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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: 4, Interesting) by romlok on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:39PM

    by romlok (1241) on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:39PM (#144170)

    If you come to their site, and knowingly try to download a AAA shooter for free, it's not entrapment. You came to them.

    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?

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:43PM (#144354)

    Debian is infected with systemd.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:22AM (#144560)

      As far as I know, downloading systemd is not illegal.