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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.'"
From TFA:
One question we get is if this works in the US. Yes, it does.
It looks like just a PPTP connection to a Swedish ISP, doling out some Swedish IP addresses. I'm curious as to the speed the service offers. What's the pipe feeding into Relakks?
I am very skeptical. My question is, how can they afford that much bandwidth? Given that their target market consists largely of P2P users, how can they tunnel all of a heavy bittorrent user's encrypted traffic for only $6.50 a month? It sounds to me like they should get into the ISP business or file hosting business instead...
I wasn't quite sure what a Darknet was so I had to read the wikipedia article. According to wikipedia it's a network where "users only connect to people they trust". If that's the case then that's different than what the linked article in the /. summary is talking about. According to it this is "a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged." If anyone can connect, I can't trust them all. It would only take one person within the web of trust to ruin it for everyone. Besides, if data eventually has to make it to me then there's always a way to locate the destination and source.
This article seems like BS.
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Man what a great idea. Justifying the 99% of the traffic on this thing that is piracy with 1% of "secret communications", of which a significant chunk is going to be concerning other law breaking, laws likely worse than piracy. Wire taps are the tools of opressive society! Oh and also the tools to catch mobsters and terrorists, I guess. But don't worry, I'm sure the people who wanted to blow up thousands of westerners on planes about this time wouldn't figure out how to use something like this.
I'm confused as to what that means...will they be turning over your source IP at the specific point in time, will they be linking your source IP to your VPN IP at a specific point in time, will they be linking you VPN IP to your name and address at a specific point in time, or what?
.. *g*
My _guess_ is that they're never under any obligation to keep a record of your source IP, and thus they can never give that away.
The service is pre-paid. If they have done their homework it's up to you if you enter your real details. All you really need is a secret token of some sorts (password, certificate) and all they need is to make sure that reaches whatever means of communication you entered when they've got paid (anonymous mail, sms etc).
Note: I have no idea if that is how they've done it - if they haven't, they should. I'm sure Rick managed to get hold of a few people with security know-how in creating this service. If not, he knows where to find them
it's in my head
In other words...
DUPE! DUPE! DUPE!
Okay, everyone can mod him down (-1 Redundant) now, for being a fraction of a second slower than you to submit.
You should be happy that this is nothing major. I heard an American sniper tell a story of when he was assigned to kill a Vietnamese sniper. The American's bullet went straight down the scope of the Vietnamese sniper's riffle, and killed him. If the American had pulled the trigger just a bit slower, it would have been the other guy telling the exact same story.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I agree, but you will find slashdot swamped with people who think they have a 'right' to take your hard work, and cloak this theft under some truly lame argument about 'information wanting to be free'. They are communists, as their actions clearly show, but they tend to get annoyed when described as such.
If your believe you have a right to take anything you need, regardless of your means to pay, i cant see how your not an anarchist or a communist. Especially if its software, music , dvds or games. These arent food or shelter, rights dont come into it. Nobody is born with an inate right to enjoy all episodes of "24" for free.
ho hum.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Actually a lot of it comes from the ability to devalue the currency by printing money on demand.
The police, intelligence services, military industrial complex for instance have to be paid. You can do that by raising taxes, or by printing more money. Raising taxes is the obvious way to do it, but how popular are you going to be if you increase income and sales taxation? You'd be out at the next election.
Well, you control the printing presses, so just print more money, pay the services and suppliers with this new money, you can do what you like then without raising taxation and pissing off the electorate. Unfortunately, money like any commodity is subject to the laws of supply and demand so if you increase the amount of money around, each dollar becomes worth less and you have inflation, though you can easily deflect that blame on to others; Oil suppliers, employee wage demands, greedy retailers etc.
If the government was unable to print money (actually to borrow it) on demand, it's power to wage war, to pay for expensive surveillance etc would be very severely curtailed because it would have to raise taxation to pay for these services.
If you really want to limit the power of governments, then you have to remove or reduce their ability to create money on demand. If you're a libertarian for instance and really believe in small government then move your savings out of your local currency and into some other commodity; Property, gold, silver, shares etc.
Deleted
How long would it work from China through the great firewall or say Thailand through TRUE's Bluecoat proxy ? once pptp.relakks.com is blocked whats the next step. Can it be made to run from a flash mem stick - or are you required to have admin rights on the machine you wish to use ?
...I obey the laws of physics....
Do you think ISP's of this nature will be required by some anti-terror law to maintain records of surfing? Surely if BT have to, this compnay should? maybe i'll re-read tfa.
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
Exactly what I hate about "Based on a True Story". Disney is the worst of them all (See: )
Anything "Based on a True Story" is 99% fiction, and 1% facts, and that 1% is usually just details like names of individuals and places, even though they probably don't match the appearance of the people/places whos names they have used.
Speilberg openly admits the sniper scene in Saving Private Ryan is based on the (anachronistic) Vietnam-era story of Carlos Hathcock, which I relayed (who knew it would get modded up?).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The claim that this service provides anonymity and immunity to logging is only true in a very limited sense! This is basically a simple one level proxy which keeps access records which the authorities can get their hands on if they "suspect" a crime is being committed. Sweden is signator to various levels of intellegence sharing deals on international crime and terrorism so none of the Swedish laws on privacy have effect if some outside government presents "reasonable suspicion" of a crime being committed. And no, you don't have to be a terrorist or kiddy pron baron to be concerned here - tyrannical governments have been known throughout history to use any means to available to them suppress and oppress their citizens...
Tor on the otherhand can claim to provide a level of true anonymity because of the 'onion routing' concept. A potential adversary would have to infiltrate the network with enough fake nodes to get to both the input end (to get the ip) and the the exit node (to get the traffic) and then do some traffic analysis to match these two together in order to figure out who is doing what. This being very resource intensive, such capability would only be available to the highest levels of intellegence gathering and even then only for a limited set of survaillance targets.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Perhaps the records that Relakks claims only need to be handed over when there is a possibility on 2+ years imprisonment under Swedish law?
There are records, Relakks implies so themselves. It's just that Relakks claims to not hand them over readily.
Considering how effective the *AA's have been at getting access to private information based solely on completely meaningless evidence (a screen printout with filenames that look like copyrighted material), I have to wonder how easy it would be for the Swedish *AA-a-like to make up a bogus claim which could potentially get somebody imprisoned for 2 years.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Aw, c'mon, it's more complicated than that. Certainly there are a bunch of kids just blindly filling up their hard drives with IP booty (you never did that in college???). But there are reasonable people that selectively pirate. For instance, I went into a CompUSA one time a few years ago and was shooting the shit with one of the Mac salespeople in there. He was telling me about how he was pretty into photography, so I asked what program he uses to edit his photos. He laughed at me and said "Photoshop, why what do you use?". I told him that I hadn't found anything suitable for the price range I was willing to pay. He and another associate laughed at me and said, "Dude, just get a pirated copy! Do you really think that they expect a hobbiest to pay $500 for a photo editing program?" Note that this was pre-Elements, so there was some logic in that arguement, and damnit, I got myself a pirated copy the next time I was in Malaysia for $1.50. Am I a dirty, low-down pirate? Perhaps, but I sleep well at night. I pay for reasonably priced software. I just bought RapidWeaver, an excellent demo-ware product.
Another example - P2P music sharing. I believe the geeks of the world have a duty to try to destroy the RIAA's business model. Their organization has many of the elements of organized crime, from intimidation tactics up to and including complicit politicians. They are not as bad as the mafia, since there is not any physical violence, but they are nasty nonetheless. While I do not file share using P2P anymore because I am spineless and afraid of their lawsuits, many of my friends regularly share hundreds of gigs of MP3s via external hard drives. You can argue that Madonna, U2, Britanny Spears... none would be possible if this ideology were to be taken to an extreme. GOOD. That's my goal.
A friend of mine is an IP lawyer, and it drives him nuts that I have this attitude. He says that I'm simply doing what I'm doing because I'm selfish. I pointed out that that's what drives EVERYONE, including his clients, and he had to agree. The high ground here is not the legal ground, in my opinion. Obviously, your opinion differs - and that's okay. I just hope we win this little battle.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Which only means the local **AA will have to make bigger accusations and provide some more meaningless evidence to make them seem plausible (the quality of the evidence isn't called into question until a trial commences, after they obtained a legal order to get your personal information).
I'm not knowledgable of Swedish law, but this is pretty much how it works in most of the western world.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The three holes that really matter are (1) If a message has been encrypted using a one-time pad, then it's absolutely unbreakable; every plaintext of the right length is equally plausible. There are other encryption systems that can lead to multiple plaintexts, including some that allow the sender deliberately to implant an innocuous message which will do less damage if discovered. (2) You can certainly brute-force a key, knowing that a particular algorithm was used; but you can't brute-force an algorithm. (3) If the only copy of the source code to implement the Digital Fortress algorithm had been encrypted using Digital Fortress, then you would still need a copy of the Digital Fortress binary with which to decrypt the source code. And it'd be quicker just to disassemble that {and guess variable and function names} than to piss around trying to decrypt it.
How likely would a real-life crypto expert be not to work out the meaning of "without wax" in one go {presumably she would know at least a few words in a few languages}, much less spot obvious anagrams such as NDAKOTA = TANKADO? Not knowing the name of the coin used in a country is hardly forgivable either! You can find out what the currency of Spain is in any travel agent. Clue: it's not the Peseta!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If this is a serious problem for content creators then they should simply stop creating. Right now, despite piracy, people are STILL making enough money that they'd rather be in that business than flipping burgers and can sustain it. But if they're really hurting, then they should go and flip burgers or become lawyers or whatever so they can make ends meet, rather than expecting the courts to force people to pay for their stuff.
Extracting fines for people seeing information without the creators permission is more theft than copying their information ever was, and I certainly don't want a system where that is their means of income. In my mind, rather than living in a world like that I'd by far prefer all of these injured content creators to simply stop creating content, if it hurts them so much to do so.
Either people will say 'What, no more music? That sucks! Hey, will anyone make a song for me if I give them this donation?' (or groups will do so), or people will say 'Huh... There's less music, but strangely I don't miss it so much, and I can find people who are still willing to make music for free as their hobby or use alternate methods to extract an income from making music.'
Everyone keeps saying 'if we didn't have copyright, there would be no creativity'. Well, I'm saying put it on the line and try it. Speaking for myself, it won't stop me from doing research or writing software if I can't hold a copyright on those things.
Not trying to burn Digg, but every time I've had any discussions there, I always assumed I was talking to HS kids. The mental picture I have of every poster there is some under-16 Apple/Xbox 360 fanboy or Linux/Windows newbie. If there are more mature people there, I haven't been able to tell from their posts.
/. limits the number of mod points that are given out, so people don't just mod everything until there's a picture perfect promotion of a popular product.
The mod system is pretty sad there too. If you post in a topic about Apple, XBox, or any other popular "community", and your post is even neutral (not fanboyish), it will be modded down instantly. That's probably why