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Piracy

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.
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Colocation Provider PRQ Raided; Wikileaks and Many Torrent Sites Offline

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  • by davydagger ( 2566757 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @05:58PM (#41519397)
    Same Country that wants assange on funny smelling charges of "rape", just raided his server room.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:02PM (#41519437)

      Same Country that wants assange on funny smelling charges of "rape", just raided his server room.

      Sorry but that is untrue.
      PRQ hosted wikileaks back in 2010.

      What did get removed was a number of torrentsites.

    • by Baloroth ( 2370816 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:39PM (#41519811)

      Same Country that wants assange on funny smelling charges of "rape", just raided his server room.

      Obviously not, given that Wikileaks is still up, and never went down according to the story. What are down are a couple of torrent sites. The only known relation to Wikileaks or TPB is the fact that this host has served both. Why was it mentioned in the headline, you may ask? Clickbait, so that people who were following those causes would read it, even though it was almost 100% completely unrelated in every possible way.

      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. So, if you really want to help Assange and think he and his cause are worth helping, stop it, and read the damned articles. Or don't, since, you know, clickbait.

      Oh and wait for some actual information to come out, since at this point no one knows anything at all, especially given the number of technical issues (unrelated, I might add) PRQ seems to be having/have had.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        TFA also mention about two thousand clients including ones with names such as "North America Man-Boy Love Association" and "Pedophile.se" so yeah.. Doubt TPB was the target, as if this would keep them down, I didn't thought they was in Sweden longer ATM but maybe they are to. Wikileaks would make somewhat more sense but I would had assumed they have already done some damage control regarding Assange if anything serious was stored for non-public view. But what do I know.

        (They mention more sites to like "Chec

      • by girlintraining ( 1395911 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @10:43PM (#41521525)

        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...

        • An embassy, a sovereign foreign government responsible for millions of lives, has come out and said "Something smells fishy about this."

          You sure you really wanna go with the appeal to authority there?

          "It's a government, you guys - they wouldn't just make things like this up! Oh and by the way, let me tell you about all the horrendous, terrifying, awful, illegal things that the US, UK, and Swedish governments are doing. Because if there's one thing everybody can agree on, governments are corrupt - except f

  • North American Marlin Brandon Look-Alikes to take such a risk be being hosted on the same servers as wikileaks. (I mean, I assume this isn't the other NAMBLA else I would like someone to explain to me why these servers weren't raided years ago.)
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Maybe because file sharing isn't illegal?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Seems like they only confiscated 4 servers this time, and not everything which wasn't bolted to the floor. Quick! someone tell the cops they got intellectuals among them!

    • were they diskless servers that booted on PXE over 10ge fibre?

      The 10ge NAS servers could very easily be burried under 20 feet of dirt and cased in concrete, (bitch to update), but very secure. As long as power+10ge+ventilation work.

  • by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:07PM (#41519473) Homepage Journal
    how this happen in a freedom-loving liberal socialist paradise such as Sweden? I thought only evil USA does stuff like this.
  • if the torrents were visible and easy to spy on, Our Governments In Action could just pick off the alleged violators.

    results might be the same, but hey, the semantics are cleaner.

    • It's a matter of efficiency. Suing even one percent of the general pirate population would not only be very expensive, but earn the ire of government as courts are clogged up for years with the flood of cases. So there are only two counters through the legal process: Either target the most important (Site operators, releasers) and hope that without them the community will fall apart, or lobby for a faster, easier way to take action against the common torrent user ('three strikes' laws and similar) which byp
  • by Nethead ( 1563 ) <joe@nethead.com> on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:26PM (#41519673) Homepage Journal

    ..their downtime is due to a faulty PDU that happened to fail..

    So, anyone got a spare powerstrip?

  • by poity ( 465672 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @06:32PM (#41519739)

    http://wikileaks.org/ [wikileaks.org]
    and even if the main site is taken down the mirrors will chug along.

  • by sgt_doom ( 655561 ) on Monday October 01, 2012 @07:01PM (#41520017)
    .....
    http://www.thelocal.se/43552/20121001/ [thelocal.se]

    Recommend Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets brilliant on cypherpunks, WikiLeaks,and privacy for the Web.
    And please don't forget...

    http://www.nnn.se/nordic/assange/suspicious.pdf [www.nnn.se]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    TPB's route has been down for quite some time now. Their router is no longer advertising their entire IP block to the internet. Try it, traceroute to thepiratebay.se, it will stop at the edge of your network.

    This is indicative of something *seriously* wrong. Normally, routers are supplied with multiply redundant power and sometimes even a live hot-spare.

    I think the timing isn't a coincidence ant TPB is lying through their teeth to prevent their users from getting nervous. Can anyone prove me wrong?

  • by Anonymous Coward

    There are no coincidences.

  • Loved that site. Don't care for filelockers, but it had nice summaries of what was released. Now i guess i have to find another site like that.

    I didn't realize wikileaks was taken down in that, figures.

    • I would recommend http://www.scnsrc.net/ [scnsrc.net] - Started and initially powered by disgruntled mods from rlslog.net. Same content, much less ads and better download links - like working torrent links (rlslog always uses their own torrent tracker/portal and the announced release almost always fails to be available).

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