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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 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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?
Close, but "hurting the bottom line" isn't enough because the Right is no more interested in money than the Left is interested in social justice. Both are interested in exactly one thing: power.
Capitalists get power from making money, but power--unlike profit--is a zero-sum game. This means that capitalists are willing to forego profits if that is necessary to prevent other people from gaining power.
That is, capitalists hate free-riders far more than they love money, so they are more than willing to lose customers to AIDS because curing AIDS for free would mean that someone else might also profit from those customers, and that would reduce the capitalist's feeling of power.
If wiping out hunger, poverty AIDS or terrorism would actually make someone money, then yes, it would be done very rapidly, the way slavery went out of style the moment it became more profitable to have consumer goods for sale to paid workers who could be controlled almost as well as slaves by debt.
Unfortunately, capitalists have learned that genuinely fixing problems is rarely the way to maximize their power. Far better to sell a more-or-less ineffective "solution" like the security-industrial complex's "War on Terror" or drug cocktails for AIDS or subsidized "food aid" for povery and hunger. Insert your corporation into one of those cash torrents and you will be in a position of power for decades to come.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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!