Pirate Parties in Space?

Tharic-Nar

Senior Editor
Staff member
Moderator
Pirate Parties International, the umbrella organization for the worldwide Pirate Parties, are bouncing ideas around the prospect of launching a satellite for the purpose of hosting a torrent site in space. Why you may ask? So that it can not be taken down for breach of copyright... there are no laws in space, right?
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Read the rest of our post and discuss it here!
 

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
This will open up a whole new can of worms that will result in the same back and forth between the artists/recording companies/movie studios/game studios and folks who pirate music, movies and games. Ultimately nobody will be any further a head and money that could be spent to better the world will be pissed away.
 

Psi*

Tech Monkey
Predictable. Although *I* couldn't have predicted this; the age old game of upping the ante ... the arms race ...
 

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
That would be too awesome..... I bet TPB would be the next to do something crazy like that, maybe relaunch their tracker, idk just would be crazy.
 

Psi*

Tech Monkey
Possibly the next step after such a satellite is to by-pass the internet with RF links and all of the controls that are accumulating. If ham radio can afford satellites, I think it a logical expectation that pirate + pr0n ought to be able to send up a network.
 

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
I read something on how if/when the internet became over regulated then the pirates would end up with their own "internet" of sorts and honestly it wouldn't surprise me :p
 

Tharic-Nar

Senior Editor
Staff member
Moderator
It already exists - of sorts. It's called Freenet. It's not an easy place to navigate, nor pleasant with regard to content, and the fact that it is ridiculously slow doesn't help either. It's a completely anonymous network which is made up by the clients itself, think the Internet powered by peer to peer. All files are stored and replicated across the network and then given a hash number. Web pages and files are then recovered through the use of these hash numbers. So in order to download files, you need the hash, your client then asks other connected nodes if they have the file and/or if they are connected to other nodes with the file, and it propagates through the system.

The thing is, you need to leave the client running 24/7 to make use of Freenet, and it takes about a day before you can actually do anything. It's also a bandwidth hog and needs about 10GB of local storage to be even remotely effective. But the entire system is built up of clients and a few dedicated nodes. The other problem is that it died out back in late 2008, so the network is filled with dead files and a lot of junk and broken links, it can take something like an hour to download a page. But the more people that use it, the faster the system becomes. Think Tor but with data storage as well.

Usenet is like a subnet of the Internet, and Freenet is like another subnet... which in-turn has another subnet called Darknet. Darknet is Freenet but with limited, user specific nodes, think of it as a friends list, so you and your 'friends' build a separate dedicated network built on Freenet. Needless to say the shady nature of the whole system, and yes, it does get used for such purposes.

The key point to the whole Freenet system is being able to remain 100% anonymous, and the developers go to great lengths to keep it that way. It's been banned in France I believe, but as always, there are ways around it. It was used to leak government documents, certain anti-piracy company emails and documents, like Media Defender. All sorts of things.

Very steep learning curve to use, you need about 3 or 4 applications, 10GB of disk space, one week and a tonne of bandwidth to use the system. After that, good luck trying to find anything, it's like walking into a teenagers bedroom...
 
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