Pirate Bay Founder: “Future copy fights will need something better” | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Founder: “Future copy fights will need something better”

torrentfreak.com

86 pointsllambda24 comments

What he actually said seems to be more along the lines of "shut it down and replace it with something better." I took the headline to imply that he's turned over some new leaf and is "anti-piracy" now (clearly untrue from the article's content).

'"Shut it down and replace it with something better" says Pirate Bay founder' doesn't get the clicks TorrentFreak are desperate for.

Really? I find it hard to imagine someone who helped make the pirate bay becoming anti-piracy. This article is exactly what I expected from the headline.

Most insightful part is the forward thinking about the new wave of enforcement that copyright infringement of physical goods via 3D printers will bring. Something I hadn't considered before, but a massive shift indeed.

Yup! 3D printing hasn't really gotten started yet, at least on a consumer level. But it's going to ramp up very quickly, especially now that publicly-accessible 3D printers are starting to become available around the U.S.

Chicago Public Library just recently opened a 3D printing lab, complete with free lessons and a variety of tools to go along with the printers. I have a feeling that it's going to be successful and it's going to garner more interest as time goes on. So yea, there are a couple of industries that are pretty scared right now.

You probably meant patent infringement rather than copyright infringement? If not, what would be good examples of copyright infringement made possible through 3D printing?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/02/19/171912...

Thanks!

These cases seem comparatively insignificant to me. I think patent infringement will be the real "intellectual property" issue with 3D printing. I'm looking forward to a renewed debate on the ethics of having governments intrude in people's private lives to enforce corporate monopolies.

That's been discussed in the past, when The Pirate Bay added the "Physibles" section to their website: http://thepiratebay.sx/blog/203

What's left to thwart the MAFIAA we need a protocol to serve anonymous/unknown data, with plausible deniability.

Like this: "I'll store this blob of data on my computer and upload it to anyone who asks for it as long as I can prove that I don't know what it contains, and that I can't know what it contains."

Basically some scheme based on asymmetric encryption with the ability to verify that the blob is encrypted. (The server owner hands one part of the key to the user, the user encrypts the blob, sends it to the server which verifies that it's encrypted with the key sent to the user.)

I don't know from the top of my head what's needed to implement that.

You mean onion routing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing

Nah, onion routing just bounces HTTP requests/responses around before sending them on to their final destination (which is still a just a server somewhere).

What the GP is talking about sounds something more like freenet or cryptosphere. When you query for some data in these systems you have no idea where it is stored and the people who are storing it / sending it back to you have no idea what they are storing.

This is not a very accurate quote, very link baity.

Why don't the admin's use The Pirate Bay for donations (on their homepage say) to help kickstart a new more secure, encrypted, decentralized file sharing software? I am sure if they offered a $50,000 prize they are far more likely to get results.

because who says the current admins are the best people qualified to build that software?

It doesn't have to be an admin, I said offer up a prize for someone who CAN produce a product.

According to Wikipedia, Bittorrent as well as other filesharing solutions like Gnutella and Kad (the eMule network) can be made to work on top of I2P [1].

The wikipedia page also lists alternative solutions like GNUnet and Freenet with anonymity built-in from the start instead of bolted-on after it became a concern.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_P2P#I2P_clients

Maybe he's referring to something like Tribler or Retroshare.

http://www.tribler.org/

http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/

What about GNUnet?

https://gnunet.org/

I don't like retroshare, it's a massive resource hog for something that is supposed to be run in the background. It consumes far to many resources.

The concept I find to be too wasteful. Bouncing through multiple channels is fine for secure communication, but for large amounts of data...

You don't watch youtube through the TOR network.

"You don't watch youtube through the TOR network."

You might if watching Youtube could destroy your finances, your credit rating, your ability to connect to the Internet, etc.

It is not said in the article but I think he's referring to the dangers of real-time tracking of torrent downloaders.

OK, let's take this apart and use this thread to analyze the alleged failings of torrent model. He raises:

(1) A security problem ("something safer"), presumably regarding identification prior to raids and repression.

(2) A speed (asks for "something faster").

(3) Centralization (best not to "depend on a few persons").

My random thoughts:

(1) Tor offers a reasonable approach for torrent metadata accrual and distribution, but will limit availability. As for actual content, spoofed origins may be possible on some networks, otherwise intermediaries are necessary and then you have Tor or a multi-VPN money-draining complexity fetish. Moving away from the open internet exclusively to Tor/I2P would be a great way to educate the user base and bring support to those projects. Good luck moving all torrent tracking sites though... it may just force people elsewhere. Still, the education benefit would be significant... but there's strength in numbers and fleeing to darknets does not play one of the greatest hands: solidarity, or social strength.

(2) Transfer speed challenges perhaps largely derive from the random distribution; itself an asset. Sourcing content more locally (using AS based logical topology mapping, community-reported speeds between ASs, etc.) may provide some benefit, but ultimately may cause greater harm than good due to increased risk of local distribution and thus prominent node identification and the aforementioned raids and repression. With regards to initial distribution specifically (versus general redistribution after initial seeding), it may be possible to add some sort of priority, anonymous queue for newly posted / incoming data that is based on an anonymous but cryptographically preserved uploader reputation metric (somehow adjudicated by trackers?).

(3) Infrastructure costs money, which is perhaps a major part of the centralization problem with TPB - someone needs the keys to the proverbial kingdom to keep it running. The web in general needs decentralization of hosting, which at the moment generally both exposes identities and is too difficult and expensive for the average user (largely therefore: Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, etc.) Read earlier today someplace Firefox has a project going in this area at the moment based upon altering consumer browsers to participate in third party data hosting, perhaps this could be co-opted carefully and legally armoured by to preserve an inability for individuals to identify which content they are in fact hosting. Unfortunately its motivator for hosting is the wont to publish one's own data .. elsewhere .. and most people right now are net consumers rather than publishers, so this may be brittle.

Others' takes?

No wait, not yet, I'm not done download ... um ... [insert something about freedom]

Seriously, my internet connection isn't the fastest, give me some time will you?

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