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https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/

Relakks is protected by Swedish data security laws, which require a severe crime before anything can be given to authorities. Quote from the FAQ ( https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/?cid=gb&lang=en ):

RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned – fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that’s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over “traffic data” including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never hand over any kind of information.

(emphasis mine) "What you entered".. They will not check the information, though I'm not sure if and how long the payment data is stored by the payment processor. Why would you use any other VPN service? The only reason I can come up with is when you need to appear from coming from country X to get around content filtering based on your location. (Ie. something is not sold to say UK, but it is available for USA).

Relakks is protected by Swedish data security laws, which require a severe crime before anything can be given to authorities. Quote from the FAQ ( https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/?cid=gb&lang=en ):

RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned – fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that’s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over “traffic data” including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never hand over any kind of information.

(emphasis mine) "What you entered".. They will not check the information, though I'm not sure if and how long the payment data is stored by the payment processor. Why would you use any other VPN service? The only reason I can come up with is when you need to appear from coming from country X to get around content filtering based on your location. (Ie. something is not sold to say UK, but it is available for USA).

You know what is even harder to identify: me sitting behind my Swedish Relakks> VPN connection.

VPN appears to address all those concerns.

OK Mr Wise Geek, let's assume you're right and Australians do figure out that they need encryption to secure their communications. What then? What technologies are available which can offer them secure access to their usual internet services without compromising on features?

I use relakks.

It has nothing to do with figuring out you need to "encrypt everything".

I do regardless though.

You don't need encryption, you need anonymity.
There are a few networks like OneSwarm and GNUnet and you can run a Gnutella network or BitTorrent on top of I2P. Don't expect to find much, though.
You can also sign up for an anonymous VPN service like Relakks and continue to use whatever you are used to.

Guess it's time to get a Relakks account. Basically you use a VPN account which gives you some random Swedish IP address. This will keep you off the radar of those collecting IP addresses for a while.

Not related to them or anything, I was just a satisfied customer for a few months. I gave it up when I realized I almost never downloaded movies and music anymore.

Slashdotted.
yahoo cache
google cache

Guess it's time to get a Relakks account. Basically you use a VPN account which gives you some random Swedish IP address. This will keep you off the radar of those collecting IP addresses for a while.

Not related to them or anything, I was just a satisfied customer for a few months. I gave it up when I realized I almost never downloaded movies and music anymore.

Delay in distribution means more people pushed to torrents.

No because they are cracking-down on that avenue. I just received my 3rd copyright notice this past week (1 and 2 date back to Christmas 2008)

Get a Relakks account. Secure and private P2P sharing via some Scandinavian country. Not affiliated, just someone who is sick and tired of being treated like a criminal just because I forgot to record a TV show on my DVD recorder.

Isn't Relakks offering just the same thing for P2P users?

It is in Sweden, btw.

Does anyone use it?

Relakks, anyone?
Strange that TFA doesn't mention it.

For people too lazy to google: https://www.relakks.com/

I remember some news story saying the Piratebay guys started this up, but as per usual it was probably complete rubish.

Nothing. There already is a Swedish offering: https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb

There are plenty of highly anonymous VPN/SSL tunneling services available for 10 or 15 bucks a month. No need to take a speed hit or trust an unknown foreign proxy server. -Steganos https://www.steganos.com/us/products/home-office/internet-anonym-vpn/overview/ -VPNGates http://www.vpngates.com/ -SecureIX http://www.secureix.com/ -Relakks https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb -Anonymizer http://www.anonymizer.com/

A very good point, and so I looked it up on the Relakks website.

"RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned â" fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but thatâ(TM)s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over âoetraffic dataâ including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never hand over any kind of information."
Source: https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/

Seems they'd need more then just one red flag to get your registration info, but that would be prior to the wiretap law.

The only way around that would be to VPN somewhere and use that VPN link to pass all your p2p traffic -- but if you have the means at your disposal to set that up then you likely have the means to find an ISP that doesn't throttle your p2p traffic.

There is services like Relakks https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb that will do the job quite well.

https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en does exactly what you've described. I believe the cost is $10/month US.

I, then, look forward to getting internet access from The Pirate Bay.

The already provide an anonymous VPN service, so it seems like a perfectly reasonable next step.

Pay 5 Euros a month and do your p2p via a VPN to Relakks (or similar). The day they start snooping on encrypted VPN connections is the day we have bigger worries than just p2p.

The best solution, ofcourse, is to switch to a less zealous ISP. But that is not always possible: I, for example, find myself subletting an
apartment that comes with horrible, horrible Comcast DSL (who actively reset with your TCP connections).

In these cases say Aye, matey and hook up to the swedish Pirate Party's Relakks VPN service (as seen on Slashdot)
to get past your pesky ISPs rules. It's also be very useful if you use coffeeshop wireless a lot and your email provider still requires plain-text passwords.

Arrr, we be lootin' again!

I'd have to say no... No matter what's in the payload of each packet, you still have to communicate with each individual peer and that communication pattern can easily be detected. A VPN style setup would be the solution, so that the middleman (Comcast) wouldn't that you're communicating with multiple peers. Of course that sorta defeats the whole purpose of p2p; now you have a single point that throttles the traffic (the VPN server or hardware device). No VPN server that I know of could handle that much I/O. And who's gonna foot the bandwidth bill? Even the best advertisement/donation supported site wouldn't be able to come remotely close to being able to support an infrastructure like that. Mesh VPN's (Hamachi) to the rescue? That would be nice, but that falls into the situation above. Even though the payload is encrypted, you're still communicating with many other peers in an obvious pattern.

If I were a comcast customer (I hope I never am) I'd get an account with http://www.relakks.com/. You wouldn't think a VPN on the other side of the world (Sweden) would be a great solution for p2p, but it works quite well and provides peace of mind. Getting 8Mb/2Mb on a 15Mb/2Mb FiOS link is not a problem throughout the majority of the day. ;)

That ISP already exists. It's called https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb
Price is EUR 5 per month or EUR 50 per year.

Dis someone say Relakks? Works as a VPN. The speed hit is there, but not huge, not as much as Tor.

This has already been done.

See Relakks.

I am sure there are more.

The CALEA mandate is yet another in a long list of privacy violations. Francisco Franco would be proud of the US.

The research shows that if the tapping capability is there, law enforcement will use it. i.e. although mobile/cell phones *can* be tapped, landlines are favoured for tapping by ratio of something greater than 10:1 (I don't remember anything more accurate, but you get the idea).

While the likelihood of somebody else tapping your Internet traffic may be low, the probability is never nill.

Now that all compliant ISPs have the taps in place, the number of capable ISP employees that can run a tap has very likely increased while the effort in making a tap has decreased. So, if you look at a tap-capable ISP employee as a commodity to be bribed, the market just became more accessible through competition. As a consequence it more likely that, say, a group of private investigators, previously unable to afford the resource, now could.

Of course, if you're not cheating on your wife, you won't have as much to worry about. But suppose you're email address is in the address book of someone who is, rightfully or wrongfully, being investigated for a criminal offence...

Recap: The more available this resource is for *someone*, the more available it is for *anyone*, and the more it gets used anyway.

Obligatory bow of the head: I, for one, welcome our new overlords.

If you don't want to bow your head, it's not obligatory. I often use Relakks, an anonymous IP provider in Sweden. I am not an employee or agent of Relakks (I'm not even a Swede), but I find the service well worth the 5 Euro/month despite the, naturally, slightly slower connection, which is 1) a PPTP VPN tunnel 2) through Sweden.

Just use this companies software, you can change the language at the top of the page if needed. https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en/

> Yeah, it's not like anyone could just connect to their trackers and get the IP addresses of nearly everybody else in the swarm.

So hide you IP address:

https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en

or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_networ k)

or both

(Note: I don't care what you say about using TOR in this way. There's nothing you can do about it, and really you want *all* activity - voip, email, surfing - funnelled through it.)

You can easily use a (open) proxy or similar to mask your HTTP traffic. But if you'd like to take it one step further, Relakks (based out of Sweden - also accepts foreign users) uses VPN to route all packets from your machine out onto the Internets. You can check their legal FAQ to read about their restrictive policy regarding your personal information. It'd take a subpoena from the Swedish gov't to for them to hand out your originating IP address. This is rarely done - and as I understand it copyright violations are not considered "serious" enough.

Works like a charm and the performance drop is insignificant. You could easily saturate even a 100 Mbps link using this service.

people have been cashing in on that for ages...
don't you remember the discussion about https://www.relakks.com/?cid=gb

There is one Internet Provider out there that will help you keep your IP adress as an unknown. I stumbled accross it in one of my many searches. http://www.relakks.com/

I actually wrote up a blog entry recently on this very topic that others might find helpful:

http://blog.screen-scraper.com/2007/03/01/how-to-s urf-and-screen-scrape-anonymously/

My biggest recommendation would be to consider commercial VPN solutions, such as:

https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng
http://www.strongvpn.com/

if someone missed parents point: https://www.relakks.com/

Given Norway's proximity to Sweden, I'm sure that the PiratPartiet (Pirate Party) would be interested in offering their paid-for proxy service there if this law ever goes through.

While I think defeating such legislation is the best idea, if such garbage does pass look into using a service like Relakks. For those who don't know this is a vpn service ran by the Swedish Pirate Party. Read their faq for more info. By the way, why not donate to the eff to help defeat this type of garbage in the first place?

Just relakks!

/happy customer...

here you go! Courtesy of Labs2 and The pirate party.

i'll be using my encrypted BT client over my encrypted vpn tunnel to download whatever the heck i feel like courtesy of my pals in sweden.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
https://www.relakks.com/?lang=en
http://thepiratebay.org/

bring it on, you big evil ISP's. *shrug*

https://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng

BitTorrent as a basic client will never be truely anonymous by virtue of the technology involved. Only by using private VPNs (like The pirate party one or by using additional software higher up the network stack like Tor can basic anonymity be enabled.

For those of us that understands Swedish it's possible to read that smtp:s are blocked in Realakks VPN and they ain't providing the users with any own server to solve the problem...

From https://www.relakks.com/faq/qna/
      SMTP-server
      F: Har ni någon SMTP-server jag kan använda eftersom min egen SMTP-server inte fungerar över RELAKKS?
      S: Nej, tyvärr kan vi i dagsläget inte erbjuda någon SMTP-server.

In English:
      SMTP-server
      Q: Do you have any SMTP-server I can use because my own SMTP-server won't work over RELAKKS?
      A: No, unfortunatly we cannot provide any SMTP-server at this time...

So spamming through this darknet won't be a problem, at least not yet... /fegis

RELAKKS is a company incorporated in Sweden. The service is basically a Swedish broadband subscription offered over the Internet. This means that the legal framework mainly consists of the The Electronic Communications Act 2003 389. What will this mean if:

Swedish authorities or,
Other organization or individuals demands access to information protected by RELAKKS?

RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but thats all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over traffic data including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.

So as long as the Swedish government can prove beforehand that you will be convicted, then they'll hand over the data, otherwise it's no-go. And as for non-Swedish authorities, Relakks say they won't give them anything.

Short version: They keep only records who is customer, not about his traffic. https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/

Legal

RELAKKS is a company incorporated in Sweden. The service is basically a Swedish broadband subscription offered over the Internet. This means that the legal framework mainly consists of the The Electronic Communications Act 2003 389. What will this mean if:

Swedish authorities or,
Other organization or individuals demands access to information protected by RELAKKS?


RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned - fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that's all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over "traffic data" including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.

The combination Swedish high-tech encryption and the strongest legal protection give you true access to Internet, safer and speedier then ever before.

For more information about Swedish Telecom Law: The Electronic Communications Act 2003:389

... and that is exactly what the "BOO TERRORISTS!"-scare is trying to accomplish now, with sentences going up to four years.

(And we all thank the almighty Fascist States of America for that)