[QUOTE]The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world’s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids — all while keeping user data secure.
The Pirate Bay is loved by millions of file-sharers but is also a thorn in the side of the entertainment industries.
The latter group continues to push authorities to take action against the site. The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006 and there are rumors that the police might try again in the near future.
The Pirate Bay is not oblivious to this looming threat. They have backups in place and are shielding the true location of their servers. Nevertheless, should the site lose all its servers it might take a while to get back online.
This is one of the reasons why The Pirate Bay decided to move the site into the cloud yesterday. The switch resulted in five minutes downtime and was hardly noticed by the public, but it’s a big change for the infamous BitTorrent site.
Hosting in the cloud also makes the site easier to scale, it reduces downtime, and is also cheaper.
“Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent,” The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.
The Pirate Bay is currently hosted at cloud hosting companies in two countries where they run several Virtual Machine (VM) instances.
“Running on VMs cuts down operation costs and complexity. For example, we never need anyone to do hands-on work like earlier this month when we were down for two days because someone had to fix a broken power distribution unit,” The Pirate Bay says.
The setup also makes it possible for the BitTorrent site to take their business elsewhere without too much hassle.
“If one cloud-provider cuts us off, goes offline or goes bankrupt, we can just buy new virtual servers from the next provider. Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.”
While most of Pirate Bay’s former servers are now obsolete, not everything was moved to the cloud.
The load balancer and transit-routers are still owned and operated by The Pirate Bay, which allows the site to hide the location of the cloud provider. It also helps to secure the privacy of the site’s users.
The hosting providers have no idea that they’re hosting The Pirate Bay, and even in the event they found out it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users.
“All communication with users goes through TPB’s load balancer, which is a disk-less server with all the configuration in RAM. The load balancer is not in the same country as the transit-router or the cloud servers,” The Pirate Bay told us.
“The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they’re running TPB, they can’t look at the content of user traffic or user’s IP-addresses.”
In addition The Pirate Bay now believes it’s more raid proof.
The worst case scenario is that The Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer. All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be re-installed at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world.
“If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images,” The Pirate Bay says.
“They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,” they add.
For Pirate Bay users the move to the cloud doesn’t change much though. If anything, they will notice significantly less downtime.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-becomes-raid-proof-121017/[/url]
Taking all bets before they try to take it down again
Does this mean it'll be faster?
Still waiting for that server in space... at least clouds are closer to space. :v:
Someone will find a way to fuck it up it's just how things work. But good for them.
Look at how many sentences in the article start with a "T". Wow, who wrote that?
[editline]17th October 2012[/editline]
The most vulnerable part of TPB now are the guys who are running it.
I wonder if they'll change the logo to some fantasy/steampunk-esque flying pirate ship since "they're in the cloud"
[QUOTE]all while keeping user data secure.[/QUOTE]
So does this mean I can redownload portal 1 without Comcast sending me a passive-aggressive email telling me, "hey could you please delete that game off your hard drive. We know it was free the day before you downloaded it, but if you dont delete it, we will shut off your internet services. Have a great day!"
[QUOTE=TheJoker;38073784]Does this mean it'll be faster?[/QUOTE]
No, most likely it'll be slower, cloud computing is slower by nature than localized servers.
GG Entertainment industry, but I think TPB won.
The Pirate Bay will always be there. Even after an apocalypse it'll be there.
[QUOTE=MILKE;38074167]The Pirate Bay will always be there. Even after an apocalypse it'll be there.[/QUOTE]
At least we have a legacy to leave to the cockroaches.
[QUOTE=Zephyrs;38074228]At least we have a legacy to leave to the cockroaches.[/QUOTE]
All those [I]"Linux distro's"[/I] for them to download :v:
[QUOTE=Killuah;38073902]
The most vulnerable part of TPB now are the guys who are running it.[/QUOTE]
Didn't work last time, won't work again.
[QUOTE=catbarf;38073950]No, most likely it'll be slower, cloud computing is slower by nature than localized servers.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure why anyone is rating the above disagree because this is basic networking. Any time two machines are separated by a non-local network connection, the time required for any cross-server operation increases. If a lot of data is being collated by multiple machines or being passed through a single switch/hub (or a procedural allocation server like the load balancer they describe), the effect is non-negligible. It's identical to lag in PC games; a 100+ms delay on the standard handshake (request, send, confirm receipt, confirm integrity) slows things down. There's a very good reason why most servers are not cloud networks.
It might not be 56k slow, but it's pretty certain that it won't be faster because of the switch.
[QUOTE=Duplolas;38073931]So does this mean I can redownload portal 1 without Comcast sending me a passive-aggressive email telling me, "hey could you please delete that game off your hard drive. We know it was free the day before you downloaded it, but if you dont delete it, we will shut off your internet services. Have a great day!"[/QUOTE]
They didn't word it very well, so it's easy to get tripped up, but it's important to know that this change does not protect the users of the site, only the people running it. No matter where you get a torrent file from, your data is still recognizable torrent traffic and Comcast could come after you for it. Even the fact that you're connecting to TPB can be monitored, since their IP address will be public. The only change is that now TPB's real-world location can't be identified, making it much harder to physically shut down by any government.
The main issue for them might be an increased vulnerability to service outages. If a telecom line is severed or power goes out for one server in the cloud, it will probably kill the entire site until it's back up.
-snip-
[QUOTE=Anti Christ;38074574]Even this can be bypassed, it's just up to the individual users, rather than TPB though.[/QUOTE]
Of course, and I can't imagine any company or government would actually monitor that since it's useless information, but it's just an example. All that really changed was backend for the server, how you actually connect to it and torrent files remains unchanged.
[QUOTE=catbarf;38074590]Of course, and I can't imagine any company or government would actually monitor that since it's useless information, but it's just an example.[/QUOTE]
Actually, a bunch of years ago EU wrote the Data Retention Directive into law:
[quote]According to the directive, member states will have to store citizens' telecommunications data for six to 24 months stipulating a maximum time period. Under the directive the police and security agencies will be able to request access to details such as IP address and time of use of every email, phone call and text message sent or received. A permission to access the information will be granted only by a court.[/quote]
And I'm very sure a lot of non-EU countries has similar monitoring.
Right, I just mean it's not incriminating or useful information, since just connecting to any piracy site isn't a crime or indicative of a crime, so I can't see how it would be used. They might hang onto the data for its own sake but it's not something users need to worry about.
[QUOTE=catbarf;38074860]Right, I just mean it's not incriminating or useful information, since just connecting to any piracy site isn't a crime or indicative of a crime, so I can't see how it would be used. They might hang onto the data for its own sake but it's not something users need to worry about.[/QUOTE]
They can see which torrents you've been looking at if they store the URL you're requesting
[url]http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5520252/Ubuntu_10.04_LTS_x32[/url]
And if they see you visited a site like TPB, searched for a torrent, entered a page for an illegal torrent then then a couple of seconds later they notice you're using P2P traffic.
I'm no lawyer or judge, but that could be enough for a search warrant.
[QUOTE=Fear_Fox;38074958]They can see which torrents you've been looking at if they store the URL you're requesting
[url]http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5520252/Ubuntu_10.04_LTS_x32[/url]
And if they see you visited a site like TPB, searched for a torrent, entered a page for an illegal torrent then then a couple of seconds later they notice you're using P2P traffic.
I'm no lawyer or judge, but that could be enough for a search warrant.[/QUOTE]
What's stopping me from visiting TPB with TOR and caching the torrent file while tunneling traffic through that?
[QUOTE=Fear_Fox;38074958]They can see which torrents you've been looking at if they store the URL you're requesting
[url]http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5520252/Ubuntu_10.04_LTS_x32[/url]
And if they see you visited a site like TPB, searched for a torrent, entered a page for an illegal torrent then then a couple of seconds later they notice you're using P2P traffic.
I'm no lawyer or judge, but that could be enough for a search warrant.[/QUOTE]
And then they obtain your had drives, only to discover its all encrypted with truecrypt. Because of shadow volumes, they cannot prove anything. It's logically impossible to have a system that isn't guilty until proven innocent when people use shadow volumes because you can simply claim that you have provided all credentials. They cannot prove that you are lying.
Part of security will always rely upon the end user.
All hail the Pirate Cloud!
YARRRR, the Pirate Bay shall never fall! All yer Linux Distros shall be un-plunderable, and you can seed to yer heart's content!
[QUotE=Van-man;38074979]What's stopping me from visiting TPB with TOR and caching the torrent file while tunneling traffic through that?[/QUOTE]
Torrenting on tor is bad mkay
[QUOTE=AugustBurnsRed;38075269]Torrenting on tor is bad mkay[/QUOTE]
it might be bad, but he's just asking a theoretical question to argue with his logic
[QUOTE=Fear_Fox;38074958]They can see which torrents you've been looking at if they store the URL you're requesting
[url]http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5520252/Ubuntu_10.04_LTS_x32[/url]
And if they see you visited a site like TPB, searched for a torrent, entered a page for an illegal torrent then then a couple of seconds later they notice you're using P2P traffic.
I'm no lawyer or judge, but that could be enough for a search warrant.[/QUOTE]
In the netherlands doing that qualifies as "Deep packet inspection" and for ISP's "Deep packet inspection" is illegal, And the police need an search warrant to be allowed to read the data.
I do personally think that its quite a violation of your privacy if there would be ISP's or government organization constantly looking at what sites you request.
[QUOTE=Van-man;38074979]What's stopping me from visiting TPB with TOR and caching the torrent file while tunneling traffic through that?[/QUOTE]
I thought the TOR devs themselves discourage use of Torrent through the TOR network since it won't be secure because of how the P2P protocol works.
[QUOTE=Zephyrs;38075037]And then they obtain your had drives, only to discover its all encrypted with truecrypt. Because of shadow volumes, they cannot prove anything. It's logically impossible to have a system that isn't guilty until proven innocent when people use shadow volumes because you can simply claim that you have provided all credentials. They cannot prove that you are lying.
Part of security will always rely upon the end user.[/QUOTE]
There are ways to get out of a legal mess yes. But that's not the point. The point is that they CAN use what they are collecting. It's not just all worthless data.
All this is offtopic anyways. So lets get back on track:
This is just another reason why it's worthless to try to fight the tide instead of going with it. The pirates will always stay one step ahead of the opposition.
[QUOTE]Then we only have to upload the VM-images and reconfigure the load-balancer to get the site up and running again.[/QUOTE]
just sounds like technobabble to me :v:
This is all nice and sure on paper. But the term 'the cloud' means fuck all as in the end it's just a company with servers scattered all over the world. I'm sure if TPB is on Amazon S3 then the police can nicely ask Amazon to kick them off. Or do the same with whatever service they're [i]paying[/i] for.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
