IMHO projects like this, should stop using the word "pirate".
I think it is a boundary for people, to emotionally (though subconsciously) having to be o.k. with being seen (mostly by themselves) as "crooks".
You don't need to be doing something illegal, in order to want privacy...
Besides I think we should reverse the picture and make sure it is the secret spying eyes, that are seen as "crooks".
It is not me being mischievous for wanting privacy - it is the governments for not respecting my privacy.
The physical analogy of online spying, paint the right picture I think:
Someone plants several cameras and microphones around your house.
They have also someone following you around almost 24/7, to always know where you are.
Why? Because you might one day do something, that may or may not be dangerous to between 1 and several thousand people - or at least talk to someone who know someone, who knows......
This is, by the way, not just you - it has been done to everyone on your street - oh... And the world...
I saw a film about the old east Germany and how they were spied on and thought wow! They were really aggressive with the spying and surveillance... Till it hit me: That was nothing compare to what is being done to virtually ALL "citizens" of the internet!..
Wow... That became a rant... Sorry... The word "pirate" got me started! ;)
> You don't need to be doing something illegal, in order to want privacy...
But due to the existence of general-purpose computers the only way of really enforcing copyright law (meaning to stop the unauthorized transfer of information) is by some kind of total surveillance cyber-policial state.
So yes, it's not the same, but they are related in practice.
General purpose computing isn't probably going away because of its economic importance (but they sure can try with DRM schemes and such). Copyright law isn't getting any better because they own the governments. Therefore...
I think it is interesting to see how many people will watch tv series, films and other content illegally, when it's easier and how many actually pays, when that's easier...
I can't remember numbers or sources, but just look at iTunes, hulu, netflix, etc. sales... I think many of their customers have watched pirated DVDs and streamed or downloaded from illegal sources, before they came around and things easy.
It's weird how, some industries would rather spend millions hunting down "pirates", instead of making access to their easy! ;)
Some content is made lagally available for free in my country over video on demand systems like BBC iplayer or channel 4 on demand.
The BBC app does not all someone to download a programme to watch later over 3g. It does allow streaming. (And i don't know what they're using to detect 3g because you can download using a 3g dongle).
So, sometimes it's easier for me to just watch it on Youtube than it is to use the official app.
It is frustrating that I try to do the right thing and they prevent me, and do so for weird reasons.
Ha! Same in Denmark with DR (Danish national broadcasting station)...
HBO (I think) owns "Dexter" and I wanted to see the latest season, only to discover they won't let iTunes sell it, till the season is over... What? Why? Wh..? Do'oh!
So you won't let me pay you to watch it on a legal "channel"?... That is why people watch it illegally!..
I agree. I wish "a rose would still be a rose by any other name", but in reality it's nothing like that. Names are extremely important ("Patriot" Act, etc. George Orwell knew what he was talking about in his book and why politicians would use Newspeak for the same reasons, to manipulate people).
Pirate has just too many negative connotations. Would someone create a party called the "Communist Party" in a democracy today? Even if their intentions would seem much different than the "old communists", I think it would have too much trouble getting off the ground (in any democratic country, not just US, where it's impossible for any third party to get off the ground).
This is also why I dislike the names darknet or darkmail. Prosecutors in US are bad enough as they are [1] (and remember Cameron Ortiz? [2]). Imagine them having to explain what a "pirate browser" or a "dark net" is to a jury. They'd say that they clearly named it that way because their intent was evil from the beginning (even if the tool may be technologically "neutral"), and they intend it for doing bad stuff with it. And I imagine the jury, who wouldn't know any better, would tend to buy it.
And I also agree completely that normal people may try to stay away from having something called "Pirate Browser" on their desktop.
I think I understand why people usually choose such names for their projects. They want to rally their supporters faster, people who really get what it's about, but I think it would do just as well based on what it does, and not because of its name, with that early adopter crowd, since they will understand what it's about and what it does.
In denmark we have the danish communist party, which is exactly that... But no... There is no real support for it.
A party called something like "the unity party" has something like 10% percent of the votes!.. And they're actually an old fashioned communist party with modern ideas of how to "get there"...
It's really interesting to watch the news and listen to the ways words are being used and becomes labels, that are spreading across all news medias, until nobody remembers what the actual story was - just that it "sounds bad".
It was a pleasure reading your entry, because it is exactly how I feel about privacy.
Actually, the whole process, or movement, that different governments promote is making us believe that if we want privacy, we want to do "bad stuff".
This may not seem obvious to people, but I see clearly that just about 100 years ago, privacy was "sacred" and untouchable, while nowadays it is becoming something to be ashamed of.
We are slowly becoming an Orwellian society, and I think the scariest thing is that our children, or maybe their children, will grow up in that kind of world and see it completely normal.
Good to know that I am not the only one concerned about privacy, without actually having anything to hide! :)
I agree with you totally! I am trying to raise my kid (soon kids), with a healthy scepticism towards authorities and authoritative sources of anything (science, history, anything knowledge)...
I hope that will help them think for themselves and hopefully become sensitive towards governments and how much authority they should be allowed to have.
I think we are at a dangerous point in time, where governments like US and Denmark where I live, are coming a bit to close to no longer being governing but actually controlling.
The idea of representatives of the people is dead - it is now the least worst choice of a few people sponsored by a tiny group of people, which is very often heads of large corporations...
That makes "the peoples" interests waaaay less interesting, than the corporations.
With a tiny group of people shifting "the power" around amongst themselves, they're bound to get a distorted view of what "real" people are concerned about and what rights they should have.
I think there is a tendency to generalize so much, that it becomes default to look at a population as a big non-feeling group with no real individuality and no real individual rights.
I agree. Here in the UK it's thankfully not illegal to circumvent censorship filters. Indeed you can opt out (although there are good reasons why requiring opt out is a bad thing).
The term pirate has negative, fringe connotations for many. Our rights to privacy and an uncensored internet should be a mainstream concern.
That's not to say this project shouldn't be lauded, it should. It'd just be nice to see projects like this becoming super accessible and I think terminology plays a part in that.
The opt out is another one of those things, build in a way, which more or less says: "no, no... you don't need to... just come on down to the office and sign this paper... no hard feelings..." ;)
It's interesting how many journalists are using Tor and privacy tools like that and how few are helping make privacy a mainstream concern.
I totally agree that this project is a good thing! More of it!
It can (almost) only help to make more people aware of why it is important :)
It's funny you mention this, because I read "PrivateBrowser" both in the link and headline instead. I didn't know that there is a Freudian slip effect for reading.
I agree with you about the negative connotation of the word "pirate". That's an issue with the political Pirate parties in Europe, too. I just don't see them ever gaining voting support from a wider audience with that name.
Yeah... Our brains are funny that way... :-P
In Denmark we also have a Pirate Party - which I might have voted on, if there were ANY change they would get enough votes to actually make a difference...
I'm 100% certain that the right name change could have multiplied their votes by magnitudes!
They have so many good points and so little credibility with such a name...
There have been no modifications to any of the packages used, no adware, trojans, toolbars, etc. This is simply a tool to help people get around censorship."
I have no reason to believe that it contains any viruses, but if it did, they'd obviously say the same thing.
The "captology" of the site doesn't convey enough reputation. CV's, history and some support / contact details. Also an easy way to build from source.
The bigger issue is making build environments reproducible such that it's possible to arrive the same binaries deterministically, and therefore proving that there's nothing outside of the code. It's possible, but it's tricky, especially with stack randomization and the other minutia of slightly different configs. More apps like the opensuse build service, brew bot and travis might help.
Also removing the affiliate link from the first question of the FAQ would help make the project more credible. Right now, the whole thing looks like an ad for something that actually provides better privacy (VPN).
I know some projects do deterministic builds using a pre-made VM. There are Bitcoin bots that periodically build the client and check it against official binaries to detect tampering.
Saying this just made something snap into place for me. Right now, we have things like Adobe Air and node-webkit, that basically just ship an address-bar-less browser, which can be used to make a webapp look like a real app (e.g. Light Table.) And we have Tor. But no one, as yet, has thought to combine the two--for example, by making an app that has an automatic-updating mechanism that updates from an .onion source, so nobody knows who the developer is.
I think I might work on this, if anyone is interested in using the result.
I'm a lot more inclined to seek out more information about the authors of the code I execute than I am to start using code that comes from exceedingly difficult to trace authors.
(So right now I am lazy about it but really only see things going in one direction, towards being more careful about knowing)
It would be interesting if Firefox or chrome ever started to ship by default with software capable of circumventing censorship. Probably they would just get censored themselves.
Opera does. It has this "off road" mode, which does the same thing. Its supposed to be some sort of caching for slow connection, but as the proxys, or what ever, are outside the UK, all the banned sites work.
I am surprised Firefox and Chrome don't have plugins which do the same thing.
Also, YIFY torrents, amongst other things, hide behind Cloudflare. UK ISPs cant block cloudflare. Well, they can, but the fallout would be somewhat amusing.
Tangent:
What sickens me is that we in the UK bend over for the US film industry, blocking sites the US will not ever block. IMHO, this is not just absurd but a disgusting double standard our gov force on us in order to suck up to the US gov. I can understand the US acting like it one rule for them, but the idea that a foreign government volunteers its population to be sub the rest of the human race angers me something rotten.
I installed opera on my phone when I was visiting China, with unintended side effect: Opera used a proxy in China even after I was no longer in China, as a result I was subjected to GFW even when after I left[1]. Looks like they decided which proxy to use at install time if you installed it in China[2].
Took me a while to figure out why certain sites were only failing in opera.
This is about a year old I think. They're promising some big changes soon, or it may be a completely different browser, since they're saying they'll be using Webkit. They want to completely avoid domain name takedowns with it, by using something like Namecoin:
I'm struggling to see what extra this gives a user over Tor. It appears to be the Tor browser bundle, minus anonymously ty guarantees, but plus some links to filesharing sites.
I'm all for additional methods to circumvent censorship, but Tor appears to be a much better solution to this, and it doesn't carry with it the negative connotations of piracy.
I seem to come across an increasing number of occurrences of the phrase 'how it looks like' (and derivatives). This, to me, sounds very wrong and is starting to annoy me more than I'd like... But since it seems to become more widespread, maybe it's me? (non-native English speaker, btw)
It should be "This is how it looks" or "This is what it looks like". This is British English. Not sure if our American cousins have a different phrase.
I'm actually asking because I don't know, not being a native speaker either. I just picked up the "looks like" idiom and assumed it was en_us considered ok (like "long time no see" or using "egregious" to mean the opposite of the original meaning)
TPB no longer uses torrent files as their primary distribution mechanism. Torrent files were already small, but now they use magnet links which are basically just a SHA1 hash and a URL for a tracker. The tracker isn't strictly necessary.
Here's a fun trick: Make a plaintext file containing "Hello world" (maybe lowercase, maybe either will work). Take its SHA1 hash. Paste that into the Transmission "Open torrent address" dialog (edit: It looks like you can only directly paste hashes into the web dialog. You can still craft a magnet link manually). Give it like 5-10 minutes. Through the magic of DHT, you will soon have a brand new copy of the "Hello World" text in your downloads directory.
Censorship in this context appears to be bypassing blocks on pirating software, movies, etc. The screenshot shows the web page title of "Download music, movies, games, and software." The toolbar buttons are for piracy related sites. The name of the product is even PirateBrowser.
Censorship to me has a different meaning. Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet or other controlling body [1]
Nope. Censorship in this context means denying access to certain host names from all people (in certain countries), regardless of what they would've done had they been able to access the host name. (This procedure could be rephrased as suppression of public communication which is considered objectionable, harmful and inconvenient.) The following is irrelevant, but I'm quite sure The Pirate Bay has links to liberally licensed music, as well as movies, games and other software.
Circumventing the censorship has the usual meaning, i.e. allowing this said access once again.
I'm not sure that "make the user do a whois and then a wiki search" is a reasonable UI flow. Even now, that whois info could be false and this could be an elaborate spoof.
The obvious goal of this project is to be able to browse torrent sites even if your country blocks those... The "No more censorship" headline seems to give people the impression that this is some kind of privacy tool which (as stated in the FAQ) is not the intention.
North Korea is an interesting choice, because its citizens do not even have internet connectivity [1]. What they have is a North Korean national intranet which is tightly controlled [2]. I don't believe Tor would be useful for circumventing this.
No, actually. Unlike you, I have been talking about the issue with people. People that aren't very tech savvy too. A lot of them will comment with "I have nothing to hide," or just "I don't care, it doesn't concern me," or even "it's a good thing" and most of them give more credibility to what's written online than to a single person explaining them various reasons how that system can be abused.
That's why I feel pro-privacy projects should explain why privacy is good. Because a lot of people don't seem to realize that. Kind of like you didn't realize that it's not me who needs a well-worded explanation (though I would surely spread it).
You don't need to be doing something illegal, in order to want privacy...
Besides I think we should reverse the picture and make sure it is the secret spying eyes, that are seen as "crooks".
It is not me being mischievous for wanting privacy - it is the governments for not respecting my privacy.
The physical analogy of online spying, paint the right picture I think: Someone plants several cameras and microphones around your house. They have also someone following you around almost 24/7, to always know where you are. Why? Because you might one day do something, that may or may not be dangerous to between 1 and several thousand people - or at least talk to someone who know someone, who knows...... This is, by the way, not just you - it has been done to everyone on your street - oh... And the world...
I saw a film about the old east Germany and how they were spied on and thought wow! They were really aggressive with the spying and surveillance... Till it hit me: That was nothing compare to what is being done to virtually ALL "citizens" of the internet!..
Wow... That became a rant... Sorry... The word "pirate" got me started! ;)