The Pirate Bay Is A Trailblazer In Technical Resilience | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Bay Is A Trailblazer In Technical Resilience

falkvinge.net

54 pointsGBiT12 comments

I was hoping the article would go into a little* bit more detail about how they manage to be so resilient, to be honest.

* where little means "any"

The Pirate Bay blog continues to detail their saga, but it's more joking than anything else, as of late (see the NK hosting joke). They claimed that they were hosted on redundant cloud providers, but as it turns out, they still have centralized servers that can be taken down.

I honestly think that it's a combination of being aware of what the servers are doing (security cameras, backups) and being able to split to a new country when bad things happen is how they've accomplished it thus-far. They usually have 12-48 hour downtime periods, then pop back up in a new country with a new blog post.

There's (almost) no way of knowing if they are using cloud providers or not, since the real servers are hidden behind a tunnel.

Their recent documentary TPB:AFK was pretty interesting and a worthwhile watch on a slow day.

Speaking of resilience, I wrote a paper [1] 3 years ago about how to rebuild torrent sites (like TPB) within a couple hours of a denial of service (legal or otherwise) using the Vuze client's DHT. There was some similar concurrent work [2] on the Mainline DHT by Aaron Grunthal. I'd be interested to find out whether anyone has applied it for that application.

[1] "Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit." https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf [2] "Efficient Indexing of the BitTorret Distributed Hash Table." http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.3681v1.pdf

In a very sarcastic turn of events, I cannot access the article. Instead it shows: "This website is offline. No cached version is available"

Cloudflare is having problems. Their DNS works fine, but at least some of their locations are suffering. They reported a DOS some hours ago, so I'm guessing that's it this time too.

Can the control over domain names be decentralized to prevent it be single point of failure? Bitcoin may do it for curreny.

.onion pseudo TLD may be the first step in evolution. But the names are 16-bit hashes making it too long and complex.

Namecoin does this: http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

It's hard to have a global name system with readable/meaningful names unless you have a central organization.

He isn't the first person to make this observation, but Zooko's Triangle is easy to link to, so: https://zooko.com/distnames.html

I2P manages human-readable domain names, but not necessarily reliably (the equivalent of DNS is just as distributed and unreliable as the rest of the I2P network).

though a good article, I fail to see anything "new" in it, compared to what we already know.

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