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Pirate Party Launches Commercial Darknet
CrystalFalcon writes "The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. 'There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,' says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.'"
...The cost of the service is 5 euros per month,...
It looks like it is at least a quasi-commercial darknet.
Ryan Fenton
Tor has three intermediate hops between you and the destination; this only has one - so you get lower latency. Also, with Tor, your download speed is the minimum of the 4 intermediate connections' bandwidths. If one of those people happens to be a dial up user, you will be getting dial-up speeds.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Quite possibly, but the facts that its: 1) a different country, with a separate legal system that seems to deliver what the US constitution promises 2) A European Union country, which has demonstrated a much less media industry friendly policy and 3) a different judicial system, so that US laws don't apply, and US legal precedents won't have much weight suggest to me that it will offer quite a bit of protection. A terrorist might get caught up in the legal web, but the RIAA will have their costs raised by a couple of orders of magnitude, and Jesus, that's alright with me (cue guitars...)
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
I think the point is that it's (1) based in Sweeden, (2) encrypted end-to-end, (3) as anonymous as you want it to be based on the information you provide to them, and (4) fairly strongly protected legally in the jurisdiction it operates in.
1 and 4 being pretty big for USians who are using it...2 for people whose ISPs filter. 3, dubiously so, as at some point they have your credit card saying that you have an account although I suppose that, if they don't store your tunnel account with your CC number, they have no way of getting to you personally.
It doesn't matter if someone nefarious is on the same link-local segment sniffing all your traffic, if they can't identify through technological means who you are, and can't compel the provider through legal means either because they didn't keep that information or just won't give it over.
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
I understand it that it's business and laws as usual here too, of course, but if they're enforced of leaving out user details, I wonder what exact differences their unconventional subscriber register has compared to a regular one. They don't seem to go into detail of that, and I'd guess that is the most interesting part here.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
If it's a truly anonymous darknet, they won't keep 'subscriber linked to ip accessed this resource'-type records. Even if the US or any other overzealous country or power subpoenaed or stole the records to prosecute, they won't know which subscriber did what and when.
So the minimum of records they would have to keep is who's subscribed and paid, and even with only a handful of people on the service, there's no way anyone could prove beyond reasonable doubt that a specific person did it, and I don't think swedish law would enable prosecution of the ISP.
I did due diligence before I opened my little business. First, the demand curve for software doesn't fit what you might think from a microecon 101 textbook. Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card. The other wrinkle is that advertising costs money and its impossible to make money at the $10 price point if you advertise. For example, during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign. I then get $25 and split $1 with Paypal, leaving me with money in my pocket. Google will not decrease my CPC just because I charge less for my product.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
They have a contract with Labs2 (run by the former ceo and founder of bredbandsbolaget) so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.
I believe that it is in the article summary:
The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth.
Even today, you can route your Bittorrent traffic over Tor or I2P, but its slow as hell. And lets not be coy. The vast majority of people will use this for infringing copyright. That is the difference -- performance.
For example;
There's a zillion reasons really. But more importantly, you shouldn't need any reason at all. The simple fact is, there exist people who would prefer, atleast sometimes, being anonymous online.
Har har har--I'm laughing too, but:
Granted--I can type in any old crap I want when registering but my actual actual IP address sounds like it's logged:
So they are keeping logs.
The American in me is hearing: "The Swedish [authority] has to be really reaaaally sure you're gonna go to jail for this" to get all the information they wanted anyway. Forgive my skepticism. What I'm saying is: I was about to sign up for this and this is why I didn't.
Piracy is not what the party is about, it's a name they picked to be noticable.
The consumer rights party would be a stupid name, as it would infer some capitalist values and the party does not take a stance in questions like that.
Everyone please read! http://www2.piratpartiet.se/international/english
The party is here to counter the police state we are turning into with Bodström giving the lobbying organisations whatever they want, and to put a stop to the silliness of patents and eternal copyright.
Actaully, this is not true. Newton developed Calculus WAY before Leibniz did, he was basically done in 1671 and it took Leibniz more than a decade longer (even though it is his notation and words we use today). The point is that Newton didn't publish until much, much later, so this remarkable mathematical technique that would change how people do mathematics forever was known only to him. The remarkable thing about that story isn't that they came up with it simultaneously (they didn't), but that they did it independently of each other. It shows that during the second half of th 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, two giants walked the earth, two of the perhaps five most intelligent men in history. It is, truly, an extraordinary thing.
And, oh yeah, they couldn't stand eachother.
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.
One of the universal rules of happiness is always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual
I've regularly been getting pings to pptp.relakks.com in the 150ms range.
This is from Dayton, OH using Roadrunner as my ISP.
If you're going to use this for any sort of interactive application, you may want to look elsewhere.
He's probably swedish, some residental cooperations and city networks have got very good deals on fiber.
I can't get fiber, but I have symmetric 12/9 VDSL (of which my actual throughput, measured, is 9/9) - at ~$50/month. The uplink makes all the difference.
it's in my head
Reading FAQ on their site it appears they use PPTP tunnel. While it's quick and easy to setup for clients, looks like it has some security flaws, quoting Poptop page about PPTP security (http://poptop.sourceforge.net/dox/protocol-securi ty.phtml):
"PPTP is known to be a faulty protocol. The designers of the protocol, Microsoft, recommend not to use it due to the inherent risks. Lots of people use PPTP anyway due to ease of use, but that doesn't mean it is any less hazardous. The maintainers of PPTP Client and Poptop recommend using OpenVPN (SSL based) or IPSec instead."
I can't speak for others, but only for myself: I recently paid for an interesting Firefox plugin that cost $5. It's a handy looking plugin that I might never use, but at that price, since it had clearly had a lot of work, I was happy to reward the author. In fact I've never used it, but I don't mind. But for $25, I would only pay that after spending some time investigating the software to decide if it's really worth the money. And usually, I don't have the time to do that, so I don't buy even if it would be worth it.
In other words, even if a higher price does suggest quality, it also says "this is not an impulse buy". And some of us like to investigate more expensive things before we buy them, even if it's not a rational use of time (I get paid well; rationally, I should just buy things and try them, but I don't).
Now, I do sympathise as I would also like to make money writing shareware. It's hard for me to imagine how though, as I haven't bought software (aside from the above Firefox plugin) in many years: FOSS being good enough for nearly everything.
Since the only software I've bought in years was a low-cost impulse buy, that tells me that maybe there's a market of people like me, who don't buy "real" software any more if there's a comparable free equivalent.
Since you've made relatively little from your program, you're obviously not dependent on the income. So perhaps it's worth experimenting with different pricing just to see what happens? Or maybe sell two slightly different versions with radically different pricing to see what happens?
Relakks will hand over SUBSCRIPTION information ( that's all they keep). This means the Riaa gets "Why yes, John Doe uses our subscription-based internet service". This isn't a crime. If the RIAA sucessfully obtains this they have ALREADY got you on copyright infringement with OTHER evidence.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
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.
Except that Swedish authorities are known to violate the law if they like it.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
I'm all for a protected darknet, but wouldn't the recently signed Cybercrime Treaty compel Swedish authorities to hand over information demanded by other governments? It seems like the U.S. could ask for traffic information to be recorded (as under U.S. law), and that the Swedish ISP would be forced to comply. ...I hope not, (and I haven't had the time for an in-depth reading of the treaty articles) but that's what the overview makes it sound like.
./ story here,
List of signatories (Council of Europe site)
Films of people dying obviously exist. They are not snuff films. A snuff film is a killing done explictly to be filmed and sold, i.e. if they ran out of film, they'd wait to kill the guy until the camera was reloaded.
Snopes quotes Kerekes and Slater's "Killing for Culture", which they call "the bible on the snuff film rumor":
Films take to inspire terror - the execution videos taken by Islamic extremists, the bombing raid footage proudly displayed by the American military - aren't snuff films.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You get paid .5 cents per hour if only one person buys your software; in that case perhaps you should consider writing software for which there is more demand. Every person who buys raises your hourly rate.
To make the most money, you don't set the price according to the cost of your labor and capital; instead you set the price according to demand, at the optimal part of the demand curve where lowering the price further wouldn't encourage enough people to buy to make up for the lost revenue. This is Econ 101 here.
What I am saying is that the optimal price is far below the current price. And since software costs practically nothing to distribute, that low price would be feasible if only there was a way to take the payments.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.