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Pirate Bay To Offer VPN For $7 a Month
Death Metal sends along an Ars Technica piece about The Pirate Bay's plans for a virtual private network service to help ensure its users' privacy. "The Pirate Bay is planning to launch a paid VPN service for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting. The new service will be called IPREDator, named after the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that will go into effect in April. IPREDator is currently in private beta and is expected to go public next week for €5 per month. ... IPREDator's website says that it won't store any traffic data, as its entire goal is to help people stay anonymous on the web. Without any data to hand over, copyright owners won't be able to find individuals to target. ... The question remains, however, if any significant portion of The Pirate Bay's users will decide to fork over 5 Euro per month solely to remain anonymous. It seems more likely that the majority either won't care, or will simply start looking for lesser-known torrent trackers to use."
No other function than circumventing copyright? Hey, I want to use it to send spam. Er, I mean, trade kiddie porn. Er, I mean, send death threats to politicians. Er, I mean, get around my employer's websense(tm).
Oops, ignore all the above. I meant to say I want to use it to post political samizdat to wikileaks.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yeah, and the advertising revenue. And the donations. And yeah, the overflow from the VPN charges. They profit by facilitating distribution of the work of others, while providing no actual value themselves. Tricky accounting and semantic arguments don't change anything in that regard.
Even if you are using a VPN, you are still connecting to an IP administered by TPB. That is cause for suspicion even if nobody can read the data. What excuse have you got for connecting to TPB at all ? Whether the authorities can see the torrents is irrelevant.
Your arguments are specious because this VPN is not for browsing but "for users looking to cover their tracks when torrenting". Browsing does not enter into the picture because of the stated use of the VPN.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
I see I'm flamebait am I ? Seems the kids have got mod points today.
Consider a man who regularly visits a brothel that the police are watching. When arrested he claims he was only there because he liked the piano playing. Either grow a pair and use TPB in the open, or attempt to hide by subscribing to a service that is run by TPB and is obviously designed to obscure the type of traffic passing over it. What do you think the authorities are going to think ? Are there no other VPN services that are not run by TPB ? Why did you choose to buy service from them, especially since most of you are in the US and TPB is in Sweden ? It is not a fucking game.
Your protestations that you are using the VPN legitimately look silly when the authorities will keep confiscating servers, and shutting down access. Surely anybody with half a brain would want a reliable service, not one subject to legal interference every 5 minutes, especially since you claim you are not using it for nefarious purposes. And don't give me any crap about downloading linux isos. I know of no linux distribution that relies on TPB as a tracker or even for publicity.
I have nothing against TPB, but this is just stupid. Like a small child trying to hide something by swapping it from hand to hand, you are so obvious you just make things worse.