IPREDator, the Terrifyingly Awesome Privacy Tool Prepares to Launch
Set to launch tomorrow, if the homepage can be believed, IPREDator is a new virtual private networking service (VPN) created by those behind The Pirate Bay. And if you don't know what The Pirate Bay is, well, you must be new to the Internet. (Welcome, it's crazy here.)
With IPREDator's VPN, you can stay anonymous on the net. Your internet traffic will be encrypted and protected - even beyond what a typical VPN offers. This way, law enforcement can't catch you when you download the latest episode of your favorite TV show...or when you get involved in other criminal activity, for that matter. And it's that last bit which is a bit troubling, we have to admit.
The Pirate Bay: Because the Legal Market Didn't Accommodate
For years, The Pirate Bay has been one of the top hubs for sharing copyrighted files illegally, much to the chagrin of the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content owners who see the site as one of the reasons why their businesses aren't making money like they used to. That may or may not be the case - it's just as likely that the content-producing industries have failed to adapt quickly enough to the entity that is the Internet, a global force that leaves no traditional business model untouched and, yes, sometimes destroyed completely.
There are a lot of reasons why The Pirate Bay became so popular. Not only is using the site easy, it also provides digital content for download when it is not possible to locate it legally. For example, in between the time a movie leaves the theater and the time it's released on DVD, there is no other place to watch it. Enter The Pirate Bay. Or pre-Hulu, if you missed a TV show, there were few places to see it. (And since Hulu is U.S.-only, the rule still applies). Even when legal marketplaces like iTunes arose, content owners still greedily held onto their product, making The Pirate Bay once again the place to find what you could not access through the "proper" channels. Today, that's still the case as some shows are missing entirely from iTunes and for others, the current season is nowhere to be found. Plus, sometimes the pirated content is even of better quality than the legal download.
Initially established back in 2003, The Pirate Bay quickly became the go-to site for finding any file on the net, many of which are copyrighted. Still, the site's operators claim what they're doing is perfectly legal. Now on trial for copyright infringement charges in Sweden where the company's servers are based (verdict expected April 17th), a Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi has claimed that 80 percent of The Pirate Bay's downloads are for content that's legal to share online. The defense for the legality of The Pirate Bay is somewhat like that old saying, "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Just because The Pirate Bay provides the infrastructure that points to where files are hosted, are they to blame when it's used to point to illegal content? That's perhaps a moral issue to debate at another time, because today's news is about The Pirate Bay's new anonymizer, IPREDator.
Going Anonymous with IPREDator
The VPN service IPREDator is being launched tomorrow (according to the homepage) in response to the introduction of IPRED in the E.U., a directive which stands for "Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive." With IPRED, law enforcement and copyright holders can request the names of suspected copyright infringers which they can then threaten and/or sue.
The easiest way to avoid detection, of course, is to become anonymous and that's precisely what the IPREDator tool allows for...and does so quite well, too, based on what's being said about it.
Although the concept is not new - other anonymizers like the onion-router project Tor have been around for some time - a tool provided by and pushed out by The Pirate Bay will likely gain the attention of a much larger swath of internet users than those ever did. Why's that? It's simple - The Pirate Bay tracks 50% of all public torrents on the net. In other words, they're huge. They also announced back in November that they had reached 25 million peers, a number not necessarily equivalent to number of users, but that refers to another computer on the Internet sharing a file you want to download. But again, huge.
Making it Easier for Criminals to Hide, Too?
This is where the copyright witch hunt has brought us: in order to access the content we want, we have to become anonymous and hide our identities. Because people just want to watch a TV show or see a movie, they have to play a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with the authorities who somehow equate downloading a file with stealing a car.
That's not to say that some people don't abuse the system and have gotten into the habit of never paying for anything, but a lot of people just casually use The Pirate Bay and other similar sites. The system arose to fill a void in the marketplace, just like any other black market does. Without a legal alternative, The Pirate Bay could succeed and it did.
Yet here we are, only a day away from the launch of a tool that is surely going to be used for much more than just torrenting. An anonymizer as easy to use as The Pirate Bay itself, affordable at only €5 per month, and made available worldwide will become the scourge of law enforcement everywhere, especially once it's put to use for much more dangerous purposes than catching up on the latest episode of "Lost." And how did we get here? A failure to adapt. Instead of concentrating on providing new ways to market, distribute, and sell content, content owners have spent entirely too much time fighting the inevitable future.
So now we have yet another tool that will make things easier for the terrorists, the child predators, and the other online criminals to use to hide behind along with those oh-so-dangerous downloaders. We can't help but wonder if that's really a good thing.
It's strange, too, because in all other aspects, the Internet seems to be moving towards a place of openness and accountability. Thanks to the movement of Web 2.0, social networking has become the norm on many sites and new tools like OpenID, MySpace ID, and Facebook Connect are letting people log in and authenticate with sites as themselves - not with some anonymous handle they can hide behind. This authenticity has been a great thing for net as it becomes harder for anonymous trolls to leave hateful comments that disrupt the normal flow of online discourse. In short, the internet has the potential to become a more civil and therefore, more engaging and productive place.
That's why being anonymous, especially so anonymous that your IP isn't even traceable, sounds like we're backtracking instead of moving forward. Although we understand the reasons behind the IPREDator project (and a bit of the anarchist in us supports it), we have our concerns. Is downloading really that bad of a crime? Will this technology be used for more harm than it is for protection from the copyright cops (just like like Tor is)? Sadly, that is, in fact, possible. And we're sorry to see that it's come to this.
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Let's just be clear on how much the industry still doesn't accomodate: the legal availability of the most desired variant, which is to legally download to own and play anytime, anywhere is still around 0% (plus or minus some indie productions) for movies an tv-shows.
That's right, nothing, nada, niente. No offering whatsoever of what's basically the only type of product worth paying for: the product that guarantees I've still got what I paid for 10 years from now.
The US has some castrated alternatives like Hulu (for how long) and iTunes that at least allow people to watch the content (although apparently the industry still has a problem with people playing TV-content on, god forbid, an actual TV...). The rest of the world still gets the big FU from the industry.
....content owners who see the site as one of the reasons why their businesses aren't making money like they used to...I love that they keep saying this in one form or another over and over and over again as if the more they say it the more likely it will become true or believed by somebody. Movies are making less money than they use to because they suck. Same with CDs. The old school model of charging top bucks for the same old crap is over. And as for all those sales lost to illegal downloading - if the only way to get this stuff was to pay for it - those downloading wouldn't. They download it because they can. They would not pay for it even if available legally. Because its not worth paying for. Or they'd wait till it came to cable or free TV.
The industry continues to blame the victims. Let me give you an example.
Yesterday I bought a CD of Les Paul and Mary Ford. It is a perfectly good CD, sold at normal retail price.
On close inspection, the CD turns out to be a 1990 compilation, even though when I ripped it to iTunes it claimed 1999. There is also a spelling error on one of the songs, even though the printed list is correct. I know for a certainty that Les Paul, a perfectionist if there ever was one, would have gone ballistic.
The cover has a photo of the couple. So does the back. So does the sleeve. The same photo is used on all four surfaces.
There's a song list on the back. There's the same list on the back of the sleeve. There's the same list a third time on the inside of the sleeve.
These are all small things. But they're indicative of the contempt with which the companies treat both artists and customers. The record companies really, truly, and verifiably do not care, as long as the cash flows.
The Pirate Bay gets my vote. They aren't pirates, they're liberators. Somebody has to break these corporations. Since "somebody" doesn't step up, it's left to everybody. And it appears we're succeeding.
It does seem that the solution is disproportionate to the problem, and I would agree with the overall point - anonymity is a step backwards. When a society supports Free Speech (as in the right not to be persecuted by the government for your opinions) then anonymity isn't really required - anonymous political pamphlets are what we had before free speech, and still have in societies where people are persecuted.
Anonymity is taking a step backwards from being responsible for your actions - ironically something that most anarchists and Libertarians support.
And let's face it, the whole essence of the Pirate Bay, from it's name to it's actions is pretty much about trying to upset people, about using technology to destroy the legal system of the society you live in. Because governments are evil, man.
(And lest we forget, TPB is bank-rolled by someone with connection to Swedish far Right parties. I bet he loves the idea of anonymous networking).
The Pirate Bay allows me to do pimpage posts like this:
http://mikecanepics.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/lie-to-me-season-1-episode-8/
I go to Fox's site for the legal repeat, and they want me to download some crap player that probably wouldn't even run on this PC. Same thing with ABC.
Pirate Bay allows me to pimp an ABC show too:
http://mikecanepics.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/castle-season-1-episode-3-writing-screen-saver/
TNT seems to be OK with the types I've done:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/leverage-the-bank-shot-job/
None of this possible *without* the Pirate Bay.
I sit here right now with Castle downloading. And I'm being *throttled* because of it. IPREDator could be in my future too.
waiting to see if it lives up the hype
Posted by: Anurag Gupta
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April 7, 2009 10:31 AM
The people in Sweden have shouted for leagal ways to download movies/music/tv-shows för 10 years but nothing happens. The lobby is not interested in giving us anything. All we can do is go to the local gas-station and get a movie for 20$. WTH. They are not interested in giving ppl what they want, because then they dont have the control of the product. WTH. There is no place to dl movies leagal, without copyprotection and other stuff. Give the ppl what they want and dont hunt down your customers.
There are legitimate reasons for anonymity beyond (and far more important than) avoiding harassment for media downloads.
Regarding "free speech", it is largely a myth, even under allegedly "free and democratic" governments. In how many European countries can one publicly state that the Holocaust was other than popularly portrayed without suffering threat of imprisonment? Why would one want to say that, you ask? Wrong question. "Free speech" that is free only so long as not too many people object to it too strenuously is an egregious lie.
Regarding tor, Ms. Perez, do you have some supporting evidence for your statement that it is "used for more harm than it is for protection from the copyright cops", or is that, as I suspect, nothing more than a baseless, mindless, and scurrilous accusation?
-C
It's anonymous and doesn't store your traffic history, but it needs your email for the beta and it charges your ACCOUNT monthly... Not sure I trust their encryption...
@lettheeloiperish: Seeing as how it hasn't even launched yet, I couldn't have possibly accused it of being used for anything, good or bad. I was asking the question - if you'll go back and actually read the sentence -
QUOTE: Will this technology be used for more harm than it is for protection from the copyright cops (just like like Tor is)?
Warner Brothers recently bought out Pirate Bay for $13 billions. I would not use Pirate Bay for this reason.
Are Warner Brothers connected to IPREDator?
If so, I wouldn't use it.
Warner Brothers recently bought out Pirate Bay for $13 billions. I would not use Pirate Bay for this reason.
This was someone's april fools joke
I work for AnchorFree and we provide free VPN service called Hotspot Shield, which provides the exact same level of protection as IPRED -- at absolutely NO cost to 5.5 million users who download the tool every day. You can read more about us and these issues in this week's Ad Age article: http://tinyurl.com/c6hmz6.
Hotspot Shield seems to store traffic data which means that it has the same loophole as many other VPNs
quote from torrentfreak:
link
"The weak link in any VPN/anonymity service is always their willingness (or otherwise) to hand over your customer data when pressured under the law. However, with IPREDATOR this should not be an issue since the service is promising to keep no logs of user activity whatsoever."
Vain.
Too public announcement. This will attract unnecessary attention to this vpn service. And do not give guarantees of security.
Yet so many examples of how corporate interests can abuse governmental powers of law to perform witchhunts on common users.
The downfall of society as we know it will not be terrorists and war, but when people finally wake up and tear their respective governments a new one...
Same here, started using https://www.anonine.com/ since ipredator is taking too long to launch
I ain't gonna write much, but everyone screams about terrorism and child predators. But seriously, think about all the open wifi, wifi with WEP and wifi with bad/easy bruteforce'able passwords around the world that also can, and probably are used by them. So go and check your wireless equipment so you are NOT helping them spread what ever they do.
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If the Movie industry CAN spend 150 million marketing a 300 million movie, I think that shows how wrong things have become, the marketting of mass produced rubbish made in china is another example, its not QUALITY anymore, intellectual rights never benefit anyone but the insigificant few, just look at the DRUG companies, the business world today is greedy and lazy without any dignity or morality whatsoever just look at everything moving offshore to countries that abuse there own people yet they want the public to show dignity and morality , we live in a wastefull world, a throw away society. The internet file sharing itself is a balancing force against the huge perverted money making distribution and marketing machines. Eventually OPENSOURCE free technologies and communities will overtake and provide us with better software and better ways to entertain ourselves.