Pirate Party of Canada Promises VPN For Freedom 98
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Party of Canada has announced that it will extend a VPN originally set up to allow people in Tunisia to browse freely while internet censorship was imposed there. Canada may soon be added to that list since the ruling Conservative Party has vowed to introduce a bill that would provide unprecedented systematic interception and monitoring of Canadians' personal communications. So the Pirate Party of Canada has announced it will extend that service to Canadians."
Re:Whats the use? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not true, if the VPN _doesn't_ use a cert from one of the major SSL cert providers (which may already be compromised by governments) and you check the cert. It's trivial to use openssl (possibly with a wrapper like TinyCA) to issue your own certs, so if the VPN provider is doing that, it's much harder in some ways for a government to MITM (in fact, if they do manage it, it means either (1) they've compromised the VPN provider itself or (2) RSA is broken)
This is why gpg security is "better" in some ways than SSL CAs - no central CA authority to compromise. It's weird that we haven't seen a gpg encryption option for TLS yet though, there's no technical difficulty I can see.
Need link to Conservative promise (Score:1, Insightful)
Can someone please provide a link to where the Conservatives "vow" to introduce this bill? Just more FUD from the losing parties.
A conservative no doubt (Score:5, Insightful)
What is the use of one man standing in front of a tank? That one man stood. You would have folded. That man may be dead but he is a man. You are not.
Sometimes a symbolic action has value. Just to show not all people fold as easily as you do.
PPoC is a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Having sat on one too many IRC meetings, I can quite firmly state that the Pirate Party of Canada is a joke, a very profound disappointment. Every single moment I've spent on their web site or in a chat room has felt like a colossal waste of my time. Nothing but a bunch of overgrown children fussing over inane trivia, trying to sell memberships and merch, and refusing to agree on any sort of official stance or direction. They can't promise shit, because they're too busy arguing over who's going to pay for the next batch of business cards. Appoint a goddamned treasurer, throw fund raisers and awareness rallies, take out ads in the paper or on progressive TV channels, you know, the usual political song-and-dance.
To put things into perspective, the non-partisan OpenMedia group has had great success in the battle against UBB (usage based billing), by leveraging those very same activities. They send an email, maybe once a month, asking for donations and listing off any upcoming meets in my area, and they have delivered RESULTS! If the PPoC put in one tenth of the efforts and professionalism demonstrated by the OpenMedia group, they'd have far more credibility and pull.
Even non-geeks tend to have the opinion that the PPoC are just a bunch of freeloading cyber-hippies, and that's insulting to hippies.
Re:A conservative no doubt (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm sure the politicians are quaking in their boots over you "real humans" who write all this screed from your parent's basement while not actually doing anything.
Re:And this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Conservative party != fiscal conservatives
Conservatives inherited a 20 billion surplus from the Liberals. The proceeded to rape that surplus, before the entire "recession". When end of 2008 hit, they managed to dig us into another 50 billion deficit position. That's 70 billion swing (about 700 billion equivalent if it was US).
We are fucking lucky they didn't have majority in 2005 or around there, as they have already proceeded to deregulate the banking sector but they didn't have time or majority needed to do same changes as in the US. If they had done that, our banks would have been fucked. Instead, they only lost a few billion.
Conservative party has VERY LITTLE to NOTHING to do with being fiscally conservative. The only fiscally responsible political party was Liberals with Paul Martin.
I can't vote NDP for same reason you can't. I can't vote "Green Party" because of their stance against civilization (eg. against nuclear, but no plan to replace base-load coal/oil/gas). No Bloc here, though Duceppe is best candidate... No conservative for the same reason that Duceppe criticizes him - he's a LIAR ("we want elected senate" - Harper. Then he proceeded to appoint his never elected buddy-buddy is Quebec to the Senate and to the cabinet. That did it for me with Harper. For as long as he is the Great Leader of Conservative party, they will never get my vote).
So my only option is Liberal party. They will never win in my riding, but I will still go and vote for Liberals because CONservatives are lead by a CONman.
This is just my opinion on things..