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"After being unavailable earlier in the day, The Pirate Bay on Monday announced it has moved to a new provider for its immensely popular (and government-hated) website. The company didn't name its provider, but it did imply that the site was now being hosted in North Korea.\r\n\r\nAt first glance, this seems like a very amusing and unlikely development. A closer look shows that it probably really isn't the case.\r\n\r\nFirst off, it's important to note that nowhere in The Pirate Bay's announcement does the organization actually say the torrent site is now located in North Korea. Here's the crux of it:\r\n\r\n\r\nA week ago we could reveal that The Pirate Bay was accessed via Norway and Catalonya. The move was to ensure that these countries and regions will get attention to the issues at hand. Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network.\r\n\r\nThis is truly an ironic situation. 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. At the same time, companies from that country is chasing a competitor from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.\r\n\r\n\r\nAlthough The Pirate Bay goes on to say it was &amp;quot;offered&amp;quot; a &amp;quot;virtual asylum&amp;quot; in the country, there's nothing to explicitly say that it took the supposed proposal. Yet as TorrentFreak points out, a traceroute suggests that site is being routed through the dictatorial country.\r\n\r\nWe performed the traceroute ourselves and found that an IP address in North Korea, 175.45.177.217, does indeed come up:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nYet that isn't really enough to prove anything. A hacker named Will did a quick analysis on the IP address in question and found The Pirate Bay was likely hijacking AS numbers to hide its true location. Here's his conclusion:\r\n\r\n\r\nWhile it is one of the more advanced fake routings it is still pretty lame, a single drop to AS4737 (like a server in China with a BGP session) and it would look much more real, and much harder to detect.\r\nI cannot certainly say where TPB is hosted now, but it must be Asia and it seems to be Phenom Penh, Cambodia as the ICMP replies after it are only minimal higher than there.\r\n\r\n\r\nNorth Korea is probably out of the question, but we still doubt The Pirate Bay is being hosted in Asia. The site has almost always relied on European hosting, and we don't have reason to believe this has changed. Furthermore, there's a much simpler analysis of what's really happening in a submission on Hacker News. Here's the crux of it: \r\n\r\n\r\nThat server is in Germany, no way it's possible to have 50ms to NK. Also traditional traceroute has 500ms+ RTT.\r\nThey are faking/spoofing the ICMP responses. They are also prepending their route advertisement with corresponding AS paths to further disguise it.\r\n\r\n\r\nNote that at the time of this submission there was no delay on the IP address in question (which is why our screenshot above shows such a high response time). 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. \r\n\r\nThe individuals behind The Pirate Bay are unlikely to trade speed for the chance to say the site is hosted in North Korea. They are more likely to hack around and can claim it regardless of whether it's true.\r\n\r\nTraceroutes can lie and so can response times. Yet it's much easier to simply check if there's an artificial delay for the response time and realize it's unlikely that North Korea is The Pirate Bay's new home.\r\n\r\nImage credit: RAWKU5"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/04/the-pirate-bay-may-or-may-not-have-been-invited-to-north-korea-but-its-not-being-hosted-there/>