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The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'
HughPickens.com writes Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 "virtual machines" (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VMs are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site's database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don't even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site's domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn't appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.
I mean, 620 GB of storage isn't much, but I'm sure some people would want to RAID it anyway. Although I've heard that Police RAID only works with write-only storage...
Ezekiel 23:20
Their traffic is up that much?! I assumed they were all but dead.
Also, I thought they sold themselves to GGF and went legit half a decade ago?
They should make a torrent of all the VMs and serve it to the world
Which truly is astounding . . .
If this were 1994.
Ziggy
"One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers
Well, that's pompous. More likely they don't care, and would rather pretend they didn't know, because it's another paying customer, right?
All traffic goes through the load balancer,"
Well, no single point of failure there, then.
Fact it is nobody except the copyright cartel cares about TPB. Sure, the cartel is powerful, but everyone else will leave TPB alone, given the chance.
Raids only make sites become raid-proof. Just as monitoring creates encryption and oppression creates rebellion.
But of course one cannot fight the core problem when the core problem is oneself.
Are they making $ off this or just doing it for the lulz?
...all that has to happen is the load balancers be compromised in some way, and the keys to the kingdom are found.
so much for "raid-proofing"
The Pirate Bay definitely deserves praise for staying up, despite being famous and constantly attacked by the media mafia. They bring hope that one day we may live in a world where sharing of knowledge, art and data is encouraged rather that prosecuted, and that some of today's files will survive until then, as well.
It will require a lot of work until we get there in the social realm (fighting the abusive law). It may help if technical solutions exist (decentralization, anonymity, security) that allow everyone to ignore the nonsensical law, to make the case even more obvious and to get by with our files in the meanwhile.
... because 640 GB is enough for anybody :)
Harr, they have a hiding place in a small island in the Caribbean Sea, just outside of reach of the hovering fleets of the colonial powers, arrgg. Harr, they change hiding places constantly and attack from the cloud of the morning mist, arrgg. Harr, their infamous captain is called [please insert next name of the domain list], arrgg.
It's great to see people do the heroic work of breaking through publisher monopolies. I pay for almost all my content but pirateers force publishers to provide much better service. Now if only lawmakers will see that monopolies are a bad thing. Only they spend hundreds of years making pirateers look like criminals, so they would look bad if they admit reality. Which is that pirateers where traders, trading goods governments had given monopoly to one company. That is something necessary, not criminal.
Still designing a system without monopolies will be hard, I have an idea:
The content maker should always have the right to allow a distributor to distribute their content, even if they already sold that right to someone else. So selling distribution rights will make the content maker much less money, because it's not a monopoly anymore. But because publishers will be competing on distribution, there will be much more distribution, and markets will be unlocked much faster. So in the end it should make the content maker more money.
Of course the system is not perfect and will need to be adapted to reality and government oversight (as any system). But I think it will address the current problem where publishers only compete on the side of gaining content and not at all on the side of distributing content.
I'd love to see the technology behind this. Maybe something in Github? TPB seems quite successful at avoiding shutdowns, and many other sites could absolutely benefit from this.
Most musicians I know make money doing gigs (i.e. working for a living). Movies are generally profitable or not based on theatrical sales - a time when there are no quality online versions; sales after a theatrical run is complete rarely changes a flop to profitability.
Interestingly, there are troupes of actors travelling all over the country and world who make money night after night performing in venues all over the country side. It's called theater, and - interestingly - when you put a "star" in a show you don't even have to travel. Have you seen the sellouts for Neil Patrick Harris, or Patrick Stewart on Broadway? Even if you ignore the fact that people can still make money performing live, the top movies, since 1920 have *the theatrical receipts* often exceeding the production cost by a factor of 4. That's a margin even the stingiest of capitalists drools over. In fact, the top 50 theatrically grossing movies (which are mostly from the last 20 years) grossed no less than 775 Million dollars EACH, and only 7 of them cost more than 200 Million to make, with none more than 300 Million. It's probably okay not to worry too much about being able to feed the families of the poor movie executives, even if by some strange change in the copyright law they lost all rights to their films at the close of the production run.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
TPB will get sued in a favorable location for the plaintiff. The plaintiff will use the judgment to go after TPB bank accounts. The back accounts are much harder to hide than the servers because TPB wants to get paid for the ads it displays.
Interesting that registrars will threaten sites that assist in obtaining illegal copies of software or media, but will do nothing whatsoever when they are shown that their customers are selling kiddie porn, illegal / counterfeit drugs, counterfeit anything else, etc...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There are some on the wikipedia page but I suspect some of them are outdated given what's said in the article. I was interested in reading about their VM setup and how they communicate with each other and what platform they're using, etc, but I can't find any details anywhere. I went through their blog, their forums, the affiliated articles, etc. Does anyone know where one might find more details of their infrastructure?
That soon a DEA SWAT team will attack VMWare development facilities and smash everything up, using trumped-up drug charges.
Not true. Credit card information is often protected by law, but if you provide the personal information that is not included in a cred card transaction, they can pretty much do whatever they want with it.
Companies are over reaching, and it has gone on way too long. They sell frauds all the time, like soundtracks to movies that don't have all the original music, or movies that we can't even get to play because of DRM, or other problems.
The real pirates are the RIAA, MPAA, Sony, etc. etc.
It's not illegal. The problem is, those in power have been abusing and exceeding their authority and nobody has held them to the fire.
It's not illegal to point to pirated material. That's like telling a minor there is alcohol at the gas station. Any issue is between the gas station and the kid.
Copyright provides legal protection so others can't profit from it, but if you are not selling it, and you were never going to purchase it anyway, then you did not deny them property.
There are laws that require a license to drive a car, fly a plane, practice law, practice medicine, but there is not one single law that requires you to have a license to use software, listen to music, or watch a movie.
Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from my butt, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed.
[...]
One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial butt hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to my butt lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. [...]"
Moments like this remind me why I installed that firefox extension.
The technology listed is not raid-proof, only raid-resistant.
It is still vulnerable to legal attack IF the governments in the countries where the servers are located are willing to use subpeonas or other means to "quietly" (i.e. without TPB finding out) determine what the next "downstream" server is until they have a full list, then do a coordinated takedown.
All it takes to stop this is to make sure that at least some key servers are in countries in which such court orders could not be legally issued.
The summary didn't say it, but I would think that after all that they have been through, TPB also has recent-enough "disconnected" backups of all of their key servers that they could bring it all back up within a matter of days if their servers were all seized at the same time. I would also think that they have a "shadow staff" who can take over in the event that the people currently running the show are arrested or ordered by a court to not participate in the project.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Most of the ads are for things that you can't pirate, like online casinos, free to play games, "dating" sites..."
nah, you are not trying hard enough.