In a post yesterday on the official The Pirate Bay (TPB) blog we were informed that the file sharing website had been invited to “virtual asylum” within North Korea. TNW reports the Pirate Bay website was unavailable early on Monday just before this news was uploaded. Six days earlier TPB had voiced its intentions to undertake a major infrastructure change within the coming week.

TPB blog writer Kim Jung-Bay wrote that “we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network”. Kim went on to discuss the irony of hiding from the government of “the land of the free” within North Korea “We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high.” The TPB blogger even went as far as suggesting the website could “influence the Korean leaders to also let their own population use our service”.

Leg pulling for lulz

However there was no solid indication that TPB actually had any hosting based in North Korea. Initial investigations by TNW and TorrentFreak yesterday using a traceroute for the URL of The Pirate Bay showed up an IP address in North Korea but with an impossibly fast response time for European access. “Essentially it appears The Pirate Bay has hijacked a couple of IP addresses, set up a fake Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) advertisement, and generated an artificial delay” reported TNW.

Four hours ago on the official TPB Facebook page the truth came out. “We hope that yesterdays little hack proved that we know the internet better than our enemies. Since about 40% of the entire internets traffic consists of torrents enabled by us, you can almost say that we ARE the internets,” wrote a TPB Facebook admin. The writer was a little upset that very few commentators were critical of the North Korea move “We've also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can't seriously cheer the "fact" that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us to f*%} off. Always stay critical.”

Despite this “fun” hoax TPB may have some real problems with hosting issues as it is pursued across Europe by a long line of copyright lawyers. With this stunt TPB does try to play the morality card and has made it clear that it wouldn’t take to any port in a storm.