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Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."
Thepiratebay.org ? I just opened it, to check this. It works fine!
1. TPB is not down, it is and has been up-just really really slow. TPB being slow is nothing new, it's been plagued with speed and reliability problems the entire summer. 2. TPB trackers were shut down a long time ago willfully. They still show up all over the place though because nobodys really around anymore to maintain the website except a couple volunteer moderators with limited access. Most torrents that were tracked on TPB's tracker are now tracked on openbt/publicbt. It's common practice for people to point dns of tracker.thepiratebay.org to tracker.openbittorrent.com. 3. Swedish news outlets have already confirmed WikiLeaks was not the target of these raids. It's just a coincidence that them and many other controversial websites are hosted at prq/rix-mainly because of their dedication to anonymity of the customer. 4. Their goal (my guess/opinion) was to take down a bunch of "scene" servers and websites simultaneously to temporarily stem the flow of high quality releases. Release groups and Pre sites/Scene sites often use servers to coordinate their efforts and post their releases to these places first-After which you have a trickle down effect where the torrents are posted to public torrent sites most of us are familiar with. I guess they're hoping that there will be enough evidence on these computers to identify some of the individuals who are at the top of the "scene" foodchain-the people who actually sneak the camcorders into the theaters or work at the cd pressing factory to prerelease a new CD etc...
I got pulled over once after blowing through 2 stop signs in under 10 feet. I had been playing GTA for 4 days straight since my car was iced in, so wasn't used to stopping. The cop informed me why I was pulled over, and then got an alert and hurriedly said "I could give you a ticket for both of those" and ran back to his car.
So yeah, it's possible. I can't find a source off hand, but a few weeks ago either /. or Fark had a story about reducing missing persons investigators, and a few months before that ramping up copyright operations. So my little anecdote aside, the sizes of the teams responsible for different types of crime are being re-allocated. That takes it from 'possible' to 'happening'. Maybe not on the scale of gp post, and certainly not to the extent of your binary logic, but yes happening.