pirates – foto by Smith
Two remnants from Jan 1, 2011. (hmmmmm, the year’s only three days old and I’m already blogging leftovers).
1 – A poem-ette I wrote about wife:
January 1, 2011
1-1-11 ~ Lady + me = us
One plus one equal one one
2 – Pirates:
Went to thepiratesbay.org (a mostly illegal Swedish file sharing site) to see what was up, but instead of their usual pirate ship logo, there was a notice from the U.S. Government saying they had seized the site for crimes against American commerce (see print screen above).
My first thought was of course — the U.S. invades and/or bombs whatever sovereign countries it feels like whenever it wants to, so naturally they’d have no qualms about illegally seizing a Swedish website. It made me smile — our pirate nation seizing Sweden’s pirate website. Aye, me mateys.
But today I went back to check and found the seizure notice gone and the original pirate ship back and it appeares the normal website came up. But as I checked around it seemed greatly diminished in its offerings.
So now I’m wondering — is it the real site, or is it actually our government pretending to be Swedish pirates in order to collect the names of downloaders?
As far as that goes, was the USA seizure notice real, or fake? I searched the web and found no news mention of a US seizure (which I think I would have were it real and legal) and learned the site was down most of Christmas week with the general populace believing it’s because of a dedicated denial of service (DDoS) attack by either the US government or US Corporations.
I did find this at nsaneforums.com: “In the final days of last month, US authorities targeted several sites they claimed were connected to the streaming of movies and TV shows {which} culminated in the apparent shutting down of 9 sites – TVShack.net, Movies-Links.TV, FilesPump.com, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org, ZML.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net – although not in the conventional manner. Rather than rounding the operators up physically or threatening them with ruinous legal action, the US Government seized at least 7 of the domains instead, and pointed them to their own server which carried an ominous warning.”
Sounds like what I saw. Also last month, Italy shut down an Italian offshoot of PiratesBay inside the country and blocked all access to any PirateBays outside the country.
I believe the cyber wars have begun. But who knows, I mean besides The Shadow?
I know I ain’t downloading nuthin’.
expires – foto by Smith