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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."
This has been the main problem with the beta as no one has been able to login to the vpn.
I don't think anyone thought this thing through.
Black Servers won't go away, because they are impossible to find and stop.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Black server - server using encrypted comms that is not publicly know
Darknet - layer on top of internet that uses encryption, multiple hop routing and other techniques to disguise nodes activity from each other
That's my understanding of it anyhow. I2P and freenet are the only darknets I know about. I wouldn't go near 'em, personally.
Shoun't that be Virtual Pirate Network?
It's entered Beta? Hardly news, I got my invite on the 1st of July, it contained a unique HTTPS URL which was the only way to access the login page. I signed up (and paid up), connected the VPN after following the simple steps to create a Windows VPN connection. My IP then geo-located to somewhere in Sweden. It's nice, cheap and easy solution, assuming it does indeed remain anonymous. Speeds are pretty much wirespeed on my 5MB ADSL in the UK.
that here in the USA, using a service like this (and subsequently being caught) can stiffen any penalties or jail time your may receive because you're actively obstructing justice.
Post your damn initials in your signature spot. God almighty it's so pretentious when people put their initials in their posts.
AC
I actually wrote my own at one point that tunneled itself steganographically using decent crypto disguised inside webcam sessions. Unfortunately, the throughput was abyssal, and of course--it was pretty difficult to get 'real' network behavior.
I wouldn't say the point of a darknet is to hide a node's activity from one another--so much as it is to conceal their presence from anything not in the darknet. Tor helps hide a nodes activity from another node (sort of), but isn't a darknet. Freenet--you can search for, but generally speaking you can't find other nodes in freenet trivially. I'd call it a greynet.
What's wrong with freenet?
It works beautifully for its intended purpose, even if there's a sad amount of...malcontent littered throughout it. Despite the nastyness that you store on your own hard drive (which you couldn't read anyway unless you want searching for it), it's not like you or anyone else could ever prove it was on your system--if they could, the very trial itself would necessitate proving a means to crack commonly used cryptographic protocols--keeping that secret (if it's possible) would be worth more to anyone than convicting you ever would be.
Amusing: Captcha = "crimes"
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.
Yes, Pirate Bay could secretly store that information, but I somehow doubt they would.
..right?
Yeah, because no one would think that the soon to be new CEO, who happens to be good friends with the RIAA, would ever do such a thing as log traffic or identifiable information. Right?