Everyone’s favorite longtime piracy headquarters, The Pirate Bay, has reportedly moved from its Swedish hosts to somewhere quite unexpected: North Korea. On Monday, the site updated its longtime pirate-ship logo with the North Korean flag, and released a press release via its blog claiming that it had been “invited by the leader of the republic [sic] of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.” (From the rest of the press release, it’s clear they meant the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, not South Korea).
But has The Pirate Bay really moved to North Korea? North Korea Tech doesn’t think so, pointing out that North Korea doesn’t have a bandwidth to really host a site with the kind of massive traffic The Pirate Bay gets on a daily basis. But the blog confirmed that connections to the site do seem to be being filtered through a North Korean computer, and hypothesized: “It’s possible, perhaps probable, that a hack is being used to route traffic through a North Korean computer.”
It’s not clear whether this is a new technique designed in some way to help the site avoid the increasing pressure it has been facing from European authorities or just a joke. The press release certainly reads like satire, and The Pirate Bay is certainly not above making politically-motivated jokes: last year, it announced that it would be placing its servers on flying drones. But with connections to the site appearing to actually flow through North Korea, could this be something more than a joke? Perhaps. We’ll have our eyes on this one.
(via North Korea Tech)
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