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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!
Now that governments across the globe are mobilizing armed men to eliminate file sharers, the world will be a perfect place. Certainly there is nothing worse than file sharing going on if this is their priority.
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.
-- Cheers!
Pirate Bay has been fine for me for the past 12 hours!
It WAS a bit slow around 4am today but it's been fine...
But whoever wrote that story should check their grammar, the main sentence is ambiguous at best:
was it:
"The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable (For Comment)"
or
"The Pirate Bay (Website is down and) is currently unavailable"
They sound similar but have totally different meanings
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
They were just investigating all the torrent/Wikileaks mirrors on rape and molestation charges.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The action, targeting the so-called 'Warez Scene', is said to have been in planning for two years, and is believed to have taken place at the request of Belgian authorities."
Ya, good luck with that. In the meantime new servers will come online and all the bits will be put back in order. This time, they will probably be put up in countries that won't answer the phone. Good job, 2 years of planning and I'm sure a heroic police effort, executing the warrants, will be undone in a matter of weeks. Welcome to the digital age.
TPB *was* taken down, doesn't mean it would last forever. Thankfully, Its been back up since at least 14:02 local time.
Too hard to check TFA before posting? (joke ;)
These raids were apparently not about TPB or other torrent sites but rather aimed at scene topsites.
I've read some media industry "information" about the scene lately where they've compared it to organized crime (in the "making money from illegal activities" sense, not the "being organized" sense). Of course, approx 99% of those involved in the scene don't make money from their involvement but I guess it's a bit harder to make them out to be evil mafioso types if they're not actually making any money...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
poof!: prostitution will disappear
close down pirate bay... poof!: piracy disappears
right, right?
regardless of your stand on media piracy or prostitution, simply from a law enforcement point of view that assumes these "vices" are simply something illegal to be fought: i don't understand why you want to shut the hubs down
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what's there. but without craigslist or the pirate bay, these "problems" are harder to catch and monitor
its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability. its not like murder or rape, where the illegality of the actions are obvious and therefore the mandate and willpower to punish perps is 100%. instead, with stuff like prostitution and piracy, the willpower wanes, the commitment lapses, because the immorality of the actions is not clearcut
such that the law enforcement campaigns consist less of going after perpetrators, but just making them go underground and disappear from prominent view
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Simultaneous raids are also said to have been carried out in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Hungary."
Sweden (1904), Netherlands (1912), Belgium (1887), Norway (1896), Germany (1887), Great Britain (1887), Czech Republic (1993), and Hungary (1904) have all signed the Berne Convention among other agreements.
Sweden may have fairly loose laws when it comes to "sharing" protected work, but it also has international obligations that may seem more burdensome now than they did back in 1904.
I wonder if ACTA will have similar unforeseen consequences in one hundred years as today's act of file transmission and duplication was likely not considered back in the day of ink and presses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_music_artists
Movies are rather different, of course.
Don't you see that "Economic Growth" must be expressed in money, and that if people don't pay for it, but still consume it, it's not "growth", for the simple reason that we cannot measure it?
I mean... duh.
That's like curing cancer for free, and not getting rich of it. That's not growth, and therefore not progress... If you aim to improve this world without earning money, you clearly have your priorities wrong.
Police and governments exist to maximize measurable profit.
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 tend to wonder when the pressure on normal people to get in line and shut up will go over the top and cause real action.
It's not just file-sharers. Anyone who simply wants to be left alone as they travel the net is subject to monitoring and, maybe, serious trouble.
How many meritless lawsuits will have to be filed, how many knocks on doors in the night must happen, before some package of technology comes into general use, a group of tools that creates a situation where ISPs see nothing but encrypted streams going this way and that, with no idea what's actually in them?
All the pieces exist. Some years ago, I would have predicted that we'd be to that point already.
But no. People just keep sending in the clear, writing all their important letters on the back of postcards unless the recipient forces them to put it in an envelope.
Is this weird? Or is my viewpoint skewed? I'd really like to know because I sure don't understand it.
As always, the story was outdated before it had come through Slashdot's rigorous editing process.
my use of the word "pirate" is with full knowledge of the discrepancy you refer to
we are after all talking about the PIRATE bay. we both know the guys who run that site know full well that the traditional meaning of piracy is a poor descriptor of what copyright infringement is, but they wear the epithet "pirate" with pride on the name of their site. when someone smears and insults you, a good tactic is to take that insult or epithet, and use it yourself with pride as a descriptor. therefore nullifying the supposed power of the negative word. a negative becomes a positive. so i proudly call myself a pirate, when i know the sharing media is nothing like swashbucklers and theft. in this way, words are always constantly shifting in meaning and implication in popular culture, and this eventually filters down to dictionary terminology years later
the same can be found in the gay rights movement: "queer" is now a word of pride. or even right here on slashdot: "nerd" and "geek" are words which were meant as insults but are now marks of honor. there are many sociological and political arenas where insults menat to smear, scapegoat, and prejudice are turned around and used as marks of pride
for example, lately i am trying to proudly refer to myself as a socialist, here in the usa. socialism in europe is just obvious common sense. but in the usa it takes on mythic ridiculous proportions of evil, by people who barely understand the concept (ever hear of library? a highway system? social security? hellooooo?). such that using the word, as a mark of pride and a self-descriptor, is almost revolutionary and controversial, here in the usa at least, when of course, according to a strict interpretation of the meaning of the word, its completely humdrum
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Check it out. I2P offers anonymous network on top of TCP/IP, and by default the installation includes an anonymous bittorrent client: I2PSnark, which is made to avoid leaking information through the application layers like: IP, usernames, network-information, etc.
I2P is encrypted end-to-end, and nothing escapes the network to the open internet, unless you route through one of the outproxies (which are generally frowned upon in the community).
You can even use I2P as a VPN, which can connect two firewalled machines with no inbound connections, albeit slowly, it works and is like a distributed Hamachi working through encrypted tunnels of your choice. In theory, any application can now be tunnelled in encrypted and distributed fashion over the old internet, although for P2P you should be sure to avoid client applications which leak information. For personal use, anything can be tunnelled and reached, *anywhere*, as long as you got outbound connections.
Using non-anonymous bittorrent in this current climate is irresponsible, as it is very easy for *anyone* to collect IP addresses. With I2P they know your IP, but not what you're doing, who you're connecting with etc. Nothing more than that you are connected through I2P..
Heck, EVEN your peers in bittorrent won't get to know your IP, since it's all garlic-routed through the IP-network, so both sides remain anonymous. Now that's genious!
I2P scales and behaves MUCH MUCH better than Freenet to boost.
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
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.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
http://www.geti2p.net/
What's interesting is that I2P has been gaining popularity much more rapidly in Europe than elsewhere. I guess HADOPI-type laws are having their effect. In the far east the project is forming partnerships with dissident groups so that media files and other large data sets can be transmitted in relative safety.
Bittorrent, iMule and a distributed filesystem are available on the network which is both anonymized and highly decentralized (moreso than Tor).
No. As soon as the accumulation of power though "competitive markets" hits a critical mark, the most powerful competitor drives everyone else out of the market. All competitive capitalism leads to monopolistic plutocracy, if unchecked by some other monolithic power, usually a governmental entity.
Standard Oil, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels Midland, Goldman Sachs, IBM, then Microsoft, AT&T, then AT&T again, take your pick.
Someone has to wield the power, and the goal of capitalism is to become king of the hill and wield it, usually by knifing one's competitors in the back. Not to "compete in a market" or any of these other "free market" dogmas you seem to espouse.
Eventually, capitalism fails. It becomes oligarchy. The entire system is designed to behave that way without some other, powerful monolithic entity to keep it in check.
No solution here, just pointing out the obvious. Capitalism is defective by design, and you really have to watch who is getting power from your purchases/dollar votes. Capitalism without a popular entity to keep it in check always becomes centrally controlled (boardroom controlled) despotism. Then your only vote is a share in the stock market.
That may be fine by you, but I don't believe I should have to buy my vote in a non-democratic system slanted to keep me in my place as an unhappy, disposable consumer.
--
Toro