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The Pirate Bay Plans Servers In the Sky
1sockchuck writes "The Pirate Bay says it plans to deploy servers on airborne drones several kilometers above international waters. The site said it was experimenting with servers using Raspberry Pi, a credit-card sized Linux computer. April Fools come early? Torrent Freak says the plan is real. It's apparently a literal approach to cloud computing."
Because they'll just get shot down or have an "accident".
But if there aren't any clouds in the sky, can you still access TPB? This sounds like an interesting project, though... I would love to see it work for technology sake.
In all irony, though, if there were LOTS of clouds in the sky, how would the site perform then?
Pirating must pay really well. I can't imagine how much it would cost to manage those servers and keep them up there 24/7.
I assume we're looking at:
I guess there are more compact antennas available, but they're likely to be both more expensive and more power-hungry than a dish.
Any sort of real server iron is going to cause both weight and power-consumption problems.
The main challenge is going to be to get enough solar panels fitted to the thing to both keep it flying and keep it talking.
Launching the thing is going to be a challenge - I'm pretty sure the FAA isn't going to approve it, so it either needs to be clandestine or off a boat. And since presumably TPB's finances don't run to aircraft carriers, that introduces challenges all it's own.
Server reliability is going to become a major issue. If you have no way of recovering the thing then you'll need to treat them as disposable - when one fails, crash it into something and replace it with another one. Unless your budget is large, you'd better hope that doesn't happen too often.
And, as others have commented, while removing yourself from every legal jurisdiction does mitigate your risk of having a search warrant issued, it only replaces it with the risk of being shot down. And it's getting to the stage where it's cheaper for a government to take military action than legal action, especially when they know no-one's going to shoot back.
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Ok, TFA conveniently neglects to mention how they plan to get an accessible IP address.
Who wants to be their ISP? And how long do you think that'll last?
This wouldn't do them a whole lot of good. The key to shutting them down isn't getting physical access/jurisdiction to them in some country, but shutting down their link to the internet. Like with any pirate, if you know where their home port is, you can easily cut them off there. Never mind radar and satellite imaging; all you'd need is traceroute and a someone in the country it leads to who is willing to sign a legal order to disable their internet access.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I can't think of any reason to do this (other than an elaborate April fools), to make these servers available to the internet they will need to either connect to ground infrastructure somewhere directly or rely on a wireless service provider (cellular or satellite).
If they're relying on a wireless internet provider they could just shut access to the servers off, if it's connected to ground infrastructure (which would of course need to go through 3rd party internet providers as well) then access can just be cut off from there instead. They may as well, if using miniature low cost servers, just create small self powered self contained servers that can be hidden at multiple locations.
Or, are they suggested that to access The Pirate Bay you will now need your own dish antenna to contact the server drones directly? :)
All these raspberry birds need to link to a base station somewhere (or how else would would customers communicate with them). And this station needs to be on firm ground, in some jurisdiction, and be connected via some backbone to the rest of the internet. Quite a number of potential points of failure to lean on without ever needing to take a single bird down.
While there are plenty of uninhabited islands out there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_island), with few exceptions they're all recognized as being part of some nation's sovereign territory which means, by definition, they're not "in international waters". The two sort-of exceptions are Antarctica and the Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard has some quite delightfully weird legal history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty) which makes going there and setting up 'commercial activity' rather less restricted than it might otherwise be, is still part of the Kingdom of Norway and subject to most of its laws. Antarctica is pretty much do whatever you want (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty) as long as it's not military. But while you might be able to set up a data center in either of those places, good luck with your internet connection.
Which brings me to my second point - "add a satellite uplink.." Who owns the satellites? Which country are they based in, and whose laws are *they* subject to? The number of comsat service providers is pretty small, and all of them have governments as major customers and in many cases part- or full-owners. Running your piratebay server on some rock off Antarctica is all well and good, but when your comsat service is cancelled because a national government took the carrier to court (or just threatened to), all you have is a disconnected server sitting on a cold rock.
This is the problem with all such 'remote island' schemes. The remote island still has to connect to the internet, and the more remote it is, the less connections you can afford to have, and the easier it is for someone to have you cut off. Better to have ten thousand redundant copies of whatever you're trying to make available floating around the internet than stick one copy on an easily disconnected island somewhere.