The Pirate Bay's 'Move' To Korea Was a Prank

judgecorp writes "The Pirate Bay's announcement that it was moving to North Korea was a prank, making fun of gullible readers. Admitting the hoax, the site said 'You can't seriously cheer the 'fact' that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to f*** off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!'" The essence of a good troll: so absurd it could just be true.

Re:North Korea

[Sperbels]

I always wondered why Polish jokes exist too. Looks like Wikipedia has a pretty good write up on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_joke [wikipedia.org]

Not just a simple prank

[futhermocker]

because they applied some BGP trickery to have the IP resolve in NK
https://rdns.im/the-pirate-bay-north-korean-hosting-no-its-fake [rdns.im]

Re:North Korea

[CrimsonAvenger]

I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII. Hitler famously staged a fake cavalry attack to justify invading Poland. I think that image of Polish cavalry charging across the border with their swords raised toward's Hitler's tanks has resonated through the ages.

Of course, the truth was that that never happened. Polish cavalry were dragoons (that mans they rode horses to battle, then got down off the nags and fought like innfantry), just like every other cavalry force still extent then (USSR used them, for example).

It should also be noted that there were more horses in use by the Wehrmacht than the Poles. 90+% of German "prime movers" were draft horses, not trucks/tractors.

Re:North Korea

[SeaFox]

The real joke is that many of the site users apparently cheered the "move". Apparently forced labor concentration camps, widespread torture, arbitrary arrest and murder of citizens by the government, collective punishment for entire families and villages, complete absence of freedom of speech, no independent media, death penalty listening to foreign radio are bad, but not as bad as IP laws that prevent you from downloading stuff you want for free.

Red herring much?
Cheering a move to NK doesn't imply cheering human rights abuses.

The cheering was for no other reason that the Pirate Bay was moving to a country that would not give a rat's ass what the U.S. or EU thought about copyright law and file sharing, nothing more. It is possible to hold mutually exclusive opinions on these two topics last time I checked.