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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 nightmare of the *AA and my pipe dream. When's it coming to the states and where do I sign up?
I think this is an awesome idea, but how will it work with the looming lack of net neutrality?
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
If it is commercial, couldn't the company' records be subpoenaed (in a worst case scenario) by state/local/etc authorities? If so, I would think that would spell even worse trouble for a user.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
This new political party is sure to cause a bit of panic all over the world, due to the extreme, overrated hype of piracy.
Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.
So of course people will pirate it. Why? Because it's rediculous to pay for something like that.
Then there's music. Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all.
Then again, sometimes piracy is a bad thing. Especially for the movie industry. Millions (if not billions) of dollars go into the making of a movie. While, yes, theater sales bring in tons of cash, DVD releases are also a huge factor in a movie's income. Downloading a movie hurts people a lot more than downloading music.
Piracy has become such an overrated "controversy" lately that it's unbarable. Look at the price of blank CDs. Did you know that you have to pay a "piracy tax" for these? Yep. All because some higher-ups think that an extra buck or two will help save a movie studio or a record company. It's batty. What if I just want to burn copies of pictures from my family vacation? Now I've gotta pay the MPAA and RIAA some extra cash for something that they don't deserve? Get real.
All these corporations think that they're helping people by attempting to foil piracy. Yes, they've got their hearts in the right places, but they're doing it all wrong. "Right track, wrong train" is a good saying for this. They really need to clean up their acts when suing people. I mean, they've gone so far as to sue old ladies who can barely turn their computer on, yet let huge pirates go unnoticed.
Why's this?
Because if they let big pirates continue doing their thing, then they get to keep on making more and more money with the "piracy taxes" and suing people left and right for WAY more than the material they've pirated is worth. They're letting people go to keep themselves in the game, which is horrible.
Also, just a little side note, to anybody who thinks the RIAA or MPAA might be knocking on your door. Go ahead and go to court, but bring up the fact that an IP address is not a person. Since your IP is the only log they have of the download (even if they have the MAC, that'll only ID a computer, not a single person), you'll win in court. And they'll lose out on a bunch of money for the court date, as well. Two-for-one, if you ask me. =D
Does this mean the serious side of evil people will be able to conduct their business without fear of being caught?
This is a problem with the darknet. I like freedom but sometimes a little monitoring and record keeping should be used to help police catch the weirdos that exist in our society.
I think there should be a balance of privacy and safety for our society, maybe there is, but it doesnt look like it to me with this new service.
After all these years of the US government exporting moralistic and lobby-built laws (soft drug prohibition, "ethernal" copyright, etc), it's nice to see somebody trying to export their society's (swedish) values of respect for freedom and privacy, even if their current crop of mainstream politicians seems to be in the pockets of the US admistration.
On the other hand, i expect that if the Relakks service becomes popular expect laws to be passed soon in other countries to curtail access to it.
I'm nervous when people are nervous about standing up for themselves and saying, "Go fuck yourself, I'll read whatever I damned well like."
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Thats not enough for some cheeky bastards, though. After people have gotten their latest crackz, I get a surge of search results from Google for things legitimate customers never search for (e.g. Name of the Program V 1.0 download). I lost $10 last time I got the hacker surge because I bid on my own program name as an AdWords keyword and the "its not stealing, its copyright infringement!!!1" crowd literally picked my pocket for a quarter a click.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet
'There must be a thousand reasons why you might want to be completely anonymous, but right now I can't think of one...'
Although this is better for speed, isn't it bad for anonimity? Traffic that has been over four hosts is harder to trace back than traffic that has hopped over a single host.
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
While I have not of course RTFA, I would thihnk that charging comercially for the service is nessesary to keep it from becoming a spammer tool.
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
"There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet"
And copying a King Kong DVD rip is not one of them. Its sad when people take the legitmate point about anonymity that you might need for political organisations, journalists and whistle-blowers, and just use it as an excuse to facilitate warez and music copying.
And calling yourselves the 'pirate party' is just plain insane. Whats wrong with "the consumer rights' party? or do they realsie thats way too hypocritical.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
What country do you live in? I live in the USA where people voted in a facist administration that thinks the Constitution is a quaint document that is exactly where it belongs in a museum. If we could wrap copper around the founding fathers we wouldn't need foreign oil. Their spinning bodies could power the country for the next thousand years. If you mod this funny you aren't paying attention.
Whats wrong with "the consumer rights' party?
When I was a kid we had these things called "people." I miss them. Nice folk; and a good many of them were producers.
KFG
And calling yourselves the 'pirate party' is just plain insane. Whats wrong with "the consumer rights' party? or do they realsie thats way too hypocritical.
According to the rest of your rant, 'honest' should come to your mind instead of 'hypocritical', because you don't perceive them as a "consumer rights party" anyway, or do you? It's an ironic statement on how they are perceived, playing with their underdog image. And people like you, obviously, would never see anything else than the "pirate" part, which is exactly why they are important, to constantly challenge such views.
Furthermore, I think the name is well chosen regardless, because can "The Consumers' Rights Party" get any more boring and non-descriptive? "The Pirate Party" is concise, provoking (to some), and easily remembered.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
And of course also to pay for the bandwidth. One of the points with it is to reduce the bandwidth loss one will see in e.g. TOR, which comes with absolutely no guarantees of high bandwidth proxies, and is actually very slow for many P2P services. But solving that problem costs a lot of money. On the other hand, that makes this solution centralized, which opens up a large box of security issues on its own, like requiring a trusted single third party, additionally easily targettable by an organization.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
There's very little in the actual document which isn't in the published article when it comes to cost.
Have you been living on Gilligan's Island?
5eu/month is, as pointed out in the FA, at the current exchange rate: $6.359.
Before Scotty Richter was castrated, he was bringing $2M into his office, yes, two million U$ monthly. And he wasn't the king of the mountain.
Can you explain how $6.359/month going to make a spammer think twice about using the service? Particularly when you consider the anonymity. No more looking for open proxies & relays.
They pay far, far, far more than that to set up shop in China, then send all of that crap back to the US. Most spam originates from the US as the 2003 U-CAN-SPAM law[1] basically gave them free reign, but the big boys still rely upon China.
Here are the top 200 spammers responsible for 80% of the crap which is dropped in your inbox.
Some of these guys (e.g. Ralsky) have substantial setups in their basements or an office (when they-he aren't|isn't getting caught running around in nothing but a black thong -- yes, there's a picture of it in an anti-spam archive.
But seriously. How do you think ~$6/month is going to stop a spammer. I'm not trying to present a loaded question here. I really do want to know your perspective on this because you may have insights no one else has considered.
The only way I can see this not becoming a spam haven is if there's a volume limit for that price and you have to pay $x/volume for each increment after that.
I'm all ears.
_______________________________
[1] Very effective, wouldn't you say? Has your volume of spam decreased (without human intervention to separate the wheat from the chaffe?)
I see lots of posts about bandwidth, which is fine if you're planning to use this service to copy large quantities of data, but for any other use latency is more important.
This won't be much use for me if it makes the latency of my VPN connection to my employer so slow that typing into VNC becomes useless. At the moment I get ~20ms ping times from home to work (somewhere in the UK to somewhere else in the UK) and typing via VNC over a VPN is just as good as if I were at work. I've had times when the latency went up and it rapidly becomes impossible to type at normal speed because you can't correct your mistakes as you go.
Has anyone got any figures for latency for this ISP?
just1
adj.
1. Honorable and fair in one's dealings and actions: a just ruler. See Synonyms at fair1.
2. Consistent with what is morally right; righteous: a just cause.
3. Properly due or merited: just deserts.
4. Law. Valid within the law; lawful: just claims.
5. Suitable or proper in nature; fitting: a just touch of solemnity.
6. Based on fact or sound reason; well-founded: a just appraisal.
Which definition of 'just' is analogous to 'whatever the people in general think', exactly?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Actually, the pirates are motivating a lot of investment in the technology to protect identity online. Privacy activists care deeply about these issues and study them in mostly academic ways, but developing a user experience that will be seamless enough to be used by many people requires a lot of actual user testing. Pirates are performing a valuable service in their way, regardless of the ethical implications of unauthorized and uncompensated copying.
Peace and love, y'all
If you're in that much trouble that they NEED to find you, believe Me, they will find you. Be it 1 hop, or 4 hops, it doesn't matter. Sure, I'd rather trust a Sweedish company for my sense of peace rather than Tor. At least you know where your hops are going with this. With Tor, it's a good idea, but what if the governemnt was running massive tor routers, sniffing packets from whatever comes across their electronic doorstep? You see, that is the weakness of Tor, besides it's speed. You need a trusted source to begin with. If you don't, it will auto-build the network as time goes on as it finds a node. But still, if one of those nodes are packet-sniffing everything, then all is for naught. Either way, if anything 'bad' happens to you, you'll still be just as screwed, but hey, at least you'll have more bandwith and less latentcy.
Spammers use free and hijacked services because they get shut down a lot. Suppose some spammer can get 10,000 emails out using a commercial darnket before the account gets TOS'd. Even if they can get 100,000 emails out before having to spend another $6, that still destroys the economics of spamming.
Unless you're suggesting that the darknet is soft on spam and won't shut down spammer accounts.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
I cannot understand why terrorists, planning to e.g. blow up a plane (which is highly illegal) would care about cryptography being outlawed. They would use it anyway, legal or not. The result is that honest people cannot use cryptography, but terrorists can.
>>Wouldn't the obvious way of doing that be to offer material for download from premium-rate dial-up servers invisible to the rest of the Internet?>>
Why didn't I think of this? All I need to do is charge money while making my website harder to access than a pirate FTP server! You should try selling this idea to Starforce! It seems to fit in perfectly with their business plan of causing the most pain for the people most likely to pay you money.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
They're PC. The now grandparent was fluffing up Digg, and clan loyalty is such that some consider it flamebait. I try to point this out sometimes, but that itself risks a downmod.
The average Slashdotter is still under the influence of either their parents, or else draconian work laws over what can be said and not said. You don't fluff up the opposition; the modern social dialogue, on either side of the political spectrum is about advantage, not truth.
The irony is that Slashdot's leaning is generally some blend of anarchist and libertarian; a position that I am very comfortable with. This general PC movement has the feel of "protecting our freedoms by restricting our rights".
Wikileaks, no DNS
Seriously though. He's complaining about the cost of google adwords, and he's leaving out the cheapest form of advertising available, Slashvertisement. I think that a lot of people think Google Adwords are way more important than they are. I may have in my 10 years on the internet clicked on 20 ads. And 99.9% of the time I don't even read them. I imagine that most people are the same. He'd get much better value for his time/money if he just linked to his program in his sig, and posted a bunch of stuff on slashdot.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Please see:
1. "The Watchmen"
2. Star Trek.
3. At least 6 million news stories about the CIA each year.
4. Bruce Schneier
5. About 6 hundred million blogs commenting about the news stories.
Oh, and
6. Decimus lunius luvenalis, better known as Juvenal.
Clear, Dark Skies
The service is provided by the Swedish high-tech company Relakks, which offers a neutral IP on top of your existing ISP service through a strongly encrypted VPN connection. Basically, this gives users the advantage of a Swedish IP address from anywhere in the world.
So, how long until Ma Bell and Pa Cable make it against their TOS to connect to an "unauthorized" VPN provider (whereby darknet VPNs are conviently never authorized)? Of course they would only do this after a little "helful nudge" by the DOJ.
Serioulsy - the idea is great, but using a service like this is basically like putting a big "HEY, I AM OVER HERE, COME ARREST ME AND THEN DO AN UNLAWFUL SEARCH OF MY HOUSE!" sign on your roof.
The sad sad thing is - a few years ago I would take a comment like this owrth a grain of salt and offer up some tinfoil to the potser. Nowadays I feel like it could actually happen.
1.) You have to keep tabs on changes in Swedish law, European Union law, and USA law if you are an American citizen or risk being exposed legally at any time. If a terrorist bomb goes off in downtown Sweden, forget it.
2.) The very use of this service could expose you to conviction. I read a case in the news in which a judge instructed a jury in a porn case that even though no incriminating files were found on the suspect's computer, the jury could take the mere PRESENCE of encryption software as an indication of guilt. I can see mere use of this service being considered incriminating by some idiot judges.
3.) It's on Slashdot for crying out loud. Do you actually think law and government security geeks are not going to find it a challenge to break it legislatively or technically? I'd feel better if it were a privacy service existing in the internet twilight.
4.) There's the paranoia factor. What makes you think it isn't a trap?
E Proelio Veritas.
I think that there's something to be said here about that. To me it says that /. users are too lazy to go forage for their own articles and instead go cherry pick them off of digg. Why? Because the digg community picks the stories, not a handful of select people. If /. wants to continue to do things that way, I have no bones about, it's just interesting that the /. model lags behind other sites.
/. has over digg is the discussions and moderation system. I was reading the comments over at digg and I felt like I was in a room full of 3 year olds (insert joke here). At least here I feel like the least meaningful and mature comments carry more relevancy than most of what I read over there.
The one thing that I think
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Authoritarian: Government based on manipulation of power where access to government information is limited and access to citizen information by government is unfettered.
Ask yourself which direction the US government is heading.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I have never understood this really.
If a darknet wants to provide indemnity for it's users, then why don't they just disable all logging of information on the darknet? If there ar eno records, then none can be supenaed.
It would be pretty trivial to design a system whereby it is proveable that any given packet *did not* originate from within Relakks, but stil not know from where it did originate. Such a system would provide them protection from lawsuits and also protect their customers identities.
What country do you live in? I live in the USA where people voted in a facist administration that thinks the Constitution is a quaint document that is exactly where it belongs in a museum. If we could wrap copper around the founding fathers we wouldn't need foreign oil. Their spinning bodies could power the country for the next thousand years. If you mod this funny you aren't paying attention
1. Fascism isn't a product of the right, it's more leftist. You aren't even using the term correctly.
2. The Bush administration does not compare in ideology to Hitler nor Mussolini. By regurgitating the internet group think you add nothing to the conversation, but you do get a +5 from the other monkeys that agree with you.
3. Clinton and Bush's attempt to pass the line item veto is a much larger violation of the constitution then anything in the patriot act.
4. Yes, our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves, but most likely it would be over congress having surrendered most of its power to the executive branch over the past 80 years. The rest of the rolling would be over social programs like welfare. When you run around quoting Ben Franklin about "Trading freedom for security", do you realize he was talking about taxes?
5. There is plenty of things the Bush administration has done that can be argued are ineffective, or just wrong. Framing your arguement with "OMG BUSH IS FACIST" is worthless.
6. Bring the pirate party to the USA!
I know you're joking (I looked up your previous posts) but you must realise that there are people who actually believe that, and people in power who WANT you to actually believe that.
It's the government's job to protect me from you, not to protect me from me.
And America's national religion isn't Christianity, it's Capitalism. We worship nothing but money here; at least, our leaders worship nothing but money and the power it buys. They use Christianity to keep the cows who think they're sheep in check.
Yeah, better kill the children now. Afterall, some of them will grow up to be axe murderers and that's just horrible. Baby, bathwater, freedom what's the difference?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not sure if you are joking, but your insinuation that "encryption is only-to-get-away-with-crime" is not correct.
There are plenty of good, legitimate reasons to want your internet connection to be safe from wiretaps.
If you lived in China, for instance, and wanted to browse pro-democracy websites, or religious websites, or anything else under the allegedly-censored regime, then the pirate party's tool could be quite helpful until the government cracked it, at which time it could just give the user a false sense of security.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Freedom does have risks, but the danger with issues like this is that for society to function effectively, with freedom must come responsibility, and vice versa. That means if the "wrong guys" win an election, they can be removed from office when they go too far. If "bad guys" walk down the street with a gun and shoot someone, then someone else is likely to shoot them.
While completely secure communication is no doubt a worthy goal in some respects, the danger is that it will be very difficult for society to hold those who abuse the system accountable for their actions if the system also permits anonymous transmission. Contrary to the claim in TFA, there really aren't that many places where anonymity is an effective requirement, and there are certainly plenty of damaging ways to abuse anonymity: think how much nicer the world would be without spam, viruses, phishing/on-line fraud, web sites offering bad advice on critical subjects like finances and medical treatment, and so on.
I have long been in two minds on this subject. On the one hand, I am not generally a supporter of complete anonymity for publicly available material, because for the reasons above I question whether the gains really outweigh the costs in practice. On the other hand, I am a strong believer in the idea that any technology is neutral and what matters is how it's used by those who have access to it. On this basis, we might suppose that even if we were to deny secure, anonymous electronic communication to "bad guys", those people will simply find other, less technologically "clever" ways of communicating privately. The problem isn't the secure communication; it's that bad people want to use it to discuss doing bad things.
I find my views on anonymity softening, however, in light of one inescapable fact: the one guaranteed constant in the debate is that different people will have different views, and not everyone will respect the same authorities to judge what is and is not responsible use of any freedom to transmit anonymously. In the absence of any absolute standard of authority, it is impossible to define what is and is not responsible in a universally applicable way. Thus we come back to freedom of expression and the threat to it posed by denying anonymity.
Perhaps a better way to deal with the problems caused by anonymity is for society to learn not to trust anonymous sources. If no-one ever gave up their details in phishing attacks, then no-one would bother attempting the attacks. Ditto buying things advertised through spam, etc. And if no-one trusted anonymous sources for important advice, then the damaging web sites would not arise. I suspect that there will always be problems with more personal issues like defamation, because it seems to be human nature to assume that there is no smoke without fire, but at least if we collectively grew up enough not to trust unsubstantiated assertions the problem would be diminished.
So I think my views are swinging towards the long-term benefits of absolute anonymity over the short-term benefits of disallowing it. Of course, this may all be a moot point anyway. If the people want anonymous communication, then they're going to get it sooner or later, whether any particular government likes it or not.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You know, there is that thing called "common sense" that everyone else seems to be lacking. Or have a different version of than YOU do, which causes them to have different opinions.
Idea 1 :
What I, HUMAN, buy, when I buy anyTHING, it BELONGS TO ME, as in "MY book, MY cd-rom, MY computer, MY audio cd, MY dvd."
And I can do whatever I want with it, and the first thing I do with each and every data support is to rip and copy it, in hopes of gaining the ability to enjoy it when the support has become unusable (re-sold, given away, destroyed, lost, scratched, missing, stolen, borrowed). I buy a CD, not a nebulous right to play recorded music. I buy a round disc that holds many ones and zeroes, which represent music that can be played back when the round thing is inserted in a suitable device. That is a little far-fetched from buying a right to listen to music.
You see, THAT is what I call common sense: WHEN YOU BUY SOMETHING, IT'S YOURS.
Idea 2 :
"Information wants to be free" : bullshit. Information IS free. It belongs in the mind of each and everyone that wants it. Information is free because it can be replicated at no cost. Which leads to
Idea 3 :
Blah blah the cost of production blah blah : bullshit. A movie that does not return its initial investment in theater tickets many times over in the first week is a commercial failure. Oh, I know, the video market gains The Industry many many more $ even, but I say fuck them. They've earned enough money already. And they might earn even more if I could actually BUY the dvds ($30 a film? Yeah, right. Make that $10 and I'll buy them in six-packs.)
The production costs for a music album could be repaid many times over, too : The more people buy the hardware (i.e. the CD, or whatever other support) or the concert tickets, the more $ you get as a musician. The more people download your music, the more people will listen to it. THAT costs you NOTHING AT ALL.
Idea 4:
MY common sense tells me that, as there are zillions of people downloading exabytes of data on various darknets, the statistical chance anyone (i.e. you, reader, or me, writer) will ever be prosecuted for filesharing is very, very near zero.
Other ideas :
What "copyrighted material"? I can't copy a CD with its artwork, booklet, and sell the copies. Chinese industries do that, they have printing and CD presses. The ones where CDs get lawfully produced in the day and pirate-copied at night. That amounts to the same as printing money, then: the value of "copyrighted material" is non-zero at industrial scales.
Or distributed, as in "ten million BitTorrent users and counting" - the very same people that DO buy round plastic things in artfully decorated jewel cases. But they do not steal anyTHING. Thus, no theft, no crime.
Now, for software. Oh, make everything free for non-commercial use already, or so cheap that it would be more profitable for users to actually buy it instead of d/l'ing the crack from badly-coded, malware-infested and porn-ad-riddled crack sites. I'd have paid, oh, happily 10 to 20 for the whole Creative Suite 2, instead of waiting for a week for Azureus to DL it in English first and in French later. I'm a student and I'm not gonna see a ROI on that before the next version or the one after anyway. Now come sue me, Adobe, with your lawyers at [one year's student's expenses] a day. And it's not as if I didn't have to have the FULL version, not those castrated student editions. Yes, I know, I must still buy the hardware, but it's pretty hard to download it off the 'Net. And it CAN NOT BE COPIED AT ZERO COST. That's why hardware can be stolen. Not software. (Stealing the box in which the software comes IS theft, copying bits around is NOT.)
And while I'm at it, I'm gonna type another rant : hardware prices. Hey, nVidia, does a Quadro chip REALLY cost you one hundred times more to produce than a crippled GeForce *200? Didn't think so, either.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.