A little less than 24 hours after it first claimed to have set up shop in North Korea, The Pirate Bay website has confirmed what most observers suspected: it was all a hoax.
Writing of the announcement and user reaction to its earlier claim, the site said it was a “stunt.” It even chastised some users for expressing support of the supposed move to the DPRK.
“We’ve also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to fuck off. Always stay critical.”
The Pirate Bay is one of the largest and longest running Bit Torrent tracker sites. Bit Torrent is a system for distributed sharing of files and can be used for any type of data, although is mostly used for illicit distribution of copyrighted content such as movies, music and computer games.
In addition to the latest announcement, posted on the group’s Facebook page and reproduced below, there was also a doctored picture showing two people sitting at computers surrounded by a group of laughing North Korean military generals. The picture was doctored to make the two users Kom Jong Un and Peter Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay (image, below).
Today, we’ve all learned something.
We hope that yesterdays little hack proved that we know the internet better than our enemies. Since about 40% of the entire internets traffic consists of torrents enabled by us, you can almost say that we ARE the internets. Fuck with the internets and we’ll ridicule you (points at MAFIAA with a retractable baton) until you beg for mercy.
We’ve hopefully made clear (once again) that we don’t run TPB to make money. A profit hungry idiot (points at MAFIAA with a retractable baton) doesn’t tell the world that they have partnered with the most hated dictatorship in the world. We can play that stunt though, cause we’re still only in it for the fuckin lulz and it doesn’t matter to us if thousands of users disband the ship.
We’ve also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to fuck off. Always stay critical. Towards everyone!
10 years and still running.
We are Schrödingers site and it’s up to us whether we want to stay alive or not, or both.//Winona, Winnie and Winston Bay
The servers would have required their own power supplies OR the North Koreans would have had to make an agreement with China to run power across the border, or something.
It was a great joke.
The announcement was ridiculous and unbelievable for many reasons, but the actual logistics were probably OK. It’s a safe assumption that – albeit probably rudimentary – Pyongyang does have something resembling a proper data centre(s). All of North Korea’s other web servers seem to stay online just fine.