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Comment by shadowmint | Hacker News Reader

obscure announcement is obscure.

basically seems like they've got a virtual setup now that lets them essentially deploy "the pirate bay" on anything that runs virtual machines.

Now if they had distributed user run VMs running this private server VPN they might have something to talk about, but is basically just a hosting change. Makes it easier for them to move around as hosting get wise and shuts them off (as it will inevitably do).

The real question is, are they doing something sneaky like having VMs running on known clouds using encrypted vpn traffic to hide the fact that those machines are pirate bay VMs, and relays to feed info in and out. ;) Just speculating...

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The description on torrentfreak says their archictecture is basically:

1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country.

2. Load balancer which is a disk-less server with all configuration in RAM that connects via encrypted VPN to two separate sets of VMs at two separate cloud providers in two different countries.

3. Said VMs using encrypted disk images, and set up to automatically shut down if they are out of contact with the load balancer for more than 8 hours, at which point a keyphrase would need to be entered to unlock the disk images.

I would assume they probably has more routers and load balancers in other locations ready in case they need to switch over.

They can keep this shell game up forever as long as the people operating it are able to get online - adding more layers if necessary.

> 1. Border router handling inbound traffic, connecting via encrypted VPN to their load balancer in a different country.

To reduce cost this "border router" is probably also running an in-memory cache such as memcached or varnish. So they simply re-created what SuprNova.org did in 2003.

9 years ago this was really novel. SuprNova was the first to introduce a load balancer for both HTML and .torrent hosting.

If SuprNova did this 9 years ago it makes me wonder what went wrong there what couldn't go wrong with the PirateBay today?

According the Wikipedia, Suprnova shutdown due to legal threats, but never was taken to court. Basically, they just caved to the pressure. On the other hand, ThePirateBay has survived police raids and criminal proceedings.

Aside from that, it doesn't sound like SuprNova's setup was quite as intricate as this. I think that the post above was suggesting that the "caching border router + encrypted VPN" setup was what SuprNova used, but that's not everything that ThePirateBay seems to be using. Also, ThePirateBay only has to host magnet links, which didn't exist (IIRC) back when SuprNova was active. SuprNova had to host all of the .torrent files.

Indeed, Suprnova shutdown due to legal proceedings. Real jailtime is now coming to Piratebay founders, they are even on record as begging for reduced jailtime, after the verdict.

It's simple: the exist node in both Tor and Piratebay has all the legal exposure. That server/caching router/proxy could become impossible to host anywhere. Move it to USA? Expect 1 hour of uptime:-) Russia? Expect 10seconds page load times.

Any experience hosting people out there? Are Sweden and The Netherlands the only few-questions-asked options on town?

It's surprising that they only went with 2 cloud providers. I would assume they probably have other dormant VM's set up just waiting to be activated.

Looks like the answer is yes.

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