PirateBrowser - No more censorship
piratebrowser.com
piratebrowser.com
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! ;)
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.
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.
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.
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/opinion/sunday/rampant-pro...
[2] - https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...
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".
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.
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 :)
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 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! ;)
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.
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!..
So many weird reasons...
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.
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...
Pirating means they will not RESPECT the owner's rights including licensing like GPL or even crediting contributors.
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 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.
For the osx client, I built bitcoin-qt from source with openssl 1.0.1f.
1. That tweet is from May 2012.
2. The other URL is in the address bar in the screenshot on the Pirate Browser web site. The screen shot has a time stamp of August 2013.
So the first URL was probably the official one in 2012, but it has possibly been superseded by the other one.
I think I might work on this, if anyone is interested in using the result.
(So right now I am lazy about it but really only see things going in one direction, towards being more careful about knowing)
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.
Took me a while to figure out why certain sites were only failing in opera.
1: https://plus.google.com/+KaHingCheung/posts/AiyxGBjsHjo 2: https://plus.google.com/+KaHingCheung/posts/b12Xh2aAcEu
Perhaps not, but YIFY torrents is certainly blocked on Virgin Media.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-cen...
It seems thetorrentfreak isn't a very reputable news outlet, as they neglected to list a single source in that entire article.
Are they personal friends with the pirate bay/browser guys or how did they come across this information without anybody else reporting on the story?
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)
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)
As the website states, don't rely on this for anything but downloading your favourite linux distros behind a censored connection.
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 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]
Circumventing the censorship has the usual meaning, i.e. allowing this said access once again.
The PirateBrowser was created by pirates, but isn't necessarily for them.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/north-koreas-internet-what...
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).
Maybe you're behind a proxy, or maybe Tor traffic is being blocked?