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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: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:40PM (#144171)

    Another question you didn't touch: If I'm a copyright holder, and the FBI sets up a filesharing honeypot and puts my content on it without my consent, doesn't the FBI then violate my rights as copyrights holder? What if they set up the honeypot in a way that others can populate it, and those others distribute my content over the honeypot without my consent?

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:51PM

    by MrGuy (1007) on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:51PM (#144179)

    I'm assuming the RIAA, MPAA, etc., would gladly consent to the FBI hosting their content as part of a sting to catch illegal downloaders...

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:21PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:21PM (#144252) Journal

      Yeah, but what about the video game cracks? Sure, the game itself is owned by a friendly corp, but at least some of the code in the crack is owned by some hacker somewhere...not to mention that they're illegal to distribute under the DMCA to begin with. If this is a honeypot it could lead to some *hilarious* lawsuits....