The Pirate Bay Starts Using Virtualized Servers

concealment writes with news of those Swedish pirates improving their infrastructure. From the article: "The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world's most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure." They are still running their own dedicated load balancers that forward encrypted traffic to one of their "cloud" providers, rather than dealing with physical colocation. Seems like a sensible decision any IT manager would make.

Comments

Re:Invulnerable?

[fredprado]

Everything in the face of the planet stands in a "grey area". In today's complex law system there is no person or entity that is totally innocent. Truth is your government, whichever it may be, can put you in jail for something already. It just needs to want to do it badly enough to take the trouble.

Re:Woo hoo! More software without paying!

[bzipitidoo]

Wrong. I'll fix it for you.

more software for the taking without having to pay someone for a copy of it.

No one pays for a copy of software any more.

And then you make this leap:

Long live not having to pay someone for their efforts!

On the contrary, we feel that creators deserve compensation for their efforts. Yes, many people do pirate and pay nothing. Many would pay something if it was possible, but often it is not, and that's the fault of industry. We disagree with the business model, that is, copyright and charging for each copy as the means of compensation.

Established businesses have sought to abuse this model to not pass on any savings whatsoever from technology driving down the cost of creating a copy to near zero. When the CD was first created, they set the price at $15 per album (LPs were about half that at the time), and promised that as production costs came down, they would pass some of that savings on to us. That never happened. Even as stacks of blank CD-Rs dived under $0.25 per disk, albums were still about $15, and to add to the insult, 90% of it was filler material to appease fans who really only wanted the one good song on the album. And then we hear that the industry cheats the very artists we're trying to support! As if that wasn't enough, they've tried to terrorize us all with lawsuits and police raids, attempted to infect our computers with viruses (Sony rootkit, you know), annoyed us with DRM that goes too far, pushed extreme laws that trample upon our freedoms (ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, DMCA, and more) and extended copyright to ludicrous lengths, and when they couldn't get their way by force, resorted to laughably bad propaganda. And they still think that preserving copyright justifies all their anti-social efforts and extremism. It took distribution of music in the mp3 format to break their schemes and force them to stop wasting money on things like all the elaborate anti-theft measures such as the oversized packaging and sensors for their precious disks, to say nothing of the disks themselves. They deserve to go out of business.

And you want to apologize for them?