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.'"

swedish ip's

[viniosity (592905)]

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

[nacturation (646836)]

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

Question?

[Cherita Chen (936355)]

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?

[Alpha830RulZ (939527)]

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?

[dcapel (913969)]

Records? What Records?!

Re:Question?

[mincognito (839071)]

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?

[dcapel (913969)]

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?

[mincognito (839071)]

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?

[mincognito (839071)]

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?

[monoqlith (610041)]

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?

[Jugalator (259273)]

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.

Read The FAQ

[tmk (712144)]

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

So it is an encrypted proxy service

[appleprophet (233330)]

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.

[D14BL0 (880565)]

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

[patio11 (857072)]

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

[bayankaran (446245)]

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.

Exporting a society's good things

[Aceticon (140883)]

After all these years of the US government exporting moralistic and lobby-built laws (soft drug prohibition, "ethernal" copyright, etc), it's nice to see somebody trying to export their society's (swedish) values of respect for freedom and privacy, even if their current crop of mainstream politicians seems to be in the pockets of the US admistration.

On the other hand, i expect that if the Relakks service becomes popular expect laws to be passed soon in other countries to curtail access to it.

Copyright incompatible with privacy

[gronofer (838299)]

I'm impressed with this idea, and particularly with one of their statements:

The only way to enforce today's unbalanced copyright laws is to monitor all private communications over the Internet.

This is one of the reasons I'm opposed to copyright myself.

it will just be full of movies and music and games

[cliffski (65094)]

"There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet"
And copying a King Kong DVD rip is not one of them. Its sad when people take the legitmate point about anonymity that you might need for political organisations, journalists and whistle-blowers, and just use it as an excuse to facilitate warez and music copying.
And calling yourselves the 'pirate party' is just plain insane. Whats wrong with "the consumer rights' party? or do they realsie thats way too hypocritical.

Re:Ahem

[Raul654 (453029)]

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.

Slashdot: yesterday's news for nerds

[Propaganda13 (312548)]

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

Re:Rock On Dude

[RShizzle (983535)]

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:ah...

[Zontar The Mindless (9002)]

I'm nervous after visiting the iranian president's blog page...

I'm nervous when people are nervous about standing up for themselves and saying, "Go fuck yourself, I'll read whatever I damned well like."

Re:ah...

[by Anonymous Coward]

I'm nervous when people are nervous about standing up for themselves and saying, "Go fuck yourself, I'll read whatever I damned well like."

What country do you live in? I live in the USA where people voted in a facist administration that thinks the Constitution is a quaint document that is exactly where it belongs in a museum. If we could wrap copper around the founding fathers we wouldn't need foreign oil. Their spinning bodies could power the country for the next thousand years. If you mod this funny you aren't paying attention.

Re:Darknet?

[man_ls (248470)]

I think the point is that it's (1) based in Sweeden, (2) encrypted end-to-end, (3) as anonymous as you want it to be based on the information you provide to them, and (4) fairly strongly protected legally in the jurisdiction it operates in.

1 and 4 being pretty big for USians who are using it...2 for people whose ISPs filter. 3, dubiously so, as at some point they have your credit card saying that you have an account although I suppose that, if they don't store your tunnel account with your CC number, they have no way of getting to you personally.

It doesn't matter if someone nefarious is on the same link-local segment sniffing all your traffic, if they can't identify through technological means who you are, and can't compel the provider through legal means either because they didn't keep that information or just won't give it over.