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."

Comments

Pirating must pay really well

[s_p_oneil]

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.

Rough design

[DeathToBill]

I assume we're looking at:

• Solar-powered drone with enough battery to last overnight - it's been done but it's not easy
• Satellite modem for data comms
• Thunking great sat dish on the back of it - not good for aerodynamics
• GPS navigation with auto-navigation to keep it in the right place
• Stabilised platform for the sat dish with something to auto point it at a satellite
• Some very-low-power, very-low-weight server

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.