10 ms·
The Pirate Bay Moves to .SE Domain To Prevent Domain Seizure
- maeon3 15y agoIs there any way to make a website that has no central location, that lives on hard drives and internet connections of citizens and self replicates and adapts when the government wants it to just disappear? A free internet is going to need a "deploy website to the hive" tool. Something that would force the FBI to have to raid computers in 50 different nations. I'd like to see a message: "this site has been DNS blocked in your region, please download this program to seed this website for others over an encrypted subnet".
- udp 15y agoIsn't that pretty much what Tor is?
- wladimir 15y agoTor does not distribute sites. You can have hidden services, but they're still hosted at one server (or, at most the sites that have the private key), which are hard to trace but can be taken down when found. I think gp is talking about something more like a content-addressable distributed filesystem. TAHOE/LAFS (https://tahoe-lafs.org/ https://tahoe-lafs.org/) comes to mind.
- aw3c2 15y agoI2P has Tahoe-LAFS support.
- cdash 15y agoThere is the freenet project (https://freenetproject.org/ https://freenetproject.org/) which is a distributed data store.
- mrleinad 15y agoYou mean, there's a freenet project, until it gains massive traction, and the US government starts blocking its ways of getting donations from people.
- Karunamon 15y agoIt's free open source code. Donations help, but the FBI tell^H^H^H^H politely asking the payment companies to stop processing for them isn't going to stop anything. People will work on it for the love of the project.
- batista 15y agoYeah, but they can still make it illegal to work on such projects (like they had crypto algorithms illegal to distribute outside the us), imprison the programmers if they insist, close down the project site, etc.
- Karunamon 15y agoOf all the things it's possible to clamp down on from a legal standpoint, writing code is probably impossible. Such is the way of the internet, routing around the censorship damage :)
- slowpoke 15y agoAs far as I understand it, Freenet is exactly that. Participants offer a part of their harddrive as storage for the network, and content is distributed in an encrypted manner. Websites and other services can be (and are) build on top of this network.
- superasn 15y agoRight now there is not a lot of incentive for the "average" user to install Tor, Freenet or any other de-centralized to make such a network popular commonplace. But if pirated bay or other popular torrent sites started telling people that for direct downloads they can use this ONE particular software and assuming the software is easy to use (as compared to the fake Usenet software scams) a ton of people would download and install such software in a jiffy and when enough people do it (for whatever their reason be - free internet, file sharing, etc) we get a free internet developing side-by-side which the govt. can't seize. The software is free and anonymous (unlike Napster, Limewire which can be shutdown) and is easy to use for the avg. user. So while sharing files like uTorrent could be the main feature, it will also give options to add a local DNS resolver (that does not depend on the root servers), and a custom web server (to host mirrors of sites). I'm sure millions of people are running uTorrent but just imagine if those same people were running this software instead of it!
- pyre 15y agoThe other question is how well some of those tools would scale if everyone were using them.
- superasn 15y agoIf it is a peer to peer network I believe it would get more robust as more people join in. Plus, if a ton of people are using it then it would reduce the bandwidth and load of each node if I understand correctly.
- gravitronic 15y ago
- spodek 15y agoI believe the Freedombox project would help in situations like this, though wouldn't solve it entirely, and that situations like this would help gain support for such projects. From http://freedomboxfoundation.org http://freedomboxfoundation.org and http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn What is FreedomBox? Email and telecommunications that protects privacy and resists eavesdropping A publishing platform that resists oppression and censorship. An organizing tool for democratic activists in hostile regimes. An emergency communication network in times of crisis. If you live near New York City, there will be a hack-fest February 18, 19, 20.
- maeon3 15y agoWow. Freedombox is exactly what im looking for. You could put a secondary dns system on it which can't be fiddled with by ISP's and oppressive governments. My freedom box could reach out to nearby freedom boxes to find the quickest route in, around and through oppressive firewalls through encrypted tunnels and what not. Where do I buy?
- mlok 15y agoFrom the FAQ 5th question, it's not sold yet. But hopefully coming soon. http://freedomboxfoundation.org/faq/index.en.html http://freedomboxfoundation.org/faq/index.en.html
- drcube 15y agoMy understanding is that they are non-existent, and people are still arguing over the design and implementation details. But if you've got the skills, you can help. You know what it's supposed to do. Chances are, whoever stops bickering and builds one first wins. I'm going to see if I can get my local hackerspace to help me experiment and build at least some sort of prototype.
- hobin 15y agoIn fact, this shouldn't be too difficult to build. I don't know much about Freenet, but I do know that if we can use bittorrent to share files using P2P, the same can presumably be done with websites. The most immediate problem that comes to mind is that, while the files being shared over P2P stay fairly constant, a website is more dynamic and gets updated a lot. I presume this could be solved by a PGP-like web of trust. I'm sure there are plenty of other difficulties to deal with I and other can think of if I spend some more time thinking about it, but I think this would actually be a pretty neat thing to build. The great thing about this would be that the more likely something is to be censored right now, the less likely it is to be censored on something like this - more people would visit/download such things, thus creating extra nodes for other people to visit/download from. EDIT: I just thought there would be an issue of privacy here that needs to be solved first. For example, if you can track the IP addresses of the people you're downloading your 'website updates' from, and you're visiting explicit sites, it becomes easy to tell whom of your friends are viewing those. ;) The easiest solution is to let people decide for themselves which sites to share, of course, but I wonder if this would mean many sites would be excluded, or whether the effects of this would be minimal.
- iwwr 15y agoYou can use the bitcoin block chain as a reliable way to store information (append-only). Was wondering why this isn't being advertised as the killer app of the service.
- wcoenen 15y agoNot information in general, just transactions. Currently only small text messages are being embedded in the block chain. It wouldn't scale to larger files.
- burgerbrain 15y agoWould it be enough for a magnet url and a short description? The Pirate Bay is moving away from hosting torrent files anyway.
- wcoenen 15y agoYes, that would fit easily. Here's an example of the text data that you can find in the block chain by running the "strings" command: http://pastebin.com/ZqqFEqkc http://pastebin.com/ZqqFEqkc
- VMG 15y agoI think the search functionality could even be integrated back into Bittorrent clients, back to a system close to what eDonkey2k was in the good old days.
- rmc 15y agoYes, we need a technical solution to these attacks on the internet freedoms. It's about time we ignored the laws and made the stupid laws irrelevant.
- zotz 15y agohttp://www.oneswarm.org http://www.oneswarm.org
- Peaker 15y agoVan Jacobson's take on this: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking
- Locke1689 15y agoThat's really not how CCN works. CCN is basically a content-based IP that affords easy caching for routing providers. Servers would still exist in their same general form.
- Peaker 15y agoWell, VJ brings specifically the example of data that is routed to another continent on board of a leaving aircraft. He stresses that the storage of every node in the network becomes a part of the network. It would really make censorship difficult -- any node can serve up any piece of data that happens to be stored on it.
- Locke1689 15y agoIt's not technically every node. Edge nodes wouldn't have much weight aside from their own content. ISP routing nodes would indeed have breadcrumbs, but there's no requirement that ISPs implement storage caching -- it's only in their financial best interest to implement it instead of network scaling. To a certain extent, yes, CCN has a distributed content nature, but that's not really what it's about. Mostly it's about routing.
- pwg 15y ago> Is there any way to make a website that has no central location, that lives on hard drives and internet connections of citizens and self replicates and adapts when the government wants it to just disappear? Maybe not completely as "decentralized" as your request, but take a look at I2P: http://www.i2p2.de/ http://www.i2p2.de/
- noselasd 15y agoYou might be able to have something like that if Van Jacobsens vision here, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6972678839686672840 , gets realized.
- eslaught 15y agoPhantom might be a good place to look: http://code.google.com/p/phantom/ http://code.google.com/p/phantom/
- dpres 15y agoList of Anonymity Networks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Anonymity_networks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Anonymity_networks My Top 3: 1. .i2p Eepsites - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2P 2. .onion sites - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)#Hidden_... 3. Freesites - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
- mef 15y agoSupposing one law or another was passed giving the US govt the power to block offending domains, if push came to shove couldn't the US government ultimately block any domain anywhere via control over the .NET TLD of ROOT-SERVERS.NET and GTLD-SERVERS.NET? e.g. punish/block any nameserver allowing thepiratebay.se to resolve to it's real IP
- slowpoke 15y agoThis isn't about blocking domains, this is about the DHS or FBI seizing the domain, which they can only do with TLDs whose registrar is located in the US (.com, .net, .org, .us, amongst others)
- dangrossman 15y agoIt's not the registrar but the registry (Verisign) they go to. Lots of people switched from GoDaddy to Gandi last month, a French registrar, but that won't help against this .. problem.
- slowpoke 15y agoSorry, my bad. I'm not that familiar with the specific terminology, so I tend to confuse some things. A better formulation would have been "TLDs which are based in the US".
- Gring 15y agoThe way I understand it, who controls the root servers can take down .se as a whole, but not individual .se domains. If the US would take down .se as a whole, big diplomatic issues would arise immediately, with the end result of either removing root server control from the US or a split of the domain system (between the US and an opposing global entity). But even then, as long as people inside Sweden have their computer pointed up to their ISP dns server which in turn has it pointed to the .se dns server, turning off .se in the root server would not stop swedish people from using swedish sites without any interruption.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
- maerek 15y agoIt appears that thepiratebay.org points to a server that then handles redirection. Question: Why hasn't the .org URL already been seized at the DNS level? DiG output below: ; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> @localhost thepiratebay.org A ; (2 servers found) ;; global options: printcmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 5372 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;thepiratebay.org. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: thepiratebay.org. 3587 IN A 194.71.107.15 ;; Query time: 0 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Wed Feb 1 15:37:02 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 50</code>
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Karunamon 15y agoProbably because it's a lot harder to seize a site in another country which isn't technically breaking any laws.. It's different from say, megaupload in that no infringing content resides on their servers. It's only going to get harder once TBP stops hosting even torrent files and moves to magnet links entirely. Once that happens, the site basically goes viral, since any random can just spider the whole site for magnet links and host a mirror.
- kzrdude 15y agoAnd Google's Cache will contain the full information of the site itself. Think about that.
- unreal37 15y agoNo doubt a court order will soon be sent to Google so that they can no longer index or cache TPB.
- Natsu 15y agoThey're already getting the government to demand essentially that: https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-industry-calls-for-broad-search-engine-censorship-120127/ https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-industry-calls-for-broad-...
- lignuist 15y agoI wonder, why they didn't move to a .is domain, since Iceland claims to be a safe data haven.
- toyg 15y agoThat law is pretty new and quite untested.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- SeanDav 15y agoThere is something called "darknet" which apparently runs as part of the freenet. I have heard about and read a few articles. This may be the way forward.
- Sami_Lehtinen 15y agoWell well, there seems to be an issue with their SSL certificate. It still says .org even if you try to access .se domain. - fail.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoSSL certificates take time to authorize/generate, depending on the issuing CA.
- kayoone 15y agoAll of the mentioned services only work if the government does not fiddle with your ISP to block certain IPs/HOSTs/DNS Servers etc. Since our way into the net is controlled by local companies who have to comply to local laws, theres always a way to prevent people from using certain services.
- batista 15y agoPermit me to address a few things in a way that is contrary, maybe, to the common HN reader's sentiments. I'd like a serious discussion of said matters rather than knee-jerk reactions. 1) "It's not stealing, because you only take a copy". We're playing with words here. First, the point is not the common definition of the word, it's what a court deems "stealing". Second, even in everyday life, we say things like "he stole the exam answers" or "He stole the recipe" (when in fact he only read them). 2) "The losses are imaginary, because not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated". Sure, the estimations of the losses are imaginary. All estimations are imaginary --by the very definition. You can argue about the accuracy of the estimations, but not of the need of an estimation (even if you put that estimated loss to zero). Also, the fact that "not everybody would have bought the stuff he pirated" bypasses two things: a) some people WOULD have bought the stuff, because they want it, if it wasn't available for them in pirated form. Those are actual money lost (I have downloaded for free lots of things that I would have bought if they weren't available because I just had to have them. Surely, other people have too. How many, is the topic of the aforementioned estimation). b) those that would never in any case had paid for the item, do not represent "actual lost money". But they have violated the wish of the content creator/distributor regarding the (paid) use of his product. This can also be punishable by law, and fined, and in many legal systems, it is. This "respect of the will" of the copyright owner, is like GPL etc works. If you want GPL respected, you also want copyright respected, even if the owner is not using a permissive license. Because the court doesn't upheld GPL for it's permissiveness, but because of it being a copyright license. 3) "The creator gets nothing anyway, it's all the big media". This doesn't matter. For one, people still pirate things that are sold by their creators directly. People have pirated even the Radiohead "pay what you want" album. Second, if the creator sold the rights to some "big media" company, that's his choice (or mistake) to make. That doesn't mean you have the right to grab a copy of his work as you see fit. Third, for a lot of the content the creator is the big media company. People pirate like crazy BS teen-pop idols and hollywood blockbuster movies, which represent like 1% creative talent and 99% big media bucks for effects, marketing and production. 4) "Their business model is broken, they should find something else to make money" - Actually their business model is not broken. They make and sell something people want. The only broken part is that people copy it for free and give it around illegally. If I get me some GPL code, and make a closed source black box extended program out of it without giving back my source, just because I can, would people say that the "GPL model is broken"? 5) "People only pirate because the prices are absurdly high / the buying process is inconvenient" - Well, companies can set their prices to whatever they want for their own stuff, and they can make the buying process as convoluted as they want. That's not an argument in favor or copyright infringement, as much as high prices for Ferraris is not an argument in favor of stealing them, and the difficulty of attaining a university degree is not an argument for printing a fake in our printer. 6) "They can make it up on concerts" - Directors and shrink-wrapped software programmers don't give many concerts. And even for musicians, a lot of musicians don't like giving concerts. Not everyone is like your local bar band or Rolling Stones. Especially in modern kinds of music, from electronica to ambient, there are lots of people that don't like playing concerts that much or feel that that is not their artistic medium (even the Beatles stopped playing concerts after '65). They still deserve some money for the use of their work. Even for artists that DO play concerts, a gig used to be mostly a loss leader for album sales. The only people making big money from concerts are mainly established artists with a managerial team, everything organized, big following and sold out venues and bands with a largish cult following (think Phish, Pearl Jam, etc). That doesn't bode well for artists that still used to make a decent living selling around 50.000-100.000 albums a year. Some artists also have actual integrity and don't want to be seen dead selling "merchandise". Not everything is "rock'n'roll". 7) "What's the proof of piracy's harm? Record company profits are at a high this year" - How is this contradictory? One can have record profits and still be ripped off. The sets of "people buying record company stuff" (profits) VS the number of "people that WOULD have bought record company stuff but they download it illegally" (actual lost money due to piracy) are not the same set. Those are some arguments. My personal opinion? 1) Software patents must go. Especially trivial. A patent period of 5 years of actual use of the patent in production seems ok for everything else. 2) Copyright must be restricted. 20-30 years at max. 3) Illegal downloading should remain illegal. Not everything should be available for free against the owner's wish. "Metallica" releases and "The managing secrets of Attila the Hun" books are not an undeniable right for everybody, there are just stuff for sale. There are lots of copyleft software, music and books, one can use.
- turbulence 15y agoI think it won't take more than a few months until it ends up being seized anyway.
- fluxon 15y agoAnyone else noticing non-response from the site? I'm supposing it's temporary, as usual...