Evidence The Pirate Bay Move To North Korea Was A Prank, In Understandable Terms

Infrastructure: Yesterday’s big story was definitely about The Pirate Bay having moved to North Korea. If you asked the Internet’s infrastructure, the net itself would tell you about the move, and The Pirate Bay issued a press release confirming the story. But reports surfaced that it could have been an elaborate hoax, and closer inspection proves that.

The problem with verifying the story or its debunking was the technical level of expertise required to understand the reports. When you started talking about “traceroutes” and “whois lookups”, you would lose 99.9% of the audience, who would be incapable of independently verifying what you said. When you added in the reports claiming to debunk the story, but which were instead about “Border Gateway Protocol” (BGP) and “Autonomous Systems” (AS) numbers, you lost another 99.9% – including me.

I can’t verify or disprove the report based on BGP and AS numbers. But there’s something else I can use. The laws of physics.

I’m going to focus on the traceroute quoted below. You can think of it in terms of a telephone line trace. It is a list of the way the signals go from your computer to The Pirate Bay. To illustrate, the first hop in the chain from my workstation is my firewall (named firewall.internal.falkvinge.net), and my ISP alltele is visible as a next step in hop #4. The crucial evidence here is in the timings: my firewall is 379 microseconds away from me, and my ISP is 3.3 milliseconds away from me.

You, too, can run this trace from where you are. Open a prompt (in Windows, it’s Windows+R, then cmd and Enter, on a Mac, you run Terminal, and on any flavor of GNU/Linux, you hit Ctrl-Alt-T) and run traceroute thepiratebay.se – on some systems, the command is just tracert thepiratebay.se. It should produce a document similar to the one below.

rick@battlestation:~$ traceroute thepiratebay.setraceroute to thepiratebay.se (194.71.107.15), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets 1  firewall.internal.falkvinge.net (192.168.80.1)              0.379 ms  2  * * *  (unknown hop) 3  * * *  (unknown hop) 4  h88-129-128-10.static.se.alltele.net (88.129.128.10)        3.327 ms  5  te0-7-0-7.ccr21.sto01.atlas.cogentco.com (149.6.168.49)     3.992 ms 6  te0-3-0-4.ccr22.sto03.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.60.21)    19.605 ms 7  te0-3-0-2.ccr22.ham01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.73.65)    22.574 ms 8  te0-3-0-6.ccr22.fra03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.49.213)  28.316 ms 9  francetelecom.fra03.atlas.cogentco.com (130.117.14.178)    35.297 ms 10  xe-3-2.r00.dsdfge02.de.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.61)       31.762 ms11  213.198.77.122 (213.198.77.122)                            31.516 ms 12  * * *  (unknown hop)13  xe-0-1-0-3.r02.frnkge03.de.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.5.62)   38.855 ms14  xe-0.level3.frnkge03.de.bb.gin.ntt.net (129.250.8.202)     38.566 ms15  vlan90.csw4.Frankfurt1.Level3.net (4.69.154.254)          118.681 ms16  ae-82-82.ebr2.Frankfurt1.Level3.net (4.69.140.25)         122.293 ms 17  ae-61-61.csw1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.134.66)           130.630 ms 18  ae-21-70.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.69.155.67)           132.708 ms  19  INTELSAT-IN.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (64.156.82.14)       135.094 ms20  209.159.170.215 (209.159.170.215)                         202.517 ms21  202.72.96.6 (202.72.96.6)                                 703.997 ms22  175.45.177.217 (175.45.177.217)                           707.161 ms

So we see 22 hops in the trace, where the last one was famously in North Korea, almost a full second from where we are sitting, 700 milliseconds out. But let’s not look at that for a moment, let’s look instead at hops #16 to #17. Hop #16 is in Frankfurt and hop #17 is in New York or Kansas City. Let’s assume New York; that’s where the transatlantic cables land. Yet, in the trace, they are eight milliseconds apart.

Let’s focus on this. The distance from Frankfurt to New York (measured in Internet signalling time) is reported to be just over twice the distance from my firewall to my ISP. This sets us thinking. What is the physical distance from Frankfurt to New York?

The distance from Frankfurt to New York is 6,195 kilometers.

The physical distance that hop #17 has to cover is 6,195 kilometers. It covers this hop in eight milliseconds. Here, let’s take a look at the laws of physics. What is the speed of light? What is the limit, as told by the laws of physics, to how fast the signals in a fi