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But Wikileaks weathers the storm
By Lawrence Latif
Tue Sep 07 2010, 15:17
POLICE RAIDS across Europe have managed to take down popular Bit-torrent
tracking website The Pirate Bay.
The website, which is hosted by the same firm that houses servers for
Wikileaks, was hit hard by the authorities as they moved in on alleged
filesharers armed with nothing more than IP addresses. According to
Torrentfreak, police in 14 countries throughout Europe were involved, including
the United Kingdom.
Talking to the web hosting site PRQ, the firm that provides hosting services to
The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks, it said that five coppers tipped up asking for
the persons using certain IP addresses. The chap from PRQ admitted to handing
over email addresses but added "it is rare that our clients have email
addresses that are traceable".
At the time of writing The Pirate Bay's website is down, though as its tracker
operates on a distributed hash table (DHT), the outage will merely serve to
stop the acquisition of torrent files and not cease actual file sharing itself.
Torrentfreak also got word from a Swedish prosecutor that the raid had nothing
to do with Wikileaks. While The Pirate Bay's website is down, Wikileaks is
still operational, suggesting that for once it isn't the centre of attention
for law enforcement authorities. It is being reported that the police seized a
number of servers during the raids.
Given the noise The Pirate Bay made about the resilience of its hosting, one
wonders how long it will take before the resourceful lads get it back on its
feet.
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Posted: 2010683@834.65
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stranger
poof!: prostitution will disappear
close down pirate bay... poof!: piracy disappears
right, right?
regardless of your stand on media piracy or prostitution, simply from a law
enforcement point of view that assumes these "vices" are simply something
illegal to be fought: i don't understand why you want to shut the hubs down
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or
prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue,
and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish
in a barrel: just respond to what's there. but without craigslist or the pirate
bay, these "problems" are harder to catch and monitor
its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground
again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like
piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability. its not like
murder or rape, where the illegality of the actions are obvious and therefore
the mandate and willpower to punish perps is 100%. instead, with stuff like
prostitution and piracy, the willpower wanes, the commitment lapses, because
the immorality of the actions is not clearcut
such that the law enforcement campaigns consist less of going after
perpetrators, but just making them go underground and disappear from prominent
view
my use of the word "pirate" is with full knowledge of the discrepancy you refer
to
we are after all talking about the PIRATE bay. we both know the guys who run
that site know full well that the traditional meaning of piracy is a poor
descriptor of what copyright infringement is, but they wear the epithet
"pirate" with pride on the name of their site. when someone smears and insults
you, a good tactic is to take that insult or epithet, and use it yourself with
pride as a descriptor. therefore nullifying the supposed power of the negative
word. a negative becomes a positive. so i proudly call myself a pirate, when i
know the sharing media is nothing like swashbucklers and theft. in this way,
words are always constantly shifting in meaning and implication in popular
culture, and this eventually filters down to dictionary terminology years later
the same can be found in the gay rights movement: "queer" is now a word of
pride. or even right here on slashdot: "nerd" and "geek" are words which were
meant as insults but are now marks of honor. there are many sociological and
political arenas where insults menat to smear, scapegoat, and prejudice are
turned around and used as marks of pride
for example, lately i am trying to proudly refer to myself as a socialist, here
in the usa. socialism in europe is just obvious common sense. but in the usa it
takes on mythic ridiculous proportions of evil, by people who barely understand
the concept (ever hear of library? a highway system? social security?
hellooooo?). such that using the word, as a mark of pride and a
self-descriptor, is almost revolutionary and controversial, here in the usa at
least, when of course, according to a strict interpretation of the meaning of
the word, its completely humdrum