The Pirate Bay Launches Ipredator VPN

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/198/ipredator.jpg

It’s betarrrr: The guys behind The Pirate Bay have officially announced the beta test of their virtual private network (VPN), dubbed Ipredator, which makes it possible to use BitTorrent anonymously. All traffic will be encrypted as well, so your ISP won’t be able to snoop on your packets.

Ipredator costs 5 euros ($7) per month, and will initially only be open to 3,000 lucky beta testers. Another 180,000 potential users have signed up for invites, however, and The Pirate Bay team has promised to let all of them in within a month. That’s a pretty lofty goal, however, and one has to wonder whether Ipredator will really be able to meet its users’ expectations

:source: Source: P2P Blog | Zeropaid

What's the point of this if it isn't free?
Seven dollars a month..? For just three dollars more someone could just get an Astraweb account and totally cut out all the BS.

any1 try the speeds yet ? is looking like a good idea.

its a grand idea. ive always wanted to do something similar for personal use however id still need a host for the server running the ssh tunnel/vpn software/or whatever other means i wished to implement, so it would still be simple enough to trace back to me

piratebay have basically cut that factor out and made it simple and easy. They aren't known for lying to users as i believe when they say they control the networks ipredator is run on. They store no traffic (which is obvious as it would be feasibly impossible to do so without an extremely large network of servers) and chances are they have logging of all kinds disabled.

The only thing that your ISP will probably be able to see is an ecrypted data packet with header information pointing to a dest source of an ipreditor vpn ip. But until a time they make using vpn's illegal (which isnt gonna happen id say) your pretty safe.

The only thing id be concerned about is payment structure. How do they bill you monthly without storing some sort of billing info for the users. Thats something i hope to see in documentation (cant find any atm but it is still beta after all).

If i were running this service id probably have each vpn service assigned to a unique hash. so to keep their vpn alive users have to send the payment along with that unique hash. That way not even an email be stored and as long as you dont drop a vpn users connection into the available pool as soon as payment runs out it should give the user long enough to renew their subscription without the need for mailing lists.

But there isnt much info on it at all at the moment. Will they make u use a specific port in your client (or shud i say port range) , or can you route all data through your service including port 80. If all data is allowed , for the price its definately worth every penny

sure you could go out an get a newsgroup subscription but the more money people like tpb get towards this stuff, the closer we get to a better anonymous online experience. Plus anything that makes the riaa and mpaa feel sick has gotta be worth 5 euro's ?

Honestly I can't see myself using this service at all. I don't feel like it would have any actual extra help in my actual setup already.

I'll assume that the people here who can't understand the reason for using a proxy service have probably never released files on P2P.

Back in my eDonkey days, I definitely could have used a service like this. There were virtually no eDonkey seedbox services back then (I don't think there are even any today!) so releasing files was always a bit risky. I was always afraid of gettting nailed, so to keep a low profile I'd release files under a variety of different user names. The socks proxy services available at the time (the early 2000's) were not designed for -and did not work well with- P2P applications and especially decentralized P2P networks. Using a proxy usually meant being firewalled, having UDP disabled, having a limited number of connections, and various other problems.

The VPN services offered today are a huge improvement in file sharing. I have two complaints with VPN though:

1. That the default Windows configuration will leave you sharing files using your real IP address whenever the VPN disconnects (unlike socks/http proxies which will disable your connection if they go down).

2. A VPN proxies the entire internet connection, while socks/http proxies can be enabled or disabled per each application. Since a lot of websites block (or prevent posting) from VPN/proxy IP ranges, making it necessary to use your real IP address, this means you will end up disconnecting P2P apps whenever visiting such websites.