Needless to say, nobody needs to “bash” the Swedes – they’ve beaten themselves up rather badly in recent months despite all of our support. I’ve bashed a few rather inept bloggers who got caught trying to “anonymously” troll in a competing news forum – which is pretty funny actually. A distraction in the bigger picture. The last thing I’d want to do is “bash” Relakks – they’re a piece of the early history of the VPN market, still alive for anyone to see as a firsthand museum display! If they hadn’t opened the market, nobody else could have improved on them – which has been done repeatedly since 2006. Even today if someone wants a cheap, quick, simply VPN and doesn’t need fast speed or wide protocol protection, pptp is a decent entry level answer. What’s happening is that “real” VPN frameworks are being improved and streamlined to where the cost is coming down with increased volume and expertise – when that price comes down to at or below the old pptp models, then things get interesting.

TPB are good guys, they just started to “believe their own publicity” as the old saying from the 1990s go. I suspect many of us have been through that phase – those of us who have actually gone out and done stuff anyway. TPB will probably also get an expensive and humiliating schooling in how reverse mergers work, unfortunately – but they will come out wiser and smarter about who to trust. I am 100% sure they won’t try to pawn off an old, busted technology as “new” in the future – that was just a bad idea, and Torrentfreak trying to CYA for them hasn’t done anything but draw attention to the whole tempest in a teapot.

Long after the new-kid bloggers and other hangers-on have come and gone, I suspect the TPB 4 will be back in the mix doing interesting things. Everyone has some bad days – the ones who make a big impact are the ones who learn from the mistakes and come back smarter and more honest. Everyone who has made massive mistakes in the past, learned from them, and chosen to come back smarter and more positive raise a hand:

Cheers,

Fausty

Meanwhile objective reality is being ignored…
Ipreditor/Relakks, is not a “genuine” anonymising service-there is a no internal disconnect between what goes in and out of there system; ie, they, and anyone with access to there servers has the ability to monitor everything that goes through. As Smirnov said, setting up a honey pot on this kind of system is trivially easy- it doesn’t require ‘cooperation’ , just a court order. This is a proprietary implementation of PPTP, which is itself a proprietary MICROSOFT vpn framework that’s more then a decade old. It routinely LEAKS DNS information. There’s no open source software reassurance, no open source system wide encryption, no comprehensive plan for ’shit hits the fan’ anonymity and plausible deniability… Relakks was an utter failure from the start- why is TPB using it? simple- it was cheap, and it’s already developed.

Same Baneki customer that posted before… (ignoring my own advice… lol.)

Ipredator wasn’t launched in June?
Strange. I use it since early June.

It doesn’t work well with BitTorrent?
Strange. My torrents are working great.

It’s Relakks just with another name?
Strange. I didn’t see one bloody evidence for that in his whole stupid story of “Aw, I’m so jealous” story.

But I guess that’s American business: Bashing the Swedes just because their service is better and costs more than three times less. Pff.

And, no, you didn’t report on it being a white-label of Relakks – nor did anyone else. Some of the Wilder posters speculated on whether it might end up being that – as I did, of course – but we all sort of assumed if it was just a Relakks rebrand that TPB would honestly say that – not drag out the “launch” of Ipredator for months disingenuously. How long does it take to “launch” a white label, anyway?

Oh, and I’ve put together some more background on your non-reporting on this story in this thread, so that anyone who doesn’t want to be bogged down in the details if your childish behavior need not wade through it here:

http://www.cultureghost.org/viewtopic.php?p=5394#p5394

Keep Googling – if you find a confirmation of Ipredator as a Relakks white-label dating to June or before, by all means post it here. In the meantime, I’d suggest you give up the trolling and get back to writing some substantive stories about this market. That’s your job, isn’t it?

Cheers,

Fausty

Evidently not THAT closely huh?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/16/pirate_bay_vpn/comments/ (post by Lazy)
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?p=1491755 (post by Nebulus)
http://groups.google.com/group/swnet.politik/browse_thread/thread/b4054fe851fc8089?pli=1 (Swedish)

There are more, but you’ll have to use Google to find them, just like I just did.

Still, no matter how much good one’s done I think we need to hold ourselves to a standard of objectivity and clear speech. TPB can do better than this – indeed, if they want to remain relevant post-TPB (and I do think we’re in a post-TPB world now), they will have to hold themselves to that standard, first and foremost. Despite these less-than-flattering decisions of recent weeks, we will continue to recognize the longer-term impact TPB has had on net culture – they’ve more than earned that baseline respect. Taken outside the context of our other discussion regarding TPB at cultureghost, that message might be less obvious in the post replicated here – such was certainly never my intention.

It’s quite possible that the TPB reverse merger itself, if it actually completes (I have my doubt) could be an unprecedented experiment in public ownership of filesharing resources – or it could end up a total fiasco. In either case, it’s certainly a first. That’s the part I’d like to see more reporting to further explore – it’s the forest that’s been lost in the trees of recent coverage of TPB.

Oh, and if this “news” is “old” then I’d certainly love to see a link to the story that previously reported that ipredator is a rebranding of relakks – I follow this market fairly closely, and I’d never “heard” of it until last week – nor had anyone else, apparently. Perhaps our one trollish visitor could help show us the error of our ways rather than just the usual pathetic, mouth-foaming hatred? Alot to ask, admittedly. . . I’d suggest that there’s medications to help with that sort of delusional, overwhelming hate – but that’d be sort of mean (and it would beg the further question of why ex-Gov Palin isn’t on those very same meds).

Cheers,

Fausty

“…and @Readers write…” <———–

What’s this about multiple personality disorder?!
(I’m not rebutting you, I’m just seeing the irony in it.)
: )

Multiple personality disorder can be treated with medication now.
Look into it.

Cheers!

Baneki VPN customer, CultureGhost fan.

Yep, The above post is by Fausty. I must say i’m surprised Jon let him post this here. Fausty talks about “trust” when he’s the international cocaine smuggler and famous zoophile, why the hell should we trust HIM? Did you read the forum post the above is linked to? He’s openly promoting his tracker zetatracker.net, one of the few animal porn trackers on the internet. I dont read p2pnet for this, Fausty just wants to advertise torrentfreedom by stirring up controversy. Do a search for Relakks and iPredator, this ‘news’ is old….

Those in the know are laughing their asses off at this one.

Also, do I have to be the first one to mention that “Fausty” and “Douglas Spink” mentioned in this article are one and the same?

How they know? The number of seeders and leechers for the same torrent is identical on both trackers.

Great reply. ^_^

Anyhow, this is like a shooting gallery. The cartels started picking off the competition in the 1990s and there are very few of the originals left. But all that means is: instead of crushing innovation, they’re encouraging it. In the same way their sue ‘em all lawsuits didn’t do much beyond telling the world at large there was a great new way to get music, every time they squash an indie, or a big outfit such as TPB decides discretion is the better part of valour, people who are a lot smarter than the ones running the cartels come up with new techniques and technologies.

So IMO, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the lamescream media (or anyone else) follows this aspect of the story. The Big 4 labels in particular are now covered in so much shit it’ll never wash off, and any chance they had of developing a viable corporate music market went down the tubes long ago. They’ll snag a handful (relatively speaking) of punters who don’t know what’s been happening, or who don’t care, but most of the people who would’ve been their online customers are finding other ways to get their music fixes. And more and more people are signing up and logging on every day, with all that implies.

The people who should know what’s going on, do know what’s going on. Thanks to the Net.

Cheers!

They won’t respond and this story probably won’t get covered in other places, no names no pack drill.

How do you know that this “anonymous” VPN service won’t actually lead the RIAA/MPAA straight to you? Don’t worry, it won’t be immediate. They’ll let it gather plenty of evidence against you and your downloading habits first. It may even steal your keystrokes, email account details and more. Who knows? With the level of corruption we’ve been seeing at the highest level of governments, it’s obvious that these parasites are above the law.

When it comes to stuff like this, it’s worth being paranoid. Very paranoid.