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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."
and it sucked. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091964/
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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?
they really *crash*.
Supplies!
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.
It's been done before with Stratovision. The model doesn't work with current fuel sources and repair times.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Seems like it would be cheaper than drones.
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.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
They're going to put Philip Seymour Hoffman in a blimp in the stratosphere?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Because there's no law stopping you from shooting down a passenger jumbo jet flying over international waters, right?
This whole plan is a little too "Pi in the sky" for me ...
Hast du etwas Zeit fuer mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer dich
Von 99 Luftboxens
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Denkst du vielleicht g'rad an mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied fuer dich
Von 99 Luftboxens
Und dass sowas von sowas kommt
99 Luftboxens ...
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Hielt man fuer Ufos aus dem All
Darum schickte ein General
'ne Fliegerstaffel hinterher
Alarm zu geben, wenn's so war
Dabei war'n da am Horizont
Nur 99 Luftboxens
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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/
We could set up our network of orbiting drones as node relays and create our own internet. Take that AT&T!
It would work great until AOL launched their own drone, which would be the size of the Hindenburg, immediately swamping the other nodes with traffic and requiring users to type all in caps.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
I'd suggest just under 100 of them. Be sure they're reflective of light in the 630-740nm range.
What's wrong with Nena?
OK, How about 70s American pop music? Norman Greenbaum:
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best
When I lay me down to die
Goin' up to the server in the sky
Goin' up to the server in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best
Prepare yourself, you know it's a must ...
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He's gonna recommend you to the server in the sky
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From the Associated Press, July 15, 2013:
Faced with an ongoing budget crisis for the next school year and pressure from federal mandates to increase education about copyright law and the life-imprisonment mandatory minimum sentence violations carry, the local high school is offering a $10 bounty for each piracy-supporting balloon brought in with a functioning computer. School officials have announced that through a partnership with an unnamed sponsor, each mylar balloon (the so-callen "floating sanity") will bring in approximately $20 for the school, and the school will keep the computers as well.
In an Interview last Tuesday, school district superintendent Ben Dover extolled the benefits of the program. "We see this as a win/win situation, very likely to ease the pain of the budget deficiencies. We get an influx of new computers, and additional monetary assets as well." he said to a room of reporters and concerned parents. "If, as rumors have suggested, the computers are unable to run Windows 9 Bloat Edition, we can still sell them off to help cover the cost of licensing both installations of our grading software.
Sources close to the issue say that there are some concerns, however, as the partnership contract has some unusual conditions. According to one anonymous source, the contract specifies that all term papers and homework assignments completed by students will become the sole property of the partner, who will then charge licensing fees to the school and teachers before they will be able to grade the students' work, costing the school up to $500 per assignment, or more if the work will be used as a class example.
A spokesperson for the partner, who has asked to be addressed only as Dick, has denied such allegations. "That's preposterous," he told reporters, "our license fees aren't nearly that low."
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Why not find a deserted or uninhabited Island in the Pacific and simply build a low cost, low power data center there. If you use processors like ARM or Atom that don't require additional cooling, you could probably engineer and build something to withstand the climate and you can make use of abundant sunshine for power with a battery backup of marine deep cycle batteries. Add a satellite uplink to the internet and the problem (in theory, at least) is solved. Placing servers on an airborne platform is certainly not without risk. You have extreme conditions of wind, cold, and varying temperatures. Finally, how do you keep the servers up there as what goes up must and eventually will, come down. Helium is infeasible as a lighter than air medium, hydrogen could work. You also have the technical difficulty of keeping it in an orbit that is over international waters. While an interesting engineering challenge, it would make more sense to build a datacenter on an uninhabited island in international waters.
Begun, the Drone Wars have.
Good-bye
Hmm, starting your post with 'Herp a derp' and quoting something that the post you replied to did not say (the summary did), while mocking the grandparent for saying it? I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but there's a significant chance that you might be an idiot.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The base station would essentially be a router - no content on it, neither legal nor illegal. The court case for taking it down would be very interesting indeed, and might get some big players (backbone providers or anyone else running routers for a living) worried enough to chip in on the defending side.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The mods saw that it wasn't in English, couldn't be bothered to translate it, and are philistines who wouldn't know good music if it filled their vagina with bacon and then sent an Alsatian to go eat it.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
When Napster came around, some of us foolishly thought the beast was slain, that they couldn't prevent people from sharing music with each other, so easy was it to copy.
They simply shut down the central organization. In retrospect, that was an obvious move.
Then decentralized filesharing came around, and we again thought that we had won.
They went after the individuals, went after the indexing services AND started trying to rewrite the laws to make it possible to block things. That is/will provide the money and drive to start censoring the web, along with "think of the children!"
I worry if Piratebay starts using rasberry pi to play this game of cat and mouse that the mafIAA will respond by 1. redoubling their efforts to censor the web and 2. pass laws saying that hardware manufacturers are liable for copyright infringement their customers do. The big guys will be exempt if they bake heavy DRM right into the hardware, but organizations like Rasberry pi get shut down. The result being a loss of open source and increase in DRM.