Talk about bulletproof - The Pirate Bay

Torrent site The Pirate Bay has gone through quite the overhaul. From TorrentFreak:

Pirate Bay Moves to The Cloud, Becomes Raid-Proof
The Pirate Bay has made an important change to its infrastructure. The world�s most famous BitTorrent site has switched its entire operation to the cloud. From now on The Pirate Bay will serve its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world. The move will cut costs, ensure better uptime, and make the site virtually invulnerable to police raids � all while keeping user data secure.

The Pirate Bay is loved by millions of file-sharers but is also a thorn in the side of the entertainment industries.

The latter group continues to push authorities to take action against the site. The Pirate Bay was raided back in 2006 and there are rumors that the police might try again in the near future.

And a bit more:

The Pirate Bay is currently hosted at cloud hosting companies in two countries where they run several Virtual Machine (VM) instances.

And more:

The load balancer and transit-routers are still owned and operated by The Pirate Bay, which allows the site to hide the location of the cloud provider. It also helps to secure the privacy of the site�s users.

The hosting providers have no idea that they�re hosting The Pirate Bay, and even in the event they found out it would be impossible for them to gather data on the users.

�All communication with users goes through TPB�s load balancer, which is a disk-less server with all the configuration in RAM. The load balancer is not in the same country as the transit-router or the cloud servers,� The Pirate Bay told us.

�The communication between the load balancer and the virtual servers is encrypted. So even if a cloud provider found out they�re running TPB, they can�t look at the content of user traffic or user�s IP-addresses.�

In addition The Pirate Bay now believes it�s more raid proof.

The worst case scenario is that The Pirate Bay loses both its transit router and its load balancer. All the important data is backed up externally on VMs that can be re-installed at cloud hosting providers anywhere in the world.

�If the police decide to raid us again there are no servers to take, just a transit router. If they follow the trail to the next country and find the load balancer, there is just a disk-less server there. In case they find out where the cloud provider is, all they can get are encrypted disk-images,� The Pirate Bay says.

�They have to be quick about it too, if the servers have been out of communication with the load balancer for 8 hours they automatically shut down. When the servers are booted up, access is only granted to those who have the encryption password,� they add.

Heh -- I love it. After all, the TCP/IP protocol was written at its heart to be able to survive damage to the network and route around downed nodes. This will be fun to see them try to take it down.