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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: 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.