We all love the Pirate bay, and recently is was taken down, but it lives on in a new and exciting form!
The Kiosk of Piracy!
Very similar to a mandel bot in a way, the Kiosk of Piracy is a decentrally hosted Copy of the Popular torrent tracker PirateBay.org the Kiosk is a huge and growing depository or as they call it SeedBox of the Pirate Bay's .torrent files; all available to the public, but the catch, it's only available offline. public but offline? how? well it seems they've strapped a Wifi Unit to the thing and are broadcasting locally for anyone to check out, it can be accesseed by visiting http://www.kioskofpiracy.org/ when in range, otherwise this address leads you to their main webpage.
They are encouraging people to run their own Kiosk of Piracy by following these instructions. they are currently hoping for someone to help them produce a Kiosk of Piracy Software, in the form of a Linux Live CD to turn any appropriate hardware into a Kiosk of Piracy. if you're a Crazy Dev, you should help these guys out.
so that's the idea, the sum-whole of the Pirate bay, available on a disk to put on anything.. a real mandel bot more or less. wow... I cannot accurately describe the hugeness of this.
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Brazil
Canada
Czech Republic
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Ireland
Italy
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Serbia
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
United Kingdom
So have decided to abandon
So have decided to abandon our quest of changing the law, and are now encouraging breaking the law? While the technology is cool, the goal of this particular unit is not exactly in line with the stated goals of the Pirate Party
hence
this has nothing to do with our quest, it just seemed like something neat to report about. obviously, you miss the point. it's an example of decentralized hosting and sharing of data that isn't part of the internet. it's current form and use are, nothing super exciting, but future mutations of this could be interesting.if you read up on the relevent context, it might appeal to you more.
No
As it is being used in this example it is violating current laws. It IS, on the other hand, an interesting thing that is happening in the world. As an innovative use of space maybe it has value with other use: see comment below.
You can talk about a torrent tracker, and even discuss news of a torrent tracker, and not be stating your support of running an illegal torrent tracker.
I don't get it.
Also: Looks like thekid read a fiction story and found a real world example of it, probably after a bit of research. Should we give him a demerit for posting it?
Oh please.
Obstensibly, it seems like a neat way to make distributed backups of a (single) site.
The reason that the kiosk in question is not connected to an extranet is so that they're indemnified, even from other activities.
However, the site in question is for shady means - to assist in the facilitation of copyright infringement. Yes, it's "cool", but also very teenage, like obtaining a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook. Good for a nostalgic memory, but that's all. Besides, who would ideally want to replicate such a piss-poor site? It's got little to no design value or appeal, the implementation is ugly and patched together, and to top it all off: you need a lot of expensive hardware to pull off even trying to get a copy off the ground.
Arguably, however, the creators want to purport that it is simply the "hydra" in action. It's one form of decentralized dissemination, sure. But it is not what the original definition of what was called the hydra: a VPN for their tracker software (which ultimately failed regardless).
TL;DR: Stupid project for a stupid site.
for now, yes
for now it is nothing more than a "piss-poor" single site being hosted on expensive ugly patched together hardware, but it's nothing more than an EXAMPLE of future things to come, imagine, instead of the Pirate bay, it held a backup of wikipedia or maybe a backup of Archive.org or something. or if we all had one like a mandrel bot and shared things with eachother. also I have faith that if it's made with linux, it'll work on anything. the cool thing is, now we have something real to point to and say "hey look a shitty pre 1.0 mandrel bot" wooo. in the future please make comments that Produce new thoughts and not just critique the hell out of things.
On a basic level
It's at least taking something online and making it useful in a localized area.
Like a less pointless version of the printed Wikipedia. The idea could be used with, I don't know, Google Maps or something. Or at least the non-owned-by-a-corporation version of Google Maps. Once it exists.
Genius!
a Creative Commons version of Google Maps would be Awesome!
or it could be
A great little thing to put in a local records store to distro local creative commons media.
OR SOMETHING ELSE
Neighborhood Backups?
Could be that spaces like this could be used by a neighborhood to create backup images for computers?
Could be spaces like this could house backups of neighborhood watch video feeds?
Could be spaces like this could house the neighborhood usenet / bulliten board?
Could be spaces like these could be where local artists upload their completed works for local distribution?
ESPECIALLY if we end up in a world with internet bandwith limits, tiered services, etc....
Dunno, it's still neat. People are awfully creative.