What exactly are the low-orbit drones doing?
Around 2012 TPB planned to set up low orbit servers to make it harder to take them down. I don’t think they really did this but it is still a cool idea. https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bays-attacks-censorship-with-server-drones-120318/
That must be an early april fools story. There is no need to shoot down the drone, just interrupt its network connection and nobody can use the server. So the physical antenna(s) become the critical infrastructure, and they are very expensive. Plus it doesnt help if countries block the website’s dns or ip.
Not to mention that a server in a drone would be magnitutedes more expensive than a simple server rack in a country that doesnt care about copyright.
it does sound a little absurd, but tbp folks are sort of known for this kind of ambitions, like that time they tried to buy a country to escape copyright to host tpb servers there
i wouldn’t personally be surprised if they seriously intended to do something like this
edit: if anyone’s curious, they tried to buy the county of sealand, which is basically a container on two big cylinders in the middle of nowhere off the coast of uk, sort of an independent country, but not really recognized by many
the problem they run into was not nearly enough money to make the purchase, poor internet connection in sealand, and also the precondition that the buyer must uphold the international copyright law, which basically renders the whole thing pointless