The Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Signs 100,000 Users Pre-Launch | Hacker News Reader

The Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Signs 100,000 Users Pre-Launch

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23 pointspeter12312 comments

The whole thing oozes irony.

Users are now paying for a service to "protect" them while they download stuff, that they didn't want to pay for.

Not only have the RIAA and MPAA completely failed to slow down the filesharers, their heavy handed tactics have provided a way for TPB to monetise their services.

So in the end, which side does Hollywood think is going to win? before you answer that I'll pose four more questions.

1) Are the number of filesharers increasing or decreasing?

2) Who's technology is evolving more rapidly, Hollywood or the P2P community?

3) Is it more convenient to go sit in a crowded cinema and pay for overpriced tickets/popcorn/drinks, or click "download this torrent" ?

4) Do you really think users are concerned with respecting the copyrights of studio's that glorify theft in their films? (eg Gone in 60 seconds, The Italian Job, The Oceans 11 Films etc)

About 3), I can tolerate the crowd, but the hour of advertisement before the movie annoys me. Especially the shorts against pirating: "Hey, I did pay and I sit in this cinema. You do not need to punish me with this indoctrination. Perhaps next time, I'll just download, to watch the movie and only the movie."

The issue is far more complicated than just file sharing, the issue of file sharing has simply brought the anonymizing services to light to the general public. Sweden recently passed a law that lets our government perform targeted mass surveillance and is in the process of passing data retention laws. Essentially our government are bullying its people into civil disobedience.

Now all the studies and polls I've seen in Sweden since the file sharing debate went mainstream a few years back is that people think file sharing for personal use is ok and my own anecdotal experience suggest it's no longer something you brush under the table it's something you do openly.

This is going on at the same time as the Cinemas in Sweden reported no loss in ticket sales between 1997-2007 (also consider this is the time when home cinema packages went mainstream) and SF the biggest cinema company reported record ticket sales for 2009. This is in a country where virtually everyone have access to at the least 24mbit DSL.

Personally I like going to the movies as does my friends, we see 3-10 movies a year even though we take no moral issue with piracy and don't mind watching movies on tiny 12" laptop screens when we feel like it. You go too the movies for the experience it sort of like why would you go out and drink in a crowded bar where you have to que for overpriced alcohol and possibly be hassled by random drunks when you can have a party at home with whoever you like.

"100k Signed up for mailing list about service" != "100k signed up for the fee-based service"

I signed up because I want to learn more, but I'm not planning on using it.

These countries need their own Hulu and other sites like it!

I never download anymore. Have no need, as 90% of the stuff I want to watch I can stream. I can wait for the other 10 %.

No need to protocol ips anymore, the police simply needs to raid all the people paying for that service. :)

It's not illegal to pay for an anonymizing service in most parts of the world including Sweden.

In fact, a cheap high-speed VPN is useful for plenty of legal purposes. If it really costs only 5EUR a month, it's a reasonable way to secure your surfing at a public cafe -- provided you trust TPB.

Too bad, tor's latency makes it painful to use for daily browsing..

I'd be more concerned about the extremely high likelihood that your tor exit node is hostile and sniffing your traffic.

That's not too much of a problem. Or at least it's not a problem that tor pretends to solve. Once your traffic its out of the last node, it's considered public anyway.

Which makes it precisely terrible for the use case that started this thread -- safe surfing on public wifi.

It's way more likely that a bad guy is sniffing traffic leaving his tor node than there being a bad guy in the same cafe as you.

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