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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 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.