Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Parties Plan To Shoot Site Into Orbit
palmerj3 writes "It is almost four years ago that The Pirate Bay announced they wanted to buy the micronation of Sealand, so they could host their site without having to bother about copyright law — an ambitious plan that turned out to be unaffordable. This week, Pirate Parties worldwide started brainstorming about a similarly ambitious plan. Instead of founding their own nation, they want to shoot a torrent site into orbit."
Dear Pirate Party,
Thank you for donating targets to us. We've been meaning to test our Space Object Destruction Laser®, but haven't found any suitable object to target. Because of your charity, we can now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operation system.
Sincerely,
The United States of America
Living With a Nerd
It's the only way to be sure...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Assuming they can actually come up with the money to launch it, I wonder how long it will be up there before it "accidentally" gets hit with a "stray" surface-to-air or air-to-air missile. It'll either be that or incentive to clean up some space "junk." Maybe this is what it will take to get NASA a bigger budget.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Space Pirates!
Isn't this all just ignoring the real problem? It doesn't matter if you buy a nation, or buy an island, or buy a satellite. You have to get your internet pipe from some external source of which isn't in your "bubble of safety". You could setup a pirate planet, but if you want to connect back to earth you still need a transceiver based in a country not owned and operated by you. Great! You can't be prosecuted for doing what you want to do, but no one can access it.
Since there are 'no rules' in space, expect this satellite to be destroyed in a matter of minutes after gaining orbit.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So... where is the money to launch something into space going to come from? Nerds chipping in ten bucks each?
Target practice, for satellite killing systems.
Launching a satellite into space costs tens of millions of dollars. Are they saying buying a platform out in the ocean was actually MORE expensive than that? Sounds like Sealand may be a little overpriced for what you get. You can buy a number of private islands for less than that. Hell, they could buy a fairly decent paramilitary force and take over Sealand that way for less than it would take to launch a satellite into any kind of stable orbit.
You could just buy the DVDs of whatever movie/show you wish to see. It would certainly be less expensive than this "space" plan.
.
>>>Feedback on this comment system?
It sucks. I hate this dynamic index.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The TFA mentioned the worry of having a "bandwidth provider" getting a take-down notice, thus pulling the site offline. How feasible would it be to simply have the micro satellite broadcast via RF the torrent list? It would cut out the need for a provider on the ground. All the PBers would need would be a way to recv the signal and input it into the computer.
It still doesn't solve the issue of "who would launch it into the sky" for them. Maybe China?
Target practice!
get ready for one hell of a server crash
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Somehow I feel way less sympathy for these guys now that I can afford to just buy the games I want... weird.
The location of the hardware where the data is stored is only a part of the challenge they face. Whether you put it on a platform in international waters, on a seagoing vessel, in orbit, or even on a sovereign planetoid, for it to be of use to terra-bound, law-bound consumers you need a communications link to that site, and one end of that link is going to be subject to the laws of whatever state the consumer is in.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's too bad that Sealand was unaffordable, but what about some of the greek islands that were up for sale?
I'm certain that this would have better latency...
It also reminds me of all the 'pirate' radio stations operation from the Northern Sea, have things changed since then? Should be much cheaper to run a tracker from there, maybe even rent some bandwidth from nearby oil rigs or the fibers under the sea - a much more viable option in my view...
Just park it right next to (or better still, in front of) one of HBO's satellites.
The US govt wouldn't risk upsetting one of their investors.
In Space No One Can Hear You Download.
Since the problem as I understand it is maintaining a list of torrents one could simply use a system such as http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/
This idea is totally going to get shot down.
It would be a fantastic way for the USA, Russia, China and some other countries to test their satellite defense systems. Shooting down space pirates would make the test legitimate.
Won't work. Read the Outer Space Treaty, specifically Article VI. (full text: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Article_VI)
In short: if it's launched from Country X, Country X has responsibility for it, whether it was launched by the Country X government or just by some wacky idealists who live there. In practice, this means that spacecraft are no more outside of national laws than seagoing ships are.
You could just buy the DVDs of whatever movie/show you wish to see.
If it's available in your region. If it's available in any region. Where can I buy an authentic copy of Song of the South on DVD?
What happened of the money people donated to buy it?
buy a massive ship and host the server on that in international waters . get different ppi staff to operate it ?
I want some of that stuff!
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
If the internet is so tightly locked-down that you can't set up a torrent site without blasting it into orbit, maybe it's time to move off the internet.
I know we joke about IP over carrier pigeon, but couldn't P2P-like distribution methods be applied to physical media? Burnable DVDs are cheap, disposible carry an incredible amount of data and can be posted worldwide for the price of a beer. Let's upgrade the sneakernet, and apply it worldwide. I'm sure somebody could come up with some kind of method that grants users some measure of anonyminity / deniability.
Latency would suck, but the bandwidth would be good, and if the *IAA want to bust this one they'll have to start applying their draconian shit to the postal systems, not just the internet.
Maybe then, when their own snailmail is being opened and any penalised for including "intellectual property" of some kind, politicians will realise just how bad shit is.
That's it.
Better idea is to buy a ship and install WiMax or 3G towers on it, then keep it sailing in neutral waters near the shores. On the continent provide VPN services allowing to connect to the ship to avoid IP blocking.
Pirate Stations strike back!
Freenet (a free/open source anonymous p2p application) is fairly easy to use now, and is a solution available now for the free exchange of information including copyrighted media, etc.
Pirates? IN SPACE?
I don't like the sound of this..
Why not? Benelux distributor does not carry it. It does for the PS3 and the 360 but NOT the PC version. Why? Other CE's are carried but not this on.
So, I am going to pirate the game. That way I get all the extra's, all the special packs from various shops, and zero cost and zero hassle to me.
FUCK YOU content industry, when you actually make it impossible to buy products, my limit is reached.
And yes, it is the game companies that are to blame for the distributor. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to give exclusivity for a region? How are market forces supposed to act with monopolies? No competition, single supplier, no choice. My hard earned money should support this? Nope.
Stop fucking up your customers and maybe people like me would actually buy stuff. But if you don't even put it in the stuff, what am I supposed to do?
And if you claim I should import, you just don't get it do you, why should I jump through hoops, to give someone else money? It would be like the supermarket putting up a moat, daring me to come in and spend anything at pain of death.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If they bought an island: they'd get invaded by some nearby country or the private forces of some individual or coporation and told "tough shit" by anyone they appealed to. If they put it in international waters, pretty much the same scenario, except someone might decide to sink them. If they put a satellite in orbit, whatever country the controlling people were in would claim jurisdiction and shut it down anyway, or perhaps if they pissed the wrong people off, it would just simply disappear from orbit. I don't think having your own private army/navy/air force to protect them would even help, in fact it might create more excuses to invade/destroy them. I'm not on the side of the copyright jerks, that's for sure, but there are too many problems in making an idea like this work unless you have essentially the resources of an entire country watching your back.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
That could bring new meaning to the phrase "The site is down".
I guess that would give a whole new meaning to "Down for service" if ever they needed to service it...
Real pirates would simply seize Sealand, no?
Someone else pointed out that if you're this far gone, it's time to stop using the internet then for your traffic.
Not to mention that for the millions of dollars needed, as well as manpower, to put something like this into orbit you could instead "AOL" it, by sending every human on earth a CDROM (or DVD) with pirated warez on it.
Want to make a statement? Use the postal system. Make every human a "evil hacker" by giving them a DVD full of stuff the MAFFIA don't want you to have.
Think: If during prohibition, if Al Capone had given away liquor, Amendment 18 would have been repealed a lot quicker.
There is no police force large enough to arrest every man, woman and child on planet earth.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Why not put it on a ship in international waters?
far easier and cheaper alternative. weather balloons with altitude control features, solar-wind power, and open wireless access points. create a true cloud network. Sure it'd wreak havoc on air traffic unless it could be restricted to specific altitudes (and even then would cause trouble), but far cheaper and easier.
Ok, this has a huge coolness factor, but there HAS to be something more cost-efficient.
Out of all the little countries around the globe, isn't there ONE with a broadband pipe whose laws don't give a shit about copyright?
As others have mentioned, cool as this may sound, I think it would just be too easy for some government to simply take this thing out. I know they couldn't possibly afford to replace this thing too many times.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
...and cheaper to just set up their own micronation platform using something like http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Making_an_Island/Construction_Guides? All they'd need is a relatively shallow site not in territorial waters. A (largely) unmanned site could be left sealed tight when heavy weather is coming, and could otherwise be maintained by a couple of guys. Armed guys, copyright law being what it is. But, hey, machine guns would be legal! http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle551-20100103-03.html
A seasteading site could be augmented by zepsats - hot air ballon "satellites" which would use solar power to maintain altitude and hover at assigned sites where they would TOR to any sites within range and relay to each other. Such units could have considerable range. Individually they'd be cheap - almost disposable - and would form the backbone of a truly free network.
How about just taking an existing satellite, after all isn't that how piracy works?
:)
(I'm joking of course).
Operating for a ship in international waters is a lot cheaper and just as hard to stop, if not harder... And with such an approach you'd also be able to use any wireless frequency you see fit...
- Am I wrong?
How about a servers on ships in international waters ? Maybe cheaper. Ok, I don't know, if it was safe and if some countries would care at all about laws to leave it alone.
On the other hand, a pirate party satellite might be the ideal test target for the military to try out some anti-satellite weapons. ^^
That said, the idea that the pirate party can actually scrape up the cash to buy a launch vehicle, build a satellite, handle ground operations and uplink and the rest is possible the most laughable idea I've ever seen on /.
Dream on, baby!
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
As-Received-By: OOB shipboard ad hoc
Language-Path: Arbwyth->Trade 24->Cherguelen->Triskweline, SjK units
From: Twirlip of the Mists
Subject: Blighter Video thread
Keywords: Hexapodia as the key insight
Distribution: Threat of the Copyright Blight
Approved: yes
Date: 8.68 days since Fall of Relay
I haven't had a chance to get the famous video from
the Pirate Bay of the intercept, except as an evocation.
(My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true
that RIAA employees have six legs? I wasn't sure from the
evocation. If these humanoids have three pairs of legs,
then I think there is an easy explanation for them shooting
down the Pirate Party relay satellite... (more)
(With apologies to Vernor Vinge.)
today in the New York Times, a Pentagon official was justifying the Obama Adminsistration's plan to allow the US military to respond to 'domestic' cyber attacks (buh-bye, Posse Comitatus!). One of his reasons was (I am not making this up) 'protecting our Intellectual Property'. Check, please.
They could just rent space on an existing commercial satellite platform to run the process, RackSpace in space!
Ironically, the RIAA wants to do the same to the Pirate Bay people.
I have referrals that tell you "I saw the most amazing ..." without providing attribution.
Its http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/21cyber.html?ref=us
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If they do that, then the MPAA/RIAA will have to orbit their own satellite.
(10 years from now)
"Look the Pirate Bay satellite is approaching that small moon"
"That's no moon!!!" ZZZZAAAPPPP!!!!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
1. Launching anything into space is really expensive. Something like a datacenter is very heavy. Say it was small datacenter, like bus size. There are not a lot of spacecraft that can launch things like that. I would call NASA.
2. Especially since you cannot launch to a geosynchronous orbit from England. You would need to go to someplace like Brazil. Depending on the orbit location and the Spot beam, only Europe and the eastern part of the US would be able to recieve and transmit to the satellite. They need to launch four satellites to get the coverage they want.
3. Datacenters create a lot of heat. The only way to cool something in space is through radiation. Good luck figuring that one out.
4. Who is going to control the hackers and mitigate accidental jamming? It will be awesome when 1000 hackers try to transmit on the same freq, or mess up the polarity. Time Division Multiple Access stuff is not that fast and is problematic. Who is going to fly the satellite and keep it in the correct orbit? Even if only a few Pirate Transmit Stations could reach the satellite because of encryption, you are going to have some issues with bandwidth.
There are at least 1000 more reasons on why this won't work. Can't they just follow the model of wikileaks?
You don't just fire an anti-satellite weapon, even if you're pissed off that "somebody leaked the formula for "New Coke" or some such.
Not even North Korea could pull it off even if they were going to dedicate a year's worth of GDP to the task.
(Its a lot easier to lob weapons in a ballistic trajectory towards a landmass than it is to hit a target up in space even if you use a nuke. [The inverse square law of damage dispersion can operate in three dimensions in space.])
It costs a shit load of dough to develop and man that kind of technology and has all kinds of political ramifications that would land people in hot water.
Even the Chinese aren't too happy about the shit storm they let loose when they shot the snot out of their own satellite.
They also hate the storm of debris which will put their own astronauts and satellites in danger for the next century.
I wouldn't worry about the RIAA and the MPAA wasting their salaries shooting a satellite down.
I wouldn't even worry about Iran trying to do it, never mind Al Queda.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Bwahahaha!
Dude its a toroid about 1 km wide by 265,000 km (165,000 mi) long. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit ]
That is a HUGE volume of space. Heavier satellites are further out within the toroid.
That can accommodate an enormous amount of satellites.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's ironic that pirates would be so stuck into the old, pre-Internet thinking. "They shut down the site, so let's move it to a physical location they can't reach."
A more modern, technology-friendly approach would be to decentralise the distribution and listing of torrent files so it becomes impossible to shut them down without shutting down every last freaking BitTorrent client in the world.
Now we are talking cloud computing I can understand!
The reason that space isn't weapon laden is that they Russians and the US signed treaties keeping it a "demilitarized zone."
That means that its meant for use strictly as for observation, (look down for photon coming up,) rather than shooting down.
Even the Chinese signed the treaty because they see the wisdom behind it.
You can't defend yourself from space based "bolides" (which can strike the planet like the "Hammer of Thor" without needing to be anything other than heavy and headed in the right direction.)
Such a weapon could be built now and use "space resources" (asteroids and comets conveniently placed in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter,) and some long-term guidance for an automated system to crash a world-changing million ton hunk of dirt and ice into this planet.
Its enough to discourage anyone knowing that after a war the loser could still "drop the hammer" on you a generation after you though it was all over and you'd won.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
So... where is the money to launch something into space going to come from? Nerds chipping in ten bucks each?
Well considering all the money saved by not buying content, why not?
I don't really care about the pirate bay but anytime there's news about them I can't help but think it's an interesting piece to read. It's almost like a soap opera for geeks.
May be I'm being too naive but why not use a very simple anonymisation scheme for those trackers? Here's how: Two independent sites host two files of random bits. When you xor these files, you get the tracker content. Neither site can be convicted of publishing the tracker because both can claim that they only publush random bits. Actually this can be more sofisticated than that: N+1 files on N+1 sites to publish N trackers, only one is really random and every one of N+1 site is claiming to be the random one. Innocent until proven guilty. Or the opposite: N+1 sites publishing one tracker (Xor of all N+1 files) only one is guilty, others are really innocent.
If hosting torrents is the ONLY thing these guy can think about as their reason for existence and governance, I certainly am not voting for them.
It's worth more that the Crown has limited jurisdiction over Sealand and they practically are having sex out there with Brittain, that it's just too much of conflict to allow any foreigner to buy that playtform. Realistically it was intentionally abandoned to improve the diverse harmony to the area on the legal implications of off-shoring to such micronation; nothing truly is abandoned unintentionally.
The people are not an extra-governmental force. It's the basic unit from which government derives it's power. At least in the U.S.
The boat idea is good if you can find connectivity back to the shore.
Put it in international waters or the waters of a nation where western copyright law doesnt apply
If the government of the nation you are docked with starts caring about western copyright law (like when Russia started caring about allofmp3 due to pressure from the US to clean up its house ready for WTO membership), you just weigh anchor and move to another country.
Another option is to find a country where the government doesnt like the US all that much (more specifically, one that wont listen if the US and western nations start asking them to do stuff) and where the government doesnt care about western IP laws and set up a datacenter there. Use it for hosting torrent sites and also for hosing all the stuff that would be a DMCA violation if the country had a DMCA.
Find a country where you can set up (and get a local TLD from their country registrar) and not worry about censorship from the government.
Western governments cant sieze/shutdown the domain since they have no control over the registrar in whatever country.
They cant walk into a foriegn country and sieze/shutdown servers or equipment.
Maybe Cuba would be a good choice.
They have a long history of not caring about anything the US and the west wants them to do.
And if you make sure that cubans cant get to the content on your site (and give the the government enough money) censorship probably wouldnt be a problem
...I intend one day to buy a small but seaworthy craft, get really drunk with a bunch of my friends, and invade Sealand.
It'd fall without much of a fuss, and maybe when I hand it back over to Britain they'd give me a knighthood, or at least tickets to Top Gear.
...you can buy cubesats off the shelf now, and for less than you might think. (Although I haven't inquired about the price for professional installation...)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
"founding their own nation" ;__; why give up this dream
warning pointless sig
360 of them? Your math is way too conservative.
The interference is not a hindrance to transmission but a feature of multi-phase communication.
You can move an beam around effectively in fractions of phase angles with a synthetic aperture antenna.
Also, you don't use one antenna but several and the effectively width of the dish is the spread of them.
No dish would raise suspicion, no changes are required to aim them, its just one untappable, non-RF-emitting fiber-optic cable.
The signal is going into/from the set of dishes and into/from a transceiver capable of handling the phase change and frequency detection.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to host it inside the Tor network?
It may not be fast, but talking to a server in orbit isn't going to be much faster. Besides, you don't have to think about "radiation vs hardware", and there is no specific target one can "accidentally" destroy, because the location of the server cannot be determined.
The saddest poem
Getting a old oil rig, and have it moved into international waters?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Single shot of laser or EMP will do. On-board server will be fried even if satellite's bus(basic power/comm. module) would survive it.
You get points for being right... Tricky part here is getting the U.S. government to believe this. It definitely doesn't act like there is any truth to your statement.
Mind the frickin' laser...
It seems like it would be a lot easier to just come up with a protocol that didn't require trackers or centralization. Plug into a mesh and everyone is equally hosting, equally guilty.
or else!