Jew World Order

Ambitious plans by file-sharing site the Pirate Bay to mount computers on robot drones are unlikely to get off the ground, according to experts.

The drones, floating “several kilometres up in the air” would act as proxy servers, redirecting traffic to a secret location, according to a posting on the site. This would make it harder for authorities to shut down the service.

“One of the technical things we always optimise is where to put our front machines … With the development of GPS-controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi, we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometres up in the air. This way, our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system,” the posting by “MrSpock” said.

It continued: “These low-orbit server stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters, we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.”

But this sci-fi-tinged plan has not impressed network experts, who have pointed out a number of flaws with the idea.

Daryl Schoolar, principal analyst for infrastructure at Ovum, said maintaining 99.99 per cent availability from a constantly airborne base station is a “daunting logistical task”.

Here are a few more reasons why the Pirate Bay’s flying robot stations idea is unlikely to fly.

Stormy weather

Keeping the drones stable and airborne would be difficult in storms, according to engineer Peter Cochrane, former chief technologist for BT and TechRepublic columnist. He said that “wind and rain can be strong, and these things are very lightweight”. He added that ice on the fuselage of the drones would pose an additional hazard. Bad weather could not only ground a bot, it could also make the wireless transmission more difficult, said Schoolar.

Fuel costs

The expense of the fuel needed to keep drones in the air 24/7 would soon mount up, particularly as you need three drones per orbit to guard against network failure, according to Cochrane.

Dodging planes

One simple but real problem would be the need to get out of the way of other traffic in the skies, and given that the Pirate Bay’s motivation for creating the flying server stations is to make it more difficult to take the site offline, they might want to reconsider. Cochrane said that jamming the signal from the drones would be “really easy”.

Holding onto airspace

Cochrane points out that unmanned drones are not legal in some jurisdictions, while Schoolar added that constantly hogging airspace in the US would be frowned upon.

Network delays

Adding a new hop or link to the network to send a message to an airborne transceiver and then back to the ground could increase network delay, said Schoolar.

In its post, the Pirate Bay admitted, “We’re just starting, so we haven’t figured everything out yet”. Sadly for fans of flying networks, it seems that they might be better off fighting their battles on the ground.

Via TechRepublic