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Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Enters Beta Testing
schliz writes "Developers of The Pirate Bay have launched their new Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to some 180,000 pre-registered beta testers. An e-mail to beta testers read. 'IPREDator does not store any personal details about its clients. IPREDator does not store any traffic habits you might have. IPREDator is the key to a free internet in the renaissance of censorship!' The new service was launched to protect file sharers in response to the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that went into effect in April."
... so many people being given assurance of "complete privacy", wonder how many will believe it almost blindly, indulge in piracy (or whatever the civilized world calls it), get caught and get into unnecessary trouble. And what are the bets that the demographics of these 180,000 people is among some of the better placed and prosperous human beings on this planet? About getting into trouble part, I do hope I am wrong though...
Capitalism is the Opium of the Masses; Customer is King is the slogan.
And what are the bets that the demographics of these 180,000 people is among some of the better placed and prosperous human beings on this planet?
Well, considering that they HAVE a computer, are most likely using it (at least during TPB activities) for leisure instead of survival, understand enough of broadband network technology to realize encryption is useful for their activity, understand VPNs, understand encryption, appreciate anonymity, and apply all of it to the indicated activity, I dare say that they're in all likelihood doing much better than the half of the world's population trying to get by on less than $2/day. ... is there a problem with that? Why do you call them out as "some of the better placed and prosperous human beings on this planet"?
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I fear you're probably right. But it is messed up that "taking steps to avoid sharing your personal information with your ISP" can be construed as "actively obstructing justice."
A person who does nothing illegal might want to use this service simply because they value privacy.
I dunno. If I were a Fed, I'd break Freenet like this:
Fed: "We have a bunch of nodes on the darknet that contain Bad Things."
Judge: "What's a node?"
Fed: "We surfed for Bad Things on Fed1, wrote the offending keys of the Very Worst Things into a textfile, and then ran a script on Fed2 that downloaded a whole bunch of the Very Worst Things. Fed2 is running a modified client that doesn't save chunks that are being passed through it to other machines. Therefore, the only stuff in its datastore is stuff that got there from our own requests. Then we walked away from Fed2's keyboard and let it stew for a few hours."
Judge: ......
Fed: "Right. When a request for a chunk comes in, and Fed2 doesn't have it, we just pass the request on to the next node. When a chunk comes through from some other node, our modified client passes it on without storing it locally."
Judge: *blank stare*
Fed: "...we add the requestor's IP address to the list of IP addresses for which we have probable cause to believe are requesting - or facilitating - the transmission of Bad Things. By the way, here's the list."
Judge: "Signed. Go get 'em."
I think the above changes might more accurately reflect reality.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
I'm sorry, but you are thinking logically. don't worry, it happens all the time to those of us with IT experience. You see, you are walking the steps from a-z and seeing that logically it would make no sense.
The problem is we are talking Child porn here, a subject where common sense and logical thinking will NOT save you from PMITA prison. Just see Little Rascals Daycare and mcMartin preschool for examples. In McMartin you had kids claiming Chuck Norris was doing ritual slaughter of Elephants in a dungeon. Logically you or I would go "WTF?" but in the McMartin case they actually bulldozed it to the ground looking for the dungeon! And last I heard there were still two being held in PMITA prison over Little Rascals, where the prosecution actually had the brass balls to tell the defense if they actually did their job and defended their clients that THEY would be arrested for aiding child molestation!
So you see, while logic and common sense would tell you that having a Freenet node, where you don't actually have the keys to what is on your HDD would protect you. Sadly in reality they would throw you in PMITA prison until you produced the keys (which you don't have) or send you to prison for aiding and abetting child abuse because you have IT experience that should have given you the ability to know what was in those encrypted files. Believe me, as somebody who has had dealing with the cops asking for help in IT matters, logic rarely comes into play. I even had a state trooper get pissy with me because I couldn't/wouldn't attempt to hack a federal server at the building where his wife worked so he could read his wife's emails and let him see if she was cheating.
Sadly most cops and many prosecutors believe that hacker crap that they see on TV, like we all have little magic black boxes that let us blow through crypto and hack into any database. See? Reality doesn't matter if all the people after you believe is what they saw on Hackers.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.