Pirate Bay 'seeks asylum' in, er, 'North Korea' The Pirate Bay says it is relocating to either North Korea (the Democratic People's Republic of Korea) - if you go by the flag in its sails on its homepage - or South Korea (the Republic of Korea), if you go by its statement.* If the file-sharing site's claim relates to the former, it certainly looks spurious given the nation's …
"Quick, duck! *WHOOSH*"
No, I "got it". I just didn't "like it", if you know what I mean - and you may not. There is nothing funny about North Korea at all.
But if the Pirate Bay would move to North Korea it would be altogether appropriate: in the same way that North Korea's ruling clique considers that everything produced by North Korea is their property to do with as they please, so does the Pirate Bay consider all music, movies, games, and software produced by the labor of others, to be their property to do with as they see fit. North Korea and The Pirate Bay share a modus operandi: maximally exploit the labor of others and return nothing.
And considering that this "fun" is being generate on behalf of the Pirate Bay and the neo-Nazi who owns it, perhaps you don't see the irony (and hypocrisy) in it. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Lundstr%C3%B6m - Lundstrom was a very wealthy man even before The Pirate Bay. Showing once again that not only has the internet degenerated into a tool for the rich to get richer but that freetards are also "tools".)
"but that freetards are also "tools"."
Not surprising. Most of the pirate bay supporters are young and naive. Teenagers and people in their early 20s don't really have much of a concept of hard work so don't see the problem in ripping off the hard work of others. Its only as they grow older that realisation dawns.
Whoa there... not everyone who supports the Pirate Bay is young and naive. That's just a bit of blatant shite, based on your assumptions and not fact. Some of the biggest pirates I know now are in their forties.
I went through a large freeloading phase which mostly coincided with me being extremely poor and extremely bored, and when it came down to the crunch I was significantly happier being just extremely poor. Once I could afford to pay, I did... and have done for many years now and extensive libraries of DVDs, games and music would attest to that.
It would also be the naive person who did not see that piracy has massively influenced digital distribution as a medium
WTF? Is my plonker being pulled here?
Oh well, if its true at least the American rights collecting rackets can go shouting "If you download a movie, you're downloading terrorism directly into your home!" and all the rest. I can't wait for the public service announcement showing Korean terrorists jumping out of computer screens and nuclear missiles shooting out of iPads!
Just as an aside - is the lack of a submarine cable actually a big deal? The Norks have got land borders with Russia (not a zillion miles from the Vladivostok-Japan submarine cables) and China (which is relatively well-connected to the outside world - once you get past the Great Firewall). Given how few users they have it wouldn't add much to those countries' bandwidth needs to have everything flow through them - and in fact they might quite like to help the Norks because they'd be able to monitor the traffic.
then they would be a lot better off hosting their servers in Iran. Iran has good connectivity (a hell of a lot better than the DPRK) and they've made it perfectly clear that they will not respect or enforce US or western copyright laws or interests in any way, now or in the foreseaable future. In fact, they're actively encouraging infringing activity in their country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-United_States_copyright_relations
So now your piracy really can support terrorism! ;-)
It's BS in the sense that it assumes it needs BGP/AS spoofing at all. It seems TPB just owns a host quite close to the backbone and forwards some traffic to another distant host someone provided them close enough to North Korea which is able to generate the correct replies. But it's more like a joke, they probably have their hosting for now legally somewhere [i]around[/i] last known HTTP destination.
They only need to mirror critical infrastructure in NK, so it can't be touched and can be used as a master replication point or similar. Other servers can still live wherever they fancy.
Note it says 'Virtual Asylum' which implies they're not upping sticks and going NORK in entirety. Though if true what NK thinks they're gaining from this I don't know. Free access to 99%-state-censored Die Hard movies?
I thought they had a network of RAM-only boxen in place these days, or are they still trying to implement that?
ROFL.
Falkvinge:
"The problem with verifying the story or its debunking was the technical level of expertise required to understand the reports."
Er, no. Five seconds reflection would have led to the conclusion that it was the usual kind of loonytune TPB publicity-seeking press releases.
Like taking CIAPC to court, for example.
Jury's still out on that one. In fact, the jury's still waiting to even convene ;-)
Does North Korea have any embassies or consulates in the west? Bung a server in one and they could claim it's in North Korea. Embassies and the like are not actually foreign territory but it would be good enough spin for a press release.
I suspect it's however more about stirring up the debate on free speech and censorship than anything else, suggesting North Korea is more freedom loving than the west.
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