You’ve got to hand it to the IT wizards at The Pirate Bay—they certainly know how to have fun with their infrastructure set-up. Echoing a prank from 2007, the Pirate Bay on Monday claimed the site was now being hosted in North Korea at that government‘s invitation. News outlets soon reported the announcement, although many did so with a healthy dose of skepticism.

That doubt was well founded, as the proclamation turned out to be a massive prank. The scallywags at the world’s most infamous BitTorrent site admitted to their shenanigans on Tuesday morning. “We hope that yesterday’s little hack proved that we know the internet better than our enemies,” The Pirate Bay said on its Facebook page, along with a few more paragraphs of colorful bravado. The site also posted a photograph of what appears to be several North Korean military figures glad hanging out with the country’s leader Kim Jong-un along with two of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders Peter Sunde and Per Gottfrid Svartholm Warg.

Technical trickery

When The Pirate Bay announced it had moved to North Korea at the behest of that country’s leader to “fight our battles from their network,” it certainly seemed plausible. Performing a traceroute on the site confirmed that The Pirate Bay was indeed accessing the Internet via North Korea. In fact, at the time of this writing, the prank was still in action and you could observe it for yourself. Just open up a command prompt in Windows and type in “tracert piratebay.se.” Then watch as your computer traces a route through servers around the world to land at The Pirate Bay’s virtual dock in North Korea at the IP address 175.45.177.217.

But what The Pirate Bay was actually doing was using some IT trickery to make it appear that the site was residing inside the notoriously Net-unfriendly nation. If you want the technical details, check out the blog of a German blogger, going by the name Will, who first reported on the pirate prank. It’s not clear where The Pirate Bay’s sever access is currently coming from, but the best guess appears to be Western Europe, probably somewhere in Germany.

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