back to article 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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How Long Before This is Made Illegal?

    I suspect this will end up as an arms race between the pirates and the authorities, with the pirates one step ahead of the law, with the authorities making more and more things illegal.

  2. Jason McQueen

    Probably Already Is

    Im sure this would/could fall into some nationalities definitions of circumventing copyright protection systems.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Way to go!

    It's about time someone fights against corrupt laws made by politicians who are deep in the pockets of the global corporations.

    Politicians are supposed to work for the population, not for the global elite!

  4. The Original Ash

    @AC (How long before this is made illegal?)

    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.

  5. Charles 9

    And what about...

    ...simply logging onto the network (however encrypted it is) and tracing and/or tracking who owns versions of an illicit track, unless they're creating the network such that no one knows who's on the other end of the line?

  6. lupine
    Pirate

    cough...

    vpn - virtual pirate network...

  7. Shane 8
    Thumb Up

    €5 for ?

    €5 for a Cd worth £9.99, games worth £39.99 and many more, fantastic where do i sign up!

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    one massive dark net

    It's sad really, the governments of the world are quite willing to force the users of the free internet into one big encrypted darknet. All because the "media globalcorps" can't keep up.

    Come back 1997-2007 we love you!

  9. Danny 14

    wow

    Thats gonna be one helluva data pipe. I wouldnt like to see their internet bill.

  10. N2

    Avast ye lubbers!

    & run out the guns,

    lets see if this will stop a round shot in their sail!

  11. AceRimmer

    @The Original Ash

    No need to pay anything, you'll be able to torrent it from somewhere!

  12. Johnny FireBlade
    Pirate

    Avast me hearties, yo ho!

    I read that and thought "Brilliant!". Stick it to the man! If those greedy bastards weren't so intent on filling their own fat pockets, things like this wouldn't exist!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Didn't they already do this?

    I remember them doing this last year with a service called Relakks.

  14. Someone

    Lazy

    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.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DPI

    Will this method bypass any filtering by the ISP? I believe it should but want to know for sure. If I can download at more then 5kb/s during the day then it'll be well worth the money!

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    okaaayyy.

    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.

  17. Phil Arundell 1
    Thumb Down

    Hang on a minute

    180,000 users waiting to join at €5 per user makes a total of over €10m per annum. I know it will cost a fair bit to run the VPN for this many users, but I reckon they'll still be making a fair few million from this "blow for freedom"

    Nice work if you can get it...

  18. Matthew Smith 3

    Being made illegal...

    @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...

  19. jubtastic1

    Heh

    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.

  20. PPPie
    Pirate

    They've done it again

    This one will take some serious effort to take down. However, if a network contains illegal data it can be closed. But it will be legally a lot harder.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @DPI

    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!

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To make this illegal...

    ... 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

  23. wolfmeister

    legal p2p subscription would make money

    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

  24. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Strange

    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

  25. steogede

    Re: To make this illegal...

    >> ... will simply require any politician to point out that child porn is being untraceably distributed via VPN

    Or say that it is being used by terrorists - afterall it is isn't a big leap to go from calling them 'pirates', to calling them 'terrorists'.

  26. Dave Bell

    Conspiracy?

    If you pay for this, you can be traced. And not over the internet

    It depends on your local laws, but just signing up looks like a conspiracy of some sort.

    O'm not that crazy.

  27. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @dave bell

    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.

  28. night troll
    Pirate

    I use...

    ...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.

  29. Andraž Levstik

    @Fraser

    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.

  30. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SO what...

    .. if they can trace the payment. Payment for a VPN isent illigal the illigal files are but they wouldent be able to see which files and by whom they are shared from a credit transfere.

  31. Barry John Williams

    A bit like...

    This sounds like the Xnet in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. Whilst the content of the network will be different, the concept is the same - a network the government can't snoop on!

  32. Wortel

    Will just raise suspicion

    And then the legal charges for monetizing on (making it possible to do potentially) illegal activities will come.

  33. call me scruffy

    I'm not seeing this.

    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?

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They will have problems...

    ..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).

  35. W
    Unhappy

    I'll say it 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.

  36. Ed 17

    Wow

    Paying to be able to steal content. Just wow.

  37. PPPie
    Thumb Up

    Anonymous Visa cards

    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.

  38. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Someone needs to point out

    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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