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Pirate Bay goes offline after Stockholm police raid
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30411782

The Pirate Bay, arguably the most well-known website for accessing pirated content, has been taken offline following a raid in Sweden.

Swedish police seized servers in Stockholm after a complaint was filed by a group targeting internet crime.

It is the first time in several years the site has been taken offline rather than simply blocked by filters.

Unexpectedly, the site's co-founder Peter Sunde - who is no longer involved - called for its permanent closure.

Swedish police have confirmed the raid, which took place after the complaint from the Rights Alliance.

"We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay," said Paul Pinter, from Stockholm County Police, in an interview with Reuters.

According to Torrent Freak, a site that reports on news about piracy and copyright law, the police operation took place in an area in Nacka, south-east of Stockholm. The area's mountainous terrain is used as a natural cooling system for computer servers.

Torrent Freak added that a number of smaller torrent websites, or sites related to the activity, had also gone down.

"We can confirm that the police has completed a raid in the facility which where we rent space for our data centre," hosting firm Portlane, which has servers located in Nacka, told the BBC.

"This raid was not for our company our any of our employees," a spokesperson said. It added: "It was partly directed at one of our customers."
Cloud strategy

The Pirate Bay has operated for over 10 years, and in that time has become a focus for the creative industry's war on copyright infringement. It is one of the internet's most-visited websites, and the movie, music and software industries blame it for losses running into billions of pounds.

Despite The Pirate Bay's operators being convicted of copyright violations, authorities have struggled to stop the site from operating.

n the UK, internet service providers (ISPs) were ordered by the High Court to block access to the site in 2012. Other countries rolled out similar measures.

The effectiveness of such blocks has been disputed. Sites will evade them by changing domains, or users will utilise proxies to circumvent them.

The Swedish raid steps up the effort to stop people reaching The Pirate Bay by knocking the site itself offline, although for how long is unclear.

Prof Alan Woodward, a security expert who has been working with European authorities to shut down illegal sites, said: "There have been raids before from which Pirate Bay has recovered.

"Recently they have taken steps moving their infrastructure to be more distributed as a way of being more resistant to raids, so I would imagine they will reappear in some form."

In 2012, The Pirate Bay announced it was to move its site to the cloud - internet-based storage, which can be shared across a variety of locations - so that raids would apparently be ineffective.
Indifference

At the time, the site said: "The site that you're at will still be here, for as long as we want it to. Only in a higher form of being. A reality to us. A ghost to those who wish to harm us."

That confidence in the site's agility appeared misguided as it remained unreachable well into Wednesday.

But according to Peter Sunde, it will be indifference that closes the site, rather than police action.

"News just reached me that The Pirate Bay has been raided, again," he wrote in a blog post.

"That happened over eight years ago last time. That time, a lot of people went out to protest and rally in the streets. Today few seem to care. And I'm one of them.

"Why, you might ask? Well. For multiple reasons. But most of all, I've not been a fan of what TPB has become."

He bemoaned the level of advertising found on the site and criticised what he called a lack of "soul" in the community.

Each time police shut Pirate Bay, we’ll multiply other servers' – party head to RT

No matter how many times law enforcement cracks down on The Pirate Bay, it will find a way to re-open, the Berlin chairman of the Pirate Party told RT - days after the website was taken offline by a Swedish police raid.

“It was already shut down in 2005, and the result was the creation of a party called Pirate Party coming with all the ideas of sharing of information, of knowledge and culture on the internet. And freedom on the internet,” Kramm said.

“So they came up with this: basically, each time you shut the Pirate Bay down, we will multiply,” he added.

The Pirate Bay offers links to torrents for file sharing, Kramm stressed, and the rights owners state that copying is a copyright infringement – despite the internet being “a huge copying machine.”

Thus, the internet “changed the view on public property,” but instead of re-formulating the copyright legislation, corporations still stand their ground concerning the copyright issues.

Kramm also said that music industry has opened for streaming, adapting to the new circumstances – and the streaming has become one of the strongest developing markets.

“We can see that this is working, and that copying on the internet doesn’t’ kill the market,” he told RT.

Commenting on the Pirate Bay’s only now being cracked down on so heavily by Swedish authorities, Kramm stated that “it’s not so easy in Sweden and Scandinavia to take down an infrastructure, especially when it’s carrying [on] like a party.”

“It’s a long fight,” he added.

However, the measures won’t work, Kramm said.

“If you just take one server away, it will have many copies somewhere else. It will not help at all.”

Cut off the head and two more shall take it's place. Hail Hydr...err I mean Hail Pirate Bay!

 LuciusAR wrote:
Cut off the head and two more shall take it's place. Hail Hydr...err I mean Hail Pirate Bay!

Seriously, you'd think these people would have learned by now. A buddy of mine is one of those "download everything" types(seriously, to the point I don't think he even consumes 10% of the content, there's simply not enough hours in the day to watch it all and certainly not enough hours to waste time watching obscure eastern european children's cartoons etc), yesterday evening UK ISPs blocked one of his favourite torrent sites, and it took them less than four hours to get a new domain up.

And feelings about the ethics of file sharing aside; I wish the industry would stop with these total bs claims about losing "billions of dollars", and even more I wish news organisations would stop just uncritically repeating the claims without even the most cursory of examination of their validity.

Who still uses torrents when you got much safer and faster alternatives?

 Sigvatr wrote:
Who still uses torrents when you got much safer and faster alternatives?

Such as?

 Sigvatr wrote:
Who still uses torrents when you got much safer and faster alternatives?

Yeah? You have my attention.

One-Click Filehosters. Not sure if we're allowed to mention names, though most should be familiar with 'em. We can download stuff at a very high speed, they aren't illegal in terms of you, as an individual user, can't be sued for downloading stuff (German law). They usually cost a monthly fee, though, but service always comes at a price. You can find most stuff over regular ways and even googling and if you know how to use the Deep Web, you're off to the land of milk and honey

I went to Pirate Bay once and was disappointed. No treasure maps. No advice on avoiding the British or Spanish fleets. No tips for keeping your mizzenmast in tip top shape. It was just a bunch of files. I can't pay a crew of scalawags with some files.

 Ahtman wrote:
I went to Pirate Bay once and was disappointed. No treasure maps. No advice on avoiding the British or Spanish fleets. No tips for keeping your mizzenmast in tip top shape. It was just a bunch of files. I can't pay a crew of scalawags with some files.

And most of all: no wenches.

 Sigvatr wrote:
One-Click Filehosters. Not sure if we're allowed to mention names, though most should be familiar with 'em. We can download stuff at a very high speed, they aren't illegal in terms of you, as an individual user, can't be sued for downloading stuff (German law). They usually cost a monthly fee, though, but service always comes at a price. You can find most stuff over regular ways and even googling and if you know how to use the Deep Web, you're off to the land of milk and honey

You do realise that you just described 99.99% of the internet's users, right? Most people don't even understand that you can do more with Google than simply type in a word or phrase, and the closest they've come to ideas like "deep web" is some atrocious "hack the nodes with the viruscode!" unintentional parody of computing on a CSI-style TV show. You also essentially answered your own question; why do people still use torrents? Because they're free, easy to find, and require barely any special knowledge to use. My 88 year old grandad who doesn't even own a computer still has a basic understanding of what a torrent is.

 Sigvatr wrote:
One-Click Filehosters. Not sure if we're allowed to mention names, though most should be familiar with 'em. We can download stuff at a very high speed, they aren't illegal in terms of you, as an individual user, can't be sued for downloading stuff (German law). They usually cost a monthly fee, though, but service always comes at a price. You can find most stuff over regular ways and even googling and if you know how to use the Deep Web, you're off to the land of milk and honey

Well, at least for people outside of Germany then, until the local government raids your establishment and gets the http access logs and/or invoices of everyone who's ever been a party to such a thing.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I always thought the old Uplink game had a compelling argument. You rented out a server in a secure private location from a shadowy organization. It was your proxy. As I recall, if the authorities ever traced it and tried to raid you, the thing self destructed. You lost at that point, but you got out.

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Ahtman wrote:
I went to Pirate Bay once and was disappointed. No treasure maps. No advice on avoiding the British or Spanish fleets. No tips for keeping your mizzenmast in tip top shape. It was just a bunch of files. I can't pay a crew of scalawags with some files.

And most of all: no wenches.

Wouldn't that depend on which files you opened

 daedalus wrote:
I always thought the old Uplink game had a compelling argument. You rented out a server in a secure private location from a shadowy organization. It was your proxy. As I recall, if the authorities ever traced it and tried to raid you, the thing self destructed. You lost at that point, but you got out.

I am pretty sure you just had to buy a new one, and you just lost all the upgrades you had bought on it.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
I always thought the old Uplink game had a compelling argument. You rented out a server in a secure private location from a shadowy organization. It was your proxy. As I recall, if the authorities ever traced it and tried to raid you, the thing self destructed. You lost at that point, but you got out.

I am pretty sure you just had to buy a new one, and you just lost all the upgrades you had bought on it.

Maybe, it's been like 10 years. Also, I probably never had cash for it.

I can check, I have it on Steam from an HiB.

Enjoying some of the memes doing the rounds

Uhh, I can reach TPB again since yesterday, I think. Not on .se, but on .cr

Scam site.

It's not a scam, it's just an archive - there are a few of them acting as read-only mirrors. There will be no new content added to them.

Last time I checked (yesterday) the site was used to grant access to files that were completely filled with malware.

 Sigvatr wrote:
Last time I checked (yesterday) the site was used to grant access to files that were completely filled with malware.

Yeah like he said, an archive of TPB *badum-tsh*

Warez are very safe nowadays compared to years ago...if you at least have a rough grasp of what you're doing. IE not downloading "Cliffbanger.exe".

For video games, for example, you can stick to the most popular cracking groups for safe releases.

should we be recommending sites on dakka, I don't think so.

I posted off topic news. The topic is straying into rule bending areas.

Well, I'm not sure where else this thread is supposed to head to. It's about TPB which is about illegally downloading software, videos, music etc.

No, nonono. You are getting it wrong. TPB is all about legally downloading ISO of Linux distributions, and movies that fell into the public domain. Anything illegal is here due to abuse of the system in a way the creator of the website never ever intended, of course!

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
No, nonono. You are getting it wrong. TPB is all about legally downloading ISO of Linux distributions, and movies that fell into the public domain. Anything illegal is here due to abuse of the system in a way the creator of the website never ever intended, of course!

Nods sagely.

Anonymous hacks Swedish govt emails over seizure of Pirate Bay servers

Swedish government email accounts have been hacked by the Anonymous hacktivist group, in response to last week’s seizure of The Pirate Bay servers by Swedish police.

The group also claimed to have hacked into the government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.
The hacktivist group also left a message at the end of the leak: "Warning: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all!! Bye :*"

This is not the first time Swedish entities have been hacked following The Pirate Bay raid. On Friday, Swedish internet giant Telia was attacked, The Local reported.

Telia's online services were affected, as well as user connections. The chief researcher at Kaspersky Lab, David Jacoby, said the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was likely triggered by the police raid on The Pirate Bay in Stockholm.

"These attacks don't come from nowhere. The Pirate Bay raid has provoked feelings in these groups," Jacoby told TT news agency.

The company also came under cyber assaults on Tuesday and Wednesday.

On Tuesday, The Pirate Bay and several other torrent websites temporarily disappeared from the internet. The sites were downed in a raid by Swedish police, which seized the servers, computers, and equipment of previously elusive web pirates.

The Pirate Bay appeared back online later that day, changing its web domain to .cr (Costa Rica).

Wait, what? Doesn't Anonymous protest social injustices? Whether real or imagined? This is just crime. Granted, petty crime no one usually cares about. Do they have some kind of idealistic angle I'm not seeing?

 Jimsolo wrote:
Wait, what? Doesn't Anonymous protest social injustices? Whether real or imagined? This is just crime. Granted, petty crime no one usually cares about. Do they have some kind of idealistic angle I'm not seeing?

I thought Anonymous just did whatever "stuck it to the man."