Future of P2P: What Comes After The Pirate Bay
Janko Roettgers | Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 12:00 AM PT


The verdict against The Pirate Bay could turn out to be something of a game changer for P2P file sharing. Granted, the four defendants have already filed their appeals, and the site is currently up and running. In fact, there are 22 million peers connected as I write this, which suggests that most Pirate Bay users don’t feel threatened in any way by the court’s decision.

However, history has shown that court verdicts against high-profile file-sharing services can lead to the emergence of newer and technically superior platforms. This trend could be accelerated by renewed attempts to take down The Pirate Bay’s infrastructure. So what’s in store for the future of P2P?

Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, recently tweeted that “[The] Pirate Bay trial will change things the way the Napster shutdown changed things.” That’s an interesting thought. Of course, the Napster shutdown didn’t change too much for file sharers, who just migrated to other platforms. But the trial against and eventual demise of Napster changed P2P as a whole, because it led to the emergence of Gnutella and KaZaa, both of which eventually became more mature technologies, capable of handling far greater numbers of file sharers with a lot less infrastructure.

The same happened when Kazaa and its siblings Grokster and Morpheus were sued and eventually lost in U.S. Supreme court in 2005. The court verdict, commonly known as the Grokster decision, led to the emergence of a number of commercial outlets based on BitTorrent technology as well as an increased focus on Torrent and other P2P community web sites.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks as to whether The Pirate Bay will eventually be forced to shut down as well, and what impact that might have. Some believe that any takedown of The Pirate Bay’s trackers (the servers that facilitate the actual P2P connections between its users) will lead to a complete meltdown of the BitTorrent world, while others hope that competing sites would just take over.

A third faction thinks that The Bay will live on forever. However, that notion doesn’t seem to be shared by Peter Sunde aka brokep. The outspoken Pirate Bay spokesperson has more than once stated that BitTorrent in its current state will be surpassed by a more advanced technology which will eventually make The Pirate Bay obsolete. So how will this post-Pirate Bay future look like? There are already two important trends emerging:

P2P is becoming part of the media web. BitTorrent was a first step towards web-centric P2P, but its implementation to date has been rather clunky, depending on both a browser for search and a client for downloads. Attempts to bridge this gap have been getting more and more sophisticated in recent months, with plug-ins like Littleshoot bringing BitTorrent to the browser and web services like BTaccel utilizing cloud computing as a web proxy for P2P.

At the same time, clients are becoming more web-aware, with both Limewire and Miro using P2P to power open content directories, and Vuze opening up to third-party search. Eventually, P2P could become something like the engine under the hood that powers the media web, regardless of whether the browser is called Firefox or Miro.

P2P is also becoming more social. Another emerging trend that BitTorrent itself hasn’t been particularly good at is being social. BitTorrent has reduced social interaction to a mathematical formula — upload bits to others in order to get good download rates — and left it up to Torrent sites to facilitate community. Some have been really good at this, but even successful communities generally lack tools for direct and real-time user-to-user interaction and discovery.

Limewire and other dedicated social sharing clients have started to fill this gap. Tribler is proving that social recommendations can be used to discover new content in a P2P environment, and Wua.la has shown that users want to self-organize in small communities that are much more like Facebook groups than private torrent sites.

Combine these two trends and you get an idea of what future file-sharing services will look like. Personally, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see such services become more popular than today’s BitTorrent sites while The Pirate Bay is still tied up in court.

Acquisitions of The Pirate Bay and new file - sharing technology, p2p 2.0
Stockholm 2009 June 30


The listed software company, Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) (GGF)
acquires The Pirate Bay website, http://www.thepiratebay.org, one of the 100
most visited websites in the world and the technology company Peerialism,
that has developed next generation file-sharing technology. Following the
completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models
that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The
responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in
connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August
2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and
copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, " said
Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

”The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the
world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business
model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content
providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators
and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers ´need
faster downloads and better quality, " continues Hans Pandeya.

GGF acquires domain names and related web sites, including
http://www.thepiratebay.org. The consideration for the purchase amounts to MSEK
60 consisting of at least MSEK 30 in cash and up to the equivalent of MSEK 30 in
the form of newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation in connection with
the completion of the acquisition). The stock share of the purchase price is
expected to be equivalent to a maximum of three per cent of the total number of
outstanding shares of GGF after the acquisition. In the case that three percent of
the shares is not equivalent to 30 MSEK, the major shareholder of GGF has
declared that he will contribute the equivalent in cash.

GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism AB.
Peerialism AB is a software technology company with its origin in KTH Royal
Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and
which presently is owned by the employees. The owners as well as the employees
will continue to work for the company. Peerialism develops solutions for data 
 2

distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p- technology. The access to
the technology is secured by the acquisition. The consideration amounts to in
aggregate MSEK 100 consisting of at least MSEK 50 in cash and up to the
equivalent of MSEK 50 in newly issued shares in GGF (according to valuation
during a period of ten days after the announcement). The share part of the
purchase price should not exceed five percent of the total number of shares in
GGF after the transaction. In addition GGF has undertaken to make initial
investments of MSEK 25 in the acquired business.

“Peerialism has developed a new data distribution technology which now can be
introduced on the best known file - sharing site, The Pirate Bay. Since the
technology is compatible with the existing it will quickly allow for new values to be
created for all key stakeholders and facilitate new business opportunities”, says
Johan Ljungberg, CEO Peerialism.

Completion of the acquisitions are primarily subject to GGF obtaining financing for
the acquisition, that any necessary resolutions are adopted by a General Meeting
of GGF, and that GGF and the Board of Directors consider that the acquired
assets can be used in a legally and appropriate way. GGF intends to issue new
shares in order to obtain the necessary financing for the acquisition. The
acquisition is deemed to be completed in August 2009. In connection therewith,
the ownership of, and responsibility for, the acquired assets will be transferred to
GGF.

“As a result of the acquisitions of The Pirate Bay and Peerialism, GGF will have a
strategic position in the international digital distribution market. File sharing traffic
is estimated to account for more than half of today's global Internet traffic. The
Pirate Bay has a global brand and holds a key position with over 20 million visitors
and over one billion page views per month," says Hans Pandeya.


For further information, pls contact:
Hans Pandeya, CEO, Global Gaming Factory X AB, +46 733 16 42 10
Media contact, + 46 706 55 24 36

A Press briefing will be held on June 30th
2009 at 11.00 at Spårvägshallarna,
Birger Jarlsgatan 57 A, Stockholm.


Global Gaming Factory X AB (publ) has been listed on Aktietorget since 2006
GGFX has the largest network of Internet cafés and game centers and provides
software. GGFX thus has access to the largest group of games players on the
Internet. The company's principal shareholders are Magnus Bergman (Chairman), 
 3

Hans Pandeya, (CEO) and Johan Sellström, (CTO) (for more details see attached
CV and http://www.globalgamingfactory.com).

The Pirate Bay is one of the 100 most visited Internet sites in the world and one of
the leading search engines for file sharing. The site has more than 20 million
visitors and over one billion searches per month.

Peerialism AB develops solutions to transport and store data over Internet based
on new p2p technologies. The solutions are capable of large scale media
distribution with clear advantages over existing solutions; it makes better use of
networks resources whilst reducing ISP traffic and significantly lowering the cost of
media distribution. The technology has its origin from research projects within
SICS (Swedish Institute for Computer Science) and KTH (Kungliga Tekniska
Högskolan). The head of research at SICS, Seif Haridi who also is a professor at
KTH will continue to be advisor to Peerialism.The company was founded in 2007
and has 14 employees and is based in Stockholm (more information
http://www.peerialism.com, http://www.sics.com,http//www.kth.se).


Background

The market for the consumption and distribution of digital media is characterised
by a complex landscape of both national and international legislation with difficult
conflicts between different areas of law – not least in balancing copyright law and
rights of privacy. This has led to a widespread global debate among opinion-
makers, politicians, academics, the general public and business people.

In addition to the responsibilities of the individual Internet user, the responsibility
for user-generated material is diversely allocated between different market
participants and may also vary from country to country. However, both U.S. and
European law place certain obligations on Internet Service Providers (ISP) and on
Information Society Service Providers (ISSP) to prevent the distribution of
unauthorised or illegal material. Time consuming legislative work and costly
litigation are taking place in all parts of the world as a result of the demands posed
by the technological evolution on the rules that are to apply.

All market participants, e.g. technology and broadband providers, various service
providers, search engines and rights’ holders would all benefit from a clearer legal
landscape that enables safe investments and the continued evolution of the
information society. GGF wants to accept the challenge to position itself as a
respectable participant in the market and contribute to Internet’s infrastructure,
with the goal to establish working models for co-operation and a clear allocation of
responsibilities on market terms, respecting both intellectual property rights and
the rights of privacy.


CV – Global Gaming Factory X AB

Hans Chandra Pandeya, CEO
St. Columba's School, New Delhi, MSc Engineering Physics, Royal Institute of
Technology, KTH, Sweden and MBA Harvard Business School.

Co-founder of Bargain Pages, an advertising paper for free ads in Birmingham,
UK. Sold to one of the biggest classifieds publishers in Europe.
Co-founder of Ad-Mag, advertising papers for free ads in India.
Co-founder of advertising papers for free ads in Australia. Sold to John MacBain's
Trader Classified Media, the biggest classifieds publisher in the world.

CEO of Interline Networks, an Internet telephony network in Sydney, Australia.
Launched a web phone for free phone calls in 2000.

Founder and owner of Unika Bostäder AB, a property developer in Stockholm,
Sweden.

Worked with advertising papers, IT companies, and property development for
17 years.


Johan Sellström, Technical Director

MSc Engineering Physics, Royal Institue of Technology, (KTH) Sweden.

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Icon Medialab, one of the biggest IT
consultancy firms in Europe.

Analytical methods and implementation, Aeronautical Institue of Sweden, SAAB
Military Aircraft, Volvo.


Magnus Bergman, Chairman

MSc in Aeronautics, Royal Institue of Technology, (KTH) Sweden, PhD in Physics,
Institute National Polytechnique, Toulouse, France.

Co-founder and CEO of Parallel Consulting Group AB that was sold to Icon
Medialab in 1999.

Former Director of Icon Medialab.

Co-founder and CEO of Cross Connect Network Group AB.

Chairman of Mobispine AB, Efield AB, CrossVenture Capital AB.

More than 20 years of experience in development of IT companies in the areas of
parallell computing, advanced computer technology, IT security, application
interfaces, communication and methodology.

The Pirate Bay Will Close Its Tracker and Remove Torrents
Written by Ernesto on June 30, 2009


Alongside the news that The Pirate Bay will sell shares on the Swedish stock market come some other significant changes. The site itself will decentralize and stop hosting and tracking torrents. Instead, The Pirate Bay will use a third party tracker and torrent hosting service to serve its users.

Earlier today The Pirate Bay announced that it would be acquired by Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) who are listed on the Swedish stock market. So, Pirate Bay users can not only share files but they can buy a share of the site as well.

Perhaps even more significant for the BitTorrent community is the thus far unreported decision to close down the BitTorrent tracker. Up until today Pirate Bay’s public tracker connected more than half of all BitTorrent users but this is about to change.

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde has informed TorrentFreak that the site will soon decentralize and stop running a BitTorrent tracker of its own. Instead they will encourage their users to use a yet to be launched third party tracker for their torrents.

To decentralize even further, the torrents that will be listed on the site wont be hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers anymore. In the near future the site will use a new torrent hosting service that will store the torrents for them. This new hosting service will be open to other torrent sites as well and can be accessed through an API.

In the end The Pirate Bay is making these changes to ensure that the BitTorrent ecosystem stays intact no matter what happens, Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak. By decentralizing the different aspects they hope that BitTorrent users will be less reliant on the uptime of The Pirate Bay’s servers alone. The burden will now be spread among several independently operated services.

For now it remains a mystery what GGF CEO Hans Pandeya meant with “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” That’s worrying to say the least.

In addition, GGF also acquired Peerialism who apparently have developed a new P2P distribution technology which will be used on The Pirate Bay. How this related to the new tracker and external torrent hosting remains unknown.

We’re trying to get confirmation and more details from GGF as soon as possible.

Update: According to Johan Sellström, the CTO of Global Gaming Factory, the plans have changed after Peter Sunde talked to us. “We had discussed closing it down initially so I think thats why he said so. The plan is to use technology from Peerialism that makes bandwidth utilization more efficient and then it would not make sense to shut it dow,” he said, adding. “Peerialism will modify the tracker but it will be backwards compatible. But all this is subject to change if for some reason it would not work. It is our ambition to do so.”

Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde Discusses the Site’s Future
Written by enigmax on June 30, 2009


On the day that The Pirate Bay announced that they will be sold to a commercial company for $7.8 million, Tomas Wennström secured an audio interview with TPB spokesman Peter Sunde. The interview is of great interest but raises even more questions as shockwaves continue through the P2P community.

Today it was announced that Global Gaming Factory X is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August 2009 and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners.

Tomas Wennström of What’s Next managed to secure a recorded audio interview with The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde. In it Peter says why the site was sold, talks a little about the future for the site and touches on the huge disappointment being expressed by the site’s fans. It’s a very interesting interview, although in common with everything else going on today, it raises even more questions.


Some key points from the interview:

GGF approached The Pirate Bay with a deal several weeks ago. TPB considered GGF to be the correct company to bring the project “to the next level” since they didn’t feel capable of doing it themselves. Peter said he feels that GGF share the same values as TPB.

Peter said that TPB have been approached by companies before to sell out, but they didn’t understand the value of TPB. He said the value of the site is to be found in the userbase and nothing else. He added that if a company is interested in buying that userbase they have to keep up spirits or they will find themselves owning something that rapidly decreases in value.

Tomas Wennström said that he found it crazy that TPB would become a listed company. Peter responded that they think the concept is “super funny” and that’s one of the main reasons they are doing this.

Peter said in the past they’ve had to hide the financial details of the site and who is doing what “for legal reasons” but says that in the future there will have to be more transparency about how the operation is run, adding that people now not only have the chance to share files, but also buy shares in the site.

Peter explained that he and the original owners of TPB disposed of the site in 2006. He refused to name who took the site but referred to a single owner in one of his responses, using the word “he”.

Peter noted that the site hadn’t yet been sold to GGF and the company will have to find funding inside 4 weeks. He said he doesn’t know who the financial backers are, but if GGF cannot find the money then everything goes back to exactly the way it was before.

Peter said that the perfect situation would be if the users of the site set up something to buy The Pirate Bay. Certainly, with all the previous fund raising for buying islands etc this might have been a possibility but this has never even been put forward as an option. The idea seems optimistic considering the backlash among the users.

Currently the site is down after suffering a minor DDoS attack, and TPB’s TiAMO told TorrentFreak that the site’s load balancer had crashed .

Peter says running Pirate Bay has resulted in ‘bad pay’, i.e minus SEK 30 million in fines - incidentally an identical amount to the cash payment part of the deal with GGF.

Tomas Wennström put a scenario to Peter - what if GGF screws up and makes all that is good about The Pirate Bay go away - which seemed like a veiled reference to the availability of the usual TPB content.

“I’m agnostic about it, I think it could be true, could be faulty, but whatever happens at least something happens, which is the big thing here. I’d rather see The Pirate Bay die in a chance of becoming better, than just dying.”

For the time being The Pirate Bay crew will assist the new owners in operating the site. In addition a new tracker will be launched as well as a new torrent hosting service.

{In general, we don't engage in any competitive "mudslinging" in our company - our efforts are focused on running a great service and seeking out new ways to improve, not trying to belittle others doing similar work - however, our beloved Fausty has been steaming like a pressure cooker ready to burst this week, regarding the "iPredator" service announced by TPB; given the overall relevance of his rant, and the connection to the larger filesharing community and the longer-term direction of the community itself, this is an exception we'll make to the "don't slag competitors" rule. . . fair warning -the Baneki team}

---------------------------

You'll forgive me, dear reader, if in writing this post I sound rather like someone who has fallen down Alice's rabbit hole and is living in a mysterious parallel universe. This week, I feel like that myself - even more so than usual. It seems The Pirate Bay has begun generating its own, Jobs-style reality distortion field. Or, perhaps, that field is being generated around them and they're as caught in it as the rest of us.

First, the fact topology:

This spring, TPB announces with the usual press fanfare that they are going to launch a "VPN service." Wow, that's rather interesting to me given my years'-long involvement in the business of providing a VPN-based service to customers around the world. I'd cite the original wired.com article about this "launch" but, alas, that article disappeared from their website this week. I'll see if I can find a cache of it and post it in a parallel thread. In short, the "launch" has zero details - what technology will they use? What new angle on VPN service will they bring to the table? Nothing. Oh, they do say they will "not keep logs of customer activity when using the VPN service." Hmmm. . . that sounds amazingly familiar - down to the exact wording of the sentences. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I'm a bit flattered (having personally written Baneki's "no customer logging" policy in early 2007).

The "launch date" for this 'ipredator' service is set as April 1st. I dutifully go over and sign up for the "contact me" list on the website - only to hear reported, a few weeks later, that two hundred thousand people have signed up for TPB's new ipredator VPN service! Wow, that's amazing - I guess I missed the launch. I check the ipredator website - no, there's no launch, still just a "enter email address' field and a link to some wikipedia articles on what a "VPN" is. Nice. Apparently the press is simply reporting however many people TPB says entered their email address as people "signing up for the ipredator service" - rather an unusual trick of reporting for a paid service eh? Given the massive traffic to TPBs's main website they could safely "announce" a "service" sending people to the moon on flying carpets, put a link in the site's footer (as they did for 'ipredator'), and have hundreds of thousands of people "sign up" by entering an email address in a form.

Anyway, ok well I'm sure lots of folks will sign up for their service whenever it launches. I mean, they have a big tracker and putting a link to a paid VPN service on the front page of a tracker, I dunno, it also seems just a little bit familiar. Great minds think alike? I guess. . .

April comes and goes, then May, then June. Suddenly there's a new flurry of press puff-pieces in late-June: ipredator is in "beta testing" yay! Nobody mentions that it was supposed to be launched April 1st. Nobody asks how a multi-month delay happened, why the "launch" is now a "beta test," what technology they are using, etc. Nope, but it is widely reported that they already signed up two hundred thousand people to their new service!!!! Wow, great reporting there. Anyway, nobody on the email list has EVER received so much as a 'welcome' email from TPB so I'm skeptical about this "beta test." Apparently, you have to be really cool (and really Swedish?) to qualify as a super-cool ipredator beta tester. I wait for further news, and then. . .

BAM! This week TPB announces they are selling the tracker. Or not selling the tracker. Or selling the membership, but not the tracker. Or selling the tracker, but not the membership - or something. Nobody can quite agree on what is being announced - but the press dutifully prints, verbatim, whatever TPB says they are doing. They sold! They didn't! They have angel wings! Oddly, I actually decide to read the press release issued by the company who is supposedly BUYING TPB - seems a decent place to start if one wants to report on a "sale," right?

Well, the press release is very clear: this isn't a sale, it's a reverse merger. And the "buyer" doesn't have the cash component of the "purchase" - they have to go raise that money now. And there's no actual business plan for what happens after the sale/merger - but someone is making good money moving worthless Swedish penny stock on the basis of the announcement alone: millions of shares change hands, day after day, all week. In non-Swedish, not-cool situations we call this "pump and dump" - if I did it, given that I"m not as cool or Swedish as TPB, the press would be all over me about it (appropriately). However, TPB's reality distortion field obviates that apparently.

All week I've waited for SOMEONE in "the press" to utter the words "reverse merger" to describe TPB's transaction. And wait. And wait. I mean, this is hardly controversial - Peter Sunde has essentially said it's a reverse merger - a way for TPB to "become listed" as the "ultimate prank!" Finally, I send a rather snippy email to Torrentfreak - who claims to "cover" the filesharing world but lately seems to be much more concerned with writing puff-pieces on whoever is coolest. Yes, they also "reported" on the 200,000 people that "signed up" for ipredator - and no they never corrected it, etc.

As I wait around, twiddling my thumbs in boredom this week (ok not really), serendipity strikes: today, in fact, a friend of a friend actually gets one of the 'coveted' beta tester invites to iPredator. Two salient points:

1. This is NOT a 'beta test' - it's a paid launch. Beta tests, by definition, are NOT paid launches - they are TESTS. If you charge people to use a service - charging full price, natch - it is NOT a "beta test."

2. This isn't even a new VPN service - it's just Relakks, with a halfway-updated skin slapped over the same forms and payment pages and all the rest. TPB's "new iPredator anonymizing service" is a warmed-over, left-for-dead project from 2006.

What is Relakks? Well, Relakks was the first consumer-focused VPN service - launched in 2006. They got some good mainstream press (including the Wall Street Journal, where I first read about them) and claimed to have signed up "20,000 customers" (a number I now question, seeing as they have now resurfaced with a similar claim about iPredator, one we know is bullshit, i.e. the "200,000 signups"). I got an account with them in 2007, as a test. Their "service" is just a shoddy implementation of pptp - which is, itself, an old proprietary VPN framework that Cisco and Microsoft developed in the 1990s and largely left for dead. Why use it? Simple, it's built in to all Windows OS's (being a proprietary Microsoft creation, no surprise) - so there's exactly zero development work needed to "lauch" a pptp-based service. You just put a how-to page up telling people how to activate the pptp frontend in Windows, buy a (licensed?) copy of a Windows Server OS, and let people connect.

Anyway, the Relakks pptp-based VPN service is. . . ok, I guess. It's slow, it's proprietary, it's not happy with some of the more non-mainstream IP protocols (like, err, bittorrent). Oh, and it leaks DNS information routinely - it was never meant to be a "real" VPN framework, and that's not even mentioning the fact that it's proprietary. As we built our first VPN service, at Baneki, we used them as a starting point - and quickly realized that doing VPN service correctly would require a completely different technical approach. We researched OpenVPN, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work. In the winter of 2007/2008 we acquired another VPN service (VPNtunnel.co.uk) which had also spent years developing an OpenVPN-based network. We kept developing and improving and updating our network and our client - using opensource code every step - and, nowadays we're at version 3.1 of our client applet.

What about Relakks? Well, it's kind of a funny/sad story. By 2008 Relakks was regularly reported to be having multi-day network outages. At the same time, they made a big fanfare about their "Internet Passport" feature which would allow people to "choose their country" from the VPN client - and of course lots of press coverage for this vaporware "feature" which was never launched and never spoken of again (in contrast, of course, we released our successful GeoChoice country selection feature last week - after months of REAL beta testing - and the press has been too busy non-reporting on TPB to notice this non-vaporware service rollout, apparently). Their website would also disappear sometimes until, finally, the website and the network - the whole damned thing - just vanished for several months. Oh well, I guess that's the end of that. Eventually, we've been told, it sort of showed back up with a "gee we're sorry" note and acted as if nothing happened, but by all accounts their customers seem to have wisely concluded it's not such a reliable service (who would trust these guys with their network security, anyway?). They've been largely written off as of historical interest alone.

Then, today, I read a follow-up to the follow-up piece at wired that says the following:



So, here's what we've got: we have TPB announcing a reverse merger - which is pointedly NOT called a reverse merger in any press coverage I've seen thus far (and there's been plenty of coverage) - and TPB announces their "anonymizing service" isn't part of that transaction. . . but they fail to mention that their "anonymizing service" is just a warmed-over re-branding of Relakks - which was itself left for dead by whoever owns it in 2008.

By the way, who does own Relakks? For all that we like to trust those silly Swedes and assume they're all swarthy and solid - wouldn't it be kinda nice to know who is behind a paid security service like Relakks/iPredator? I mean, we don't make any secret about who our founders are - warts and all.

Is iPredator just Relakks under a new name? If so, who is the "man behind the curtain" who is running this thing? Why should we trust him/her? If it's TPB running it - and TPB just rolled the dice on a spectacularly shady reverse-merger (which is not called a reverse merger, of course) and showed horrific judgment - isn't that perhaps relevant? If it's the Relakks crew - the same one that disappeared for months in 2008 and abandoned their customers - that might also be noteworthy.

Alas, don't hold your breath for anyone to do anything as prosaic and pedestrian as ask questions about such things when giving fawning interviews to TPB; no, nothing but that. Instead we'll just continue to see the same warmed-over talking points, the same lying-through-omission about what "iPredator" actually is, the same "trust is we're cool" approach to justifying what TPB is doing (and not doing) with community-supported resources. It's all a bit much for me - I grew up in an era when we were held to task for what we did, good or bad (and I've been on both sides of that). I can't imagine, personally, showing this level of bad judgment and NOT being torn to shreds by the press as a result (and yes I HAVE shown judgment this bad - and worse - in the past and, yes, I've been torn to shreds by the press for it. . . and learned as a result).

The whole thing has turned into a bit too much of a celebrity/paparazzi dynamic for me to understand; that's just not my world. In my world, people are "famous" because they do good, important, useful, creative things - people like Jeff Bezos or Zennstrom or Fanning - these are the people I've always watched as role models and as peers. When things flip over to a fully press-driven, fame-driven, famous-for-being-famous universe I'm just out of my league. I've done my share of press junkets - good and bad - and I've had my share of front-page stories (good and bad); they were all because of something I DID (good or bad), not just because I was "famous for being famous." TPB is now in that world, and it seems their tenuous connection to the actual world of network technology and network community has been cut entirely.

Honestly, this week, I feel as if the Michael Jackson news has been more substantive than the drivel reported on what TPB's been doing. And that, indeed, is a low threshold to meet.

Fausty

Here's the comment I posted in response to the Wired article, cited above. It's "awaiting moderation" - somehow I'm not holding my breath for it to appear any time soon (with all due respect to Wired's generally excellent reporting and editorial stance):

As mentioned, here's my verbatim note to the boys at Torrentfreak. We've since had a couple of back-and-forth emails, but those aren't something I'd share in public without both parties agreeing - nor are they of much general interest I think. This original note I sent is relevant, insofar as it highlights just how deep the rabbit hole goes! (tongue is, yes, firmly in cheek and self-sanctimony filters are set on "high"):

As lots of folks have noticed, the sharp pencils behind p2p.net have picked up the story.

What's rather odd is that a troll has showed up in the comments. Ok, that's not odd at all, but the details behind the troll are. The key point the troll makes is: "Do a search for Relakks and iPredator, this ‘news’ is old…."

Hmm, that's kind of identical to the argument that the 2 guys who run Torrentfreak made in a series of emails to me a couple of days ago - when Torrentfreak tried to justify exactly why they've helped TPB hype this "new" privacy service - and yet now won't tell their readers that it's just Relakks. First, at 1pm on Friday Enigmax cites this article they wrote in the iPredator-hype era, saying that: "[w]e already told everyone that iPredator uses the same system as Relakks." What they actually wrote is this:



Now, this is a little bit odd because the date on this article now shows up as "June 22" - i.e. a couple of weeks ago. I seem to remember this being posted in the spring, not a few weeks ago. But my memory is sort of erratic and I could be imagining things. Let's just assume that Ernesto did say that the "tech platform" being used by Ipredator is the "same" as Relakks. As I said in my response email to him:



Next, at just before 4pm on the same day, Ernesto himself writes me a pithy little note. He makes the argument that:



Aside from the fact that this "we just report what people tell us" explanation of what "journalism" is being rather thin in substance (and rather identical, verbatim even, to the strong criticisms salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald has made against conventional journalists for doing exactly that) - and aside from the fact that 2 of the 3 "anonymity services" that Ernesto decided to "report" on have now been hit with major questions about viability (remember that Torrentfreak has been quite supportive of TorrentPrivacy - opps sorry about those malware rootkits, dear readers), this is a bit of a non sequitur isn't it? By now it's indeed confirmed that Ipredator is just Relakks rebranded - the "solid proof" is available from anyone in the beta testing program (I suppose we can get screenshots if that's necessary, etc.). Yet torrentfreak isn't reporting this, even though Ernesto says point-blank "we will report it" - but they claim they already reported it, even though they really didn't. . .

My head hurts.

Unfortunately this is where things take a turn for the weird. Last week I posted links to my post (the first in this thread) citing the TPB transaction as a reverse merger and 'outing' Ipredator as Relakks in several news threads discussing TPB (not at torrentfreak, however - they now censor any comments I post in their comments section, an irony I'll get to below). That's when p2pnet picked up the story, which has now spread fairly far and wide via passalong (including an automated retweet from TPB's twitter account - which is cringeworthy in it's own way). Perhaps digging the knife in a bit, I make the following tweet to Torrentfreak's own twitterstream Saturday afternoon:



Then, today on Sunday a troll (posting using two anonymous nicks) makes an appearance in the p2pnet story's comments section, concluding a classic trollpost with the following argument:



Call me skeptical, or just call me experienced in seeing how people are often willing to dig a deeper hole to try to justify the shallow hole they dug in the first place, but this sure smells like one of the Torrentfreak boys resorting to anonymous trollposts on another news site trying to retroactively justify why they've failed to report on a significant factual error in their earlier puff-piece on Ipredator/TPB. Think about it. . .

1. How many trolls are really motivated by a story being "old" news?

2. Why didn't the troll just cite a specific article, instead of saying "search?" Perhaps because Torrentfreak is the only result of such a search, and citing their own article was a bit too close to home? {edited to add: the troll responded with some "search" results - one in Swedish, and two that indirectly point back to the original Torrentfreak article - but no link to the Torrentfreak article itself. . . which is sort of strange, since an actual google search on the terms turns up as the FIRST relevant link, you guessed it, the Torrentfreak article! The first 3 results are actually hits on this story in this thread, with #4 the first old one. . . indeed that's about as proof-positive of intentional non-mention of Torrentfreak by the troll as one could ever get. -fausty}

3. Why isn't Torrentfreak reporting on the Ipredator story in the first place? Heck, even TPB themselves have RT'd the Ipredator/Relakks "outing" story - but not Torrentfreak. Notable via it's omission. . .

4. Why is the troll so worried about our company "getting publicity" in this process? It's oddly resonant with Torrentfreak's explicit decision to non-report on what we do, last year, after a big trollfest in one of their comments sections was allowed to spin wildly out of control (including death threats against me, etc.) while Enigmax and Ernesto sat back and watched. Since then we've simply routed around Torrentfreak - their reporting has become more and more shoddy and fanboy-ish and we don't have much use for that.

5. Is it any coincidence that Torrentfreak has been getting "exclusive interviews" with Sunde for the past several days, asking fanboy-style questions of him and never daring to ask any real questions - say, about Ipredator. After all, Sunde has specifically mentioned Ipredator in recent press statements - including the "beta test" - and it would make sense to ask why they are reselling Relakks and not stating that fact clearly.

In short, it does appear that Torrentfreak has decided that getting "exclusive" paparazzi-style access to Sunde and TPB is worth more than actual reporting on actual facts regarding a major TPB blunder. And, in doing so, Torrentfreak has not only been willing to actively avoid reporting on participants in the community who really are doing new, aggressive, viable projects but has even gone so far as to post quasi-anonymous troll comments at other news sites trying to justify their puff-style relationship with TPB.

Maybe I'm wrong here, and maybe the fact pattern adds up to something different. Maybe there's some other troll trying to justify Torrentfreak's actions in comments posts on a Sunday afternoon - indeed I've got my share of trolls and stalkers in the world, so it's not entirely unreasonable. Maybe there's some other reason Torrentfreak is avoiding any questions about Ipredator - which along with their "youtube killer" is putatively one of two projects TPB is going to continue after the reverse merger is done. Or maybe not. . .

In either case, I'd love to hear from Enigmax or Ernesto: what's up, guys? You seem to like to pass judgment on me privately, without standing up in public to state your personal prejudices directly. If you have some personal reason why you've decided I'm to be subject to some kind of "red scare blacklist, version 2.0" because of who I am, how about you say it directly? Where I'm from, being a man and being willing to stand up for who you are is considered something of a requirement to be taken seriously. Here's your chance. . .

Fausty


ps: here's the response I made to their trollpost, which I've included in this thread because it says something important about my larger-scale, deep respect for TPB and what they've done for all of us:

Pirate Bay's Weird New Business Plan
By Mark Scott | BusinessWeek
The new owner of the swashbuckling Swedish peer-to-peer outfit will bundle up the collective Internet bandwidth of its users and resell it to ISPs


When the founders of file-sharing Web site Pirate Bay were given a year's prison sentence in April for allowing users to illegally swap copyrighted content, many thought the swashbuckling Swedish-based Internet company was finished. Not so. On June 30, Sweden's Global Gaming Factory (GGF.ST), which runs cyber cafés and sells gaming software, announced it would buy Pirate Bay for $7.9 million—a hefty sum for a Web site that became the poster child for unlawful downloads on the Internet.

What does Hans Pandeya, Global Gaming Factory's chief executive, plan to do with his new acquisition? The answer is complicated and controversial. In an interview with BusinessWeek, Pandeya said he first intends to go legal by paying royalties for online content to media companies such as Warner Brothers (TWX), Sony BMG (SNE), and Vivendi Universal (VIV.PA). He didn't say how much he'll pay—and concedes he hasn't yet entered into discussions with any music and movie companies. Analysts estimate that up to 90% of downloads from Pirate Bay's 20 million users currently are illegal.

But Pandeya's ambitions for Pirate Bay 2.0 are much greater. He has hatched a novel scheme to bundle together the collective Internet bandwidth of Pirate Bay's users into a giant new peer-to-peer network. Then, he'll resell that broadband capacity on an ad hoc basis to Internet service providers—companies like Comcast (CMCSA) or AT&T (T)—that are in need of a quick injection of cheap bandwidth. Pirate Bay aims to split the revenue with its users, who will be financially compensated for sharing their connections. Pandeya declined to say how much users could pocket.


Cheaper Data Traffic

"The technology will use the community of file-sharers to cut costs of data traffic for ISPs by more than a half," says Pandeya. "Users will earn money by joining, which can be spent on Pirate Bay's other services [such as an expected online music store] or transferred to their bank accounts."

It's an intriguing notion, though not unprecedented. Other global peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have similarly used the collective computing and network capacity of participants—ranging from the Skype (EBAY) free Internet phone-calling service to massive research projects that distribute number-crunching work to millions of PCs.

Perhaps the best known among these is SETI@Home, based at the University of California at Berkeley, which has used P2P technology for more than a decade to speed the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI participants allow access to their computers via the Net when they're not in use, creating a giant pool of processing power—a "virtual supercomputer"—that analyzes radio telescope data for signs of life from outer space. The technology also is being used by researchers to probe diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Pirate Bay's plans aren't quite as philanthropic—and some analysts say pooling bandwidth for resale to ISPs won't be a slam dunk. Mark Mulligan, research director at consultancy Forrester Research (FORR), warns that Pirate Bay could face mass defections by its existing users, who might look elsewhere if the Web site swears off illegal content.

That, in turn, could make it hard to build a peer-to-peer community large enough to generate excess bandwidth to sell to ISPs.


Banking On Lucrative Ads

"This doesn't appear financially viable," Mulligan cautions, noting that ISPs already are active in trading bandwidth among themselves and may not want to embrace an upstart with a shady past. What's more, many may balk at what amounts to buying back network capacity from their own customers.

Even the legality of Pirate Bay's new concept isn't entirely clear. Users who have paid for broadband from an ISP could profit by selling some of it back to Pirate Bay. That might violate the terms of service laid down by some providers, says Tony Ballard, a London partner at media law firm Harbottle & Lewis, although in principle, he says, "there's no obvious reason why network operators could object."

Aside from the peer-to-peer bandwidth strategy, Pirate Bay also hopes to make as much as €40 million ($56 million) per month from running ads on its legal content portal. Yet Forrester's Mulligan reckons the plan also embodies significant risk—and thinks the €40 million figure is "crazy."

Why? With 16.1 million unique visitors in May—the latest figures available from researcher comScore (SCOR)—the old Pirate Bay had enough scale to attract major advertisers. But blue chip companies like Wal-Mart (WMT) or Coca-Cola (KO) wouldn't go anywhere near a site associated with illegal downloads. Now, if Pirate Bay goes legit, those concerns should ease, but the site also risks losing millions of users and becoming less desirable for advertisers. "There's a fundamental flaw in [Pandeya's] belief in transforming it into an advertising business model," Mulligan concludes. Indeed, to date no illegal music downloading sites—including such pioneers as Napster and KaZaA—have successfully made the transition to a paid service.

Global Gaming Factory expects to complete its Pirate Bay acquisition by the end of August, so it has a couple of months to iron out the details. But Pandeya is convinced he has a great opportunity in hand. "Content is just one revenue source," he says. "Data transport, that's where the money is."

Scott is a reporter in BusinessWeek's London bureau.

Pirate Bay Torrent Looks to Encrypt the Entire Internet From ‘Prying Eyes’
Janko Roettgers / NewTeeVee | July 10, 2008


The team behind the popular torrent site The Pirate Bay has started to work on a new encryption technology that could potentially protect all Internet traffic from prying eyes. The project, which is still in its initial stages, goes by the name “Transparent end-to-end encryption for the Internets,” or IPETEE for short. It tackles encryption not on the application level, but on the network level, the aim being that all data exchanged on your PC would be encrypted, regardless of its nature — be it a web browser streaming video files or an instant messaging client. As Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (a.k.a. Tiamo) told me, “Even applications that don’t supporting encryption will be encrypted where possible.”

Neij came up with the idea for IPETEE back when European politicians were starting to debate a Europe-wide move to DMCA-like copyright enforcement efforts, which were eventually authorized in the form of the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive in the spring of 2007. “I wanted to come up with something to make it harder for data retention,” said Neij. But he didn’t publish the initial draft proposal until early this month, when the discussion about privacy and surveillance online suddenly became urgent again. The Swedish parliament passed a new law in June that allows a local government agency to snoop on “the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals,” as the EFF’s Danny O’Brien put it. Neij promises that his new encryption scheme will be ready before the law takes effect next January.

IPETEE will likely be implemented as an add-on to operating systems like Windows and OS X. It will essentially do its work in the background, handling all incoming and outgoing IP traffic without any further interference from the user.

Let’s say you want to open a video download from a remote machine. IPETEE would first test whether the remote machine is supporting the crypto technology; once that’s confirmed it would then exchange encryption keys with the machine before transmitting your actual request and sending the video file your way. All data would automatically be unscrambled once it reaches your machine, so there would be no need for your media player or download manager to support any new encryption technologies. And if the remote machine didn’t know how to handle encryption, the whole transfer would fall back to an unencrypted connection.

Neij told me that IPETEE could be easily implemented for data transfers between end users, such as files shared through P2P. “The proof-of-concept code will be available both on Windows and Linux,” he explained, but the next step would be to make it scalable and available for operations in a server-based environment so that administrators could use IPETEE to protect their users’ web or email transmissions.

IPETEE could be a big step towards standardizing the encryption of web, email and even VoIP traffic, but it wouldn’t protect against all types of interference. Your ISP could still kill your video downloads via BitTorrent, because newer traffic management solutions can identify P2P transfers by simply looking at the patterns of your uploads and downloads and not at the individual data packets. It could also potentially slow down certain transfers, because it takes time to establish encrypted connections. There might be other flaws in the architecture of the IPETEE system as well, which is why Neij’s team is currently talking to crypto and network experts. But he seemed optimistic that he would have at least a proof of concept implementation ready by the end of the year.

Of course, the Pirate Bay folks don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to following through with their plans. NewTeeVee alumn Jackson West pointed out back in March that long-planned projects like The Video Bay, the music site PlayBle and a new and secure P2P protocol have yet to be launched, and that’s still true today. Adding an ambitious project like IPETEE to the list doesn’t seem likely to solve that problem, but maybe this time Neij and his crew will overcome their ADD.

Wow, TPB is going to "invent" something called VPN - in 2008. I wonder what happened to this project, like so many other of their "projects?" Maybe the re-branding of Relakks is what is their idea of "developing a magical new protocol to encrypt the internets" turned into. . .

Fausty

The Pirate Bay’s Unfulfilled Promises
Jackson West | Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 4:30 PM PT


The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde and Frederik Neij recently sat down for a lively and intimate three-part interview with Dayrobber, a Danish online video site. But if, like me, you’re looking forward to a big announcement or two from these merry pranksters, you might come away disappointed. (Part one is embedded below, and parts two and three were posted today thanks to a request by TorrentFreak’s Ernesto.)

They continued to shoot down the idea that the popular torrent tracker is making a profit — Sunde says his take so far has been “a couple of free drinks,” and what income he does get is from speaking engagements. They did discuss related businesses they’re working on, but we’ve been hearing about those for months and I’ve yet to see any progress on those fronts.

NewTeeVee’s Janko Roettgers reported on projects The Video Bay, music site PlayBle and the new P2P protocol Neij is developing that promises to provide more anonymity to file sharers. But that was last May, and none of the projects are live to the public yet. Sunde promised to migrate to the new protocol by November, which leaves Neij about eight months to complete the task.

Just keeping the site online while doing battle in Swedish, Danish and American courts over copyright claims could certainly be eating into the team’s time. And if the site is just covering costs, that means there’s no profits to fold back into new projects — though as someone who donated to the efforts to purchase an island, I’d still like to know where that money went.

Who knows, maybe Carl Lundstrom can lend them a few Euros, or the site can reach a settlement in their suit against the labels and studios that will net some cash.

If the pace of development doesn’t pick up, the entertainment industry might finally catch on to the idea of a DRM free, ad-supported, bandwidth-efficient content distribution model — which Sunde admitted is about the only thing that would put The Pirate Bay out of business.

Will GGF Really Take Over The Pirate Bay? Could Be Doubtful
from the is-it-all-a-ruse dept


Martin points us to a video interview with Hans Pandeya, the head of GGF, the supposed new owners of The Pirate Bay. To be honest, the interview seems somewhat incoherent, where he doesn't actually answer the questions, and does little to elaborate on the confusing business model he's talked about with others:

Here is the video link:

But what I found most interesting about the interview is that Pandeya repeatedly notes that his shareholders will vote on the acquisition in August, and if the company cannot show a clear legitimate business model, he doesn't think they'll approve the acquisition. The questions try to dig down on this, and Pandeya doesn't really do much to answer them, but it certainly sounds like the company has a giant out. There are some other contradictions in Pandeya's statements, as well. At one point he implies that they'll have agreements in place with record labels in time for this vote, and if they don't, then people will vote against the deal -- but then says that it will take much longer to get those deals in place, and there's no way they'd be ready in time for the vote. The whole thing remains a bizarre mystery that is more confusing than enlightening... but I'm beginning to wonder if the deal will ever happen, in reality.

Looks like a few other people are starting to put the pieces together - finally. From TechDirt today:



Can anyone say. . . pump-and-dump?

Fausty

Kazaa's bizarre new PR campaign
07/07 2009 11:38 AM | Posted by: Janko Roettgers


Remember Kazaa? I know, it's been a while. Kazaa used to be one of the most popular P2P applications, until Edonkey and Emule and eventually Bittorrent came along to offer better ways to download media files. And then there was that lawsuit, resulting in an expensive settlement as well as the commitment to stop unlicensed file sharing on its network.

But that didn't stop the owners of Kazaa from trying to cash in on the popular name. Sharman Networks and Brilliant Digital Entertainment have converted Kazaa.com into music download store that essentially resells subscriptions of DRM-protected Medianet (formerly known as Musicnet) music downloads.

Those downloads can only be played with a Windows Media Player, and they come with a pretty hefty price tag: Kazaa charges you about 20 bucks per month for its music service. Just a quick comparison: Rhapsody Unlimited costs $12.99, and Napster.com only charges 5 bucks per month.

So how does Kazaa compete? Through heavy advertising via Google (you might have seen some of their ads on this blog as well), and questionable SEO marketing. Case in point: Brilliant Digital sent out a press release through PRWeb today that touts a new option to share HD home movies. The whole thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and in fact the new feature isn't even mentioned on Kazaa.com.

But that's not really why the company invested a few bucks in PR. The great thing about PRWeb is that you can include links in your press releases, and Kazaa's contains multiple links, with terms like "free music download" linking to its website. That's good for Google juice, but bad for people who actually look for free music: Kazaa.com offers its subscribers a free seven day test period, but each downloaded track will stop working soon after you cancel that subscription.

But wait, that's not all. The company also decided to include a really odd endorsement of its product in the press release, presumably to fill the gaps between those SEO links. Here's what they came up with:

"Jonathan James, Web Hacker spoke of the endless possibilities the software provides to the Kazaa community "They are going to come at you like they came at 'tereastarr,'" he said."

And here's what's wrong with that:

Tereastarr was the Kazaa user name of Jamie Thomas, who has just been sentenced to 1.9 million dollars in damages for trading music via Kazaa's former P2P client. She might not feel all that happy about being part of Kazaa's marketing campaign, but one also has to wonder what this endorsement is supposed to say: Subscribe to Kazaa's overpriced service, and you'll get sued anyhow?

The quote itself actually doesn't come from Jonathan James, but from Thomas' defense attorney Joe Sibley, who used it in her trial, according to AP.

So who is Jonathan James? It's obviously a pretty common name, but there probably aren't too many hackers called Jonathan James. In fact, I can only think of one right now. Jonathan Joseph James was conviceted of breaking into Nasa computers in 2000, and eventually committed suicide in 2008.

Whoops. That would have been a major PR blunder for any reputable company. Good thing nobody really remembers Kazaa.