The Pirate Bay published a blog post today claiming that it has relocated to a "new provider" in North Korea after being invited by the totalitarian country's leadership "to fight our battles from their network." The announcement comes just days after The Pirate Bay relocated to Norway and Spain after facing legal threats from an entertainment industry trade group in Sweden, where it had been hosted for the past three years. The new post appears to be a satirical commentary comparing the North Korean regime to the democratic governments of Western Europe and the U.S. Aside from the fact that the author of the new Pirate Bay post is listed as the improbable "Kim Jung-Bay" (a permutation of The Pirate Bay and Kim Jong-Un, North Korea's young leader), there are several other good reasons to doubt the file-sharing website has actually moved to the isolated nation.

For one thing, North Korea's access to the internet is notoriously limited by design, with the country only recently setting up an international mobile wireless network for tourists. For another, The Pirate Bay has played a similar prank on the Web before, claiming on April Fool's Day 2007 that it had relocated to the North Korean embassy in Stockholm, Sweden. But the most convincing evidence for The Pirate Bay's fakery comes from a German programmer who traced back the hosting chain from its supposed location in Pyongyang, North Korea, to an address in Cambodia. The Pirate Bay looks to be using a border gateway protocol (BGP) spoofing method to make it appear as though it is serving up links from inside North Korea. While The Pirate Bay may not have actually followed Dennis Rodman in traveling to the country, it does seem to be running out of safe havens for its popular file exchange.