from the how-much-can-you-trust-anyone-online? dept.
Several people have been warning users to avoid The Pirate Bay, due to CloudFlare integration and potential FBI IP bugs. There are even suggestions that the FBI has been involved in the site's somewhat mysterious rebirth.
Nobody knows who really runs The Pirate Bay, but the old moderation team were all removed as part of the relaunch. The Pirate Bay now allows people to 'report' malicious torrents instead of having a moderation team.
Some claim the FBI re-launched The Pirate Bay or had connections to the owners, implanting IP bugs on all torrent’s uploaded for investigation. The Pirate Bay has denied these accusations, claiming CloudFlare is only a temporary measure to help with the influx of traffic on the torrenting site.
CloudFlare is a cloud server provider, but is based in the US. Many privacy advocates claim CloudFlare is not a safe tool, due to the potential warrant-less searches from the FBI and other US agencies. On the topic of working with the FBI, The Pirate Bay has not responded, but TorrentFreak claims the accusations are "complete nonsense" but said that "general security concerns of using a US-based service are legitimate".
What does SoylentNews think? Is it wise to stay away?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by rts008 on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:33PM
"Run away! Run awaaaay!"
Trust a PirateBay site hosted in the USA?
Not a chance!
After all the troubles that the PirateBay have been through due to US pressure, to have it turn up on US soil is stretching creditability too much for me to accept it.
This is one time that I'm going to have to lean in the direction of the paranoid factions.
As long as the PB is hosted in the US(or equivalent minded nations), I'm treating it like it has 'virtual Ebola', and avoiding it like it was plague.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:45PM
"Trust a PirateBay site hosted in the USA? Not a chance!"
Change that to "Trust a site hosted in the USA?".
US law enforcement and military actions are no longer subject to any sort of rule of law. Especially since 9/11, law enforcement has begun to do whatever it wants: surveillance without a warrant, secret courts, assassination lists, torture... You name it, the US does it. All the while the citizenry is in deep denial that their government could ever act like that.
Avoid US-based organizations wherever possible. Where it's not possible, at least use services hosted outside the US. Just for example, if you use AWS, be sure to choose European hosting.
The Pirate Bay? There is no possible reason to host it in the US. It's clearly a honeypot.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:54PM
Err ... where is SoylentNews hosted?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by CirclesInSand on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:45PM
Why would you feel the need to trust SoylentNews? Are you doing something illegal that you expect them to keep secret? Oh. Right. You can't tell me, can you?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:59PM
Because I let it send me data to be processed on my computer by my browser. And the data could in principle contain any exploit that I'm not aware of.
Note that you don't have to do anything illegal to become a target. For example, I'd not be surprised if every single nuclear physicist in the world were on the watchlist of the NSA, for the sole reason of being a nuclear physicist.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:28PM
Are you doing something illegal that you expect them to keep secret?
You speak as if one has to do something wrong for their actions to about them to be used against them.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:49PM
Er...well, yes, but I don't need to trust SoylentNews. I store no sensitive data here. I post more-or-less under my real name, on this public forum, so there's really no trust required.
FWIW: I expect that the people are entirely trustworthy, but - as you make clear in a backwards sort of way - the fact that they are located in the US means that anyone would be foolish to store sensitive data here, or to attempt any sort of real anonymity. If the US government wants their data and their records, then it gets them, unless they are willing to risk jail for a principle (and probably even then).
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 13 2015, @02:36AM
At least in the U.S., we *know* they're collecting our data.
In other countries, you might not know it's happening.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:28PM
FWIW, I've been checking the .cr version and the .se (new) version and all the torrents I've tried resolved to the same files. for the files I have been looking for (not apps! just playable media) they have been fine and not bogus at all.
planting ip bugs in movies and music? I kind of doubt it. its been a long time since you could embed executable code in playable movie/music files (right?).
use a VPN to download and stop living in fear.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by francois.barbier on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:09PM
Change that to "Trust a site hosted on earth?"
Thank to the NSA, I don't even trust my own EU country network.
It was in the news last year that Belgacom was in bed with the NSA.
Now, what am I supposed to do?
Farewell, the web of "trust".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:48PM
Now, now, comrade Bradley. We here in the good ol' US of A are fine folks without a care in the world ... except for which reality show to watch or which sports team will impress us with their beer commercials. All the rest is taken care of for us by the respectable gentlemen who purchase seats in Congress of the White House.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:44PM
supposedly it requires only three chinese characters to "say" what you said but what you said in english is very cool nevertheless ... comrade
: )
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:39PM
Yes, Americans have been in deep denial, but more and more people on all ends of the ideological spectrum have begun talking about how the only way out is revolution. The BBC just posted a radio interview with Alan Greenspan [bbc.co.uk] wherein he said he thinks the United States is headed for a "political crisis." Alan Greenspan is a famous master of understatement, so I read that as his term for "revolution."
As more people talk about it, there will be people who start working on doing something about it. Thanks to the now universal knowledge of universal NSA/government spying, anyone who would be in that group would be keeping their cards close to their vest. There aren't going to be any Bolsheviks or Sons of Liberty this time, because those are too easily discovered and infiltrated. This one will erupt everywhere in a million directions. When it kicks off, there will be some clever boys who have tracked down all the NSA spooks and bankers and start working on their personal "Most Wanted" lists.
All the PR fluff the Powers-that-Be are pumping into the media now about how "there's robust job growth!!! No, really!!!" and how great the economy is makes me laugh. I file it under, "Don't Piss on My Head and Tell Me It's Raining."
You would think that with chatter mounting the way it is, that somebody in government would be *strongly* recommending they do something to address income inequality and all the other entrenched problems that have been burning down the middle class for 30 years, and do it NOW. But they won't. People in power are all smart, handsome, crafty, deft leaders--everyone around them always tells them so. They're doing everything right, and always do. To all the rest under them and around them, the only thing I could recommend is run, run fast, run far, dig deep. Hide.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:23PM
You just made the list.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:42PM
Revolution need, even if the whole world comes with.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:53PM
You're taking on legal risks going there no matter what. If you think you're ethically founded, no law can change that.
But if your goal is to defray legal risk to yourself, don't pirate from anyone you don't personally trust.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:18PM
That's good advice on a personal level. It's not so good for society. We should not accept bad laws. If ever there was a case for non-violent protest, this is it. If Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and the Founding Fathers, including the revolutionaries who threw the Tea Party at Boston Harbor, had listened to this advice, the world would now be a worse place. We whipped PIPA and SOPA. Much of the DMCA should be repealed, but that will not happen unless we press them. Don't let anyone keep the Trans-Pacific Partnership secret. There's wide agreement that copyright and patent law is too extreme, and that the will of the people is being ignored in this matter because it suits powerful, rent seeking interests.
Pirate, baby, pirate!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:20PM
I didn't say to accept bad laws.
The clear intent of this summary is to mitigate risk of being caught. I suggest that trusting a third party for that is a bad idea.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:46PM
Yes, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is horrific. Not even members of Congress are permitted to know what's being negotiated. They're being told, "Trust us." And I think, you know guys, I don't even trust anyone in Congress. So I trust what the negotiators are doing even less. It's such an inflammatory issue, that it almost seems like they're trying to create a trigger event that will sink the country and a large part of the world in a sea of fire.
And the list of potential trigger events is growing so fast that I'm going to have start using scientific notation soon to keep track of it all.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:59PM
i mean, do they re-wrap appz with a little special wrapper stub thingy? that's rather detectable.
anyway. If they are just gathering logs, couldn't have they done it while the original was in place?
and if it is the logs, and the site is the honeypot, whats their endgame?
cos i cant really see any endgame, if its a honeypot, to what purpose?
they can tap interesting cables/endpoints already, why bother with such a ruse?
and if they wanted tpb to infect people with, couldnt they just have bought ads on that site, like everybody else does?
(we pretend they cannot inject traffic directly into your http/ftp whatever stream)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NickFortune on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:18PM
I did see someone speculate that they might be after uploaders and first seeders. It's about the only thing that seems plausible.
Potentially, it's not a bad plan either. There was some research a while back that suggested that about 5% of the file-sharer community produced about 90% of the data. Targeting those people might be the only the content cartel can get a handle on the problem.
That said, Cloudflare would be enough to put me off, even if were legit
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday February 13 2015, @02:41AM
Because there are millions of targets, as many as you need to pad your resume when the next round of promotions rolls in.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:03PM
If the FBI relaunched the piratebay website, wouldn't they be legally restricted to only hosting copyright free material?
Suppose you download an album with copyright protection off of the pirate bay. Can the FBI charge you, if they were the ones hosting it? Couldn't a defense lawyer tear that apart?
Even if a defense lawyer couldn't, wouldn't the FBI be legally just a liable as the downloader?
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:05PM
Law enforcement honeypot all the time, and probably have some small-text to let them do it legally.
I'm not a lawyer, tho.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:23PM
It's an interesting area to sort out. However, as far as I'm aware, undercover "sting" operations are lawful. The real question would be entrapment - are they enticing you to do something you wouldn't otherwise want to do? Or are they just letting you do the thing you wanted to do anyways, and using your actions as evidence against you.
Consider two cases. In one, an undercover FBI agent knows a person is having marital problems. The agent buddies up to the target at a bar and says "You know, a lot of your problems go away if your wife were to die unexpectedly. I know a guy who can help with that..." The guy initially says no, then thinks about it, then says "maybe you're right," and calls the hitman (who is also an undercover FBI agent). That's entrapment - there's no reason to believe the target was planning to hire a hitman before the FBI suggested it. They induced the criminal activity. This likely wouldn't hold up in court (IANAL).
Now consider the FBI taking out an ad in Soldier of Fortune offering vague "problem solving" services. A man calls the service, saying he's been having issues with his wife and he'd like to have the problem "taken care of." They negotiate a price, but when the buyer shows up with the money he's arrested. That's a sting. In this case, the man clearly had the intent to behave criminally before he called the FBI agent, and initiated the process. The FBI merely facilitated the criminal behavior up to the point where they had sufficient evidence of a crime to arrest. This likely would hold up in court.
So, which case is hosting a torrent site more like? I'd think it was more like the second case - given someone who's already demonstrated the desire to behave illegally, and knowingly initiated an illegal activity, they facilitate the criminal behavior to gather evidence. If you come to their site, and knowingly try to download a AAA shooter for free, it's not entrapment. You came to them.
Entrapment would be them sending spam to thousands of people saying "AAA games! 100% free! 100% legal! Come to our site today!" That's inducing people to behave in a way they otherwise wouldn't.
Here's a better question. When did enforcing copyright restrictions (which are a civil matter of property rights) in the US become the domain of the FBI (whose mission is to investigate and prosecute interstate crimes)? I know that this is the case, and I'm sure there are some statutes out there (remember when there was VHS and we had to watch those warnings), but really we're talking about law enforcement bodies enforcing property disputes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by romlok on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:39PM
What if I came to their site to download a Debian Linux ISO, and among the search results was an offer to download a pirated copy of "Debian does Dallas"? I didn't go to them for anything illegal, yet the site offered me something illegal. Would that be entrapment?
If the site were then flooded with pirated content with punny Linux-distro titles, would the FBI be unable to prosecute any of the downloaders due to entrapment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:43PM
Debian is infected with systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:22AM
As far as I know, downloading systemd is not illegal.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:40PM
Another question you didn't touch: If I'm a copyright holder, and the FBI sets up a filesharing honeypot and puts my content on it without my consent, doesn't the FBI then violate my rights as copyrights holder? What if they set up the honeypot in a way that others can populate it, and those others distribute my content over the honeypot without my consent?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:51PM
I'm assuming the RIAA, MPAA, etc., would gladly consent to the FBI hosting their content as part of a sting to catch illegal downloaders...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:21PM
Yeah, but what about the video game cracks? Sure, the game itself is owned by a friendly corp, but at least some of the code in the crack is owned by some hacker somewhere...not to mention that they're illegal to distribute under the DMCA to begin with. If this is a honeypot it could lead to some *hilarious* lawsuits....
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:43PM
Interesting. What if the FBI arrested you after they shot your wife though? That seems even more similar to this situation, if the FBI were to be hosting legitimate torrent files. And I think that is a safe assumption, since if the torrents were fake, then everyone would immediately know it was a sting.
On the other hand, maybe the FBI would take the position (comically) that hosting torrents isn't copyright infringement. I doubt it though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:33PM
Change problem wife to terrorist target and you have exactly what the FBI has been doing recently when it "foils another terrorist plot". In some cases, the FBI has spent a couple of years and a lot of money pushing the target (sorry, the "suspected terrorist") to move forward with the plot (which the FBI has completely invented).
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:35PM
Fortunately, those cases don't wind up in court anyways - you just call them an enemy combatant and have done with them. So you sidestep the legal issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:14PM
There's no such thing as "entrapment" anymore. Nowdays its called a "reverse sting operation".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:27PM
> If the FBI relaunched the piratebay website, wouldn't they be legally restricted to only hosting copyright free material?
They don't host anything. It is all magnet links which aren't even torrents, just hashes.
I would be more concerned with the trackers, but the trackers are chosen by person creating the magnet links, no the pirate bay. That is, unless, they are reading the trackers off the posted magnet links and then creating new ones with additional trackers which they then publish instead. But if they were doing that, someone would have surely have noticed by now because it is trivially easy to see if the magnet link you posted is the same one they published.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wantkitteh on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:22PM
Prosecutors will trump any tiny thing they can into a Felony 37th class 2000-year sentence to intimidate you into a plea bargain. In those circumstances, a little procedural impropriety that'll never come to light in court means nothing - I can't find the link, but someone linked to a story in a comment here on SN where a guy was advised to plea bargain by his own lawyer, even though the arresting officers lied about the crime he supposedly committed and they had video evidence of him not committing the crime he was accused of. He stood up to the bullying US legal system and got an acquittal instead of taking the advice he paid for, accepting the plea bargain and ending up in prison.
tl;dr - Aaron Schwartz
(Score: 1) by number11 on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:39PM
Since when did the FBI (or other 3-letter agencies) overly worry about whether what they were doing was legal? They can always get John Yoo to write them a legal opinion saying that it is legal. And what makes you think they'd admit to running TPB? Once they know who you are, they can always find some other way to identify you, that's called "parallel construction".
And the copyright liability is a civil matter, not a criminal one. Civil means the copyright holder would have to sue them. And (in most cases) guess what, you can't sue the feds unless they first give you permission to sue them (that's called "sovereign immunity"). Good luck with that.
No, they're pretty much above the law. Laws are for the little people, not them.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday February 16 2015, @03:56PM
It would be trivial for the FBI to get permission from the copyright holders to distribute content for the purposes of a sting operation.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:19PM
Ok lets assume the FBI wanted to get ip addresses of those pirating stuff. Why would they bother setting up a honeypot? TPB has always been a public tracker, anyone can easily grab the torrent and get a list of the ip addresses directly from the tracker. No honeypot required.
Am I missing something?
(Score: 1) by tnt118 on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:08PM
I've always assumed that since you in turn share those file as well, the legal waters become quite muddied. "But your honor, they themselves were making the files available for free! Of course I did nothing wrong!"
I think I like it here.
(Score: 2) by boristhespider on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:55PM
Pretty straightforward to throttle your uploads, either entirely, or just to things guaranteed legal like Linux distros.
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Friday February 13 2015, @03:29PM
TPB stopped running a tracker some time ago -- they basically hosted a searchable database of .torrent files and corresponding meta-info. Of course those .torrents generally include one or more public trackers, but none of those trackers are run by TPB (for the past few years). But of course, your point stands regardless of who runs the tracker -- if it's public, you just ask it for a list of peers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:00PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @07:57AM
teacher practices safe sex while teaching.
Please seed!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:27AM
If it's a teacher for tantra, the question might be justified.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:09PM
Is the safest place to host to avoid the FBI servers in Iran? Sealand? Do we crowd-fund a network of LEO satellites that each hold the entire content of the Library of Congress and every other bit of content known to mankind? Do we seed mini-servers with wifi all around the world doing the same?
Does that keep @Phoenix666 safe when he torrents something?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:20PM
LEO satellites might sound like a good plan NOW, but Ronald Reagan's Star Wars system will soon put and end to that!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:09PM
Maybe we should attach servers to the undercarriages of the Bentleys and Rolls of the 1%, so they can serve the masses everywhere they go and eventually be the ones to get sued for copyright infringement when they're caught. All we need is a mole in the repair shop of a top-end auto dealership... Or we could stick them to the undersides of tables in Starbucks and power them with the smell of over-roasted coffee beans (on second thought, nah, they'd overload).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:21PM
implanting IP bugs
What's an IP bug when it's at home?
on all torrent’s
I found one! They're disguised as apostrophes!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:41PM
I've always been wary of Cloudflare. It's a pervasive service that gets between you and the web sites you want to visit and can aggregate profiles of where you've been. Sounds scary. It's like the opposite of the Internet, a central proxy service that tracks network traffic. What are they doing with all their network traffic data? Does anyone know?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:59PM
> Does anyone know?
Anyone who knows for sure if CloudFlare is doing something nefarious definitely isn't going to disclose it because they've got millions of dollars in stock options riding on not disclosing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:56PM
The bigger problem is the loss of staff/mods [torrentfreak.com] and the rise of spam torrents [torrentfreak.com] since it launched. Oldpiratebay, isohunt, kickass, etc. are better choices until shit settles down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:02PM
In other words, not at all.
The real thing about most "piracy", though, is that there is no real reason for it. If you want entertainment, there are people that are flat-out giving it away online (e.g. The Guild or Battle for Wesnoth), struggling performers who would really appreciate you paying a cover charge to see them live, and of course the entertainment you and your friends create for each other when you get together.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @08:31PM
The *AAs do not want that. They want you to watch and enjoy carefully licenced media, provided by them at a reasonable cost (per viewing).
They create these shows for us so that we may view them. They know exactly how much money they should make from each show, and each episode, which is how they know exactly how many people are illegally viewing their own hard work.
Meanwhile, the content producer I work for has this week stolen 105 minutes of pay from me. Next week, I'm expecting another 60 minutes, and the week after, another 180 minutes. All because I didn't work hard enough to deserve that pay, though. No, it's not redirection of public funding from the person it was meant to pay, into running the business. It's because I don't deserve it.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 12 2015, @10:45PM
If you are in the US, and an employee, that's wage theft [wikipedia.org], and it's illegal. If you're a contractor of some kind, it's a breach of contract. Either way, it might be a good idea to contact an attorney who specializes in labor law, and make sure you keep good records of these extra hours as evidence of a pattern. Also, consider talking to your co-workers about that, since they're probably experiencing the same thing, which turns an individual case into a class action.
None of which justifies breaching copyright. The correct solution to that problem is to not play their game - you don't need anything they're peddling, so don't bother taking it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:26PM
I have three versions of office. If I installed legitimate copies the latest one would override the others. I need all three because of some edge cases where things are not one-to-one compatible. I could install two VMs and buy legitimate copies of each suite, but why should microsoft get 3x the money for incompetency?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:28PM
the onion for "soylentnews" (http://7rmath4ro2of2a42.onion) is down ...
my guess is that the prison inmates are hard at work trying to figure out how to build "load-balancing" of hidden services into tor.
once this is accomplished you can forget cloudflare and monster-hosting-scale-building-hosting-farms and have a "youtube-like" popular website running from 56k dial-up connection ... or sumething.
anyways the onion for piratebay (http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion) is down too ... AND winter is coming : (
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @07:44PM
Piratebay is just a placeholder for magnet links. It is not piratebay that you need to worry about. Only other peers in the swarm know your IP. They are your potential enemy. So the only answer is to obscure your IP.
Torrent over a VPN that you think you can trust and one that has a positive rep.
I like private-internet-access aka PIA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:28PM
But can we trust you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:36PM
anonymous coward is a name you can trust.
trust anonymous coward.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pnkwarhall on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:11PM
What does SoylentNews think? Is it wise to stay away?
Does it really come down to "Can I get away with it?" If this is the real question/problem, the true elephant-in-the-room to the whole "piracy" issue, then you've placed the solution squarely back in the court of the RIAA and their brethren. Their goals are all about creating consequences (or at least the perceived risk of consequences) to dissuade this type of behavior.
If one sincerely believes the dogma of "Content wants to be free!" and "Screw the RIAA/MPAA for their sins", then one should grow some balls and practice civil disobedience -- accepting the consequences that may or may not come along for the ride.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 1) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:56PM
You're all missing the really important thing here:
There is a great big apostrophe in that article where it bloody well shouldn't be, and it's driving me mad.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:08PM
Just use the Tor version of The Pirate Bay at http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ [uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion] then (with a properly configured browser, please).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zyx Abacab on Friday February 13 2015, @01:04AM
Please, for the love of god, nobody take this advice seriously. Tor is fantastic at making some protocols anonymous, but it works terribly with BitTorrent [torproject.org].
Getting your torrent files or magnet links through an anonymous proxy does no good when your client broadcasts its real IP to the swarm or tracker. Anonymizing your connections to the tracker does no good when the message consists of your real IP anyway. BitTorrrent is not an anonymous protocol. It's brain-dead to expect a proxy alone to magically make it anonymous.
If you're concerned, use a blocklist. If you want an extra degree of safety, use a trustworthy VPN. Neither of these solves the problem, though. Furthermore, they both require a degree of trust which, in practice, amounts to blind faith.
If you want to be anonymous, don't use BitTorrent; use I2P or join a Darknet instead.
Above all, please do not rely on Tor for BitTorrent anonymity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @05:31AM
I never said anything about using Tor for torrents.
The Pirate Bay is not a tracker, it's just a website containing magnet links, and as such it's perfectly fine to use Tor for The Pirate Bay.