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People are asking for more pirate bay stories. Sure. I have a few... Thousands.
Do you know that tpb once hijacked North Koreas Internet? https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-moves-to-north-korea-gets-virtual-asylum-130304/
Do you know that tpb once hijacked North Koreas Internet? https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-moves-to-north-korea-gets-virtual-asylum-130304/
Someone managed to find a broken router setup which managed to make it possible to pretend to be north Korea, in a more central routing location than actual north Korea. To make it look real even the traffic was slowed down to look like a satellite connection.
Took days before people figured it out. It was quite fun, unfortunately it meant that people in North Korea had issues getting online. But I think their sacrifice was worth the lulz.
Tpb also did one of the first (maybe the first) crowd funding campaign. What did we try to finance? New servers? No, we tried buying a country called Sealand. I remember I was laughing when the Prince of Sealand got invited to Larry King because of it. https://www.wired.com/2007/01/the-pirate-bay-2/
On a side note, a weird American dude contacted me when this happened, he liked that we had weird ideas and wanted our help to build Internet in a corrupt African nation, which he had traded guns for a lot of rights.. Like owned their infrastructure. Forward thinking dude.
There was a company that placed fake movies on tpb for movie companies and sued people downloading, taking their IP. We managed (can't disclose how) to get copies on all their emails. Including which ip numbers they used so we could block them.
Once I called them up, explaining the ironic part that he based his business of breaking our terms, which is illegal. During the call their secretary sent out an email someone had a bday in the office and there was cake. I ended the call saying "don't forget to get some cake!"
A few weeks later someone leaked some of their internal stuff, including a phone call between them and the district attorney of NYC, where they bragged about their security skills...
Some of the core people from that hack later moved on to form another more anonymous hacking group.
The documentary tpb afk got crowdfunding, of course getting promoted on tpb. The front page linked to kickstarter. Kickstarter stopped working, it was like a ddos attack. Early days of crowdfunding!
A lot of people ask if I'm still in touch with Gottfrid or Fredrik from tpb. Well, we never really could get along. We have extremely different political views, and it has polarised more over the years. Gottfrid said it best, we should not be in the same room together.
The way tpb worked was because we only agreed on a few basics: a free Internet, not controlled by corporations. We enjoyed high tech with low/no budget (brings out the best in technologists). But mostly we just enjoyed telling privileged people to fuck off.
The name of the documentary, tpb afk, is from a quote from one of our court cases. I got annoyed at the prosecutor for using the term IRL, "In real life", I told him we use the term AFK, "away from keyboard". Because the Internet is for real.
In the end I left tpb because I spent 8hours per day on it, and also had a full time job, and wanted to work on other projects without the other guys.
Since I left I'm less of a fan, It's not political anymore, but honesty one thing annoys me more. We decided early on that we would close down on the tenth birthday no matter what. Things need to burn to give space for new things. They didn't. Oh and the porn ads, jeez.
Oh we never built that African Internet. But we did build satellite Internet later. But I'll keep that story. For now.
There's also the story about when I ran for the EU parlament. I was on the interpol wanted list and my campaign was: vote for me so I get diplomatic immunity. I released a weird campaign video. It's here. I understand if you unfollow (I had a 40C fever).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=187&list=FLkYIC6sy_dC7ab8Y0_GT-wg&v=fModmx3U8HI
https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=187&list=FLkYIC6sy_dC7ab8Y0_GT-wg&v=fModmx3U8HI
So, Stefan wanted the polar bear story (I presume). Every now and then when we got legal threats we replied with a picture of a polar bear. If asked why, we explained it was a real threat to us, roaming our streets. Copyright isn't important compared. https://twitter.com/hageast/status/1349845386366746625?s=19
