Frei Denken

Archiv für August 2009

Auf Stern.de berichtet Sebastian Christ in seinem Blog, warum die Piratenpartei den Bundestag entern könnte:

Und es werden immer mehr Menschen, die sich den Piraten anschließen. Die Zeit hat unter anderem dazu in dieser Woche ein interessantes Dossier geschrieben (das, nebenbei bemerkt, im krassen Gegensatz zu den vielen netzkritischen Artikeln der vergangenen Monate steht). Demnach treten der Piratenpartei jeden Tag 80 Menschen bei, während die SPD täglich 30 Mitglieder verliert. In Meinungsumfragen liegen die Piraten nach Informationen der Zeit bei zwei Prozent.

Doch die politische Stimmung ist auf Seiten der jungen, unverbrauchten Partei. Und mit jedem Tag des Nichtwahlkampfs steigt die Chance der Piraten, vielleicht doch noch das Unmögliche möglich zu machen: in den Bundestag einzuziehen. Ich halte das persönlich nicht für wahrscheinlich – aber auch nicht für ausgeschlossen. Aus folgenden Gründen: …

Den ganzen Artikel gibt es hier.

Auf Stern.de berichtet Sebastian Christ in seinem Blog, warum die Piratenpartei den Bundestag entern könnte: Und es werden immer mehr Menschen, die sich den Piraten anschließen. Die Zeit hat unter anderem dazu in dieser Woche ein interessantes Dossier geschrieben (das, nebenbei bemerkt, im krassen Gegensatz zu den vielen netzkritischen Artikeln der vergangenen Monate steht). Demnach treten der Piratenpartei jeden Tag 80 Menschen bei, während die SPD täglich 30 Mitglieder verliert. In Meinungsumfragen liegen die Piraten nach Informationen der Zeit bei zwei Prozent. Doch die politische Stimmung ist auf Seiten der jungen, unverbrauchten Partei. Und mit jedem Tag des Nichtwahlkampfs steigt die Chance der Piraten, vielleicht doch noch das Unmögliche möglich zu machen: in den Bundestag einzuziehen. Ich halte das persönlich nicht für wahrscheinlich - aber auch nicht für ausgeschlossen. Aus folgenden Gründen: ... Den ganzen Artikel gibt es hier.

Gerade beim täglichen Rush durch das Netz im Blog von The Pirate Bay gefunden:

Riding out the storm

We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Signed;

The Pirate Bay Crew – Always when needed.

Diese kurze Rede bzw. dieses kurze Statement ist im übrigen an eine der drei berühmten Kriegsreden (WW2) von Sir Winston Churchill angelehnt.

Gerade beim täglichen Rush durch das Netz im Blog von The Pirate Bay gefunden: Riding out the storm We have, ourselves, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our Internets, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. Even though large parts of Internets and many old and famous trackers have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Ifpi and all the odious apparatus of MPAA rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the ef-nets and darknets, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Internets, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the baywords.org, we shall fight on the /. and on the digg, we shall fight in the courts; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, the Internets or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the Anon Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in Cerf's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. Signed; The Pirate Bay Crew - Always when needed. Diese kurze Rede bzw. dieses kurze Statement ist im übrigen an eine der drei berühmten Kriegsreden (WW2) von Sir Winston Churchill angelehnt.

Einen interessanten, wenn auch kurzen, Beitrag zum Thema Filesharing und faire Gerichtsverfahren hat die gerade frisch gebackene, britische Piratenpartei in ihrem Blog veröffentlicht.

Justice for those accused of file sharing will naturally require the opportunity for those accused to have an opportunity to see the evidence against them and challenge it in a court of law. To reduce file sharing by 70%, assuming 7 million people sharing 100 files each means dealing with 70% of 700,000,000 files. That’s 490,000,000 fair trials, or if, as has been rumoured there are to be two different offences, one for uploading, another for downloading, nearly 1 billion fair trials.

Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

Einen interessanten, wenn auch kurzen, Beitrag zum Thema Filesharing und faire Gerichtsverfahren hat die gerade frisch gebackene, britische Piratenpartei in ihrem Blog veröffentlicht. Justice for those accused of file sharing will naturally require the opportunity for those accused to have an opportunity to see the evidence against them and challenge it in a court of law. To reduce file sharing by 70%, assuming 7 million people sharing 100 files each means dealing with 70% of 700,000,000 files. That's 490,000,000 fair trials, or if, as has been rumoured there are to be two different offences, one for uploading, another for downloading, nearly 1 billion fair trials. The government tell us that 7 million people in this country share files. It's hard to find any precise data on how many individual files each one of those people are sharing, but 100 seems like a fairly conservative guess. In the Digital Britain report, the government also tell us that they want to reduce file sharing by 70% within a year. Leaving aside the obvious question of why they don't commit to a 100% target if they really think that file sharers are doing something morally wrong, let's look at what would be involved in reaching their target. Justice for those accused of file sharing will naturally require the opportunity for those accused to have an opportunity to see the evidence against them and challenge it in a court of law. To reduce file sharing by 70%, assuming 7 million people sharing 100 files each means dealing with 70% of 700,000,000 files. That's 490,000,000 fair trials, or if, as has been rumoured there are to be two different offences, one for uploading, another for downloading, nearly 1 billion fair trials. Her Majesty’s Courts Service say in their annual report that they dealt with 150,000 criminal cases and 2 million civil claims last year. Can they realistically be expected to cope with an additional 1 billion next year, and has their budget of £1,766,222,000 been expanded 500-fold to do so? The answer, quite simply is no. The inescapable conclusion is that the government are not intending to fund the expensive luxury of justice for those accused of file sharing. We can only afford to have a system without justice, where simply being denounced by a copyright-holder is sufficient for summary punishment to be dealt out, and that summary punishment will be dealt out to 70% of 7 million people. If you believe that denying a fair trial to around 5 million people in this country is wrong, maybe it's time to join the Pirate Party?

Wer sich für VPN und sicheres, anonymes Surfen im Internet interessiert, für den gibt es einen interessanten Vergleichsartikel zwischen dem schwedischen VPN Anbieter IPREDATOR und IVACY den ich auf barelyadraft.com gefunden habe. Hier werden die Vor- und Nachteile der beiden Dienste kompakt beschrieben und  deutlich veranschaulicht. Für alle die gerade auf der Suche nach einem zuverlässigen und seriösen Anbieter sind, ist dieser Artikel eine gute Grundlage für die Entscheidungsfindung. Die Pros and Cons sind jeweils in einer übersichtlichen Tabelle zusammengefasst:

Diesen Beitrag weiterlesen »

Wer sich für VPN und sicheres, anonymes Surfen im Internet interessiert, für den gibt es einen interessanten Vergleichsartikel zwischen dem schwedischen VPN Anbieter IPREDATOR und IVACY den ich auf barelyadraft.com gefunden habe. Hier werden die Vor- und Nachteile der beiden Dienste kompakt beschrieben und  deutlich veranschaulicht. Für alle die gerade auf der Suche nach einem zuverlässigen und seriösen Anbieter sind, ist dieser Artikel eine gute Grundlage für die Entscheidungsfindung. Die Pros and Cons sind jeweils in einer übersichtlichen Tabelle zusammengefasst: Privacy has always been difficult online. You could potentially do a lot of illegal things without knowing it was illegal, like downloading movies and tv shows from thepiratebay. There are of course also people who knowingly do illegal things and wants to hide it (this could also be from thepiratebay btw). I wrote a little big about why it might be good to be a little careful when being online about a week ago here – so I won’t go into that too much. For this post I will focus on the two options I have found will suit my needs, but which should I (and you!) choose? It’s time for… Trying for anonymity online isn’t new. Recently the Tor network has gotten some attention. Also old-timers like Freenet, free VPN connection solutions such as Hotspot Shield are there and even free proxies are touted by  enthusiasts as options, but the conclusion is always the same: It works like crap, is horrendously slow and requires a lot of work to maintain or along those lines. For me, having a full time job, having to keep up writing posts  on my blog, running marathons, going to dive bars with my girlfriend playing dart (yup, we did that last Saturday night – I won!! woot woot!!) – sorry got sidetracked there for a minute. Anyway, bottom line?! I’m busy, I need something that works and I am willing to pay for it! I need a solution that works for my girlfriend! What works for her? Something that requires zero maintenence, zero new processses, works behind the scenes – i.e. just-works. And I have a very good incentive to keep it simple when I implement anything that affects anything she does on her computer – If it does work I have her on my back asking “when will it be fixed?”. IPREDator.se Alright, so looking at IPREdator, I have to say, it works beautifully. I was invited in to the beta program lasdt week and have been trying IPREDator out since then – I mean how could I resist, it cost just €15 try for 3 months, so why not?! It’s a dead simple setup (PPTP), which makes securing your connection a breeze. But the biggest thing is really the speed of the service – it’s top notch for any VPN service out there. Of course since the server is in Malmö in Sweden and I live a mere 40km away from that server, this could influence my experience compared to the other VPN solutions I have tried. At any rate, it’s as fast a my regular connection (10Mbit download), so there’s not performance loss.  Another great thing is that all ports seem to be forwarded, so direct connections when downloading torrents works blazingly fast. Hope this holds true even after they start en open beta or release the final service. Really, for me, the only real downside of the service is that the IP is Swedish and therefore I cannot access all the American or UK only services I use/want to use. I’m thinking hulu.com video, last.fm radio, iBBC Player video, pandora.com radio and all the TV network sites. But I highly recommend it. Go get signed up already on ipredator.se for the beta and they’ll probably invite you soon enough. Ivacy.com I actually signed up for Ivacy.com just a week or two before I got let in the IPREDator.se beta program, and I have to say I am really impressed by all the things it has to offer. It’s also therefore pretty sad that the service has some severe reliability issues in relation to speed and to access points. Now don’t get me wrong, ivacy.com is AWESOME and I really recommend it. They have a lot of very useful services that make it stand out compared to other services, as long as they fix their speed and access point reliability. Regarding speed, this could of course be somewhat low because I am located in Denmark and the access point I use is in the US (probably the West Coast), which could influence the results. But there’s no excuse that the access point has been down! Enough about the problems, let’s look at what you get with the service. Now it’s almost double the price of IPREdator, so obviously they have to offer more. I can’t mention all of it in this post, but you can check it out in the pros/cons table below. I will say that the full binary usenet access is very nice, but the really killer feature for me is the private dark net (meaning a kind of internet available only when you are connected securely and anonymously to through the ivacy vpn connection). The dark currently has 4 cool services that makes it totally worth the money. The most important and useful one is instant.torrents.site (<= link only works when you are connected through the ivacy vpn btw). Here yo you can get the instant-torrents site to download any torrent to the site and then you just download it via regular HTTP download afterwards (with resume). The cool part is of course twofold – you’re not exposing yourself to downloading of torrents at all and you don’t have to leave your computer turned on while it happens. And it works brilliantly! Especially useful if you are donwnloading very big torrents. Another cool feature is the instant-music.site (again, only when connected via vpn), where you have all popular music to download instantly. It’s a like an iTunes store for cheap. The final feature I would like to highlight is the fact that you can connect via UK, Russian or US access points (US access point currently down at time of writing…grrr….), which means you can get access to e.g. US only sites. This means, for me, that I can see all the tv shows I follow online via hulu.com, the respective networks homepages (e.g. cbs.com), internet radio sites (e.g. last.fm – which costs $3/month in  Denmark for free radio) and of course this also applies to setting up VPN on the iPhone to e.g. use the Pandora, last.fm radio applications or download applications that are only available in the US App store. Also, with ivacy.com you get several connection options compared to IPREDator. You can of course setup a regular PPTP VPN setup, but you can also download a Firefox extension which allows you to just secure the Firefox application instead of everything on the comptuer (works great for using the instant-torrents.site service). There’s also a pre-compiled Firefox browser for download that can be run from a USB drive with instant anonymity! great stuff! So go sign up and get 100MB free traffic to test out the service. Sign up here Which should you/I choose in the end? It’s a tough choice. It really depends on your needs. If all you want it anonymous an fast download of torrents, then IPREDator.se is definitely the way to go, but if you also use internet radio, need access to US only sites, use usenet service or see value in the darknets available that I described above, well then it’s no-brainer, ivacy.com is definitley a-go!