Slashdot Mirror
Swedish Pirate Party Launches ISP
WillDraven writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that the Swedish Pirate Party has launched an ISP. Starting with 100 residents in a housing organization in the city of Lund, Pirate ISP hopes to gain 5% of the market in Lund before spreading to other markets. Headed by longtime Pirate Party member Gustav Nipe (video interview in English), the company aims to provide Internet service with the sort of guarantees one would expect from the Pirate Party. Most notable are the promises to keep no logs of subscriber activity and thus to provide no data to law enforcement or private corporations."
Please spread to other countries...
But isn't it better to trust people with freedom than to treat everyone like criminals?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
And? People use highways for illegal things. They use their homes for illegal things. Hell, they probably use government buildings for illegal things. Cracking down on freedoms in the name of a minority of miscreants is never a good thing.
and I bet the Pirate Party and the network engineers and system administrators that they hire will be at least smart enough to straight filter, either at the packet level at the border, or application level on the mail servers, any traffic coming from IP ranges known to belong to the RIAA, MPAA, or constituent organizations. That's what I'd do. Or segment abuse@ off on its own area, let it take the hammering, and spit all the addresses back via feedback loops and get their email black listed. Or... run the mail server on OpenBSD, where spamd is linked to pf, and accept the incoming connections from their mass-mailer at 1bps, thus backlogging the sender and screwing them over (disk i/o issues, etc). Fun stuff like that.
... people start using it for child pornography transfer and other things that SHOULD be illegal.
This is precisely why these things shouldn't be illegal. At least, possession and transfer of information (including child pornography) shouldn't be illegal. (Of course, abusing children to make child pornography should be illegal, and child pornography itself could very well be evidence of a crime.) The problem is, as soon as you make certain kinds of information illegal, then it would be impossible for ISPs to provide the kind of anonymity many of us would desire. Child pornography makes a wonderful excuse to impose strict data retention laws that affect a wide variety of users.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
...that a special ISP has to be launched to get the type of protections every ISP should have.
Then this ISP can set up an autoreply that gets triggered by "DMCA" in the body, informing the sender that the DMCA is an american law and totally irrelevant in most other countries. (though writing such replies manually can be a lot of fun, I did plenty of that when I worked as abuse-handler at a large webhost in Denmark. A lot of American lawyer-types really can't get it into their thick skulls that american laws are not universal, and if they have a valid complaint they need to say so (and be specific!) instead of just waving around a wand, trying to invoke the magical DMCA.)
Downloading child pornography is a major crime?
It's better to let a guilty man go free than convict an innocent.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I'm not sure if you're trolling or trying to be funny but that's just fucking scary.
Yes, because the ** Association of America will send DMCA (an American law) notices to a Swedish ISP. You know what the Pirate Bay does with those letters now? They post them up on a page and laugh at them.
That's a false dichotomy. You can be allowed freedom to speak while still being able to be found when you use that freedom to engage in criminal activities or to organize acts of terrorist destruction.
If you can be found and punished for that then you can be found and punished when you want to speak out against your government, when you want to say unpopular things, support unpopular positions or organize acts of civil protest.
"... this age of terrorism and child pornography ..."
What the hell? You think this age is "different" some how?
Terrorism is certainly not rampant. Look back a few decades, to say, the fifties or the sixties when there were riots all over the USA.
Child Pornography, hell. Look back a century, "children" were getting married to middle-aged men and having their babies. The only difference is, back then nobody arrested you for it, or even thought twice about it.
"This age" is noted only for everybody being declared a criminal and living in fear that their government is going to lock them up if they happen to say something ... like, say, this post on SlashDot RIGHT HERE.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
If you want to make analogies, do it right. There is no "just in case" recording of everything I do in my home so that cops can get a warrant and watch what I did. Even for "live" investigations, there's a high legal barrier before a cop can enter my home. If someone just accuses me of stealing something, it is not sufficient for a warrant. On the internet, with most ISPs, not only is there a record which ties my online activities to my identity, there's also almost no barrier if someone wants to access that information.
logging every site that every user visits through an ISP just in case law enforcement want to check up on it later to see if they're viewing illegal material is like putting a camera in every bedroom just in case law enforcement want to check up on it later to see if you've been raping victims in the room.
an equivalent to a warrant to search your house would be a warrant to search your computer not having your ISP recording everything you view for future inspection.
You left out the "on the mail servers" part of his post. Meaning that the filtering is done for incoming email to the ISP itself, not traffic in general.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Would that be Pirate_Party.arg?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
That's going to be fun for the admins when the server falls over and they need to figure out why. /var/log is there for a reason.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
I think that'll be small potatoes compared to the fact that every black hat, spammer, script kiddie, phisherman, fraudster, terrorist, and mobster can safely do whatevery they want and not have to worry about it. If this ISP manages to grow to any decent size I'd expect it would turn into the pariah of the Internet with admins everywhere blocking the IPs becuase they don't want to put up with all the crap that hit's their servers.
Swedish ISP's as a rule don't have limits and tend to cost something along the line of $10 to $40 depending on bandwidth and extra services.
Child pornography is a red herring, a talking point cynically trotted out by politicians and duly repeated ad nauseam by the unthinking masses. I've seen nothing to suggest that its prevalence is any more than anecdotal, yet it is repeatedly used as an excuse to promulgate laws that shape the future of our society. It's our time's Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood.
The stupid pirate party and the stupid Swedish government have just handed a huge propaganda victory to the RIAA. Within a week the entire swedish economy will have ground to a halt and terrorists will be overrunning sweden and building WMDs! Then the RIAA will say "We told you so! Look what happens when ordinary people are allowed freedom!"
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I think that'll be small potatoes compared to the fact that every black hat, spammer, script kiddie, phisherman, fraudster, terrorist, and mobster can safely do whatevery they want and not have to worry about it.
You know what? I say good. Just like how the government needs a warrant to tap your phone, it's absurd to think it's ok for them to monitor everything everyone does on the internet. The government has no authority to stop people from having private conversations in person or on the phone, the internet shouldn't be any different.
This is just like how each time a new form of media comes out, the MPAA / RIAA try to sue for using it for "piracy" - just because the internet is a "new" form of communication, they want to ignore laws against spying on people.
Freedom doesn't just apply when you want it to apply.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Child Pornography, hell. Look back a century, "children" were getting married to middle-aged men and having their babies. The only difference is, back then nobody arrested you for it, or even thought twice about it.
I know, that always kills me. People try to say that they're "kids", yet not that long ago they would be married at that age. Hell, people try to talk down on teenagers and say that they're stupid and such, but it's only because society changed to make them less responsible. 100 years ago many of those high schoolers would have had a job and a family already. That's how things were for thousands of years, then all of the sudden society goes batshit crazy and decides that anyone under 30 is incompetent and needs the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.
I'm all for punishing people who intentionally harm others. However, I'm not for having blanket rules because a few old people who had crappy lives decide that they know better than everyone else.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
ECHELON is now on your tail. Good luck! :)
http://thepiratebay.org/legal
Dilbert RSS feed
The problem that you seem to be missing is that morals are subjective. Your morals may not apply to me. For instance, if I feel it is morally wrong for you to discuss football because I feel that football and it's "Us vs them" mentality has destroyed American politics, do I have the right to find you and stop you (or punish you) for violating my morals?
The fact that everyone doesn't automatically recognize this fact instantly is what scares the GP (and me).
In fact, I'm reluctant to hit submit because it's hard to believe it's not a troll, but it was written with a sincere sounding naivety so I'll give it a go :)