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.'"

Comments

Re:Rock On Dude

[RShizzle]

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?

So it is an encrypted proxy service

[appleprophet]

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...

Re:So it is an encrypted proxy service

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should stop basing your price estimates on what you're currently paying in USA. I currently pay roughly $10 per month for my 100 Mbit line, both directions I might add. Though I rarely get to use it all unless I'm using a domestic server.

Feels nice though to grab a DVD from Usenet in about 15-20 minutes.

Darknet?

[Matt Perry]

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.

Re:Question?

[evilviper]

Ok, you are either copying me (your post id is one larger) or that is plain SCARY.

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.

Re:Awesome!

[stinerman]

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.

They already use something like this. If you were doing something really illegal, like planning to kill thousands of people, would you send it in the mail or speak about it over an unsecure line?

The problem (is it a problem?) with freedom is that people will abuse it. In this case, the right is privacy. If you outlawed crypto for fear of terrorists using it they would just use other methods. It might not be SSL/TLS/etc. but simple keywords. For instance, it could be agreed upon at a meeting that if the heist/bombing/etc. is going to go ahead, I speak to you about my mother. If not, I could speak to you about my father. Simple things that like that is essentally all they'd need to do to circumvent any outlawed crypto. The counter to that is to monitor the communcations of every last person on earth for all time.

Here, I'd hope you'd understand that the solution is worse than the problem. So that terrorists can't use tools that law abiding citizens use, you'd have to totally eliminate privacy and have everyone monitored all the time.

Warning! Not Anonymous

[bananaendian]

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.

Re:Question?

[mwvdlee]

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.