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Swedish police raid hosting firm PRQ, takes down "pirate" websites
Swedish police officers recently conducted a raid on web host PeRiQuito AB, or PRQ. Law enforcement officials confiscated four servers according to PRQ owner Mikael Viborg although it’s unclear at this hour which site(s) were hosted on the machines. Unsurprisingly, we are hearing that a number of file-sharing and streaming sites are currently offline. The owner suspects police were investigating intellectual property violations, according to a post on TorrentFreak.
The firm has been a hotbed for controversy for some time as they’ve played host to the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se and Chechen rebel website Kavkaz Central over the years. The raid coincided with downtime at the Pirate Bay but the team there has since confirmed they are no longer hosted with PRQ and as such, the timing was sheer coincidence. Interestingly enough, PRQ was created by Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij in 2004.
This is the third time that PRQ has been raided since its inception. Authorities obtained 180 servers in 2006 related to a case against the Pirate Bay. As it turns out, many of those servers belonged to customers that didn’t have any ties to the BitTorrent site. The hosting firm was again targeted in 2010 as part of an operation against file sharing network “the Scene.”
Viborg said he won’t know until tomorrow which sites the police were after. Helena Ekstrand, a spokesperson for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said she was aware of the raid but had no additional information to supply at this time.
User Comments: 12
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Piratebay is down so that could be one of the sites.
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The Pirate Bay is one of the websites
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1 person liked this |NTAPRO said:
What about the "The raid coincided with downtime at the Pirate Bay but the team there has since confirmed they are no longer hosted with PRQ" part :T
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treetops said:
TBH is back
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People today still use PirateBay???
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NAMBLA, bahahaha love south park
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Wow a server snatch that didnt overtly involve the US. Amazing....perhaps every govt out there is cracking down on piracy. What a heavy handed and draconian event this is. However, there is going to be more and more raids like this in the future.
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ETF Soldier said:
NAMBLA, bahahaha love south parkA couldn't help but crack a smile when I read that :P
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Still makes me laugh, they allowed piracy to go on and on for several reasons.
More and more people will fork out cash to ISP providers for some of that lovely broadband so they too can use such sites and services. As well as check their email and be another lame o who has facebook.
The more people that get a broadband connection to join in this so called piracy will then have to buy one of the many Divx Xvid .x264 and HD streamers / playback devices. Buy more HDD space.
It is all about the greed factor, and now they have your cash they can take away your candy.
Enjoy your freedom. Or Nothingsfreedom.
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NTAPRO said:
You don't need facebook to be a "lame" lol
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avoidz said:
Legitimate sources are lagging far behind more consumer-friendly resources. See how DRM is working out for you, Big Media?
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TPB is back already, and we have plenty of other torrent sites to use.
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