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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
...The cost of the service is 5 euros per month,...
It looks like it is at least a quasi-commercial darknet.
Ryan Fenton
Basically, this gives users the advantage of a Swedish IP address from anywhere in the world.
That's what I call massaging the numbers!
(Unfortunately,) I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waiter.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...
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
FTA: "We got Dugg pretty hard and expect Slashdot to come visiting at any time now."
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...
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
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.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
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
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 get nervous when things world gets so tense that some people don't recognise a joke like this anymore...
X.
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.
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...'
You forgot to mention "think of the children!".
Great Intellect...
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.
"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
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.
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.
Well, the FBI can't even catch them when they do use wiretaps, so who cares.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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
I applaud their honesty, but I'm not convinced on this "you pay us monthly, and we'll destroy the service" business model.
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
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
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.
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."
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
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
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?
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 trouble with true freedom is that you have to give it to people you don't like.
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
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.
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.
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)
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!
This is just down right, unamerican. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.' Its the governments job to watch over us and make sure we follow the teachings of jesus.
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 wouldn't admit to having read that particular trainwreck if I were you ;)
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.