These findings are the result of the Cyber Norms sociological research project carried out by a group of Swedish researchers. The researchers conducted a survey among Swedes aged between 15 and 25 and found that 10 percent of this group is currently taking measures against increasing online surveillance.

Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law in Lund, estimates the percentage of all Swedes who are hidden on the Internet to be as high as 6 or 7 percent. If this figure is accurate, it means that there are more than half a million Swedes who already use a service to hide their identity.

The researchers note that file-sharing is not the only reason for people to anonymize their connection, but the results of the survey clearly show that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, over the past months we’ve seen that more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

Contrary to what the anti-piracy lobby had hoped for, file-sharers are not an easy catch. Their calls for harsher copyright legislation are only driving ‘pirates’ underground. According to the Cyber Norms survey, more than half of all respondents said they would take measures to protect their identities if anti-piracy laws in Sweden are toughened, as is currently happening in the UK and France.

Currently, the most common and widely used privacy services are VPNs. These services allow a user to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. Millions of file-sharers around the world use services like this to prevent being tracked by anti-piracy companies, and this number is increasing rapidly.

The recently launched Itshidden service is one of the few that offer a free service in addition to premium subscriptions. Due to its increased popularity the owners recently had to disable new registrations in order to keep the service running smoothly. In just a few months Itshidden signed up over 100,000 members. Other VPN services report an increase in signups too.

The anti-piracy laws currently being mulled have created a flourishing multi-million dollar ‘online privacy’ industry. In recent months these services have seen a massive increase in customers, with most of them paying around $10 per month to prevent third parties from logging their download behavior.

Perhaps the entertainment industry should invest some time and money in creating legal and attractive alternatives to piracy. Apparently most file-sharers are willing to pay $120 a year for unlimited and unhindered access.

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These services, such as The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator, usually charge a recurring monthly fee to pay for bandwidth and hardware bills. However, this week a new player entered the VPN market, offering their services for free – no strings attached.

Named ItsHidden, the free VPN solution has opened up a BETA test to the public, who can now privatize their Internet traffic – including BitTorrent transfers – in next to no time. ItsHidden was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities.

“It has been created to put some rights back in the favor of the user and that includes us,” David from ItsHidden explained to TorrentFreak. “There are so many bodies, mostly unelected that seem to have full access to the most intimate of online details with little or no justification and more importantly, no evidence.”

The service encrypts the connection between the user and ItsHidden’s servers and prevents anyone from reading this data as it is sent or received. We were further assured that no data logs are kept of the user’s transfers. The best news is of course that it’s totally free, and they hope to keep it like this in the future.

“It is a free service, we will of course have to limit in some way eventually to stop the whole lot collapsing, but we will always have a free account. The paid account would be geared at about $5 and will add port forwarding and other features,” David said.

During the BETA phase the service uses shared IP-addresses, but once they have completed more testing ItsHidden will be able to issue static IPs. The servers are all located in The Netherlands at present, but they will spread to other locations once the service is out of BETA.

We have of course tried ItsHidden ourselves and the service is offering good speeds for a VPN, although this might differ based on the user’s location and the load on the network. Right now, we are hoping that it wont collapse once thousands of new users flood the network. Fingers crossed.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

It pretty much works straight out of the box. First you have to chose a connection point – at the moment they have servers in Europe, USA, Canada. The closer the connection point is to your true location, the faster the speeds you will get from the service. Then, after you’ve chosen a connection point, just click connect and the program will connect to the server. The connection is made through the SSH protocol with 128bit encryption, which prevents traffic shaping and keeps your traffic ambiguous to prying eyes.

TorrentFreak briefly tested the application and it worked surprisingly well. People who are used to uTorrent wouldn’t notice any difference, besides the fact that they are using version 1.7.7 instead of 1.8 which was released earlier this week. The download speeds we got were decent as well, perhaps 5% less than normal, but that’s to be expected, and is acceptable for an SSH tunnel.

Alex, who runs Torrentreactor.net and TorrentPrivacy, told TorrentFreak: “We started the TorrentPrivacy project at the end of 2007. The idea was to give torrent users an anonymous BitTorrent service from a party they can trust. TorrentReactor has been online for approximately 4 years, and we believe that when people see that TorrentPrivacy uses ns1/ns2.torrentreactor.net as DNS servers, they won’t have any questions about a possible government setup of torrentprivacy.com.”

When we asked Alex about his motivation to start the project, he said that he wanted to make it as easy as possible for BitTorrent users to be anonymous, and get the RIAA and MPAA off their backs. “We don’t like the situation where two organizations from the USA believe they can rule the world. The Pirate Bay showed them that other countries have other laws and American laws don’t work outside of USA. We want to be the pain in their asses, and allow users to download what they want without fear of a sudden door knock.”

One of the possible downsides to the project is that you have to use their client, which is Windows only. For now there are no plans to offer SSH accounts separately, Alex told us. They do offer some other goodies though. As TorrentPrivacy only secures you while you’re using torrents, they have also developed a web proxy, listing 300 torrent sites which you can visit anonymously as an extra service.

Sounds great, right? Yes it does, but unfortunately the service is not free. TorrentPrivacy currently has three payment options. $2.95 per week, $9.95 per month and $99.95 per year. I guess it’s up to you whether you think it’s worth it or not.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.