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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."
All of those other things you speak of can be monetized in some way by various corporations and governments. I don't think any of them have really found a good way of making money off of file sharing since their ridiculously large "winnings" in court are more than many people see in their entire lifetimes and therefore probably never get paid.
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
So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
So, if we could figure out a way to prove that terrorism, hunger, poverty, AIDS, or whatever injustice hurts the corporate bottom line, we'd see action being taken to clear it up in no time?
Close, but "hurting the bottom line" isn't enough because the Right is no more interested in money than the Left is interested in social justice. Both are interested in exactly one thing: power.
Capitalists get power from making money, but power--unlike profit--is a zero-sum game. This means that capitalists are willing to forego profits if that is necessary to prevent other people from gaining power.
That is, capitalists hate free-riders far more than they love money, so they are more than willing to lose customers to AIDS because curing AIDS for free would mean that someone else might also profit from those customers, and that would reduce the capitalist's feeling of power.
If wiping out hunger, poverty AIDS or terrorism would actually make someone money, then yes, it would be done very rapidly, the way slavery went out of style the moment it became more profitable to have consumer goods for sale to paid workers who could be controlled almost as well as slaves by debt.
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.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
at the request of Belgian authorities
at the request of who? Last I checked, Belgium didn't even have a government!
I guess the "news" part is that the Unified World Corporate Government has launched another public relations attack against TPB.
Like the recent wikileaks attack, we will soon have a few rounds of "news" stories about how The Pirate Bay supports terrorism and child pornography and how the principle people behind The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Party are really horrible people, probably rapists or child molesters.
There will be raids on their personal property where their homes and property will be "accidentally" damaged and their cellular phones and televisions and their kids' computer equipment will be "seized" as evidence.
But filesharing will continue, because it's still about the best marketing tool the entertainment industry has.
Now move along, there will be no congregating here.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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).
Freenet could be a piratebay replacement distribution method. A browser plugin to allow it would be ideal. The speed issue is not NEARLY as bad as it used to be. Freenet has made slow but steady progress over the years. Is it as fast as typical web browsing? Of course not, but speeds around a megabit or more are not uncommon. If it was a big turn off before because of speed I'd recommend trying it again. Content is still sparse, but the system DOES work.
To be honest - I can't say. I've looked at Gnunet's home page, but haven't installed it, or tested it in any way. I'll be even more honest - I'm still learning how to make all the others work properly. I mean - it's one thing to install it, and visit a couple of flog pages, it's another thing entirely to actually navigate the darkweb, find what you're interested in, all the while avoiding the CP freaks, and make something of your experience. I WILL be downloading and installing Gnunet into a VM soon - but how soon, it's hard to say. Maybe a month, maybe 6 months, but I'll get around to it!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br