5 ms·

Isn't it enough to take down the DNS servers to make TPB unusable for sharing (at least to add new torrents) ? Achieving fault tolerance using a few cloud prov

Isn't it enough to take down the DNS servers to make TPB unusable for sharing (at least to add new torrents) ? Achieving fault tolerance using a few cloud providers is nice (and expensive) but they're still far from raid proof (all it takes is some coordination from police in multiple countries).

kennu 14y ago
According to the article the main vulnerability would be the load-balancer, which is hosted separately. Traffic between it and the cloud instances is encrypted, so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay.
- moe 14y ago
  so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay. When the IP addresses of the 'loadbalancers' are known then it takes any cloud-provider the better part of 5 minutes to determine which of their instances are exchanging how much traffic with those IP addresses. However, if a country really wants to go ballistic on TPB then it'd be much easier to just knock their public-facing IPs out at the IX-level[1]. A fairly low-cost operation (if your legislation enables it) and the only circumvention is then to proxy through a different country - a significant barrier for most users. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_point...
  - solnyshok 14y ago
    while I hope this never happens, it might finally give impetus to p2p wireless darknet/shadownet/rebelnet... Whatever they will call it then
fragmede 14y ago
It's an increasingly technical digital game of whack-a-mole, and the mole has completed another burrow. There are still technical measures that could be taken with-in one country. Eg. automated null-routing of A records for thepiratebase.se (and then do it N-times a second).
- jacquesm 14y ago
  All it takes is for some political body to lean heavily enough on the TLD registry. .se and .org are no more invulnerable to this than .com
  - rmc 14y ago
    Perhaps. And that's why you have many TLDs. So .se and .org are gone, so it moves somewhere else, then it moves again.
    - chii 14y ago
      I think somehow the MAAFIA is going to manage to get laws passed which will null out any set of words they like in the registry without prior notice. This would mean the end of DNS as we know it i guess. Or stipulate that DNS services reveal those who registered and then can prosecute along those lines.
Toshio 14y ago
In the case of a DNS takedown, all it would take would be for The Pirate Bay to publish a browser extension that stores a few IP addresses and "drops in" whenever the user attempts to acces thepiratebay.se.
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  Savvy users in parts of Europe (Denmark, I believe) are already just adding an /etc/hosts entry to do exactly this. That doesn't solve the problem of the IP address itself changing, but then you need some system of distributing the updated IP addresses whenever they change. Which would require inventing a distributed lookup system....hmm... this is starting to sound familiar....!

kennu 14y ago

According to the article the main vulnerability would be the load-balancer, which is hosted separately. Traffic between it and the cloud instances is encrypted, so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay.

moe 14y ago
so that the cloud providers don't actually know they're hosting The Pirate Bay. When the IP addresses of the 'loadbalancers' are known then it takes any cloud-provider the better part of 5 minutes to determine which of their instances are exchanging how much traffic with those IP addresses. However, if a country really wants to go ballistic on TPB then it'd be much easier to just knock their public-facing IPs out at the IX-level[1]. A fairly low-cost operation (if your legislation enables it) and the only circumvention is then to proxy through a different country - a significant barrier for most users. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points_by_size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_point...
- solnyshok 14y ago
  while I hope this never happens, it might finally give impetus to p2p wireless darknet/shadownet/rebelnet... Whatever they will call it then

fragmede 14y ago

It's an increasingly technical digital game of whack-a-mole, and the mole has completed another burrow. There are still technical measures that could be taken with-in one country. Eg. automated null-routing of A records for thepiratebase.se (and then do it N-times a second).

jacquesm 14y ago
All it takes is for some political body to lean heavily enough on the TLD registry. .se and .org are no more invulnerable to this than .com
- rmc 14y ago
  Perhaps. And that's why you have many TLDs. So .se and .org are gone, so it moves somewhere else, then it moves again.
  - chii 14y ago
    I think somehow the MAAFIA is going to manage to get laws passed which will null out any set of words they like in the registry without prior notice. This would mean the end of DNS as we know it i guess. Or stipulate that DNS services reveal those who registered and then can prosecute along those lines.

Toshio 14y ago

In the case of a DNS takedown, all it would take would be for The Pirate Bay to publish a browser extension that stores a few IP addresses and "drops in" whenever the user attempts to acces thepiratebay.se.

chimeracoder 14y ago
Savvy users in parts of Europe (Denmark, I believe) are already just adding an /etc/hosts entry to do exactly this. That doesn't solve the problem of the IP address itself changing, but then you need some system of distributing the updated IP addresses whenever they change. Which would require inventing a distributed lookup system....hmm... this is starting to sound familiar....!