The Pirate Bay has announced that it plans to launch “Low Orbit Server Stations” that will act as a front line defense against future take-down attacks and censorship attempts on the world’s largest torrent site.

Details are sketchy, but it sounds like these low orbit servers will act as proxies that redirect users to geographically-hidden servers that host the actual torrent indexes and trackers. At the moment, TPB uses a similar setup: public front-end servers (mostly in Sweden), and secret back-end servers that are (apparently) hidden away in a mountain bunker. Orbiting servers would replace some or all of these front-end servers, with the ostensible purpose of making it very hard for the authorities to shut them down. (more…)