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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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...

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.

> 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.

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