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by drpfenderson 4203 days ago
So....what happened to the "raid-proof" server array they were talking about in September? (https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-runs-on-21-raid-proo...)
4 comments

I'm imagining a Daemon (as in the Daniel Suarez book) like system that gets paid by web advertising companies in Bitcoin, and automatically spawns it's servers on cloud providers who accept payment in Bitcoin. One or more hot backups on a single VM would silently wait for the live system to go down, then respawn itself and switch over the DNS. Namecoin could be used in place of, or augmenting, traditional domain names.

The only really tricky bit is "raid-proofing" secrets (Bitcoin/Namecoin private keys, DNS credentials), but Amazon and presumably other cloud providers are starting to offer HSMs. Or perhaps some combination of Shamir's Secret Sharing and multisig wallets + voting pools.

You might be interested in Charles Stross's "Accelerando", where he posits a similar system of python scripts acting as decentralized companies, constantly shuffling ownership of themselves among themselves.

It's been too long since I've read it, so I forget what the actual point was.

Ironically enough, sub-second music IP rights swap between the shell corps, so as to dodge any lawsuits getting anything out of them.

Worked great too, unless you discount the whole "convert the earth into computronium" in later chapters implying it's origin from the same subsystems.

I think you will find this interesting then: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agents
Despite the headline, what that article describes isn't "raid proof." Instead it describes a system that can be recreated at a new hosting provider even if the current accounts are terminated or hardware confiscated. A disaster recovery plan.
The same thing that happened to the low orbit server drones (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/pirate-bay-plans-...). They make such statements because they enjoy the media talking about them.
The site's still up, just has a different URL.

https://thepiratebay.cr/

Slow, 500 errors everywhere, and doesn't seem to have the blog. Are we sure this mirror is legit?
Not a mirror, a proxy. It doesn't work when the main site is down.