Pirate Party Launches Commercial Darknet

CrystalFalcon writes "The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. 'There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,' says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.'"

Rock On Dude

The nightmare of the *AA and my pipe dream. When's it coming to the states and where do I sign up?

Re:Rock On Dude

From TFA:
One question we get is if this works in the US. Yes, it does.

It looks like just a PPTP connection to a Swedish ISP, doling out some Swedish IP addresses. I'm curious as to the speed the service offers. What's the pipe feeding into Relakks?

Re:Rock On Dude

They have a contract with Labs2 [labs2.se] (run by the former ceo and founder of bredbandsbolaget [bredbandsbolaget.se]) so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.

Net Neutrality

I think this is an awesome idea, but how will it work with the looming lack of net neutrality?

Re:Net Neutrality

It's in Sweden. Net Neutrality doesn't directly affect it.

Some definitions...

Democratic: Representative government where the people have free access to information about the government and the goverments access to information about citizens has checks and balances.

Authoritarian: Government based on manipulation of power where access to government information is limited and access to citizen information by government is unfettered.

Ask yourself which direction the US government is heading.

Re:Net Neutrality

Not outside the US, no.

Inside the US, though, the customers of large US telecom companies may be firewalled off from the service by the very people they are paying for Net access. If not that, they may be slowdd to a trickle of traffic.

If I was paying for access to "The Internet", and my service provider wasn't giving me access to everything I could legally access, then I'd be getting ripped off, wouldn't I?

So for the rest of the world US net neutrality laws don't matter so much. For those of us in the US, they matter a great deal, even when the traffic starts overseas.

Re:Net Neutrality

As far as I understand the "lack of net neutrality" would only effect US* users of the aforementioned darknet. AFAIK for networks outside the US the net remains neutral**

*Yes yes I know or packets traversing across a US network segment.
**Neutral until the Telco's lobby the US administration to reign in them darn foreigners. After all its their divine right to extort money from those who have made a successful internet business.

Re:Net Neutrality

It's not an awesome idea because as much as it has it's good use there is also the darker side with pedophile, snuff and other crap that should not be tolerated.

Snuff films are not real [snopes.com]. And the problem with pedophilia isn't the transmission of images of the sexual abuse of children, it's when actual sexual abuse of children goes on.

Freedom has risks. If you have free elections, the "wrong" guys might win. If you have secure communications, "terrorists" might use them to make plans. If you have the right to keep and bear arms, "bad guys" may have guns.

But if you believe in freedom, you're very very wary of the state getting to define who the "wrong" guys, the "terrorists", the "bad guys", are. Consider that Martin Luther King Jr. was a target of COINTELPRO; consider Nixon's "enemies list"; consider the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dredd Scott decision, the Alien and Sedition acts, the Red Scares, the concentration camps for Japanese Americans...

you cant have a place where you can bend the rules forever, that's anarchy!

And? "Anarchy" means no ruling hierarchy. Some people think that's a good idea [blackened.net], especially when it comes to communication. As Robert Anton Wilson put it [rawilson.com], "A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of `monopoly in the means of production.' Since man extends his nervous system though channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain."

Important note...

...The cost of the service is 5 euros per month,...

It looks like it is at least a quasi-commercial darknet.

Ryan Fenton

Slashdot: yesterday's news for nerds

FTA: "We got Dugg pretty hard and expect Slashdot to come visiting at any time now."

Re:Slashdot: yesterday's news for nerds

Welcome! You're late. :-)

Re:Slashdot: yesterday's news for nerds

I think that there's something to be said here about that. To me it says that /. users are too lazy to go forage for their own articles and instead go cherry pick them off of digg. Why? Because the digg community picks the stories, not a handful of select people. If /. wants to continue to do things that way, I have no bones about, it's just interesting that the /. model lags behind other sites.

The one thing that I think /. has over digg is the discussions and moderation system. I was reading the comments over at digg and I felt like I was in a room full of 3 year olds (insert joke here). At least here I feel like the least meaningful and mature comments carry more relevancy than most of what I read over there.

Re:Important note...

There's very little in the actual document which isn't in the published article when it comes to cost.

...I would thihnk that charging comercially[sic] for the service is nessesary to keep it from becoming a spammer tool...

Have you been living on Gilligan's Island?

5eu/month is, as pointed out in the FA, at the current exchange rate: $6.359.

Before Scotty Richter was castrated, he was bringing $2M into his office, yes, two million U$ monthly. And he wasn't the king of the mountain.

Can you explain how $6.359/month going to make a spammer think twice about using the service? Particularly when you consider the anonymity. No more looking for open proxies & relays.

They pay far, far, far more than that to set up shop in China, then send all of that crap back to the US. Most spam originates from the US as the 2003 U-CAN-SPAM law[1] basically gave them free reign, but the big boys still rely upon China.

Here are the top 200 spammers responsible for 80% of the crap which is dropped in your inbox. [spamhaus.org]
Some of these guys (e.g. Ralsky) have substantial setups in their basements or an office (when they-he aren't|isn't getting caught running around in nothing but a black thong -- yes, there's a picture of it in an anti-spam archive.

But seriously. How do you think ~$6/month is going to stop a spammer. I'm not trying to present a loaded question here. I really do want to know your perspective on this because you may have insights no one else has considered.

The only way I can see this not becoming a spam haven is if there's a volume limit for that price and you have to pay $x/volume for each increment after that.

I'm all ears.

_______________________________
[1] Very effective, wouldn't you say? Has your volume of spam decreased (without human intervention to separate the wheat from the chaffe?)

Ahem

And how is this different from Tor or Freenet?

Re:Ahem

Tor has three intermediate hops between you and the destination; this only has one - so you get lower latency. Also, with Tor, your download speed is the minimum of the 4 intermediate connections' bandwidths. If one of those people happens to be a dial up user, you will be getting dial-up speeds.

Re:Ahem

Although this is better for speed, isn't it bad for anonimity? Traffic that has been over four hosts is harder to trace back than traffic that has hopped over a single host.

Re:Ahem

If you're in that much trouble that they NEED to find you, believe Me, they will find you. Be it 1 hop, or 4 hops, it doesn't matter. Sure, I'd rather trust a Sweedish company for my sense of peace rather than Tor. At least you know where your hops are going with this. With Tor, it's a good idea, but what if the governemnt was running massive tor routers, sniffing packets from whatever comes across their electronic doorstep? You see, that is the weakness of Tor, besides it's speed. You need a trusted source to begin with. If you don't, it will auto-build the network as time goes on as it finds a node. But still, if one of those nodes are packet-sniffing everything, then all is for naught. Either way, if anything 'bad' happens to you, you'll still be just as screwed, but hey, at least you'll have more bandwith and less latentcy.

Re:Ahem

This is what they're saying on their website [relakks.com]:

RELAKKS is a company incorporated in Sweden. The service is basically a Swedish broadband subscription offered over the Internet. This means that the legal framework mainly consists of the The Electronic Communications Act 2003 389. What will this mean if:

Swedish authorities or,
Other organization or individuals demands access to information protected by RELAKKS?

RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but thats all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over traffic data including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.

So as long as the Swedish government can prove beforehand that you will be convicted, then they'll hand over the data, otherwise it's no-go. And as for non-Swedish authorities, Relakks say they won't give them anything.

Re:Ahem

So as long as the Swedish government can prove beforehand that you will be convicted, then they'll hand over the data, otherwise it's no-go. And as for non-Swedish authorities, Relakks say they won't give them anything.

Except that Swedish authorities are known [wikinews.org] to violate the law if they like it.

swedish ip's

Basically, this gives users the advantage of a Swedish IP address from anywhere in the world.

That's what I call massaging the numbers!

(Unfortunately,) I'll be here all week. Be sure to tip your waiter.

Re:swedish ip's

Be sure to tip the chef, otherwise you might be borked.
 

Question?

If it is commercial, couldn't the company' records be subpoenaed (in a worst case scenario) by state/local/etc authorities? If so, I would think that would spell even worse trouble for a user.

Re:Question?

I think part of the point is that sweedish law gives much higher burdens of proof for requesting such info. TFA gives some interesting (but maybe unreliable given US law's recent incursions) info about the law they rely on

Read The FAQ

Short version: They keep only records who is customer, not about his traffic. https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/ [relakks.com]

Legal

RELAKKS is a company incorporated in Sweden. The service is basically a Swedish broadband subscription offered over the Internet. This means that the legal framework mainly consists of the The Electronic Communications Act 2003 389. What will this mean if:

Swedish authorities or,
Other organization or individuals demands access to information protected by RELAKKS?


RELAKKS Safe Surf enjoys the strongest legal protection possible under Swedish Law because of the service type (pre-paid flat-rate service). This means that RELAKKS do not have to keep an ordinary customer database (to be able handle transactions etc.). This is of importance if forced to hand over information.

If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned - fined not enough). .

RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that's all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.

For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over "traffic data" including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.

Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.

The combination Swedish high-tech encryption and the strongest legal protection give you true access to Internet, safer and speedier then ever before.

For more information about Swedish Telecom Law: The Electronic Communications Act 2003:389

Re:Question?

Quite possibly, but the facts that its: 1) a different country, with a separate legal system that seems to deliver what the US constitution promises 2) A European Union country, which has demonstrated a much less media industry friendly policy and 3) a different judicial system, so that US laws don't apply, and US legal precedents won't have much weight suggest to me that it will offer quite a bit of protection. A terrorist might get caught up in the legal web, but the RIAA will have their costs raised by a couple of orders of magnitude, and Jesus, that's alright with me (cue guitars...)

Re:Question?

Records? What Records?!

Re:Question?

Perhaps the records that Relakks claims only need to be handed over when there is a possibility on 2+ years imprisonment under Swedish law?

There are records, Relakks implies so themselves. It's just that Relakks claims to not hand them over readily.

Considering how effective the *AA's have been at getting access to private information based solely on completely meaningless evidence (a screen printout with filenames that look like copyrighted material), I have to wonder how easy it would be for the Swedish *AA-a-like to make up a bogus claim which could potentially get somebody imprisoned for 2 years.

You're paranoid and here's why

Relakks will hand over SUBSCRIPTION information ( that's all they keep). This means the Riaa gets "Why yes, John Doe uses our subscription-based internet service". This isn't a crime. If the RIAA sucessfully obtains this they have ALREADY got you on copyright infringement with OTHER evidence.

Re:Question?

If it is commercial, couldn't the company' records be subpoenaed (in a worst case scenario) by state/local/etc authorities?

Records? What records?

Re:Question?

Re:Question? (Score:2)
  by dcapel (913969) on Tuesday August 15, @02:01AM (#15908566)
(http://wot.narg.googlepages.com/)
Records? What Records?!

Re:Question?
  (Score:2)
  by mincognito (839071) Alter Relationship on Tuesday August 15, @02:01AM (#15908567)
(http://thegreennotebook.blogspot.com/)

  If it is commercial, couldn't the company' records be subpoenaed (in a worst case scenario) by state/local/etc authorities?

  Records? What records?

Ok, you are either copying me (your post id is one larger) or that is plain SCARY.

Re:Question?

Re:Question? (Score:2) by dcapel (913969) on Tuesday August 15, @02:01AM (#15908566) (http://wot.narg.googlepages.com/) Records? What Records?! Re:Question? (Score:2) by mincognito (839071) Alter Relationship on Tuesday August 15, @02:01AM (#15908567) (http://thegreennotebook.blogspot.com/) If it is commercial, couldn't the company' records be subpoenaed (in a worst case scenario) by state/local/etc authorities? Records? What records? Ok, you are either copying me (your post id is one larger) or that is plain SCARY.

Re:Question?

um, that was supposed to be funny but i forgot to copy the formatting. but seriously, that was an amazing coincidence. 1 in a 1,000,000. other people win the lottery, i simultaneously post the same message to slashdot as dcapel.

Re:Question?

In the late 17th Century, Newton and Liebniz came up with Calculus almost simultaneously. [wikipedia.org]

Now, in the 21st century, we have 'dcapel' and 'mincognito' with identical, +1 Insightful Slashdot posts simultaneously.

I call that progress.

It's now time for you two to sue the pants off of each other for copyright infringement.

Ready, set, call your lawyers...now!

Re:Question?

Been reading the Baroque Cycle, have we? ;)

You are drastically underestimating the genius of Newton and the influence he would have on science. Saying "Newton did a handful of big things - laws of motion and universal gravitation (although these were building on the work of others more than is generally seen)" is like saying "Yeah, Einstein fooled around with physics, but really anyone who studied Planck and Maxwell could figure out that stuff".

He didn't just develop "laws of motion" and figure out "universal gravitation". As you said, this had been worked on by many people before. What Newton did that was so extraordinary was that he was able to, with four simple laws, explain EVERYTHING. He explained why Galileos balls fell like they did, he was able to explain Keplers four laws (which took Kepler 17 years to figure out), he was able to explain how the earth was kept in orbit around the sun, he was able to explain why the moon circled the earth. You have to realise the enourmous scientific breakthrough of being able not only to explain planets and apples movements, but to actually realise and prove that they were the same force!

After Newton, most people were of the opinion that physics was basically done! The rest was small stuff, maybe clarify exactly how the laws worked in fluids, or figure out that magnetism stuff. In the 19th century, students were actually advised not to study physics, because since Newton had finished it, it wasn't really a subject for the future.

Newtonian mechanics reigned as completely unchallenge for 180 years! 180 years! Only in 1864 with James Clerk Maxwells equations did a seed of doubt become planted, but there would be no other theory for another forty years. Between 1687 and 1905, Newton had not ever been even slightly modified. I mean, imagine that. In the modern world there is general relativity and quantum physics, but they change all the time, with string theory and m-theory, and the accelarating universe and whatnot. Not so with Newton, his theories remained, completely intact. They were that good.

A wonderful quote from Lagrange (who inarguably knew more about this stuff than us two) is "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish". Turns out he weren't entirely correct, but you can hear in that quote that impact that Newton had had. He had explained how the world worked. All of it. Simple as that.

This is not even mentioning all the other amazing stuff that he did, the optics, the telescopes (which were indeed the greatest telescopes of it's day, and is still in wide use today), etc. Yeah, I agree, Hooke was a genius, but what did he do that was comparable to Newton? Discovered and coined the word "cell"? Hooke's law of elasticity? Assorted discoveries in Biology? His architetural feats? That doesn't even come close to Newton.

And so what if he was an asshole? Sure he treated both Hooke and Leibniz (and pretty much the rest of the western world) like shit, but does that mean his scientific discoveries are somehow worth less?

Bottom line, Newton completely changed how we view the world. Him and Einstein, those are the only two that can make a claim on explain the System of the World.

Re:Question?

Ok, you are either copying me (your post id is one larger) or that is plain SCARY.

In other words...

    DUPE! DUPE! DUPE!

Okay, everyone can mod him down (-1 Redundant) now, for being a fraction of a second slower than you to submit.

You should be happy that this is nothing major. I heard an American sniper tell a story of when he was assigned to kill a Vietnamese sniper. The American's bullet went straight down the scope of the Vietnamese sniper's riffle, and killed him. If the American had pulled the trigger just a bit slower, it would have been the other guy telling the exact same story.

Re:Question?

Quick translation from their Security FAQ:

What do this law [of Swedish electronic communication; 2003:389] say when it comes what Swedish government agencies or others request access to the information protected by RELAKKS?

When it comes to Swedish law enforcement agencies, RELAKKS has the same rights and obligations as a regular ISP with two important differences.

1. RELAKKS uses advance payments, which implies RELAKKS does not need to follow a traditional subscriber register. This is of great importance due to what kinds of customer information RELAKKS can disclose.

If Swedish agencies can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have legal support in requesting the user information from RELAKKS (the penalty has to in this case be greater than fines), RELAKKS need to disclose the subscriber details you as a user has submitted.

2. RELAKKS does not save customer details beyond those you have given yourself when signing up for the service (you can also change these details as long as you're a paying customer). If you don't proceed using the service, RELAKKS will delete your user account.

The details Swedish agencies can request beyond user account details (see above) are so called traffic information. These are protected by a much stronger legal protection. To disclose these, the crime needs to have a penalty of at least jailtime in two years.

I understand it that it's business and laws as usual here too, of course, but if they're enforced of leaving out user details, I wonder what exact differences their unconventional subscriber register has compared to a regular one. They don't seem to go into detail of that, and I'd guess that is the most interesting part here.

So it is an encrypted proxy service

I am very skeptical. My question is, how can they afford that much bandwidth? Given that their target market consists largely of P2P users, how can they tunnel all of a heavy bittorrent user's encrypted traffic for only $6.50 a month? It sounds to me like they should get into the ISP business or file hosting business instead...

Piracy really isn't all that bad.

This new political party is sure to cause a bit of panic all over the world, due to the extreme, overrated hype of piracy.

Not all piracy is a bad thing. I mean, software these days is seriously overpriced. You could teach yourself some very basic programming skills (Visual Basic, for instance), and create a program that'll do exactly what the $100+ equivilant does.

So of course people will pirate it. Why? Because it's rediculous to pay for something like that.

Then there's music. Just to let you know, piracy HARDLY hurts the musician. Considering that 90% of the sales go to the record company before the artist ever sees a penny, they're really not "losing" much at all.

Then again, sometimes piracy is a bad thing. Especially for the movie industry. Millions (if not billions) of dollars go into the making of a movie. While, yes, theater sales bring in tons of cash, DVD releases are also a huge factor in a movie's income. Downloading a movie hurts people a lot more than downloading music.

Piracy has become such an overrated "controversy" lately that it's unbarable. Look at the price of blank CDs. Did you know that you have to pay a "piracy tax" for these? Yep. All because some higher-ups think that an extra buck or two will help save a movie studio or a record company. It's batty. What if I just want to burn copies of pictures from my family vacation? Now I've gotta pay the MPAA and RIAA some extra cash for something that they don't deserve? Get real.

All these corporations think that they're helping people by attempting to foil piracy. Yes, they've got their hearts in the right places, but they're doing it all wrong. "Right track, wrong train" is a good saying for this. They really need to clean up their acts when suing people. I mean, they've gone so far as to sue old ladies who can barely turn their computer on, yet let huge pirates go unnoticed.

Why's this?

Because if they let big pirates continue doing their thing, then they get to keep on making more and more money with the "piracy taxes" and suing people left and right for WAY more than the material they've pirated is worth. They're letting people go to keep themselves in the game, which is horrible.



Also, just a little side note, to anybody who thinks the RIAA or MPAA might be knocking on your door. Go ahead and go to court, but bring up the fact that an IP address is not a person. Since your IP is the only log they have of the download (even if they have the MAC, that'll only ID a computer, not a single person), you'll win in court. And they'll lose out on a bunch of money for the court date, as well. Two-for-one, if you ask me. =D

Software piracy really is all that bad

I run an independent software vendor (gross sales to date: $250 -- hey, its a hobby and if you're going to make fun do better first). It took me approximately 50 hours to write the software which I sell and the program's complexity approaches that of Notepad. Perhaps some people with far, far too much free time would say its ridiculous to pay me $25 when they could just spend the 50 hours themselves. Fine, I understand that -- then bloody write the thing yourself. In reality, everyone who comes up with that lame excuse spends 45 seconds trying variations on Google of crackz, serialz, and whatnot to find the latest Chinese hacker group to have broken my just-enough-to-keep-honest-men-honest registration scheme, and then 600 of them hit my web server in a day.

Thats not enough for some cheeky bastards, though. After people have gotten their latest crackz, I get a surge of search results from Google for things legitimate customers never search for (e.g. Name of the Program V 1.0 download). I lost $10 last time I got the hacker surge because I bid on my own program name as an AdWords keyword and the "its not stealing, its copyright infringement!!!1" crowd literally picked my pocket for a quarter a click.

Re:Software piracy really is all that bad

its ridiculous to pay me $25 when they could just spend the 50 hours themselves...

One of the issues I have with smaller shareware apps is the price - rather than $25 for your app, if you cut the price to say $10 more people will be tempted to pay rather than look for a crack/serial. And I am writing from experience.

The math doesn't work, trust me

I did due diligence before I opened my little business. First, the demand curve for software doesn't fit what you might think from a microecon 101 textbook. Price is a signal of quality, and $10 software is "crud" whereas $25 software which accomplishes what you are setting out to do is worth actually getting out ye olde credit card. The other wrinkle is that advertising costs money and its impossible to make money at the $10 price point if you advertise. For example, during my last week I made roughly half of my sales through Google AdWords, at the cost of roughly $10-15 per sale depending on the campaign. I then get $25 and split $1 with Paypal, leaving me with money in my pocket. Google will not decrease my CPC just because I charge less for my product.

Re:The math doesn't work, trust me

You left out some important information; what's the name of your product? what does it do? and where can I download the crack?