How The Pirate Bay Plans to Beat Censorship | Hacker News Reader

How The Pirate Bay Plans to Beat Censorship

torrentfreak.com

34 pointsantr16 comments

Open articleView on HN

Similar projects:

Tor: https://www.torproject.org/

i2p: https://geti2p.net/en/

Gnunet: https://gnunet.org/

Freenet: https://freenetproject.org/

The most interesting of all (imo) which I have tried and used (works fairly well) is project meshnet: https://projectmeshnet.org

They have their own network called Hyperboria http://hyperboria.net/ and the ultimate plan is to abstract away over the whole hardware infrastructure of the modern internet. (Using wifi relays or whatever, might be unfeasible but still interesting)

Note that Hyperboria uses CJDNS, which last time I checked means each node needs to be explicitly granted access via one or more existing nodes, which means unlike many of the other alternatives they're not really trying to address anonymity.

Personally I see that as a major flaw. They claim it is "censorship resistant", but if you can roll up the local part of the network by knocking down doors and leaning on people, I'm not convinced.

"Fractions of the dollar go to the artists, and the archaic content distribution models mean lots of content can't be seen legally without a 100 channels of cable or a $40 DVD."

"Now if all TPB did was make it easier for people to OD on Game Of Thrones I'd still be impressed."

Jesus Christ. It's not your role to unilaterally "solve" content distribution problems without the consent of the creators. Sorry. And It's not a basic human right that you get to watch Game of Thrones.

Now, you can say "I want to watch Game of Thrones and HBO can go fuck themselves, so let's build this alternate internet that lets me do that based on Bitcoin whatever." But don't paint it as some noble calling, aimed at ending censorship or fixing the copyright system or DRM or whatever.

The Pirate Bay exists to help people pirate content owned by other people. Fine. But I don't think they're quite the freedom fighters they're portrayed to be. Except as it pertains to their freedom to continue doing this.

IP protection is not a human right either.

It's an intentional restriction of freedoms to enrich others. Now, it's perfectly fine to consider that restriction an acceptable trade-off in order to encourage creation, but that's not somehow an inherently more justified position than believing it is not justified.

I have the feeling that "intellectual property" and piracy are equally evil.

> And It's not a basic human right that you get to watch Game of Thrones.

Sure, I get your point. But let's say there's a TV show that costs $8 for season 1 of the DVD, but $16 to stream it in SD and $24 to stream it in HD. Sure, I don't have to watch it, and it isn't my right, but I can't help but feeling like it's a big "fuck you" to me that they do this. So forgive me if I have little sympathy for them when I decide to go pirate it instead. Not to mention that pirating actually gives me more freedom and flexibility to download and store the content as I see fit.

Here in Germany, the entire television system is somewhat different from the US. Most people do not have what we call "pay TV", but consume only free-TV and DVDs/Blurays. There is no usable streaming service (usable in the sense that it has more than two (!) non-ancient TV series on it). No Hulu, no Netflix.

Now with Game of Thrones, what happened is this: The pay-TV group Sky got the rights for it and is showing it with a rather short delay compared to the US date. However, you can't just buy the channel that has GoT, but you have to buy a whole package of channels. That package is rather expensive, since Sky owns several very costly sports transmission licenses. Needless to say, I don't know anybody with a Sky subscription who is not a very devoted sports fan.

So for most GoT fans, it is as if you were paying your whole "cable bill" just for that one series.

If you decide against that (how could you!), you can of course buy the DVD. The DVD for the third season will be available in March 2014.

Yes. One year later.

So essentially, you are locked out of the conversation about GoT that is going on on the internet if you want to remain legal without footing the enormous Sky bill. I wonder if there is a firefox extension out there that filters your on-screen text for GoT mentions, since it is absolutely impossible to be one year behind on GoT and spoiler-free.

Does anybody still wonder, why GoT was the most torrented thing out there for 2013?

There are some distribution problems that do need to be fixed because they're just weird and stupid.

I can stream a program over 3g using BBC iplayer app. And I cN download that program to watch later if I'm using wifi. But for some reason I can't download the program over 3g. There aren't any rights issues. It's just a weird gap in their delivery.

How is this different then freenet?

I just wanted to thank you -- I'd never heard of freenet. I know sometimes "how is this different than x" is not considered constructive to some, these posts genuinely pique my interest. Anyone who is interested - https://freenetproject.org/ & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

edit: "While Freenet provides an HTTP interface for browsing freesites, it is not a proxy for the World Wide Web; Freenet can only be used to access content that has been previously inserted into the Freenet network. In this way, it is more similar to Tor's hidden services than to anonymous proxy software like Tor's proxy."

This doesn't even seem to be anywhere near as advanced as Freenet.

To call it a "new Internet" is a huge stretch and an insult to actual projects that are dedicated to building a successor that extends the present infrastructure, like cjdns (which itself originated from Kademlia, largely known for being used in the eMule network).

I only remember to check in on freenet when stories like this one pop up, so I was very surprised to see that the project is sporting a healthy 5-figure bank account. I had been used to seeing it in the vicinity of $500 or maybe $2000, for years at a time.

It is great to see organizations step up and support a project like freenet, despite the realities of what a truly anonymous network could mean in terms of content and behavior. Maybe a separately funded independent security audit is in order though.

When I read these things I constantly find myself struggling between, "great! Another attempt to re-take the internet!", and "great. The n+1th attempt to re-take the internet."

I can't decide whether the better future is homogenised internet similar to what we have today, but with these protections layered over it, or whether the best option is for there to be dozens or even hundreds of disparate networks that will grow up separately.

In some ways, I suppose this is similar to the past - what with BBS homogenising in to newsgroups and AOL.

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again"

Diversity is good because all these networks will be testing out different ideas. The best ideas will be self-evident, and they will propagate by means of popularity and inclusion in future networks.

Like Bender said: "Forget about the blackjack! And you know what? Forget about the Internet!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com