P2P badboys The Pirate Bay kicked out of Greenland: Took under 48 hours

The Pirate Bay has been torpedoed after telecoms companies from two countries blocked the website’s dual domains. The world’s largest file-sharing site moved a Swedish .se domain to a Greenland-based .gl address between late Monday night and early Tuesday morning after apparently being tipped off that the Swedes were planning …

[Ross K]

Registering a domain in a small country is a pain in the balls. A domain registrar with too little work has plenty of time to scrutinise your application, invent stupid rules or make you jump through hoops.

Get a .kp domain guys...

[JDX]

Or a .ml?

[robert cooke]

trying to get a .ie at the moment. the hosting company happily takes your money, then off to the register. oh dear, that's when the hoops come out. but a .it address? not a problem. Italian efficiency, it's better than the Irish.

[Ross K]

Gaaah. It'd be easier to get a .kp off the North Koreans than a .ie off the IEDR.

I can get a domain name in 5 minutes from GoDaddy, so unless a customer is really desperate for a .ie I'd tell them to think on...

[Captain Underpants]

@robert cooke

Ah, .ie domain registrations, where the high cost is justified on the grounds of exclusivity and the reasons you'd want to get one offered are "well, it shows you're doing business in Ireland". It's almost as though .ie domains are being managed by people who don't have the faintest understanding of the technology involved...no, wait, it's exactly like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

craz.ie

Do they still have the policy whereby, unless you can prove you're a business based in Ireland, you can only register your full name [and no nicknames. Sit up straight, boy —and stop chewing!]... after providing your birth certificate, mother's maidenhood and assorted other paperwork in triplicate?

Good old Ireland. At the forefront of the campaign to create the world's first Infomation Cycle Lane.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: craz.ie

@m a d r a:

No, see, you're missing the point. Being excessively expensive and restrictive is a way of denoting the domain's exclusivity. Because we all know that when you think Internet, you think dot-ie. Never mind those tacky dotcoms, I heard anyone can have one of them for a tenner or less! Truly the filthy floozies of the internet world. Dot-ies, now - they've got standards. And class. And definitely aren't just yours because you had the money to spend.

(Don't forget the rule about how you won't get a .ie domain if you want to serve up smut! Because we all know that Ireland is a smut-free country. Yep. Definitely. *cough*)

It occurs to me that de Valera would likely approve of the nonsensical policies governing the sale & administration of the .ie domain. Which, if you know anything much about the man's policies and legacy, says about all that needs to be said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Italian efficiency

An acquaintance of mine bought an excellent domain from the Italians.

It's under maintenance at the moment but you can usually find it here: fuckw.it

[Anonymous Coward 15]

.kp?

They'd have to be nuts...

[fixit_f]

Tiny?

It's the third largest country in North America. Seriously it's a MASSIVE land mass, just not very populated is all :-)

[Brian Miller 1]

Re: Tiny?

There are only 3 countries in north america so coming last place is nothing to write about. Most Europeans consider mexico part of central america. If you are not of that opinion it is still 3rd of 4.

It is less than 1/3rd the size of australia. The ridiculous landmass you speak of is actually a product of the way we map the globe to a flat surface. If you look on google maps for example it appears as large as USA and canada combined. This is bullshit.

Anyway it is smallish. Roughly 12th in the world. Brazil and argentina both have its number. Anyway, I am sure they meant small in terms of population.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tiny?

A quick query on my GIS system returns six countries in North America, not counting the Caribbean: Bermuda, Canada, France (St. Pierre & Miquelon), Greenland, Mexico, and the US. Not sure what's the source of my data, but everything looks in the right place.

I am a European, educated in three different European countries (including the UK), and they all considered Mexico as being in North America.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tiny?

Me again. Looking at a different data source it seems to include everything north of Colombia, which increases the list to twenty-something. Snif! Whatever happened to Central America? :-(

[O RLY]

Re: Tiny?

Central America isn't a continent. North America's southern demarcation is the Panama-Columbia border.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to get a .is for the lulz, but I don't know what to do with it.

[Anonymous Coward]

And - to be top-of-the-line stupid: Registering a domain widely associated with piracy in a subsidiary of Denmark .... and bestest friend of Sweden???

On top of that, Denmark will do anything any lawyers ask of them, indeed Denmark will even pre-empt that lawyers may ask for something to be done to someone and put citizens on a trip to the US for a 15 year old drug charge, that the Americans had forgotten about!

The Piratebay could learn from Slysoft (http://www.slysoft.com/en/about.html) and locate somewhere where EU or US copyright laws are not universally respected. Venezuela, pehaps?

[JDX]

This is exactly the kind of thing which will not deter experienced pirates - who are not scared of naked IP addresses - but could put off/confuse a vast number of casual "I just want to click download" pirates who use piracy because it's so easy.

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

When I started university, many moons ago, people would hand out IP addresses in numeric form. They were for muds, IRC, and BBSes, mainly, and I know, as a fact, that some didn't have DNS addresses. People had notebooks full of them and it seemed to work well enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

"When I started university, many moons ago, people would hand out IP addresses in numeric form. They were for muds, IRC, and BBSes, mainly, and I know, as a fact, that some didn't have DNS addresses."

Yeah , I remember that too. Good thing IP6 wasn't rolled out back then or we'd have been royally screwed!

"Sorry, could you repeat that , fe34:ab3f:c7da:22... what?"

[dotdavid]

TPB should perhaps look to getting a memorable IP then, like Google's "8.8.8.8" for their DNS. Although I suspect they would have the same problems keeping it as they have had with their domain names...

[Charles 9]

Round-Robin Resolution.

That doesn't work anymore in an environment where one DNS entry can point to any number of actual IPs. And TPB probably uses this technique as part of its cloud strategy, ensuring that the name resolves to a working server SOMEWHERE. So, yeah, you need the DNS name because the IP addresses may not be the same from day to day.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Round-Robin Resolution.

From what I can see TPB uses anycast, they only use 1 IP for their main site with their own ASN and it hasn't changed since they moved away from prq.se. They do not use RRDNS.

[akeane]

But:

Another user was so angry she resorted to writing IN BLOCK CAPITALS:

IT IS THE END OF DAYS!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're doing it all wrong!

Aarrrghggh mateys, ye needs to go out for pillage and plunder. Not kindly askin' if ye may put yur digital meadhall theres.

[mark 63]

geography

Greenland is an " autonomous constituent" of Denmark

Hey I learned something today :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: geography

"autonomous constituent" is what the Danes use as the PC term for "colony". That prevents them from remembering just how badly they've fucked the inhabitants there for 400+ years.

[mark 63]

Bay not Pirate

Dear Sir,

Your constant metaphors comparing the The Pirate Bay to some kind of pirate ship do not bear close examination. The copyright hoodlums have named their outfit a BAY - a place for pirates to convene. Hence "dropping anchor" and "firing broadsides" are incorrect similies.

I shall be writing to my MP

yours

PGN

[Charles 9]

Re: Bay not Pirate

Um...you drop anchor at a port. A bay can be considered a natural place to put a port.

As for firing broadsides, they can be aimed at ports as well as other ships.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bay not Pirate

> Um...you drop anchor at a port. A bay can be considered a natural place to put a port.

Erm, you can drop an anchor anywhere.

It doesn't have to be a port, a bay, or anything for that matter.

But his objection still stands: neither port nor bay actually drops anchors.

[Anonymous Cowerd]

Re: similies (sic)

Assuming that you meant similes, they aren't incorrect similes.

They are incorrect metaphors.

[Lexxy]

Why are they on .se? They just arrr

To err is human,

To ARR is pirate.

So - .arr obviously? They should apply for the TLD.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Why are they on .se? They just arrr

Quite. They should make other arrangements.

[robert cooke]

Didn't Iceland say they'd happily host Pirate Bay? if they like cold northern countries they'll be laughing there!

[wowfood]

If Iceland host them I doubt it'd be long until Tesco and Asda have their own versions.

[No. Really!?]

Maybe they could locate in an "anarcho-syndicalist commune"

...if approved by the Executive Officer of the Week.

Would that be .mp?

[Velv]

Alongside another article today about gTLDs, perhaps they should apply for .pirate

[Eugene Crosser]

.so

because Somalia is the home of pirates these days.

That, or apply for a gTLD, as other suggested.

[g e]

Re: .so

But then a GTLD is going to be under the control of Americaland, so no good.

[Steve Evans]

Re: .so

It's a pity the military forces don't go after the Somalian pirates with the same kind of drive the lawyers have for TPB. Which is a little absurd as last time I checked, TPB had never killed anyone.

(FYI, Somalian pirates have a habit of throwing all the AK47s over the side and claiming to be fishermen when intercepted).

[Naughtyhorse]

Re: .so

FYI

sea captains have a habit of taking a day or so deciding if they are pirates or not, then deciding not (cos they threw their guns overboard) and letting them go....

in their piddling little boats

800miles off shore :-)

[Zolko]

Re: .so

@Steve Evans : "(FYI, Somalian pirates have a habit of throwing all the AK47s over the side and claiming to be fishermen when intercepted)"

funny how things go: what I've heard is that the Somali where fishermen, but since the BIG Chinese and Japanese and European fisherboat-factories are fishing in their waters, they don't get to eat, and use their waters to intercept some boats.

In other words, if you want to get rid of Somali pirates, clear their waters from GIANT fisherboat-factories.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: .so

Mr. Evans, having some first-hand experience in East African waters, I suggest you refrain from commenting on things you know absolutely nothing about. Seriously.

[Crisp]

ThePirateBay.se down?

If only there was another way of accessing their website...

Maybe something like a series of four octets that would allow you to access the site no matter what the DNS name was.

Edit: I should have read JDX's post.

[DrXym]

Why does the Pirate Bay even need a host?

They should host their website *in* bittorrent. Namely you click on a special magnet link that the p2p client recognizes as a web application (i.e. a bundle of HTML, CSS, Javascript), it downloads and then opens in your web browser. Now you have your Pirate Bay app.

The app would either perform searches from a hosts url which can change dynamically as needs dictate, or even through the p2p client if there is a via distributed search protocol.

[Pet Peeve]

Re: Why does the Pirate Bay even need a host?

Or move the website to TOR as a hidden service, yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why does the Pirate Bay even need a host?

It already has an .onion address (jntlesnev5o7zysa.onion)

So even if they blocked ALL the public DNS (icann managed) names it would still be accessible through TOR. The public address just helps those who don't use TOR (or don't know how to use it). Perversely , the whack-a-mole that is happening these days is more likely to push people onto darknets to get their Games of Thrones fix - i'm not sure the authorities would like that though,

The other scenario is that an alternative DNS starts being used more frequently (bit or open spring to mind) so tld blocks by icann become irrelevant.

[Paul 135]

Re: Why does the Pirate Bay even need a host?

Yes, I never understood the Pirate Bay/BitTorrent model of using normal web domains to list content when it is so obvious what the inevitable outcome would be. Why on earth did they not savw themselves a lot of hassle in the first place, and built upon the model used by networks such as gnutella, allowing the search functionality to be within the protocol itself?

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Re: Why does the Pirate Bay even need a host?

" used by networks such as gnutella"

There's a chocolate spread network? Who knew?

[Anonymous Coward]

why is it illegal?

I could never understand why torrent indexes are illegal. They don't host any content, just URLs. Why would words be illegal?

[Chad H.]

Re: why is it illegal?

Because they entice/encourage illegal behaviour.

[batfastad]

Re: why is it illegal?

So does google when you punch in the hash of a torrent. So does ebay, encouraging people to buy/sell second hand media (technically piracy). So do manufacturers of MP3 players with software that allows you to copy CDs etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: why is it illegal?

Yes, but they all have lots of money, and are therefore not behaving illegally. Do try and keep up!

[Captain Underpants]

Re: why is it illegal?

@Chad

I'm not sure that applies across the board - besides, if it were true, it would equally apply to every search engine ever made publicly accessible and probably every computer-based comms technology ever made.

Newsgroups are still going strong and, barring Newzbin, haven't been persecuted for being an easy way to get warez. I've never heard of an IRC server being chased over warez/piracy issues even though that's another fine long-standing avenue for naughtiness.

Meanwhile, BitTorrent is a fantastically useful protocol for anyone who wants/needs to distribute large files without bleeding money for hosting, which means that it gets used for both lawful and unlawful uses. (I saw "lawful" because the "illegal" aspect of torrenting is based on the "oooooh, that's redistribution, therefore we'll treat people running torrent clients in the exact same way as we would someone mass-producing knock-off DVDs that they sell for a fiver down the pub".)

I have a whole bunch of torrents that I regularly seed at home - many of them are legitimately free films ferom the likes of vodo.net; others are legitimately free software packages or game mods; others are non-free but private-tracker torrents for things like Humble Bundle game packs (as in, the torrents are made available by the Humble Bundle founders and I seed them to try and help HB keep their bandwidth costs down).

The fact that naughty material is available as a torrent doesn't mean that all torrents are naughty or that the existence of torrents predisposes people to be naughty. If anything was going to predispose people to be naughty, it would be the access they have to a networked machine that's very good at making copies of information structures....

It's also worth noting that in certain countries, taxes are levied on storage media that are directly paid to performing artists collection bodies as "compensation" for piracy (Canada & Spain, for example). How easy is it to argue that an action is illegal if the state has already imposed a tax on you which asserts that you will commit the action and charges you accordingly?

[Alan Brown]

Re: why is it illegal?

"It's also worth noting that in certain countries, taxes are levied on storage media that are directly paid to performing artists collection bodies as "compensation" for piracy "

Supposedly. The general opinion of canadian artists is that the prime recipient is the canadian General Fund.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: why is it illegal?

@Alan

That's not the point. The point is that the levy is applied to storage media, and the legislature describing it states that compensating artists is the rationale.

The fact that the levy is incompetently administered does not reduce the potential problem of treating as criminal an activity for whose repercussions you are imposing a tax.

[Darryl]

Re: why is it illegal?

Most of the people I've talked to here in Canada about this (of course I am a completely law-abiding citizen and would NEVER pirate anything) are of the opinion that, hey, the government charged me for pirating music when I bought these blank CDs, so I'm damn well going to get my money's worth.

[Rukario]

Re: why is it illegal?

From http://www.cpcc.ca/en/frequently-asked-questions:

The private copying levy is not a tax. It is a royalty paid to music rights holders. Unlike a tax, which is collected by the government, the private copying levy is collected by the CPCC to provide remuneration to rights holders for private copying. The private copying levy is earned income for rights holders and helps them to continue to create music.

Also, note the change in how the money is distributed:

Music authors and publishers: 75% in 2000; 58.2% in 2010-11

Performers: 13.7% in 2000; 23.8% in 2010-11

Record companies: 11.3% in 2000; 18% in 2010-11

[Captain Underpants]

Re: why is it illegal?

I have to say I don't love the idea that buying a CD and having the temerity to transcode it to a format that can be used by the only audio-playing equipment that I own should involve me paying an additional levy. Especially not since buying the storage media involves paying the levy even if you only ever buy digital downloads:ie where the payment you've made for the song already accounts for it being a digital file.

So no, they can screw off, it's a tax. If it's applied across all storage media sales (ie there's no way for me to say "I won't be storing any transcoded media on this device, therefore I am exempt from the levy) then I don't see how they can argue otherwise.

[Rukario]

Re: why is it illegal?

@Captain Underpants

The reason it's called a "levy" and not a "tax" is because it isn't collected by The Government.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: why is it illegal?

@Rukario

Yeah, I noticed that the first time. I'm not personally convinced, though, because it's applied across the board and provides no exemption mechanism for those whose usage does not match the criteria. Hence, if it's a legislatively-mandated cost to be included in the price of all such items, it's no different in my mind to sales tax/VAT. (The more cynically minded might argue that the fact that the money gets funneled to a body who then pisses it away in a manner that most of its intended beneficiaries don't much like is yet another similarity to an actual tax...)

The difference between a tax and a levy in semantic terms is irrelevant, in any case - the key fact here is that if you buy storage media, you are paying a per-amount-of-storage-space charge to a body which compensates musicians for the transcoding of their music that you are assumed to do, whether or not you do it. At which point, screw 'em. If they're allowed to pre-emptively charge you for something you may do just by virtue of buying hardware, then the same sort of logic legitimises users pre-emptively snaffling naughty free copies of $BAND's new album before deciding to pay for it or not, because apparently we're reversing the usual order of the payment | product handover process in retail transactions...

[Chad H.]

Re: why is it illegal?

It's a matter of degree.

Google doesn't celebrate the fact that unlawful behaviour can be committed through it - the pirate bay on the other hand openly promotes this as a feature, the clue is in the name.

In the other cases, lack of prosecution doesn't mean the behaviour can be considered okay.

I'm not trying to attack torrent technology - the question was asked what the Pirate Bay is doing that's illegal - that would be encouraging illegal behaviour, and I challenge anyone to say with a straight face that they do not.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: why is it illegal?

@Chad

Well, I guess it can be argued that with TPB in particular there's a specific focus.

But generally, with torrent trackers, unless they're focusing on specific media and stopping people submitting legitimately free material as torrents, that's not necessarily the case.

It's going to be interesting to see how Google treat trackers in future, given that the emergence of Google Play (or should I say re-emergence of Google Video?) means that they now find themselves with conflicting interests, since taking the AdWords money from torrent trackers may well mean depriving themselves of film rental/sale revenue through Google Play...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: why is it illegal?

>Because they entice/encourage illegal behaviour.

So do BMWs

[Dan White]

Re: why is it illegal?

Ant and Dec encourage me to commit violence against my TV. Should that make them illegal?

[Crisp]

Re: why is it illegal?

ThePirateBay is sometimes the only way to recover media for something that you've legitimately bought.

My old copy of Starcraft and Brood Wars still entitles me to play the game, even though the CD's that the game came on died a death a long time ago.

[Melzeebub92]

Cache

I've found that you can bypass these restrictions by simply googling the page on PB that you want and viewing a cached page from google.

Personally, I find the ease in bypassing these blockages moronic and shocking. Surely there is a much more effective way of blocking the page that isn't this easily maneuvered...

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Re: Cache

"Surely there is a much more effective way of blocking the page that isn't this easily maneuvered."

Yes, there is, but it involves DPI and filters on your BB link. Think Phorm.

This isn't something we want at any price.

[b166er]

'Twitter user David Neal was devastated when he was unable to break copyright before breakfast'

Welcome aboard noob-troll

Yaarrrrr

[Anonymous Coward]

They should base themselves in China, that would really piss Hollywood, er, i mean America off.

[Stevie]

Bah!

Suggestion: Change name to Absolutely Legal Stuff Bay.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Bah!

...or change name to YouTube. That would take care of all the problems relating to copyrighted audio and video.

[Neoc]

Have they tried...

...the Cayman Islands? It works for Banks and other Corporations...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Have they tried...

TPB do have standards - they don't want to be associated with criminals

[RaveDance Radio Station]

The pirate bay is such a good site would be sad to see it go

[Grease Monkey]

Don't forget, of course, that some countries object to your registering a domain their unless you operate there. Or, let's be fair, unless you pay taxes there.

[Stevie]

Bah!

Does anyone have hard figures on the legal/illegal content flow that are trustworthy?

'cause if not, my anecdotal first-hand experience (from others: I've never visited The Pirate Bay) is that 100% of the torrent usage is copyright infringing, and that will inform my views on the matter.

I venture to guess that downloads of <insert free operating system> are far outweighed by downloads of, say, Avatar.

Hell, I'll bet more people download copyrighted Wizards of the Coast Dungeons and Dragons material than legitimate stuff if it comes to that.

[Captain Underpants]

Re: Bah!

You're right to ask for numbers, but I'd also like to point out that there is a non-trivial amount of legitimately freely redistributed content out there in torrent form. I'm not going to argue that it's more popular than $USBILLBOARD#1ALBUM or $TENTPOLEHOLLYWOODBLOCKBUSTER, but it's certainly there.

There are also commercial operations using closed trackers to distribute their software.

There is also the ever-present warez issue of files being deliberately misnamed (as has happened not only by malware or dodgy smut merchants, but also with "poisoned" files released by record labels).

So without a clear and quite labour-intensive methodology (which will need to include some sort of anonymised data access to a large number of ISPs, as well as permission to retrieve and inventory every torrent identified from the anonymised ISP data, as well as some sort of magic to identify when non-free material is being legitimately torrented) there's no useful way of reaching any conclusion.

(I should clarify - this applies to the overall superset of torrent trackers; I suspect that the number of legitimate torrents on TPB is rather low as a proportion of the total number of torrents...)

[Anonymous Coward]

So sad

The pirate bay is running out of options as no civilized country wants to support piracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

... ProxyBay?

[SleepyJohn]

Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

... that in the old days the internet was controlled by American gangsters and corrupt governments. That can't be right, surely? Is that why my teacher calls it the Second Dark Age? A second era of "cultural and economic deterioration" that accompanied "a period of low activity in copying"?

She said that in those backward days people were so stupid they could not understand the difference between digital patterns flashing across the internet and plastic discs carted around in trucks. She was laughing so much she could hardly get the words out.

Was it really as horribly stupid as that, Grandad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

You teacher was referring to current day digital criminals not the old days.

[SleepyJohn]

Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

I was referring to my grandchildren referring to these days as 'the old days', in the fond hope that their generation will rid themselves of the parasites currently trying to wrest control of the internet from the people.

[FrankAlphaXII]

Re: Hey Grandad, my pal Jimmy says ...

That would be great and all, but the internet was never under their control. First it was the US DoD, then the NSF, then IANA/ICANN. Funny way of looking at things you have there, or you need a history lesson. Now go fetch grandpa another beer.