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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: 3, Interesting) by NickFortune on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:18PM

    by NickFortune (3267) on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:18PM (#144251)

    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?

    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

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