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The Pirate Bay Starts Using Virtualized Servers

Posted by Unknown on from the they-took-our-media-jerbs dept.

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.

13 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Invulnerable? by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

    The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids

    Wanna bet on that?

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    1. Re:Invulnerable? by SJHillman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a little sad when you have to write police raids into your disaster recovery policy. Especially when it's one of the more likely disasters.

    2. Re:Invulnerable? by gweihir · · Score: 5, Informative

      Quite frankly, anybody not really, really big has to. With "cloud" servers not on your own private cloud, everybody has to.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Invulnerable? by RabidReindeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a little sad when you have to write police raids into your disaster recovery policy. Especially when it's one of the more likely disasters.

      Sad, but true. It has already been amply demonstrated that you can end up offline because someone else in the farm got raided and the police simply confiscated things wholesale.

    4. Re:Invulnerable? by interval1066 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Hey. You. Got off of my cloud.

      --
      Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
    5. Re:Invulnerable? by icebraining · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, you can have many physical servers with many IPs.

      Eventually people will start using distributed torrent discovery (see Tribler), which coupled with integrated torrent signing for the release groups to authenticate theirs, will be invulnerable to such raids.

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    6. Re:Invulnerable? by helix2301 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think it's funny that pirate bay has better disaster plan then most legitimate businesses I know of in my area.

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      http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
    7. Re:Invulnerable? by jbmartin6 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They may not even know. Remember when Amazon was hosting Wikileaks? Uh, we are? They said. Setting it up is all pretty automated, it might stay there until someone explicitly looks for it. After all, from the cloud perspective they are just renting an IP and some data storage, they wouldn't necessarily know that it was TPB unless they read the data. Which they aren't supposed to do.

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  2. Re:TPB owners living the life by fred911 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And your point is (besides the one on the top of your head)? Now, go sit in the corner untill you have a topic worthy of discussion. I've had far to much of the "holier then thou", slander them with drug use western attitude.

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  3. Re:Invulnerable?-TPB giving P2P bad name. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Now why does a site that is only used for legal purposes (hosting Linux ISOs is the usual excuse) need to be immune from police raids?

    In case you haven't got the memo, the police (among others) doesn't give a flying fuck about legality when it comes to all things internet. Witness the Megaupload fiasco, witness the RIAA willingness to put offline through its government bought agencies legal sites for years at a time. Proactive mesures are necessary, lest your online presence be tossed in a moat never to be seen/heard from again. But hey, what's that they say about collateral damage anyway ?

  4. What kind of RAID by aktiveradio · · Score: 4, Funny

    You think they are using RAID5 or RAID10 to stop the police?

  5. Re:TPB owners living the life by VMaN · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can use the word "steal" all you want.

    But as long as the artists still have their works, you're using the wrong word.

    And when people are using it wrong on purpose, it makes me care just a little bit less every time.

  6. Good to study by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is actually good area to research for everyday organizations that are not about to be on the receiving end of a police raid. The reason is simple, the most common disaster (not failure) that strikes most servers is the legal subpoena. Can your business survive a legal subpoena that would take a large portion of your data?

    This is not an idle consideration, it's actually a very common consideration. Places like OnTrack do far more business recovering data for legal services like subpoenas than they do with disk failures. You usually get a certain amount of time (couple weeks or so) to respond to a subpoena with the requested data. If you don't get the request filled in time, or if the other side convinces the judge you might mess with the data they will simply seize your servers / data by court order?

    Can you survive this? If you can survive this scenario, than chances are you can recover from just about any other reasonable disaster you might encounter. The pirate bay scenario is one that should be studied from a disaster recovery standpoint, regardless of your stance on piracy.