Pirate Bay launches encrypted private network The Pirate Bay has opened beta testing on its encrypted virtual private network which it reckons will stop copyright hassles for anyone wishing to share files. The only issue for the freetards is the price - €5 a month. The VPN is being used by 3,000 testers right now and there are another 180,000 in the queue. Pirate Bay …
It will never be made illegal.
VPN access is fundamental to secure remote access to network infrastructure, for telecommuting, for secure transactions between financial institutions, for press freedom in foreign (and potentially hostile) lands, etc etc. Making VPNs illegal would be like making modems illegal, as the people who tapped phone conversations in days gone by couldn't understand 14400 baud.
I'd pay for this service. I'd pay more than €5.
I got a beta invite, only to be disappointed that they’re reselling Relakks. The beta website text, VPN setup, IP addresses, even the price is the same as Relakks. http://www.ipredator.se/favicon.ico is still the Relakks logo.
Lazy sods. All that delay to become a reseller. I now doubt that they should have been put on trial over the Pirate Bay. It’s probably not theirs and just a re-branding job. Not that I’m complaining. Relakks AB have the experience and infrastructure to ensure it doesn’t get overloaded and collapse in a heap. The beardy one would be proud of the Pirate Bay boys. As I wrote when el Reg announced IPREdator, it’s the Pirate Bay name that’s the important bit. Any disappointment is down to it not being a new toy to play with.
Who'se up for giving their hard earned to convicted criminals and fascists?
Also, as they're appealing their conviction at the moment, it's not really going to impress the court much setting up a pay-for-piracy service. Presuming they are found guilty again, it's a fair bet that ther sentance could have been reduced, that's not going to happen if the judge sees this sort of behaviour, it could even result in an increased sentance.
@The Original Ash
Who says it can't be made illegal? Who says that governments cannot impose the requirement for corporations to own a trust certificate authenticated to a governmental CA for SSL communications, say 5 years from down the line?
The political will on the part of governments - invariably influenced by large corporations - is certainly there, if not the technical will...
The mad thing is that this is definitive proof that so called freetards are quite willing to pay €5 a month for all you can eat content.
I'd say it's priced about right, and if a similarly priced legal service was launched before xmas It'd have a decent shot at getting an entire generation that's never paid for any content to seriously consider the idea, possibly even buy into it.
But lets face it, Virgin announcing £20 a month for music alone made headlines, so they're still living in fantasy land.
Its unlikely, an ISP would see heavy traffic on a given port of a certain type but they couldn’t identify it as dodgy, they may be able to tell that yes you are connected to the TPB VPN but not what’s going through it, id imagine that end users would be masked from one another but this is getting dangerously close to the old days of Morpheus where you have a central server, this was promptly shut down!
TPB needs to advertise a legitimate reason for this network.....which just happens to be used for other stuff! Course if the servers were hosted in some back end of nowhere country that sticks two fingers up to the EU and USA then they are laughing!
In saying all that, ive been using Usenet for years and have already enjoyed this privilege for quite some time, and at much much higher transfer rates!
... will simply require any politician to point out that child porn is being untraceably distributed via VPN, the media will latch onto it followed by headlines and knee-jerk legislation banning non-government approved encrypted networks.
No doubt the RIAA/MPAA is busily arranging meetings with politicians now to point out these facts.
I'll give it 12 months :p
exactly - just 100 million subscribed p2p users globaly at 5 euros a month gives the industries 500 mill A MONTH in revenue (after a deduction for the site which garners the signups - they need a commision to make them come onboard any such legal scheme, and for some reward for signing up people to start with.
and that's just the potential revenue that 100 million users would yeild, it'd be more if legal p2p subscription was launched globaly with access thru any participating torrent search site. and it'd yeild way more revenue than the labels schemes can muster with their daft tactic of spending all their money chasing a few downloading families now and again. This isnt about downloading imo anyway for the labels. this is about controlling a monopoly for the 4 labels. They are afriad to lose control
Why did'nt the music megacorps think of this first....
£5 to log into their network, set up some of their music to be streamed to a custom player( or encrypted folder on the users HDD) and off you go.
They'd be making pots of money, the pirating would be reduced and everyone is sort of happy.
Paris... because I'd make her happy
It does seem like they may have thought about the IT secrecy long and hard, but missed the fact that electronic money is very traceable. I can't imagine that paypal (surely they'll be the payment agency) will be able to refuse to cough up information about money going into TPB's accounts to lawmakers.
Actually I can't think of a way that you could subscribe electronically, secretly and payment of that many 5 euro notes into a bank account would set the 'money laundering' alarms ringing within a day or so.
...a VPN network with about 20 servers all over the world (including Iran!) which I can log on to. I can even tunnel between 2 or 3 different servers on the system if I was really paranoid, all for 100 euro per year. So one set of servers in one country (a la Relakks AB IIRC) for 5 euro pm is not that good a deal IMHO.
The point of this service is to bypass the IPRED legislation. That's the main thing it's used for. As for paying electronically and being anonymous it really isn't an issue. As a legal entity which I'm assuming they are, to receive payments they are required to have those records.
The main thing is that there would be no logging of traffic. Like what IP you accessed when which is what the IPRED legislation is all about iirc.
But yeah 5€/month for a throwaway IP that battles the "graduated response" system and gives you greater anonymity if used together with tor. Not to mention running tor exit nodes through it and so on. It's worth a lot more than 5€.
I do hope they offer other methods than paycrappal.
An important feature of filesharing peer-to-peer, such as bittorrent, is that the data is communicated directly between peers, using whatever routing resources exist. The other feature is that no one machine has to provide an uplink to serve to all the clients.
In this form all the comms will be through a central VPN server. Any sane engineer would stick a cache at the VPN server and so avoid it having to endlessly uplink repeated data from peers, of course if they did that TPB would blow a hole in their so-called defense that they don't host copyrighted material.
Still, good to see TPB is compounding one offense with another, namely following up their existing copyright infringement with refusal to pay, presumably sweden counts this as contempt of court, or can send in debt collectors?
..collecting the fee, as with "AllOfMP3", they put pressure on the credit card companies and Paypal who stopped processing payment. AllOfMP3 changed their name to MP3Sparks, and all was well for a while, but now you can't get credit on that site now. (I think they've changed their name again).
the record companies could make mega wads of cash just by copying allofmp3's business model. Simples. Allofmp3 was the #2 most popular paid download site, after iTunes, whilst it was able to take payments. When they got shut down, emusic became the #2 after iTunes. But then the record companies got over-greedy again and upped the prices.
How the hell are the record co's finding it so difficult to come up with a digital download service to match Amazon CDs (let alone Amazon Marketplace CDs) on price?
I don't support the leeching free p2p use, but as long as this ludicrous situation of MP3 overcharging continues, I'll have no sympathy whatsoever for any of the RIAA record companies.
Rubbish regarding money being easy to trace... Most sensible people don't buy CDs or DVDs online by using their own credit cards, they use the disposable Visa cards these days.
So nothing stopping people from paying for PirateBay VPN using this method. Anyway, there is nothing illegal about using a VPN, so can use your own credit card if you like.
to the politicians that the actions of the MPAA / RIAA are single handedly driving the innovation of schemes that will make it impossible for governments to snoop on their citizens, and make it easier for the pedos to distribute their kiddie porn without detection.
If the worlds governments really wanted to protect children they would be either outlawing the MPAA/RIAA or (more realistically) forcing them to license their content to everyone on RAND terms so that low cost all you can eat services could proliferate, negating the drive to develop and use services such as this IPREDator one by TPB. On top of this, it would pull the rug out from under anybody who tries to sell pirated material, which according to the MPAA and RIAA, is somethings terrorists do to raise money.
Quite literally, by supporting the MPAA/RIAA legal crusades, the worlds governments are actually exacerbating the very issues they are struggling with the most.
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