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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".
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.
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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Und dass sowas von sowas kommt
99 Luftboxens ...
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intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
But if there aren't any clouds in the sky, can you still access TPB?
We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, pirates were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
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.
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.
Begun, the Drone Wars have.
Good-bye
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?