Science fiction is only impressive when it involves technology that hasn’t existed yet. Writing a book that deals with a flying server farm? Sorry, The Pirate Bay is all over that.
In a recent blog post, The Pirate Bay made known their plans on building a fleet of flying servers to serve as their front-end proxy servers. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) will presumably make it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to shut down. “…[O]ur machines will have to be shut down with [airplanes] in order to shut down the system. A real act of war,” states the post. The servers will be built using low-cost Linux machines, like the $35 Raspberry Pi.
While this may just be some sort of elaborate joke, there are working examples of fleets like these that already exist. TorrentFreak interviewed a group called Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today that has already created their own system that does just that (they’ve even included a pretty neat video). Whether it serves as a darknet for file sharing, or as a way to allow peer-to-peer communications in regions where Internet access is censored, there’s a multitude of uses for these nifty drones.
Cripes. Next, you’ll tell me Terminators are going to be walking around enforcing RIAA policies or something.
(Note: Macgasm in no way endorses or recommends piracy. But this technology is just damn cool, and could possibly be the future of the Internet.)
Sources: Ars Technica, TorrentFreak
