Back in July 2008, torrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced plans to encrypt the Internet. That hasn't happened yet, but they plan to offer a VPN tunneling service to the public starting April 1.
Dubbing the service IPREDator after the controversial Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that takes effect the same day. IPRED's main goal is to make it easier for copyright holders to acquire the personal data of suspected illegal file sharers.
By offering a VPN service that doesn't log its traffic, IPREDator is simultaneously setting itself apart from other Web-based VPN services and offering what looks like a way to legally evade IPRED. Without logs, users will be able to exchange data without worrying about a subpoena revealing to whom the data packets were going, or what their contents were.
Other details about the new VPN service are thin, except that users will be asked to pay a small premium, approximately $6.77 or 5 euros, for the service. It's also not clear if the service will be compatible with other non-file sharing uses, or if it will try to compete with other encrypted tunneling services like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC.
The current beta is free and can be signed up for at the IPREDator site, although it's taking only 500 testers. If anybody does get a chance to use the beta service, please post about it below.
If you're up on your pirate lore, or perhaps have your Pirates of the Caribbean plot flow-chart handy, you'll know that sea-faring criminals are no friends of Johnny Depp-devouring monsters. As it goes on the high CGI seas, so follow the stormy waters of the Firefox add-on world. Yesterday's Pirates of the Amazon plug-in, which adds torrent links to songs and movies in the Amazon.com store, is met today by The Kraken, a plug-in that adds Amazon.com links to torrent Web sites.
The Kraken adds Amazon results to MiniNova and The Pirate Bay searches.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The Kraken is extremely simple and there's no configuration required. When you visit popular torrent Web sites The Pirate Bay or MiniNova and search, Kraken will insert its own results box at the top of the site's search engine results that links back to Amazon.com. Kraken did not work with ISOHunt, Torrentz, or TorrentReactor when I checked them.
The plug-in defaults to showing only one result during your first search. To see more hits, click on the Show Top 10 Items for a longer list, or click on the Show All link at the bottom of the list to jump to the relevant Amazon.com page. Share opens a window to quickly e-mail off your Kraken results.
The Kraken obviously isn't going to change anybody's mind about torrenting copyrighted media, but it's encouraging to see that at least somebody out there has a sense of humor instead of firing off threatening and specious letters that probably cost more in attorney's fees than in recovering theoretically lost earnings.
A new Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon lets users download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.
If the content can be found on the Pirate Bay's search index it shows up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page. This links directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.
The extension developer's site, along with the link to download the software is currently offline. The extension made the front page of Digg a few hours ago, which is likely what took the site out (not legal intervention). I've contacted Amazon to see if the company is making any efforts to block the extension but have not heard back yet. As it stands, the extension still works, albeit without the "Download 4 Free" thumbnail, which is hosted on the developer's servers.
As blog Torrentfreak notes, this is a really bad time for such an extension. Piracy continues to be a huge problem for movies, music albums, and PC games. Amazon's online MP3 store is one of the least expensive places to legally purchase DRM-free music, and this extension manages to make it that much simpler to pirate. It also coincides with a time of year when online retailers are getting an increase in traffic due to holiday sales.
That said, anyone who knows how to pirate content probably did not need this to continue their habit.
A similar add-on is available for IMDB users from Userscripts.org that cross references movie titles with torrent sites to find copies of films online. Despite its clear lean toward piracy, I'd argue that one of its more useful features it is to track down subtitle files, which can provide translations in smaller countries where the content might be legally available but not localized.
Below is a demo of how the extension works. Expect the developer's site, along with the download links to be back up later today.
Pirates of the Amazon screencast from pirates_of_the_amazon on Vimeo.
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