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."

Comments

Re:Why

[jollyreaper]

I can't believe that filesharing is given such a high priority by governments in Europe. The entertainment industry must have a VERY strong lobbying organization to pull that off. It's a pity that rape victims and other sufferers from really bad crimes are not as well organized and don't have such deep pockets as the entertainment industry.

Look, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. They're also being very serious about wikileaks. It's not just the entertainment industry getting their balls fondled here.

Incidentally, I love how the wikileaks thing just highlights the problem with the way the powerful handle their business. The problem isn't that bad things happened, the problem is that you found out about it! So reform efforts won't be directed towards preventing bad things from happening, just making sure we're more diligent about keeping them under wraps. "If not for them, you wouldn't even know about the military slaughtering innocent civilians! And would you even be so upset about fecal bacteria in your meat if nobody told you?" Stupid smoke detector keeps going off, pull the batteries. By the way, anyone else having trouble breathing? I wonder if there might somehow be a connection.

Time for the tinfoil hat, eh?

[sweatyboatman]

I salute you for resisting using all caps and maintaining a conversational tone, at least.

You're positing that all the world's problems are not only solvable, but easily solvable. I'm sorry to break this to you, but humanity is not omnipotent, we're barely competent. And yes, I am including those bad actors you accuse of creating war, disease and starvation in order to profit.

You mention some serious issues, but you're not helping to solve them by imagining a capitalist conspiracy of a mysterious "them" against the righteous "us". You're misdirecting your energies against ghosts and shadows instead of supporting what actually leads to progress: political activity, scientific research, charity and education.