Was the North Korea Hoax the Best the Pirate Bay Can Do?

The Pirate Bay turned heads on Monday when it announced the latest safe haven for its file-sharing servers: North Korea. "But that doesn't make any sense!" said everybody. "North Korea is home to the world's worst Internet and most despotic regime." That's all correct. It doesn't make any sense, because it was a fake.

When in doubt, listen to the computer nerds. Even though the Pirate Bay did a good job engineering the hoax — their announcement blog post sounds basically believeable and its IP address were routed through Pyongyang — pretty much everybody suspected it was in fact a hoax. Then, on Tuesday morning, at least one programmer followed the Swedish organization's digital footprints and determined that, yes indeed, this North Korea-Pirate Bay marriage is nothing but a prank. The organization came clean on Facebook a few hours later.

The first suspicious signs that the Pirate Bay didn't really move to North Korea become obvious the second or third time you read the announcement. "Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network," says the post authored by Kim Jong-Bay (not a real person). "This is truly an ironic situation." The announcement goes on to detail how American companies are "bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew."

Well, that sounds sort of absurd. By the time the post's fake author starts talking about letting North Korean people use its service, the absurdity reaches new heights. It's really unbelievable, yet one can't help but second-guess the news. More absurd things have happened. Remember that time Dennis Rodman went to North Korea with a VICE correspondent?

And the Pirate Bay is in need of a new permanent home. The organization's servers were recently pushed out of Sweden, where they'd lived for years. And so, the Pirate Bay set up shop in Norway and Catalonia, Spain, though it's remains unclear if local governments will tolerate the operation.

The handy thing about computers and the Internet is that a geek with the right skills can pretty much trace anyone's every move. Peering deep into the source code, the savviest hackers will also be able to tell if a website is actually hosted in an unlikely place — Pyongyang for instance — and that's exactly what the hivemind at Hacker News did in the hours after the announcement.

Suffice it to say the technical details involved in d0xing the Pirate Bay prank are technical, very technical. As early critics pointed out, the website's new IP address was based in Pyongyang. However, upon closer inspection it became apparent that the Pirate Bay had hijacked some IP addresses around the world and the main IP address was actually based in Germany. In one hacker's words: "They are faking/spoofing the ICMP responses. They are also prepending their route advertisement with corresponding AS paths to further disguise it." In other words, the Pirate Bay tricked the Internet into telling you that it was hanging out in North Korea, when it really wasn't.

Like I said earlier, the organization came clean. "We hope that yesterdays little hack proved that we know the internet better than our enemies," the organization said on Facebook. "Since about 40% of the entire internets traffic consists of torrents enabled by us, you can almost say that we ARE the internets." We should've known.  It was only five years ago that the Pirate Bay pulled the exact same stunt as an April Fool's Day prank on the Internet. The only thing that's different now is that North Korea is arguably much more volatile and dangerous with a 30-year-old leader and an itch to blow up nuclear weapons. So if people were confused about the Pirate Bay's little prank at first, they're understandably a little bit irked about it afterwards. At least this blogger is.

The Pirate Bay doesn't give a shit if you think its jokes are funny, though. This is basically a warning shot aimed at whomever wants to try and shut it down next. That Facebook post concludes, "Fuck with the internets and we'll ridicule you (points at MAFIAA with a retractable baton) until you beg for mercy."