Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe
Stoobalou contributes a link to this story at Thinq.co.uk, from which he excerpts: "Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden. Swedish Internet service provider ISP, which hosts both The Pirate Bay and whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks, earlier denied rumours of a police raid, saying that officers had visited them to ask questions over two suspect IP addresses, and that no computers or other goods had been seized."
Thepiratebay.org ? I just opened it, to check this. It works fine!
thepiratebay.org is still available to me here in Sweden.
Slashdot Beta should die a painful death.
Far be it from me to say that a /. submitter would rush to publish--but, as of the time of this posting, TBP is not down or offline. I simply stuck the URL in my browser, perhaps too rudimentary a method for testing?
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
too hard to check a site before submitting the story?
and it works fine in belgium too. I think the idea was to get it slashdotted, but they seem to have failed.
new sig
Now that governments across the globe are mobilizing armed men to eliminate file sharers, the world will be a perfect place. Certainly there is nothing worse than file sharing going on if this is their priority.
Pirate Bay is up and works. It's slow, so either there's been some damage or it's slashdotted.
Was that really too hard to check, Slashditors?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I can't believe that filesharing is given such a high priority by governments in Europe. The entertainment industry must have a VERY strong lobbying organization to pull that off. It's a pity that rape victims and other sufferers from really bad crimes are not as well organized and don't have such deep pockets as the entertainment industry.
-- Cheers!
Pirate Bay has been fine for me for the past 12 hours!
It WAS a bit slow around 4am today but it's been fine...
But whoever wrote that story should check their grammar, the main sentence is ambiguous at best:
was it:
"The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable (For Comment)"
or
"The Pirate Bay (Website is down and) is currently unavailable"
They sound similar but have totally different meanings
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
They were just investigating all the torrent/Wikileaks mirrors on rape and molestation charges.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The action, targeting the so-called 'Warez Scene', is said to have been in planning for two years, and is believed to have taken place at the request of Belgian authorities."
Ya, good luck with that. In the meantime new servers will come online and all the bits will be put back in order. This time, they will probably be put up in countries that won't answer the phone. Good job, 2 years of planning and I'm sure a heroic police effort, executing the warrants, will be undone in a matter of weeks. Welcome to the digital age.
It was down first try. fine 2nd time around... Seems a bit skitish
...had the EU produced Entertainment Industry content of their own worth pirating. But it was predominantly "Yankee Corporatist" wallets which stood to suffer, so high on European law enforcement agendas it was not. Hey, I love Dr. Who as much as the next guy, but I'm just saying the way it is...
These raids were apparently not about TPB or other torrent sites but rather aimed at scene topsites.
I've read some media industry "information" about the scene lately where they've compared it to organized crime (in the "making money from illegal activities" sense, not the "being organized" sense). Of course, approx 99% of those involved in the scene don't make money from their involvement but I guess it's a bit harder to make them out to be evil mafioso types if they're not actually making any money...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
just tried http://thepiratebay.org/ -- was down the first few times I tried, then up again... noticed some other posts saying the same...
poof!: prostitution will disappear
close down pirate bay... poof!: piracy disappears
right, right?
regardless of your stand on media piracy or prostitution, simply from a law enforcement point of view that assumes these "vices" are simply something illegal to be fought: i don't understand why you want to shut the hubs down
its not like shutting down craigslist or pirate bay is going to make piracy or prostitution go away. instead, you allow craigslist and pirate bay to continue, and you do your law enforcement job, and monitor the hubs. like shooting fish in a barrel: just respond to what's there. but without craigslist or the pirate bay, these "problems" are harder to catch and monitor
its almost as if law enforcement wants to drive these problems back underground again so they don't have to deal with them. out of sight, out of mind
which shows you the ambivalency with which modern society views stuff like piracy or prostitution: they are on the cusp of acceptability. its not like murder or rape, where the illegality of the actions are obvious and therefore the mandate and willpower to punish perps is 100%. instead, with stuff like prostitution and piracy, the willpower wanes, the commitment lapses, because the immorality of the actions is not clearcut
such that the law enforcement campaigns consist less of going after perpetrators, but just making them go underground and disappear from prominent view
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
... or the world is an awful place where governments world-wide don't care for anything important.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
That the police are enforcers for corporate overmasters rather then the people....
"Simultaneous raids are also said to have been carried out in The Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, Great Britain, the Czech Republic and Hungary."
Sweden (1904), Netherlands (1912), Belgium (1887), Norway (1896), Germany (1887), Great Britain (1887), Czech Republic (1993), and Hungary (1904) have all signed the Berne Convention among other agreements.
Sweden may have fairly loose laws when it comes to "sharing" protected work, but it also has international obligations that may seem more burdensome now than they did back in 1904.
I wonder if ACTA will have similar unforeseen consequences in one hundred years as today's act of file transmission and duplication was likely not considered back in the day of ink and presses.
That leaks guy gives us all a bad name !!
True, many pirates are criminals (rapists, swindlers, drug addicts, and of course microsoft employees) but we aren't all bad. Not that bad. Not really bad, anyway.
Don't you see that "Economic Growth" must be expressed in money, and that if people don't pay for it, but still consume it, it's not "growth", for the simple reason that we cannot measure it?
I mean... duh.
That's like curing cancer for free, and not getting rich of it. That's not growth, and therefore not progress... If you aim to improve this world without earning money, you clearly have your priorities wrong.
Police and governments exist to maximize measurable profit.
I've been trying to get on Pirate Bay this morning and most times my connection either times out or I get an error page about connecting to a caching server and only after mashing the reload button many times do I actually get a page.
Then again this could just be the effect of everyone reading news stories about it being down and trying to "test" if the site is up, thus overloading and taking down the server for real. Hooray for self-fulfilling prophecy!
1. TPB is not down, it is and has been up-just really really slow. TPB being slow is nothing new, it's been plagued with speed and reliability problems the entire summer. 2. TPB trackers were shut down a long time ago willfully. They still show up all over the place though because nobodys really around anymore to maintain the website except a couple volunteer moderators with limited access. Most torrents that were tracked on TPB's tracker are now tracked on openbt/publicbt. It's common practice for people to point dns of tracker.thepiratebay.org to tracker.openbittorrent.com. 3. Swedish news outlets have already confirmed WikiLeaks was not the target of these raids. It's just a coincidence that them and many other controversial websites are hosted at prq/rix-mainly because of their dedication to anonymity of the customer. 4. Their goal (my guess/opinion) was to take down a bunch of "scene" servers and websites simultaneously to temporarily stem the flow of high quality releases. Release groups and Pre sites/Scene sites often use servers to coordinate their efforts and post their releases to these places first-After which you have a trickle down effect where the torrents are posted to public torrent sites most of us are familiar with. I guess they're hoping that there will be enough evidence on these computers to identify some of the individuals who are at the top of the "scene" foodchain-the people who actually sneak the camcorders into the theaters or work at the cd pressing factory to prerelease a new CD etc...
I tend to wonder when the pressure on normal people to get in line and shut up will go over the top and cause real action.
It's not just file-sharers. Anyone who simply wants to be left alone as they travel the net is subject to monitoring and, maybe, serious trouble.
How many meritless lawsuits will have to be filed, how many knocks on doors in the night must happen, before some package of technology comes into general use, a group of tools that creates a situation where ISPs see nothing but encrypted streams going this way and that, with no idea what's actually in them?
All the pieces exist. Some years ago, I would have predicted that we'd be to that point already.
But no. People just keep sending in the clear, writing all their important letters on the back of postcards unless the recipient forces them to put it in an envelope.
Is this weird? Or is my viewpoint skewed? I'd really like to know because I sure don't understand it.
Fight the pigs! Install Tor Relays and Freenet nodes on as many computers as you can.
torproject.org and freenetproject.org
The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated
take them all in for re-programming/fear training. never mind the pornverts, as they make up their own 'content'?
No bullets yet, but draconian repression of the underprivileged by the rich and powerful is an evil that was never really abolished, fanciful patriotic musings notwithstanding. Too bad so many people forget the lessons of history.
The website is down for me as well. I am at the KTH network by now. On the other side, I don't see anyone talking about police raids at Stockholm.
It seems that the Swedish provider also plays host to Wikileaks. How timely!
It's a Symbiotic relationship. The Entertainment Industry (not artists, btw) and the governments need each other.
The industry distract the people from what the governments are doing (hint: pilfer)
So when the industry come knocking about competition to their eternal monopoly, the governments jump to help. You wouldn't want your smoke screen to clear up and have light shining on you...
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
1. Stage police "raids" or simple questioning.
2. Submit slashdot story.
3. Sit back and watch the slashdot effect as TPB's own users overload the site and take it down.
4 ?????
5. PROFIT!
I think you got almost all the truth. The key here is evidence: to prosecute a user for sharing copyrighted work is just a matter of finding evidence that a file was downloaded to X and that X was linked to you. Log files make this trivial. To convict someone accused of rape or pedophilia is much more difficult: evidence can be unreliable or murky, a lot is based on people's testimony and you don't always have DNA aka smoking gun. It's not that they don't go after them (they do), is that it's just too damn hard and it doesn't get a lot of publicity (understandably).
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
since european police can assign such vast resources to chasing file sharing kids it must mean serious crime in europe is all but eliminated.
Kugrian's comment led me to thing that these news about Pirate Bay shutdown are quiet suspicious. It's seem like an joint action from DMCA and polices from Europe to spead a rumor, create paranoia and take TPB off by DoS.
Bah, the industry owns the US government, you rarely hear about cases where people are sued for downloading here in Europe.
One raid gives you the impression that it's somehow a high priority? We don't even have a DMCA! File sharing is a legal right in some European countries, others have various approaches.
The many different European governments are rarely subject to the US kind of lobbying. Each country has it's own government and lobby, they don't have the same strength and resources as the RIAA/MPAA.
Oh, and there is no entertainment industry of similar importance and strength as Hollywood here. There is no reason for our governments to prioritize that industry. It does exist in the US however, doesn't it?
The European Parliament [of the EU] is at least clearly against the American ACTA plans! Your Congress and Senate is filled to the brim with lobbyists and the people who answer to them.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Ya, good luck with that.
Do you actually use the word "ya" in face-to-face conversation or is it just for posting online?
my use of the word "pirate" is with full knowledge of the discrepancy you refer to
we are after all talking about the PIRATE bay. we both know the guys who run that site know full well that the traditional meaning of piracy is a poor descriptor of what copyright infringement is, but they wear the epithet "pirate" with pride on the name of their site. when someone smears and insults you, a good tactic is to take that insult or epithet, and use it yourself with pride as a descriptor. therefore nullifying the supposed power of the negative word. a negative becomes a positive. so i proudly call myself a pirate, when i know the sharing media is nothing like swashbucklers and theft. in this way, words are always constantly shifting in meaning and implication in popular culture, and this eventually filters down to dictionary terminology years later
the same can be found in the gay rights movement: "queer" is now a word of pride. or even right here on slashdot: "nerd" and "geek" are words which were meant as insults but are now marks of honor. there are many sociological and political arenas where insults menat to smear, scapegoat, and prejudice are turned around and used as marks of pride
for example, lately i am trying to proudly refer to myself as a socialist, here in the usa. socialism in europe is just obvious common sense. but in the usa it takes on mythic ridiculous proportions of evil, by people who barely understand the concept (ever hear of library? a highway system? social security? hellooooo?). such that using the word, as a mark of pride and a self-descriptor, is almost revolutionary and controversial, here in the usa at least, when of course, according to a strict interpretation of the meaning of the word, its completely humdrum
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Perhaps just a strange choice of words, but you could get the impression that one of the raided providers is called "ISP". The only named provider I have heard mentioned is PRQ, who also hosts Wikileaks.
Check it out. I2P offers anonymous network on top of TCP/IP, and by default the installation includes an anonymous bittorrent client: I2PSnark, which is made to avoid leaking information through the application layers like: IP, usernames, network-information, etc.
I2P is encrypted end-to-end, and nothing escapes the network to the open internet, unless you route through one of the outproxies (which are generally frowned upon in the community).
You can even use I2P as a VPN, which can connect two firewalled machines with no inbound connections, albeit slowly, it works and is like a distributed Hamachi working through encrypted tunnels of your choice. In theory, any application can now be tunnelled in encrypted and distributed fashion over the old internet, although for P2P you should be sure to avoid client applications which leak information. For personal use, anything can be tunnelled and reached, *anywhere*, as long as you got outbound connections.
Using non-anonymous bittorrent in this current climate is irresponsible, as it is very easy for *anyone* to collect IP addresses. With I2P they know your IP, but not what you're doing, who you're connecting with etc. Nothing more than that you are connected through I2P..
Heck, EVEN your peers in bittorrent won't get to know your IP, since it's all garlic-routed through the IP-network, so both sides remain anonymous. Now that's genious!
I2P scales and behaves MUCH MUCH better than Freenet to boost.
Don't scare me like that. TPB is up and running.
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
The flaw is that the musicians aren't the ones making the money! 75+ percent of every entertainment dollar spent goes to straight the labels. The musicians are already slaves-to the labels! If you really are as concerned about not 'ripping off" creative people then you'd be getting your facts straight before making a fool of yourself in public!
My dns client (my laptop) can't get an ip for tpb as of 7/9/10 14:55 GMT. Of course, at the moment I'm sitting in a waiting room at Ceders-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles using the campus' free wifi service, they might be blocking it. I'll try a look up later from home.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
So what would keep these governments from taking over the servers and monitoring those that connect to it to upload and download files? My biggest worry is just that, the person I am connecting to and downloading from is actually a monitor that is either sending me a bogus file, or getting information from me. I think im done torrenting for a while..not worth it anymore.
... in terror and were suddenly silenced. I feel as though something terrible has happened.
I salute you for resisting using all caps and maintaining a conversational tone, at least.
You're positing that all the world's problems are not only solvable, but easily solvable. I'm sorry to break this to you, but humanity is not omnipotent, we're barely competent. And yes, I am including those bad actors you accuse of creating war, disease and starvation in order to profit.
You mention some serious issues, but you're not helping to solve them by imagining a capitalist conspiracy of a mysterious "them" against the righteous "us". You're misdirecting your energies against ghosts and shadows instead of supporting what actually leads to progress: political activity, scientific research, charity and education.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Pirate Bay will not stay in the ashes for long. They will rise again, stronger and better than ever before. Make no mistake. This is not about file sharing as much as it is about politics. The corporations have had too much power for too long. Up the rebels!!!
Except the police HAS no choice. Most western countries rather like the idea of the police NOT having any choices to make. They act on the instructions of their masters, either elected or at least appointed officials. Cops don't get to choose what and what not to enforce.
Such a raid as this isn't decided at the donut stand or whatever swedish cops eat. It is decided... well... that is the question isn't it? Police and prosecutors who work for the public good have always made it clear that this kind of stuff is very low priority to them. So who countermands them?
And then, you find such incidences as in France, were the person putting in new laws is married to someone who works in the entertainment industry. Corruption? No... not directly. More the willfull neglect of the voice of the people by only listening to a small segment.
You compare speeding with piracy... so how many children are killed by copyright infringement each year? I do admit, that I have downloaded at unsafe speeds before, even while drunk, but the only time blood was spilled is when I cut myself on the celophane wrapper of my new modem.
So, WHY did a lot of cops NOT spend their day catching people who drunk drive, rapist and others who harm society and went after nerds in their bedroom who harm the profit margins of a very small group of people, often foreigners?
You would think with all the corruption in Europe and terrorists they let slip by, they would have more important things to do. Like say capture REAL pirates doing REAL harm to commerce. Funny that the people so hot on piracy never go after real pirates who can shoot back. Aparently interrupting millions of dollars in shipping isn't as big a crime as copying music.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Unfortunately, capitalists have learned that genuinely fixing problems is rarely the way to maximize their power. Far better to sell a more-or-less ineffective "solution" like the security-industrial complex's "War on Terror" or drug cocktails for AIDS or subsidized "food aid" for povery and hunger. Insert your corporation into one of those cash torrents and you will be in a position of power for decades to come.
....except there is this little thing called "competition" that drives capitalists towards producing a better product. If they don't, they run the risk of someone else displacing them. If they purposely hold back (for any reason) then they place their precious "power" at risk. Don't you get it? In a capitalist economy, the very power you speak of comes from providing the most value. And you provide the most value by continually innovating more than the other competitors in your field (and also doing lots of other things correctly).
I can't believe you went through all of that and then failed to point out the competitive influence angle. That's just one of many beauties found in capitalism - and you just pretend it isn't even there. As if there is some grand conspiracy amongst capitalists to produce sub-par items for the stupid, unsuspecting public......c'mon, get a grip. Companies produce what the market demands. Otherwise, they can't get that power you speak of.
I can't believe you went through all of that and then failed to point out the competitive influence angle. That's just one of many beauties found in capitalism - and you just pretend it isn't even there. As if there is some grand conspiracy amongst capitalists to produce sub-par items for the stupid, unsuspecting public......c'mon, get a grip. Companies produce what the market demands. Otherwise, they can't get that power you speak of.
If what you say is true, why is there dearth of broadband options in the United States? It is common knowledge that there is collusion among corporations (google the Mitsubishi, Hitachi, and Toshiba price-fixing conspiracy on memory). So, in other words, corporations can make mighty fine profits on sub-par products by collusion, bribery, and other shenanigans.
maybe the part with affordable healthcare
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but there is a technological and economic justification
meanwhile: is there any moral justification to standing in front of a lake, pointing guns at people and forcing them to buy bottled water instead?
well that's our current ip system, in the internet age: the internet is the lake, the endless free resource that threatens to put the bottled water guy out of business
ip law is for the benefit of distributors that the internet has replaced, not creators. creators don't need distributors anymore, society doesn't need distributors anymore. simple disruptive technology and basic economics at work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.geti2p.net/
What's interesting is that I2P has been gaining popularity much more rapidly in Europe than elsewhere. I guess HADOPI-type laws are having their effect. In the far east the project is forming partnerships with dissident groups so that media files and other large data sets can be transmitted in relative safety.
Bittorrent, iMule and a distributed filesystem are available on the network which is both anonymized and highly decentralized (moreso than Tor).
Because phone and cable operators are generally granted monopoly status in a given market?
And I suppose that the benign government just gives this away, free of charge?
This article was by "timothy".
I take his articles with a grain of salt.
Please take that shrilly devil spawn.
xoxo,
Canada
Doesn't seem to be working right now. I hope this is just a strange coincidence. Any news?
in the usa that qualifies as communism worse than north korea, or so the rightwing propaganda goes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Front Sight Firearms Training Institute.
Yikes, Goog.
that's what the right wing assholes in the usa call socialism
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
yeah, but...
What if time-traveling Hitler had cancer, but it was cured for free, so he used harsh sarcasm on your grandmother?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The instinct of survival is married to competition all the way down to our lizard hindbrains. This is why Capitalism - for all of its terrible manifold consequences - remains far more prefereable to humans rather than 'Washing the Peoples Truck'. Even the Central Committee realized this, but I give them about ten years before the tiger they are riding finally turns on them.
As a (somewhat) political organization, (probably not in full agreement with the ACTA/WIPO folks), does a police raid on their communications hub constitute a breach of the democratic process? TPB may not be mainstream, but certainly the big big corporate money backing ACTA/WIPO is not mainstream either, and TPB is trying to do things in the open, in light of full public scrutiny. ACTA/WIPO is a members only club, where you aren't allowed to have a say, your rights will likely be violated, laws will likely be broken, but because they are in suits, they get away with criminal acts against millions of people on a daily basis, without authorities batting an eye. TPB in contrast is merely bringing a sense of sanity to the process (copyrights were originally a right to copy, not a stick to prevent copying forever ...and 90 years past the death of an author is starting to look like forever...), and patents are becoming a bigger and bigger joke, and there is no sanity to it. Copyrights and patents are an artificial monopoly, originally designed for a short time. No math was allowed to be patented. Copyrights were less than a generation. TPB is a reaction to the FAR FAR overreaching (what an author creates in this 20's should be public in his 40's, not when his grandchildren are in their 60's). Patents should be good for a maximum of 30 years. Each time a patent is sold, the remaining time on the patent should be cut in half. Reform should have happened 50 years ago, and everything lately has been going in the WRONG direction.
Damn ninjas!
i'm going to say that capitalism is the same as wahhabism
the equivalency makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but for some reason a bunch of morons will believe the two things are related, if i chant it enough or package it in simpleminded slogans
do you even know what socialism means? no: i mean its logical coherent definition, what the word means conceptually, not its completely bullshit random connection with "scary words about bad people"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know why, but torrents from TPB never, ever worked for me. Torrents from other sites, no problem for the most part.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
No. As soon as the accumulation of power though "competitive markets" hits a critical mark, the most powerful competitor drives everyone else out of the market. All competitive capitalism leads to monopolistic plutocracy, if unchecked by some other monolithic power, usually a governmental entity.
Standard Oil, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels Midland, Goldman Sachs, IBM, then Microsoft, AT&T, then AT&T again, take your pick.
Someone has to wield the power, and the goal of capitalism is to become king of the hill and wield it, usually by knifing one's competitors in the back. Not to "compete in a market" or any of these other "free market" dogmas you seem to espouse.
Eventually, capitalism fails. It becomes oligarchy. The entire system is designed to behave that way without some other, powerful monolithic entity to keep it in check.
No solution here, just pointing out the obvious. Capitalism is defective by design, and you really have to watch who is getting power from your purchases/dollar votes. Capitalism without a popular entity to keep it in check always becomes centrally controlled (boardroom controlled) despotism. Then your only vote is a share in the stock market.
That may be fine by you, but I don't believe I should have to buy my vote in a non-democratic system slanted to keep me in my place as an unhappy, disposable consumer.
--
Toro
TPB is back up again already.
Hey, same AC here.
Yes, I2P, or any system offering REAL distributed anonymity will be slower than connecting directly through TCP/IP. It really stands to reason, it's a tradeoff: Some CPU will go to X layers/hops of encryption, and some network traffic will go to route encrypted traffic around the network in X number of hops. However, your activities will be MUCH harder to track, especially when avoiding the use of exitnodes to connect to normal IP addresses, which is typical of Tor usage.
Paid services may offer fast central servers. However, you will be registered as a customer, and who knows what kind of logging they're required by authorities to do, and what happens when they're bought up or starts to cave in somehow. How much is encrypted, or really anonymous, is also in question when you have to connect central servers, despite best efforts..
Tor is fast, faster than I2P when used as an outproxy / exitnode. However, you are also a HUGE target when using outproxies / exitnodes, since everything has to go unencrypted and to real IP-addresses at the exitnodes. The exitnodes and servers beyond them, has to be trusted NOT to snoop or perform Man In The Middle attacks, since little else is stopping the exitnodes, or anything in between, to be a perfect setup for these kinds of attacks. Sending to real IP-addresses is also a wide-open portal for snoopers / MIT-adversaries into the "darknet" and its activities, which weakens the whole anonymity of the network. Ie., if the government decides Tor is used mainly for bittorrent, which may be easier to prove when snooping exitnodes, they may ban usage of Tor entirely (not likely though since Tor is also used for political propaganda/enlightenment, depending who you ask). Another question is the quality and speed of Tor exitnodes. They are really fast and first-class servers connected to "big tubes" ;-). You might be wondering what kind of logging goes on in there, and how much goes to intelligence agencies, while lesser-informed agents use Tor for "spying" or "secrets" (which Tor is really NOT that suitable for, anonymity != secrecy != security, especially in Tor's case).. Lastly, maintainers of Tor has stated they do not want bittorrent on their network. As Tor is not made to scale up to such traffic, so it might be blocked in the future.
I2P offers alot more: anonymous bittorrent, "eepsites" (anonymous www-sites), anonymous mail, anon-IRC and arbitrary tunnels that you setup yourself, working within its own "darknet", thus avoiding leaks to bystanders (a bit similar to VPNs). All this works out-of-the-box in I2P and can easily be extended in Java, so its worth checking out. Odds are, you can already find most common torrents using I2PSnark, and you can be part of exploring and extending a real anonymous community. It's quite satisfying to see how the project is developing and how much thought has gone into anonymity.
There are also other bittorrent clients on I2P, and iMule, is the I2P-version of the "Mule"-series, as well as other protocols like gnutella.
I2P works by using garlic-routing, which is like onion-routing with hidden-services in Tor: Every node, except the sender, only knows its peers and the next target, not any nodes extending beyond that for any given message. Every link in the chain can only decrypt its own packet, and only the last node can decrypt the entire message. Thus, both sender and receiver remains anonymous, even to each other. The contents are also kept encrypted through the whole chain, except for sender and receiver. Very interesting stuff when you read up on it..
A bit of caution though. I2P has not reached version 1 yet, so full anonymity is not guaranteed. It will be more secure than most other services, paid or free. It is open source / public domain, but also a work in progress. Don't do serious criminal activities on I2P, as it is frowned upon by the community as well.
I tried Freenet some years ago, but I2P has had me positively surprised many times over. It's MUCH more
http://www.pornbay.org/ and its tracker is down :(
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
It never ceases to to amaze me how they get so much police force, just because some rich people say money is the new god. they wouldn't get that kind of force even for war criminals.
Emergent behaviors are not conscious in the members of the group but can easily be misinterpreted to be some sort of leader planning or group think. Don't assume that simply because you may do this or see this that the world operates similarly. It is very human to think geese plan to fly in a V shape - its a fractal pattern that emerges without any planning whatsoever. Some will see the pattern try to make theory and rules from it and perhaps say its proof god's influence that such "headless" intelligence exists.
Capitalist conspiracies are far more real than people realize; however, a lot of the evil that goes on is thoughtless emergent behavior - only a little bit is individuals contributing their ill will to the direction; from little Eichmanns to big Eichmanns, even leaders become caught up in the momentum there is no inside control/plan to easily point to. Sure there are groups of like minded people complicating the whole thing and possibly their understanding is enough that they can nudge the beast towards their goals but not as much as one would like to think.
I tend to see these things as ghosts in the system; but unlike computer science fiction, these are real -- ghosts running on human social systems. Even that is not so simple in that the two are influencing each other and each have some degree of consciousness of the other. (the 'ghosts' not having a normal sense of consciousness obviously.) Many people who see evil emergent patterns attribute it to a thought or force and will give it a name like The Devil; some famious psychologists have done so (few openly) while others see it as a perfect example of emergence.
See the Stanford prison study as a primer. Then think about how when acts are abstracted by removing them it becomes easier to get people to do them - money is 1 layer and there are good studies showing that removing just 1 layer past money can get honest people to do things that everybody would disapprove of with money. (You should already be familiar with the famous Milgram Experiment.) Its bad enough with money, but we have multiple levels... Now we have this whole P.R. created belief system around "intellectual property" that makes the intangible into something tangible...
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