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How Much Can the Resurrected Pirate Bay be Trusted?

posted by janrinok on Thursday February 12 2015, @02:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-much-can-you-trust-anyone-online? dept.

sigma writes:

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?

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:19PM

    by Kilo110 (2853) on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:19PM (#144160)

    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?

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  • (Score: 1) by tnt118 on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:08PM

    by tnt118 (3925) on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:08PM (#144188)

    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

      by boristhespider (4048) on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:55PM (#144270)

      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

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Friday February 13 2015, @03:29PM (#144626) Journal

    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.