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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, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @11:08PM
Just use the Tor version of The Pirate Bay at http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ [uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion] then (with a properly configured browser, please).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zyx Abacab on Friday February 13 2015, @01:04AM
Please, for the love of god, nobody take this advice seriously. Tor is fantastic at making some protocols anonymous, but it works terribly with BitTorrent [torproject.org].
Getting your torrent files or magnet links through an anonymous proxy does no good when your client broadcasts its real IP to the swarm or tracker. Anonymizing your connections to the tracker does no good when the message consists of your real IP anyway. BitTorrrent is not an anonymous protocol. It's brain-dead to expect a proxy alone to magically make it anonymous.
If you're concerned, use a blocklist. If you want an extra degree of safety, use a trustworthy VPN. Neither of these solves the problem, though. Furthermore, they both require a degree of trust which, in practice, amounts to blind faith.
If you want to be anonymous, don't use BitTorrent; use I2P or join a Darknet instead.
Above all, please do not rely on Tor for BitTorrent anonymity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @05:31AM
I never said anything about using Tor for torrents.
The Pirate Bay is not a tracker, it's just a website containing magnet links, and as such it's perfectly fine to use Tor for The Pirate Bay.