It’s really barely a draft

IPREDator VPN for anonymous filesharing and an introduction to the alternative

June 20th, 2009 Posted in software, tips, website

I don’t know about you, but since the story of the single mom in the US got fined $1.9 miiiiillliiion dollars (<= pronounced as Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies).  So how much did she download? all movies since 1980? The full catalog of Canadian teen sensation (who had a smashing nr. 38 billboard hit) Whambi? Nope! 24 songs…yes twenty-four!!!…songs. That’s like…2 albums for 1.9 million dollars? incredible!!! Makes you think…

So I started looking for how I could secure myself from ending up like the single mom? Well first of all, I wouldn’t download songs by Gloria Estefan (and definitely not at a $80.000/song rate as the single-mom did), but that’s a given! Next, I wouldn’t use LimeWire or any network client based on the Gnutella protocol (or any other non-bittorrent), because even with tools like PeerGuardian, you’re a sitting duck waiting to be nailed. Did I mention, btw, that back in the good old days of p2p I got a nasty letter from the MPAA where they urged my ISP to shut-down my internet connection and prosecute me?! (needless to say for completely fraudulent charges of course (douché bags should have done their homework..tsk tsk), but still, if I had consorted in such devious and illegal activities I would have been slammed legally, so repeat the morale: don’t use LimeWire or the likes of it).

Anyway, all to help all the single-moms out there, this didn’t go unnoticed by the good people of The Pirate Bay. Also, it didn’t go unnoticed by the, also good people, of the Swedish Government (btw, Denmark beat the living bejesus out of the Swedish soccer team not too long ago – Denmark FTW). So the Swedish Governemtn made the first move, apparently by reading 1984 by George Orwell, and thinking “yeah, let’s move towards that society depicted in the book), so they passed the IPRED (Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) into law.

Sweden implemented a new law, the IPRED, which basically gives the copyright holders the right to demand ISP’s to deliver name and addresses of any people they suspect of having done anything illegal, so they can prosecute them (note that a copyright holder is allowed this before they can prove, or have proven, 1. that the person in question has done something illegal, and 2. having positively indentified that the person in question is also the owner of the internet connection was also the one using the internet connection for illegal purposes. Amazing that big corporations are favored so heavily over consumers!! Shame on your Swedish politicians!! (I should note, for good measure, that Danish ones aren’t much better having ISP’s implement DNS blocking of certain sites, including The Pirate Bay. Use OpenDNS to circumvent it btw…)

The Pirate Bay indirectly replied to the IPRED law with a”this s*cks cowb*lls” type message and announced they would introduce a private “for pay” network, where you for €5/month could access everything on The Pirate Bay without risk of being caught doing something illegal, should you inadvertently download something that was illegal from The Pirate Bay (among all the great legal stuff like e.g. Steal This Film – there’s also a sequel btw)… This network network is called “IPREDator“ (<= clever right? get it? IPREDator - so it’s like the opposite of the law…haha…I’m sure we all had a good laugh about that one…. *sigh* (note sarcasm please)). Anyway, the IPREDator is basiclly just a Virtual Private Network (VPN), so that no one on the network can be identified as coming from Sweden (and thus, the Swedish IPRED law can’t apply..tadaaa). Of course, the added benefit is that no one can identify anyone on the network and no logs of any activity is saved, so you’re home free, prosecution wise.

So naturally you should be well on your way to the IPREDator site and signing up for downloading immunity right? well I forgot to mention, there is a slight catch – it’s in private beta at the moment and only 3000 lucky people (Swedish people I imagine) have been allowed to participate for now. There’s another 180.000 people signup for beta waiting to be let in. That 180.000 people in front of you in line, which is quite similar to the lines that formed for the recent iPhone 3G S launch. So what’s the alternative or do you have to wait, like you’re waiting and have waited for Duke Nukem Forever? Of course not! There are  alternatives, and I’ve tried one of them and have to say I am VERY impressed!

Ivacy.com is what it’s called (again, soooo (note the sarcasm please) clever that they got the ivacy.com domain name which allowed them to use the pr.ivacy.com name in public…get it? pr.iacy.com? almost privacy.com right? yeah, but privacy.com was too expensive for those cheapskates…). Luckily all the money they didn’t spend on the domain name, they used to make a great service! And a great service it is! Much too long to write in this post, so read more about following the link below. In short Ivacy provides torrent downloading for you, VPN can be used on an iPhone to get Pandora, Last.fm iPhone radio integration, will also you to access all the great programming from hulu.com, southparkstudios.com, cbs.com etc. (bascially all the American TV shows), the BBC iPlayer works (when choosing a UK IP),  etc. If it sounds like gibberish above, I’ll explain in the post below when I get the time to finish writing it, but the shor of it is that it’s a decent value for the €10/month in my opinion…

• Read the review of the Ivacy.com & IPREDator VPN services

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