That's right, the Pirate Bay is going to start flying unmanned drones to act as their front-end, so that the only way to shut them down is to shoot them down. It sounds like something right of the The Running Man, but take a look:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120319/01045818152/pirate-bay-claims-its-going-to-host-site-via-drones-flying-over-international-waters.shtml

Whatever your stance on piracy(I feel the value of an open archive of all data outweighs inferred profit loss), you do still have to hand it to the scurvy pirates for their ingenuity.

While you're there, check out their article on the use of the Raspberry Pi as a free-communication device in oppressed countries

And here I thought that today's Ctrl-Alt-Del comic was just a random commentary on the relationship between the pirate end of consumers and the RIAA/MPAA. I'm certainly very impressed at the engineering ingenuity of this plan, separate from the moral/ethical concerns.

That is quite Genius..

They've demonstrated any engineering ingenuity? All I've seen is them saying "let's make flying servers". I'll believe it when they have real designs.

Not to say that high-endurance UAVs haven't been done before, but I doubt the TPB guys will be able to get anything useful out of the idea.

Balloon+Buoy+Server gogogog

Sounds good, but how do you keep the balloon inflated? Helium and Hydrogen atoms are very very small. AFAIK there's no lightweight membrane in existence that can contain them indefinitely. If you use UAVs(which we'll pretend they have the resources to purchase) you still have the problem of where to launch and land them(without getting arrested), and of maintenance costs. Either way, you need a sizable boat, which law enforcement can easily stop just long enough for your airborne servers to run dry and crash.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see them succeed at this, if only for the story and to show the power of small computers, but I'm still pretty skeptical.

EDIT- saw these videos of interesting unmanned airship designs in the comments section of that article:





EDIT-

Just read this:

http://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/

Apparently someone already did exactly this, albeit at a shorter range.

This video is also an amazing demonstration of the technology: