The Pirate Bay logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I assume most people on the internet know who the pirate bay are. For those of you who do not know they are a small group of dedicated computer geeks who provide a search service for people to find and download torrent files. Apparently a lot of those files are pirated versions of movies, software, songs etc, but also torrents are used for things like dvd install disks for different open source software and operating systems.
Any way the pirate bay are forever getting pushed off the net by governments who have their domain delisted and other underhanded tricks. But with the use of small computers, Linux and lightweight packaging, radio transmitters and the like the pirate bay are at least talking about making flying pirate drones to make getting to their servers harder and thus more secure. I am not sure of the ability of these guys to make such drones that can stay up there for very long but I am sure that they thin they can do it or at least they want to make people think they have done/can do it.
A lot of people think that if they let people use their software for free they won’t be able to make a living or rather they won’t be able to get rich. Other people think that all information and software should be free. There are now Pirate political parties, which have elected members to parliaments and even the EU, a Pirate church and movements starting all over the world. The pirate movement (not to be confused with Somali Pirates) is growing and will become a player on the world stage.
Pirating software is huge. It is estimated that up to 40% of Windows users are using a counterfeit copy which is just sad since there is Linux available free (go penguin!) And pirating software has been part of computer culture since before there was a personal computer, but it’s no where near the problem software patents are, but that’s another post.
I guess what I want to know is what does everyone think of that?
Borg or No (S31) 