Piratpartiet Launches new Darknet P2P Service

This past June The Pirate Bay torrent site’s headquarters were raided by Swedish authorities. Afterwards, the site quickly rebounded and it has been in near constant operation since. The site’s operators were accused by corporate interest groups like the MPAA and RIAA of being at the center of the rampant piracy which was being conducted with impunity by the users of The Pirate Bay.

While there is little argument over whether or not illegal activity was taking place, representatives of The Pirate Bay and others claim that Bit Torrent technology is used (by tracking sites like The Pirate Bay) simply to track users, establish and maintain connections between the appropriate users and then wrangle the complex algorithms necessary to get complete files distributed to the entire swarm.

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This past June The Pirate Bay torrent site’s headquarters were raided by Swedish authorities. Afterwards, the site quickly rebounded and it has been in near constant operation since. The site’s operators were accused by corporate interest groups like the MPAA and RIAA of being at the center of the rampant piracy which was being conducted with impunity by the users of The Pirate Bay.

While there is little argument over whether or not illegal activity was taking place, representatives of The Pirate Bay and others claim that Bit Torrent technology is used (by tracking sites like The Pirate Bay) simply to track users, establish and maintain connections between the appropriate users and then wrangle the complex algorithms necessary to get complete files distributed to the entire swarm.

The technology itself and the tracker site operators that set up the bit torrent trackers are in no way in control over what material passes through the network. Since the raid, the MPAA and RIAA have continued to crusade against piracy on behalf of the company’s that created them; and groups like The Pirate Bay, The Pirate Bureau and Piratpartiet (major Swedish Torrent supporters) have fought for Internet privacy and the right to have Bit Torrent treated as a legitimate technology.

The Piratpartiet is a quasi-political party that supports various causes related to Internet freedom and privacy. The Pirate Bureau is a similar organization (but one with political aspirations) that recently held a rally, together with the Piratpartiet, to show opposition to the Swedish government’s decision to raid The Pirate Bay. In a related development that stems directly from the raid on The Pirate Bay in Sweden, Piratpartiet yesterday launched a new P2P service that will offer users an unprecedented level of anonymity. The new service allows anyone with a computer to send and receive files and information over the Internet “without fear of being monitored or logged.”

The logging of IP addresses is becoming more and more common, and intellectual property owners are becoming more sophisticated in the methods they use to track, log and sue users of P2P technology of every stripe. Because of this, anonymity is becoming a near necessity for those engaged in file sharing or trading. Known as a “Darknet,” the new network from Piratpartiet allows members to use “untraceable addresses so that they cannot be personally identified.”

Unlike block lists and other IP address based technologies (like Peer Guardian) that are designed to keep users safe by blocking out the IP address blocks owned by certain companies and organizations that are known to track activity on P2P networks, Piratpartiet has a P2P technology that was designed from the ground up to provide anonymity by adding a Swedish IP address over the one given out by a users ISP.

Swedish high tech company Relakks provides the virtual provider network (VPN) technology that allows users of the new Darknet to appear to be local Swedish residents to the outside world instead of revealing a user’s true and identifiable network layer information.

The VPN technology used by Relakks is also envrypted; adding another layer of protection into the system. “The cost of the service is 5 euros per month, and it is available now at www.relakks.com. A portion of the subscription fees will go towards the Pirate Party’s work in changing the copyright and privacy laws and making the service obsolete.”

Via Piratpartiet