SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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 Much of the DMCA should be repealed, but that will not happen unless we press them.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.