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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.'"
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.FTA: "We got Dugg pretty hard and expect Slashdot to come visiting at any time now."
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?
Quite possibly, but the facts that its: 1) a different country, with a separate legal system that seems to deliver what the US constitution promises 2) A European Union country, which has demonstrated a much less media industry friendly policy and 3) a different judicial system, so that US laws don't apply, and US legal precedents won't have much weight suggest to me that it will offer quite a bit of protection. A terrorist might get caught up in the legal web, but the RIAA will have their costs raised by a couple of orders of magnitude, and Jesus, that's alright with me (cue guitars...)
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
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
Records? What Records?!
DYWYPI?
I think the point is that it's (1) based in Sweeden, (2) encrypted end-to-end, (3) as anonymous as you want it to be based on the information you provide to them, and (4) fairly strongly protected legally in the jurisdiction it operates in.
1 and 4 being pretty big for USians who are using it...2 for people whose ISPs filter. 3, dubiously so, as at some point they have your credit card saying that you have an account although I suppose that, if they don't store your tunnel account with your CC number, they have no way of getting to you personally.
It doesn't matter if someone nefarious is on the same link-local segment sniffing all your traffic, if they can't identify through technological means who you are, and can't compel the provider through legal means either because they didn't keep that information or just won't give it over.
I understand it that it's business and laws as usual here too, of course, but if they're enforced of leaving out user details, I wonder what exact differences their unconventional subscriber register has compared to a regular one. They don't seem to go into detail of that, and I'd guess that is the most interesting part here.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
They have a contract with Labs2 (run by the former ceo and founder of bredbandsbolaget) so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.
For example;
There's a zillion reasons really. But more importantly, you shouldn't need any reason at all. The simple fact is, there exist people who would prefer, atleast sometimes, being anonymous online.
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.
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
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
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.
Snuff films are not real. And the problem with pedophilia isn't the transmission of images of the sexual abuse of children, it's when actual sexual abuse of children goes on.
Freedom has risks. If you have free elections, the "wrong" guys might win. If you have secure communications, "terrorists" might use them to make plans. If you have the right to keep and bear arms, "bad guys" may have guns.
But if you believe in freedom, you're very very wary of the state getting to define who the "wrong" guys, the "terrorists", the "bad guys", are. Consider that Martin Luther King Jr. was a target of COINTELPRO; consider Nixon's "enemies list"; consider the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dredd Scott decision, the Alien and Sedition acts, the Red Scares, the concentration camps for Japanese Americans...
And? "Anarchy" means no ruling hierarchy. Some people think that's a good idea, especially when it comes to communication. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, "A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of `monopoly in the means of production.' Since man extends his nervous system though channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood