Torrent Website ExtraTorrent Under DDoS Attacks; Pirate Bay Also Down (torrentfreak.com)

It's getting harder for people who don't like paying for movies, music, and applications. Popular torrent website ExtraTorrent is suffering an outage Tuesday, the site confirmed. The site says it is on the receiving end of DDoS attacks, observing 40 to 50 million requests coming from the United States every hour. The site told TorrentFreak that it has been facing "tons of cyberattacks" over the past three days. The Pirate Bay is also down for many users. Users who try to access the site get a CloudFlare downtime warning, or a new Captcha error.

Comments

Re:Uh oh, honesty. 53 million songs by 14M artists

[110010001000]

It isn't "being cheap". I like to maximize my income while minimizing my expenditures. Any good business does that. You should too.

Re:Uh oh, honesty. 53 million songs by 14M artists

[BlueStrat]

What's that? These people are doing the opposite, unlawfully downloading the few songs that the major labels released this week, while ignoring the 53 million songs they can legally get for free, the ones that aren't produced by the major labels? I wonder why they insist on getting the major label music and ignore the vast majority of music, which isn't produced by major labels. I guess they actually DO really want something that the major labels offer, they're just crooks who decide to take it illegally rather than spend the $1 to buy it on itunes or Amazon or whatever.

Or, maybe they want DRM-free recordings in the quality/format that *they* choose and which can't be "disappeared" from their "library" at the whim of some corporation, or maybe want copies of music no longer offered by the labels/studios.

Cheap is nice, but there are other reasons equally valuable to many listeners. The old business model died when general purpose computers and the internet became ubiquitous. The MPAA/RIAA/labels/studios are the present-day equivalent of buggy-whip makers desperately trying to fight progress and preserve the old paradigm instead of taking advantage of the opportunities new technology and new methods of distribution offer.

It would not surprise me in the least to learn that the major labels/studios and/or the US government are the ones responsible for the DDoS attacks...actions which, if performed by an individual, would be prosecuted as criminal acts. But then, it's become almost a daily routine that the government is discovered to have broken the laws we must obey. 'Law for thee but not for me' seems to be the normal attitude and policy with the US government. Another good reason to keep government size, scope, and powers to the minimum needed to prevent chaos and lawlessness. When it comes to governments, with great size and power comes great corruption.

Strat