Colocation Provider PRQ Raided; Wikileaks and Many Torrent Sites Offline 138
An anonymous reader writes with some chilling news about PRQ, the infamous colo founded by two Pirate Bay founders. From the article: "Stockholm police raided the free-speech focused firm (PRQ) Monday and took four of its servers, the company's owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24. While a number of bittorrent-based filesharing sites including PRQ's most notorious client, the Pirate Bay, have been down for most of Monday as well as PRQ's own website, Viborg told the Swedish news site that the site outages were the result of a technical issue, rather than the police's seizure of servers."
Torrentfreak is reporting that the Pirate Bay isn't using PRQ for anything important (if at all), and that their downtime is due to a faulty PDU that happened to fail as a coincidence.
Re:Free speech under attack. (Score:4, Insightful)
Spot on, and seeing this happen in a place like Sweden makes it even more disturbing. We are in regression, or devolution. Don't know which is more correct, but it's not good. It can only result in a new, very dark age. The desire for freedom is seen as a sign of lunacy to many.
Re:same country that wants Assange just raided.... (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:Free speech under attack. (Score:5, Insightful)
What I want to know is why sites like this keep trying to locate in unfriendly countries. Why not put them in someplace safe, like Russia? Is the bandwidth there a big problem or something?
And yes I know, Russia isn't exactly a big fan of free speech either, but they don't give two shits about IP laws and certainly not about protecting American IP. If you put something on your servers that criticizes Putin, sure you'll get shut down. But if you put up tons of pirated American media for people to download (let alone simply torrents), they're not going to care, instead they'd welcome the business.
Re:same country that wants Assange just raided.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is part of the reason it is hard to take the whole "Assange is a persecuted martyr" seriously: his supporters never seem to know all the facts, they simply react. Knee-jerk reactions do not help, and make your entire position look bad.
Dude, you are smoking the cheap $3 Propaganda brand crack. Assange isn't a persecuted martyr because he's still breathing. He is being persecuted, however. The fact that he's a political figure simply can't be ignored or dismissed. You may agree or disagree with the charges. You may think he's an asshole, or the greatest thing since sliced bread. And we can argue the minutae of it until the heat death of the universe, but it's pointless. You and I are just random people on the internet. An embassy, a sovereign foreign government responsible for millions of lives, has come out and said "Something smells fishy about this." These aren't the kind of people to make rash decisions. You and I may not have all the facts. His supporters may or may not. But the embassy officials that put their country's pride and reputation on the line do have them. It would be reckless of them to have offered him asylum if they didn't feel there was firm ground to stand on. Remember -- The British government was inches away from wiping their arse with the Geneva conventions and storming the place, creating a massive international diplomatic incident... the kind of incident wars have been started over in years past.
The statement he isn't being persecuted is readily refuted by the simple observation that diplomats aren't irrational. It's a job requirement that they consider carefully the consequences of each action, and even in a small country there's going to be a vetting process to ensure that their interests are represented by someone who isn't nuts. Bottom line is he is being persecuted; You can agree or disagree with it, but you can't outright deny it. The evidence simply can't support your position.
All that said, let me step away from intellectual discourse now and say I think the man was a fucking moron. Who in their right mind moons the government with the largest standing military and biggest economy by GDP on the planet? I could give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut about whatever charges they're bringing him up on, or the diplomatic incidents he's created -- the dumb bastard's gonna have his ass battered and deep fried at the end of this, one way or another. Maybe what he did was right, maybe it wasn't, but goddamnit man... if you're gonna shine the biggest badass in the room, at least be a man and take your lumps right then and there, not run off and hide under someone's skirt after.
*cough* We now return you to your regularly scheduled flame fest, already in progress...
Re:Free speech under attack. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think we have ever been really free, at least in a modern sense.
I suspect the early Picts, Vikings and other tribes had significantly more freedom than we have today.
We live in a pervasive information society, one where the government is the biggest customer and companies are all too happy to sell our data to it.
Our grandchildren will piss on our graves for what we have allowed.