downloading it.

But now what if there is another file which is "Last half of New Blockbuster Movie" with the same claim? It would be fairly obvious that if I download both, I can be fairly sure that I have downloaded at least one file with a false claim. But what if, for example, my best friend downloads the second file instead of me?

Pretty simple

[adewolf]

Time to enact legislation that separates the government from corporations, much like separation of church and state. Pliable/compliant/paid off corporate governments must be stopped. No government should ever be "compelled" to defend private corporations interests. Well, all the big record companies will go out of business soon anyways. It's really a waiting game.