There is no shortage of government and entertainment-related agencies chomping at the bit to shut down the Pirate Bay for good. While the group has not suffered a permanent service ending raid like [Kim Dotcom] and the Megaupload crew, they are always thinking up novel ways to ensure that the site can endure whatever law enforcement throws at them.
In a recent blog post, representatives from the group unveiled plans to put their front line servers in the clouds, courtesy of custom-made autonomous drones called “Low Orbit Server Stations.” The project is in its infancy, but the general idea is to mount small computers like the Raspberry Pi on GPS-controlled drones kept aloft 24×7 (presumably) using solar energy. These drones would communicate with clients on the ground via radio transmitters which they state can provide a “100Mbps node up to 50km away”.
Calling the claims grandiose would be an understatement, but then again the Pirate Bay has proven to be a difficult organization to quash in any substantial way, so only time will tell.
[via The Daily What – Thanks, roboman2444]
This sounds like some kind of trolling and not like anything to be taken seriously…
this would prove to be a substantial project, but if pulled off could show that anything is possible. Even with all the agency’s attempting to take them down Pirate Bay will live on.
It all goes back to “The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.”
If a site wants to be live, the site will be live. Megaupload was still reachable via direct IP and several mirrors for quite a while after it was ‘shut down’. If they wanted to fight back, it would have been trivial to relocate and redirect the site before the authorities had a chance to really kill them off.
A while back, there was that solar plane project, that aimed to stay aloft on solar power alone. Did that ever go anywhere? I believe the general idea was, climb in the sunlight when it was powered, and glide at night.
As I understand it, they are talking of floating the hardware for the redirects to ‘still’ ground based servers.
I must have missed something, because although it is a novel idea… it still seems kinda silly. I thought we were aiming for a satellite network. Both ideas are still very expensive. As long as they dont build any self defense in to whatever method they choose… (skynet).
Possible with a solar powered blimp/zeppelin of some description. Otherwise fuel becomes too much of an issue.
Sounds expensive. I hope they do it and publish the make files. Given the US government’s hungry eyes on the web, I think we could all do with a nice deployable server setup like that, in case they decide to shut off all the phones and web for an “emergency”. Like Egypt did last year.
Sounds like target practice for the air force
Would be an awful shame if a “meteorite” hit your sat.
cheap, disposable…hit as many as you like.
I wonder how they will handle airspace issues…
Well, I guess It will be easier to take down than on a building on land.
RIAA/MPAA just has to have a word with the US government to send a predator shoot the server drone down.
I can’t wait for the headlines.
“USAF Shoots Down Unarmed Radio Drone to Uphold Copyright”
That’s not going to make them the people’s enemy or anything…oh no.
The headline will be more like:
“Jet air plane full of the cutest puppies and kittens collides with Pirate (or Terrorist) drone, then plummets into a major city, death toll 247 and still climbing”
That’s how I would have it done.
they shoot it down, TPB puts up another. they are cheap and disposable by design. and missiles are expensive.
the price thing is interesting. an asat missile costs at least 9 million dollars. Actual values should be MUCH higher (like 24million). Based on a modified SM-3 (which is the cheapest asat weapon).
Of course we can’t compare defence budgets with pirate bay budget. But if a satellite costs let’s say like 1000$ and if they launch 1000 of them it will cost 1 million dollars.
1 million might sound a lot but actually is really easy to gather. In April 2008 piratebay had 12million peers, now it must have much more, if everyone donated a single dollar… you get the idea.
To shoot down all the satellites the cost is 9 billion dollars.
Let’s put 9 billion into defence numbers.
It’s enough for 60 F-22.
9 B-2 Stealth Bombers
2 aircraft supercarriers.
5 nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines.
=)
As… “interesting” a concept this sounds, I can’t see it happening for TPB if I’m honest…
Also, the comments on their website are beginning to approximate the ones found on YouTube… Not really a place for hearing the technical merits/pit-falls of such a system!
Naive. The drones don’t need to be physically blown up in order to be shut down. Jamming will do nicely.
I’m sure they’re not foolish enough to use a special or limited-permission band. I would be willing to bet jamming won’t be possible without blocking some other radio-based services for regular consumers.
The bigger issue would be airspace clearance. How many of these things would be sucked through jet engines before they begin just outlawing drones and screwing that permission up for the rest of us?
airspace upper bounds is 30KM, if they go higher than that (which if its low orbit they have to be) then they are not within anyone’s airspace.
Laser.
mirror
I want some of those radios, please.
This concept has been demonstrated by the NASA Pathfinder project; specifically the Pathfinder-Plus variant which tested the concept of an atmospheric satellite, or so Wikipedia informs me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder.
In any case this is ambitious and measures like this may be necessary if we are to have a Internet that is truly beholden to no one, for better or worse.
This makes me wonder if we’ll be talking about space elevators next week!
Some sort of weather balloon like thing would be better. In the day, it would float up to higher altitudes to get better solar exposure. In the night, it would sink to low altitudes and use battery to heat the balloon.
There is no possible way a quadrotor could be solar powered. Possibly a large, glider like aircraft.
Arrrg, as an actual pirate, of the seafairing variety; i couldnt help but wonder: wouldnt it be a lot cheaper to make like google and float your servers out in international waters on a big old rusty ship? They’re a lot cheaper then youd think and there actualy quite good on fuel when they’re standing still.
Wouldn’t all this be pointless when RIAA/MPAA shuts down the land based ISP the drones are connected to?
There will always be a network point where the “illegal” trafic has to go into the “public” network for the users. That point will always be the weakest link that RIAA/MPAA will target…
Was mentioned at foxnews.com, or was the drudge, yesterday.
Piracy or not, it would be a pretty cool hack.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No it’s a Raspberry Pi
Cool idea!
Put a few microSDs on there to act
as local storage. They don’t use
much power at all when reading, but
as they are incredibly lightweight
they would be a near ideal medium.
Has anyone thought of using light
to send/receive data? the latest
red VCSELs draw <1mA and modulate
at up to 10 GHz.
few, slightly pedantic, things:
radio waves are light and are commonly used for data transfer
fibre optics also use light…
Radio waves are light?
“Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation…”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_waves
From what I’ve read, radio waves consist of photons, so, yeah, they are, in a sense, light.
it would be cool if they made it look like a pirate ship
That. That would be one of the greatest things since nutella.
+1!
I suspect that, just like TPB buying Sealand, this is 90% a publicity stunt. The idea itself may not be impossible, but the primary motivator is just to get people talking.
The biggest issue I have with this idea is how they are supposed to let clients talk to the machines. Are all TPB users expected to buy the appropriate transceivers?
Great, now we have cyber-airship-software-pirates in real life. It’s a cool idea, but if this was fictional, I’d think the writer was about to jump the shark.
From a practical standpoint, the drones would have to be expendable-cheap for this to work. Depending on the political opinions of a ground-based observer with a gun, these things might look like perfect little targets: challenging, meaningful with the added thrill of shooting down “evil hacker pirate gliders” as the big news might describe them, and without the guilt of shooting down a live bird.
The real benefit of this project would be the development of more affordable unmanned drones. That’s the first thing I would download from them.
I agree this isnt too realistic for TPB but I do like they way they went to only magnet links. Means they are becoming more slimmer and easier to relocate if they get shut down. I remember reading that you can download the entire torrent library of TPB and its only a few gigs now.
Yarr pirates belong on ships in the sea and in the sky. Wave your freak flag wide and high
its a prank. It doesn’t matter where you put the servers, even if they managed to put it on the Moon they still need ground base receiver/transmitter with ground line connected to internet, which make whole hidden/unreachable servers senseless
yeah, they can always shutdown the ground station or just block the dns/ip that its using
only way to make it work is to piggy back on existing packet radio stuff that’s common and bridged into the web
Why don’t they extend the torrent clients to also act as Torrent search engine so every torrent client also hosts torrent names and their corresponding Seed IPs.
So if I would want to download Movie X, the “Movie X” string goes to every IP from which I’m downloading or uploading other stuff. These clients are further ditributing my search string. If the torrent_name-Seed_IP list of every connected client is big enough, the search only has to go down a few nodes, until it returns useful torrents. Piratebay currently has 4,2M torrents. So if every client hosts a random 4200 entry Torrentname-SeedIP list, I’d have to ask on average 1000 other clients until there’s a useful result.
Does not scale. Gnutella did it exactly this way, and the overhead generated from search queries was larger than the bandwidth most users could afford.
Again with Raspberry Pi hype crap?
Do you even know how much load a server serving something like the Pirate Bay as to withstand?
How much bandwidth do you need so the site loads in less than 1 day?
Sd Cards as storage, perfect, now add up some Tb of them….
Sometimes I think that people in HaD dont know anything about the internetz and how they work, its not a rainbow kitten puking internetz to you, its a bit more real world than that.
http://torrentfreak.com/download-a-copy-of-the-pirate-bay-its-only-90-mb-120209/
130 MB for 1,643,194 torrents that’s not bad. Having even 1 2GB SD card should be enough to have all the hashes of all the torrents on TPB
Umm, seriously? You don’t have to hate on it.
I think the intention is to have a LOT of these things and to load them less heavily . Assuming, of course, that this is not trolling or a joke or a stunt.
If they’re smart, it won’t just be one of these things serving the whole deal. It’ll be hundreds of them each serving a little bit to those nearest them, to reduce strain on the servers and increase resiliency of their system. Cloud storage, both figuratively and literally.
Have them communicate via the web to position themselves optimally for spacing between them and local TPB traffic patterns, so that if one stops responding (i.e. locks up or literally crashes) they can all reorient themselves to pick up the slack.
The only issue I can see with them is ground communication, but if you get enough people in every region to get a transceiver, even if one goes down all the planes can just reposition themselves to another nearby one. It’ll be especially fun if they license the tech to other high-traffic sites so it will be harder to just make it illegal to have a transceiver.
At this time, this conversation over at the pirate bay is just bench racing. Besides the ground station side of things may prove too much effort for the kiddies looking to get entertainment content for free.
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/21/london-thinktank-has-already-l.html
The ground station can be distributed as well. How many homes with wi-fi nowadays?
It would be not too far fetched if a great number of people could just be convinced to leave their wi-fi routers open, or with weak security settings…
Maybe even allowing some sort of back door into their rooters that one can always claim that is unintended! For plausible deniability of course…
“I didn’t knew anything about it, it might be due to a virus that infected me! :-O”
how many homes with HAM radio equipment that can be connected to internet ? wifi routers LOL
they should start transferring torrents by smoke signalling
I’m in. How do I find the plans to send over to ShapeWays?
In the source article they were discussing the fact they wont be hosting the entire traffic, just acting as a landing domain before ren-routing the users to as they put it ‘secret locations’ so really all the hosts on the drones would be doing is redirecting people to their now newly distributed content. That doesn’t really seem out of the bounds of what a few small computers could do.
As for communications? Just use GSM have them fly an orbital path around a new GSM tower every day. Keep them moving and incorperate sone way to change the sim/mac if they needed to. The disruption and inconvenience of shutting down a gsm mast to keep TPB off when the could just move wouldnc’t be feasible.
Altitude control using Peltier
module to freeze atmospheric water
onto a metal plate would work.
Also handy as a source of hydrogen
for keeping balloon inflated..
That’s brilliant! I had ideas about using Peltier-cooled condensers to get hydrogen for buoyancy, but I never thought of condensing/freezing atmospheric water as a means of altitude control!
Now make it look like the airship thing
on “Aeon Flux”… but with the
wifi/optical/etc nodes on the
strings..
Flexible solar cells which spin and
track the Sun would also be neat.
Personally I think TPB should use little drone Ship
I don’t quite get it, why use a fleet of flying web servers you have to maintain when they have 12 million users who would be willing to use a bit of bandwidth for the same purpose? Cheaper, more resilient, and has the ability to scale much better. I admit that searching would be difficult with this scenario, but that isn’t the point of the raspberrys anyway.
It is hard to find a drone that will not require landing to recharge or refuel.
There are technologies out there that allow amplification of the voltage. and NO i am not talking about inverters or transformers. Systems that actually turn for example 10V into 15V without loss of Amps!
There are also generators that are powered by magnet! If that is used then no other source of energy will be needed. Just search for “Permanent Magnetic Motor”
As a way of communication HAM frequencies can be used. No one is going to jamm all ham frequencies.
and as a receiver use another set of CB radios.
Very easy to make! and since signal will be going up with no obstacles no need for MEGAWATT amp 🙂
If some one willing to work on this project let me know. Not necessary for pirate bay but just the idea of making cheap enough drone and that can truly stay until motor fails 🙂
just search for Redion and my TV’s