To the Pirate Bay: a modest proposal | Hacker News Reader

To the Pirate Bay: a modest proposal

antipope.org

228 pointscstross115 comments

In 1729 Jonathan Swift anonymously published “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” [1], which suggested that poverty and overpopulation in Ireland could be alleviated if the poor would either eat their children, or sell their children as food to the rich. In allusion to the original, the phrase “A Modest Proposal” is used to introduce suggestions that are satirical, hyperbolic, and sarcastic. Not knowing the origin of the phrase, some authors use it to introduce proposals that are genuinely modest, much to the disappointment of this reader.

fn. 1: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080

To be clear, the title of the post, "Pirate LOSS? An alternative ...", makes no allusion to Swift.

While true, the submission title does, and the submitter is the author.

While this proposal isn't quite as "modest" as Swift's, I would argue he's using the phrase correctly. You think he's actually suggesting making ratbots that survive off pizza crust and ferretbots to find them?

This sounds like a mockery of the pirate bay's proposal, just as Swift mocked how the people of his time thought about the poor.

In the biomimicry department, I'd look to the birds. Imagine an ornithopter mimic that seeks out power lines, clamps onto them, and powers itself via inductive pickups in its feet. Its battery gives it a 10-minute flying range; this gets recharged first. Then it goes into broadcast mode.

Sure, its signals could be triangulated, but if the mimicry is clever enough then it might be difficult to distinguish from a real bird. And it could be equipped with various means of monitoring its environment (such as an RF receiver which monitors the strength of nearby police-frequency broadcasts), which would allow it to rapidly bug out at the first sign of trouble. It takes to the air, circles for a few minutes, then finds another power line and starts over again.

We get it; you're a Charlie Stross fan.

Actually I haven't read him, but I'm told I should.

You should!

Not that's an ingenious idea. It wouldn't necessarily need to fly; an operator could catapult it up and let it hook onto a line, and a lead weight in the tail would orientate it like a real bird.

You could either make it disposable (expect it to have a limited lifespan when removed by the authorities), or make it stop transmitting and drop to the ground when it thinks it could be in trouble. Birds tend to be coloured to merge into the undergrowth anyway, and if it drops before it's spotted, it could be very hard to find. An operator would then recover it at a later date.

Of course I meant "Now that's an ingenious idea". :/

The hight would be an advantage, and you'd get free power - the best of both worlds. You could put a transmitter (complete with inductive pickups) in place, then fly the drone back for reuse. It would also be quite hard to take down, even if they knew it was there.

I wouldn't worry too much about cloaking. The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter, unless it's to get prints or the society in question is very Orwellian (in which case, you can't make the drones anyway, because Big Brother is watching). I'd just go for transmitter which are too cheap to bother fighting against.

> The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter

But the power company might want to knock down a device that's stealing their service.

It's a low power device. They'd press charges if they caught you (to discourage other people doing the same thing), but it's not worth sending out counter-surveillance operatives to trace the device, then calling out a couple of linesmen to take it down simply to save power. A 60 watt device (my laptop running at full power) costs ~$70 a year. A Raspberry Pi, even with a reasonable Wifi transmitter, costs far less. And I bet the cost of power at a distribution line is less than what a consumer pays for power in their home.

As someone who lives in a society enabled by cheap, centrally generated electric power, I'd actually kind of hope the power company would seven-figures go after somebody who steals it from their distribution network, even if it's just somebody who wants to watch Game of Thrones without HBO.

> The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter

They do have varmint rifles though

The aren't going to fire a varmint rifle into the air in a populated area. They might want retrive these to get fingerprints or DNA samples, so they could chase down whoever put it there (and the MPAA / power companies might lobby for them to make this a priority), but I doubt they'll do anything dangerous simply to take down the devices.

I seriously doubt them shooting at power lines.

They can wait and shoot them mid-air.

Maybe I don't understand electrical engineering well enough, but wouldn't an ornithopter then also have to carry some sort of heavy duty (several hundred or thousand-pound) transformer as well?

First, since the power draw would be small, the transformer could be small too. Second, you could probably use solid-state devices like a regulator & rectifier combo instead of a transformer.

Not necessarily - for example, fluorescent lamp glows near high-voltage power line, even if is not plugged in to any power source.

A transformer consists of two inductors that transform electricity by - you guessed it - induction.

You don't need a transformer because you can just get the electricity in the correct voltage by using the right inductor. I haven't made any calculations but I would expect the battery to be bigger and of greater weight than a sufficient inductor.

Wouldn't they be stealing power, then?

Going from the murky world of copyright infringement, to straight-up stealing a service seems like a pretty terrible idea.

Yeah, but the further we take this into the grey area the smaller the leap will be to adding anti-personnel defense capabilities!

What grey area? It's illegally tapping a power line.

Power distribution lines are already a major inefficiency loss to the power company. It's unclear if there would be any additional parasitic loss from the recharging bot, the efficiency of the system as a whole could in fact be greater than if the bot plugged into a metered outlet.

Kind of suits the piracy debate rather well actually. :-)

If you put a coil up to a HVAC line and draw current from that coil, that is going to increase the impedance of the line and reduce the amount of power that can be delivered at the other end.

Yes, the energy loss would probably be tiny in proportion to the energy transmitted and the resistive loss on a power line, but it is nevertheless a real loss to the power company.

It could be more efficient than plugging the bot into a metered outlet, but the power company gets paid for energy drawn from a metered outlet.

By analogy, it is more efficient for a retail shop if you steal goods from their warehouse before they are stocked on the shelves than if you buy them off the shelves, but the first case is a net loss for the retail shop, while more efficient, because they don't derive any revenues, and the second case, while less efficient, leads to an increase in profit for the shop.

This is quite different from piracy, which has no direct marginal cost - copyright was created to allow the recovery of fixed costs on certain types of work when there are low marginal costs to production.

My understanding is that at transmission line voltages, a big source of power loss is via corona discharge.

There are electrons and ions moving near the power lines. Perhaps it's possible to obtain a some of that power at a low rate without coupling back-EMF to the lines.

The electric grid loses a lot of power through inefficiencies anyway. If anyone did try this, I've no doubt the electric companies would be (rightly) very pissed off, but more about the potential risk to their power lines than the actual power lost.

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=9291

Lighting a barn requires a heck of lot more power than sending out a wifi signal, even a fairly strong one.

I lose money through inefficiency because sometimes I drop coins on the ground and don't bother going after them, but if you start reaching into my pockets for my pennies, you and I are gonna have words, followed by fists.

It's not that they/I worry about watts/pennies, or even that they/I worry that you'll damage the powerlines/pockets, but that it's outright theft.

Human beings have the luxury of being irrational about their finances, whilst publicly traded corporations are supposed to be able to justify their financial decisions.

If a CEO says, "I hate stealing, so I'm going to spend 10 million dollars year of the company's money to stop 10 thousand dollars in power theft." then I don't think that's going to impress the company's shareholders.

DARPA actually had a request out for bat-like UAVs that could latch onto power-lines to recharge.

Here is a PDF on the subject:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Mo...

Do you actually need an ornithopter? Why not just make it a powered glider (small pusher prop). The wing supports could be made of conductive materials, or infused with small wires, and the thing could just buzz along close to the wires. If you get it right, you could get more juice than you output, and when you get enough stored charge, just fly high and glide down, find updrafts, etc until power is low again and go buzzing some more.

No need to hide them. All you need is a "data limpet", sort of like a limpet mine, but it serves data instead of explosions.

Take a small single board computer, with meshing WiFi, data store and solar power. Put it in a tiny flat cylindrical case with a solar panel on one circular face and a nice strong rare earth magnet on the other. Make them cheap, so they can be mass produced.

The challenge is to then place as many as possible in the most inaccessible spots possible. Attachment methods might include:

* Throw them

* Dangle them from an RC helicopter flying close enough to the target for the magnet to attach.

* Launch them from a trebuchet

* Air canon or rail gun

* Use your imagination. Coolest and most spectacular idea wins.

Locations can be anywhere there is ferrous material, the higher and more inaccessible the better:

* Tops of tall bridges

* Radio masts

* Transmission towers

* Buildings

* ...

Even if the data limpet is in full view, if it is on a sheer face hundreds of metres off the ground, it'll probably take ages to sort out the access difficulties, both physical and legal, to remove it. It would also be an unequal contest, in that removal is a major deal, but placement isn't.

The tech could be applied in any situation where a powerful entity is trying to silence a powerless entity.

Edit: formatting

Wouldn't a sniper rifle "remove the mine" from the MPAA's perspective?

Doing that in an urban area will get you in a lot of trouble, even if you're police.

If these things are cheap ($<20), and there are hundreds of them scattered in various not-so-easy-to-find places around the city, good luck trying to snipe them all. Or even find them. (Imagine hiding one inside a vent shaft inside a building. Or in the sewer.)

This idea is brilliant. True decentralized piracy without a a network to connect them all. Impossible to stop!

The MPAA isn't allowed to use sniper rifles on bridges. The police have better things to do.

You mean this: http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox_DIY ?

Electronics would have to be rated for high operating temperatures this sort of device would see outdoors. That depends on local climate and on details of physical construction, of course, but, by and large, industrial temperature rated (-40C to +85C) electronics would have to be used.

Also, this (and the original LOSS proposal) would run afoul with the FCC and similar regulatory agencies outside of the US. This will make it yet another government agency to cross swords with.

The best way to stop something like this would probably be to claim that they disrupt other important, life preserving services. That would probably keep most people from putting them up.

I doubt that would make much difference. They still have to walk round and tell everyone to switch their laptops and phones off on planes even though they claim the plane will crash if you don't.

Probably because many people don't believe that anymore.. Last time i flew (in Europe) most people did turn off their cell phones etc.

Well, at least it seemed like they did.

I usually turn mine off, not because the plane will crash, but because it'll waste it's battery looking for a signal from a tower that it can't find. That's actually part of the reason that there's so much variation in cell phone battery life is that if you're in an area of lower reception it'll take more power to transmit back to the tower. If there's no towers to respond a lot of phones (used to anyway, can't confirm 100% if they still do) would try to transmit at maximum power to get a ping back from the tower and start getting a connection to the network.

How would that work? "the wifi device will cause society to end, but the one in your house and in the Starbucks on the corner? Those are just fine." I doubt the type of people who would put these up are the kind of people to buy that line of reasoning.

The police (etc.) are likely to assume, though, that it does serve explosions - like in Boston in 2007. All the more so if the devices are placed on bridges, transmission towers, large buildings, public transport vehicles, etc.

BREAKING NEWS - TERRORISTS FROM ANONYMOUS AND PIRATE BAY SEEN PLANTING BOMBS ALL OVER CITIES

The Pirate Bay's LOSS proposal is so far from reality that it's close to a joke. It's not 'low orbit' and just because Raspberry Pi is small it doesn't help you with keeping the UAV up there for a length of time. And such a device would be easy to find via RDF and would be jammable and incredibly vulnerable to attack. It would be easy for a government to cause a UAV to crash.

If they really want to do something I'd suggest that they build a screen saver that allows them to distribute their database across machines all over the world.

Spot on. It always struck me as an elaborate joke just to spook the authorities and see what kind of a reaction they would get.

Ahem. "I am ruling out nuclear propulsion because I assume The Pirate Bay do not have access to a supply of fissionable materials. Otherwise, it's Game Over for the MPAA."

No smileys here: No sir.

I was referring to the original Pirate Bay post describing their plan for the LOSS proposal, not this particular article. Plenty of people here seem to be treating it as a serious project, judging by the comments here at least....

Building underground pizza-eating rat robots (with or without smilies) sound as serious as the original proposal, that didn't include smilies either.

I am shocked, SHOCKED sir, that you could possibly suspect anyone would write a humorous piece without smilies!

I am sure Jonathan Swift is spinning in his grave.

Perhaps we could attach his corpse to a generator and put an induction charging mat in the roof of his coffin (or shallower if it's really 6 feet down and the surrounding soil is found to have high iron content, thereby effectively blocking the inductive charging) so that the rat bots can use /that/ to charge. We'd need some type of authentication system for the rat bots so the police ferret bots don't tap the same power. I'd suggest a pressure-sensitive switch linked to an arduino-powered RFID reader. Perhaps it would also require a key revocation system in the event that one or more rat bots ate recovered and the ferret bots attempt to spoof the RFID tags. We could accomplish this with some type of coffin-to-coffin mesh network (an "Under[ground]Net[work]", if you will.)

I'll start the project on Github and propose my idea for budgetary consideration at Noisebridge. We can get a Google Docs group going and I'll run the Dokuwiki off my linode vm.

Cheers!

Poe's Law makes satire difficult these days. With the huge amount of tech sites that post stories like this with a straight face, I actually wasn't sure it was satire, and I follow your blog pretty regularly. I thought it was out of character based on earlier posts (your analysis on space travel), but I've seen worse serious posts pop up on reddit and even here.

My rule of thumb: if I LOL, it's satire. If I don't, it doesn't matter. I remember a couple of times it was embarrasing, though.

One was at the movies. Pulp Fiction. Christopher Walken is telling the story of the watch. When it reaches certain level, I am the only laughing person around. The more I feel everybody throwing me vicious looks in the dark, the less I can't stop.

Edit: BTW, I enjoyed the story a lot, thanks cstross!

And to inspire a community to find more innovative and feasible solutions.

Glad to see people noticing how absurd this whole idea really is. Every time I read something about this 'proposal' it conjures up a mental image of a smoke-filled room full of geeks on a sci-fi/spy film bender who haven't left their parents basement for two months.

It really is absurd, I can't believe anyone would take it seriously for a second.

I mean go to http://thepiratebay.se/legal and read some of the stuff they send back to companies/lobby groups who threaten them with legal action. Hilarious, but you wouldn't exactly take what they are saying as gospel.

When I think of unmanned UAVs, I think of advanced DARPA research, or the UAV from the GRAW videogames[1]. This isn't something remotely feasible for TPB.

This is what I'd imagine happened:

- The pirate bay guys, with their naughty sense of humour, sat around a table and said "hmm, wonder what we could possibly do right now to make the MPAA and their Congressional lapdogs really choke on their caviar and burbon..."

- Mikael* in the corner pipes up, "I know! Let's announce some outlandish, yet semi-technically feasible idea which geeks will know is bullshit but will make those crazy, out-of-control American lawmakers propose some more insane laws. Then in a couple of weeks, we can release another announcement, saying what idiots they are and why do they insist on wasting taxpayers dollars on locking down their own airspace and generally turning themselves into North Korea..."

- Then the chairman goes "Great idea! Meeting adjourned. Mikael, you are promoted to senior-shit stirrer!"

(Needless to say, this is all conjecture and quite possibly bullshit, but far more plausible to me than TPB actually launching sci-fi UAVs in the near future.)

*I'm making up a Nordic-sounding name here, what can I say, I'm reading Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the moment.

[1] http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/image/article/765/765249...

> This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war. [...] These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we're building, that's more than enough.

Am I missing something here? Someone would just have to pull the plug on whatever "base station" these LOSS are connecting to and/or go right for the uplink to the "intarwebs" and take them off the web completely. If they could strong-arm the Swedish police amongst others into raiding the hosting facilities in the past, "coercing" cooperation from an up-stream ISP shouldn't be a problem?

There is no ISP. These things would not need to be Internet connected. The entire Pirate Bay directory now fits in a few hundred MB. All it needs to do is transmit.

That was my problem understanding it - because the original blog entry said:

> One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary. http://thepiratebay.se/blog/210

The point is, "transmit? To where?". Unless these things make a WiFi mesh and you are in range, you would require some sort of gateway to access the data.

If they ever do get this going and it works (unlikely even if it isn't a joke), it could be a very interesting thing for doing freenet style things. No global IP to trace to and the pirate bay could end up completely anonymous.

I still haven't got past how they plan to power the damn things. Which is to say, that doesn't even seem to have entered the plan.

What is far from reality?

There's everything you need:

Weather balloon: http://www.amazon.com/30ft-Professional-Weather-Balloon-1200...

10W solar panel: http://www.amazon.com/Instapark%C2%AE-High-Efficiency-Mono-C...

Some batteries: http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-BA25115-Rechargeable-900mAH-B...

Raspberry Pi with Wi-Fi: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

Then just install your server on the Pi and let the device scan for open Wi-Fis. Send hundreds of them for capacity and redundancy.

It is far from reality.

1. The weather balloon will keep going up until it bursts (typically in the stratosphere). This will not take long (under two hours). So, if you are going to use a balloon it's going to be tethered. Tether it means that it can easily be shutdown by cutting the tether.

2. WiFi range with omnidirectional antennas is very limited. With directional antennas it is measured in km. So either you have to keep the balloon near the ground (which makes it easy to detect and destroy) or you have to point an antenna at it from somewhere (which means that you can't scan for open WiFis easily).

3. The typical payload for a weather balloon would be about 1kg. The solar panel that you are pointing to already weighs more than that and you'd have to include the Raspberry Pi, storage (Pirate Bay is 21.3Gb), suitable antenna, backup batteries and housing. So you'd be having a hard time and would need multiple balloons.

So suppose you really want an airborne server platform. You are going to need the following:

1. Something that flies under its own power and has sufficient energy to keep flying. That probably means a gasoline or kerosene engine of some sort, unless you keep it really light and can use solar power.

2. The computer bit is easy and everyone is focussing on it but it's not exceptional. Pirate Bay is small and needs a not complex computing environment (especially if there were many of these and any load was spread across them).

3. A way of communicating with this device. This means radio communications with sufficiently high bandwidth and that implies ground stations to pick it up.

While I agree that there's a bit more to it, let me see if I can rebuff a few of your points.

1. Yes, a typical weather balloon will do that, but it's possible to make a balloon reach neutral buoyancy at a specific altitude see:zeplin.

2. WiFi is a poor choice, that I agree. Assuming you're using something else, you can actually use a directional antenna pointed straight down with a very narrow (2-5 degree) beam. As long as there's no obstructions on the way down, it should work fine. It's like of like how a satellite works. You're probably not going to get 100Mbps, but if you multiplex it over enough balloons, it might work.

3. See 1, you can tune buoyancy with weight. Weather balloons are usually really light so that it keeps the costs down and they can go higher faster.

I hope I'm not being pedantic by pointing out that the person to whom you are replying has, in fact, floated a capsule to the upper atmosphere: http://blog.jgc.org/2011/04/gaga-1-flight.html

Didn't know that, that's pretty awesome.

> but it's possible to make a balloon reach neutral buoyancy at a specific altitude see:zeplin

Only for a short time. Hydrogen leaks, and helium leaks even faster. Plus how do you keep it from blowing away in the wind? (Keep in mind that winds also blow up and down.)

Leaking is a harder problem, I don't see any way around it other than using hot air or having some sort of autonomous in-flight refueling. As for the wind, I vote that it shouldn't matter, as long as it doesn't get stuck in a downdraft that crashes it, or an updraft that brings it above its operational ceiling, then lat/long shouldn't matter too much as long as there's enough of them. This is supposed to be a backup in case TPB gets shut down, some sort of mass backup distribution. On average, the airborne servers should be available once in a while.

But you're right, there's massive problems any persistent airborne presence.

> then lat/long shouldn't matter too much as long as there's enough of them

So you are suggesting let them move randomly yes? Well if you assume a 10km range you would need 1.62 million of these to cover the earth, and since they would probably bunch up due to wind, you'd need even more of them.

And why do you assume they won't be stuck in up or downdrafts? Earth's air pressure varies constantly, so a truly neutral position is impossible. But even if you managed it, the slightest breeze would move it easily - meaning they would constantly crash to the ground or go too high and pop.

I think most of you are missing the point of the title (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal). His suggestions are not meant to be taken seriously, and as others have pointed out, it is quite likely that TPB's suggestion may not be entirely serious either.

It might be worth considering that the whole reason they put forth the idea of drones or LOSS or however you want to define them was to a) inspire technologists to consider creative ways of dealing with draconian policy/enforcement, b) draw parallels between the projection of power manifested by drones operating in US interests overseas under questionable/controversial legal circumstances and their own situation.

Have we all already forgotten how the internet works?

Flying raspberry pis, or birds on power lines, or pirates in space are all cool...

but how do you get those bits from up there in the sky to me, down here, in Phoenix, AZ? Is TPB planning to also buy up fiber? And then copper to my house? TPB is now getting into the telecoms industry! (Which would be a cool pivot, I guess)

The servers might be in LEO, or floating in a blimp, but the routers are still sitting in a meet-me room somewhere on the ground, and those routers and cables are still vulnerable to "stop routing TPB or we stop peering with you".

Here. "Gibson's guide to internet work": http://www.thingist.com/t/item/2926/

I came to post this exact same thing. The whole project is a joke.

I am ruling out nuclear propulsion because I assume The Pirate Bay do not have access to a supply of fissionable materials. Otherwise, it's Game Over for the MPAA.

Maybe The Pirate Bay should get in contact with North Korea, they'd be more than happy to help undermine the capitalist system from the inside.

Seriously, though, I think this entire thing is merely a PR stunt by the The Pirate Bay. They were never even thinking about doing that. Just like a company they need PR to continue to exist and get donations. Remember, TPB also "tried to buy" Sea Land at some point in time, an oil platform that some people claim is a country? Anyway, it is a good PR stunt, many startups can learn from that.

Sealand was a WW2 anti-aircraft platform. It's too close to shore for doing anything really criminal (like, copyright infringement - murder would probably be fine).

The problem these days is that organisations who don't want to be under US rule have to possess a reasonable number of operational nuclear warheads... It's not enough to set sail and stay in international waters.

Are you proposing TPB creates an Android app to host their magnet links, from a phone attached to a Romotive, broadcasting wifi, powered by several means (induction, solar, etc)?

I don't see why not - seems much better designed than some "enterprise" systems I've had to deal with…

But Pirate Bay don't have a support contract that they're trying to sell us

Skip the Romotive and utilize a human going about their daily commute. They even come preprogrammed with the desire to locate and utilize power sources!

I really enjoy reading Charlie's thoughts on just about anything, I loved Accelerando, and definitely don't mean to take a shot at him here.

When I encounter a title which includes the phrase "A Modest Proposal" I assume the words that follow are generally facetious. Swift wasn't actually advocating for the devouring of delicious Irish adolescents; I'm certain Charlie is well aware of that fact (in the case of other writers who invoke the title, I am sometimes less confident).

TPB's LOSS initiative is probably absurd enough to meet the requirements, as is Charlie's ratbot counter proposal. Except it seems he's sort of serious? Then he concludes by posing to his readers what appears to be a completely honest request for their dream implementations of Raspberry Pi. Many commenters both on his blog and in this HN thread have apparently taken the post at face value.

It could be that this was just a slam dunk bit of satire, achieving exactly the desired result. If that's the case, to me this post doesn't exactly live up to its namesake. Charlie's identified a ridiculous plan, and suggested an equally ridiculous alternate plan, without so much as a wink or a nod.

Now what?

I read it as an exercise in science fiction, and imagining what will be possible with stuff that's not far beyond the current state of the art. Yes all of these ideas are unworkable right now.

The shocking thing, when I stopped to think about it, is how much closer they are to being realistic than my gut instinct felt like they were.

Sufficiently powerful computation, storage, and solar power are cheap and miniaturized. Hobbyists have used cameras tied to balloons to take video of the edge of space. Research projects have produced robots that can power themselves from biomass and sugars. All science fact.

Ten years ago these ideas would have been obvious science fiction. Now it takes a bit longer to establish what parts are outlandish because so much of it is so much more plausible. It makes me think about how things will look in 2022. I don't have a strong expectation that any of these ideas in particular will come true. The future will likely be stranger still.

This problem will solve by itself. How ? when teens have no favorite series to download via TPB, they will have to distract with other things such as politics. And when they get into politics, guess what they will want: to outlaw the opression of the people by the few, and their TPB back.

You are very cute like a small child.

Here's an idea, instead of building anything that moves, how about building a cheap, disposable server you can install covertly anywhere you want that automatically dials home after installed and can use WiFi or Ethernet?

http://pwnieexpress.com/

You can make it look like an air freshener! No one will be the wiser. The ethernet cable is there so you can remotely check the levels of air freshener in its cartridge, of course:

http://www.ien.com/uploadedImages/ien/IENblog/PwnPlug.jpg

Stolen power + Stolen network = Practical Path to Piracy!

I am almost sold, until I read that it only does WEP cracking... For $500+, WPA2 crack at minimum...

Sewers are often below several meters of concrete/rock/earth, interwoven with steel reinforcements, metal tubing, wires, power conduits and other stuff that would make for very poor wireless reception even when directly above the ratbot. The airborne approach on the other hand guarantees maximum range.

Perhaps a small, solar-powered dirigible would be a better approach? They don't require massive amounts of power just to stay airborne and solar cells (battery buffered) could arguably provide enough power to stay stationary in most wind situations.

A miniaturized version of this perhaps: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/4324155

Balloons don't require anchor cables if you give them some rotors. Use the propellers to keep within a certain area, but you don't need to expend so much energy on lift.

On the one hand, helium is running out. On the other hand, hydrogen explodes.

Hydrogen exploding may not be such a bad quality in this use case. It would be difficult for an aggressor party to get the drone back in one piece; snipers would be ineffective. A sniper could still take out the floating server, but (properly designed) the resulting explosion would wipe away any useful evidence of the server's purpose. One would likely need another drone built to separate the server from the balloon without aggravating the hydrogen.

Sadly (or happily), hydrogen doesn't explode that easily. The hydrogen autoignition temperature is 500 degrees Celsius. Even if a bullet were to effectively transfer heat, it's still 100 of degrees to cold. Hydrogen got a bad reputation from Hindenburg. It's irresponsible to use only because so many lives depend on it but still relatively safe. The first airship to circumnavigate the globe was a hydrogen zeppelin! And it never spontaneously combusted during its 12 year life apparently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin

I think that a swarm of cubesats[1] would be a very possible solution. Much more practical than small drones and probably not that expensive.

[1]: http://www.cubesat.org/

Will the first replicators be born from piracy?

Given that the wi-fi range would be a lot less than an airborne solution I wonder if it wouldn't be easier for the police to pinpoint their location. It would also limit the practicality as you'd need a lot more of them to get the same coverage.

As for fuel, perhaps human waste can serve as a viable source of power?

Tether the drones across the countryside. Supply power through the tether. Make them a Redundant Array, so that loss of a single drone doesn't lose any data.

Rig them, so that if the tether is cut, they erase their copy of the hard drive encryption key, then fly to a "safe house."

Somewhat odd to see that people around here are trying to shoot down a bold idea like that. I would argue that the idea is not at all that "crazy" as some here try to make it sound. The great thing is, that there is a very active RC plane community with many brilliant minds around.

For example the arguments, that planes have to land every so often are highly questionable, when there are already long-range planes in reasonable size and weight such as the Tam-26.

With relatively unsophisticated components they were able to make the flight across the Atlantic (1888 miles) in about 40 hours ( http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=941744)

Countless other efforts are at the moment working on how to solve the problems using solar power for RC planes. And the problems seem to be at least in theory not that unrealistic.

So this article is a little ill informed. If the pirate bay is working on what other people are working on It won't be a little quadrocopter.

NPR recently did a story on what the future of commercial drones are shaping up to be [1]. The deal is they are working on drones with huge wingspans that require very little propulsion to stay airborne and can carry both solar panels to collect energy and batteries to store that energy. The planed flight time for one of these aircraft would be on the order of years. As of today they have successfully tested drones of this kind that can stay aloft for weeks. If thats the kind of technology the LOSS will leverage then it will fit the role nicely.

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143144146/drone-technology-fin...

Who said a UAV has to be an airplane? Why not a balloon/blimp? They should be able to stay airborne passively. Then powering the server is another problem but with a blimp weight isn't really that big of an issue.

It has more to do with control in high winds, but you're right in that LTA craft are probably better suited for the task.

Cheap daytime solution could be a 'solar balloon'... Like these: http://www.solar-balloons.com/howto.html

It's good that this idea is getting the attention it deserves, but I saw this idea on Reddit yesterday, among other alternatives (could've been the same author, though).

I'll take the bait. Replace 'robot-rat' with 'rat'.

I'm more thinking along the line of replace 'rat' with 'human'. We could all form a living peer-to-peer (in every sense of the phrase) network.

or vehicles. like car parasites . so this thing like attaches to a car and transmitts pirate software over wi-fi or hosts other free software. it can change host cars by itself if needed.

It would need be a robot that can attach itself to a rat, then de-attach and hunt for a new rat when that one is dead. Because rats have very short life spans.

So what we're really looking for is a rat parasite robot.

A rat's life span of about three years seem adequate to me. I guess the electronics won't even last that long in such an environment.

Robots which go through the sewers broadcasting to the internet. Reminds me of the matrix.

for a moment i thought he will propose implating chips on live rats.

Actually, this would be a better idea than the one in the article! If we can use the rat as an energy source it would beg almost unstoppable.

i wonder if there are already been research of rechargin bateries from bodiliy fluids or something

This sounds like something out of a Neil Stephenson novel.

I think the big point is being missed: whatever technology our military masters decide to use, we can use it too.

Spy bots patrolling our streets to see who is downloading illegal content or doing something illegal? We have that. So, we can use the same tech to keep doing what we want.

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