Is the new Pirate Bay secretly run by the FBI?
Source: thevine.com.au
This week, a Twitter account apparently tied to network security group Anonymous tweeted "ALERT: STAY AWAY from The Pirate Bay website as we have gotten reports that it has been seized indirectly by the FBI and is logging IPs." Some people have freaked out as a result.
ALERT: STAY AWAY from The Pirate Bay website as we have gotten reports that it has been seized indirectly by the FBI and is logging IPs.
— TheAnonMessage (@TheAnonMessages) February 1, 2015The main concern has to do with the content delivery system CloudFlare that the resurrected TPB is using. In response, the Pirate Bay updated their blog to explain "This is only initially to handle the massive load upon the servers. It will be removed shortly." CloudFlare is an American service, and given the American surveillance agencies' propensity for strong-arming American companies into cooperating with their efforts, it raised some hackles.
The thing is, as savvy Reddit users point out, you don't need to strong-arm The Pirate Bay nor their content delivery systems to obtain the IP addresses of people torrenting things. Everyone who torrents has access to the IP addresses of their peers, provided they're not using a proxy service like Tor. Anti-piracy firms have taken advantage of this in the past by uploading so-called honeypot torrents to lure people into downloading copyrighted material via a torrent, and then collecting all the IP addresses.
Very few people have been successfully prosecuted by IP address, however, as they're unreliable identification for a person. All you have to do to create reasonable doubt is point out that any number of people could've been using your computer, or had that IP address on your network, at the time something was downloaded, to create reasonable doubt.
[...]
Read the rest: thevine.com.au
