All of a sudden, the Pirate parties are making it possible to vote for the defense and enrichment of the connected lifestyle, which is relevant to the core for the net generation. Thus, because you can vote for it, by definition, it becomes politics – which it wasn’t before.

I guess that’s why it took a long time for me to reconciliate with the fact that i’m a politician. I grew up knowing that politicians are boring, pretentious and infighting. It is only with the expanded use of the word that it makes sense that fighting for civil liberties is, in fact, policymaking. And those of us who fight for net liberty have become politicians, as people can vote for us to… fix things.

Politicians have been de-pedestalized. And that’s good every part of the way.

I’ve understood that a lot of US readers misread me when I say that 9% in an election is a sensation. That’s because the United States and Europe have completely different election systems: in the United States, if you take 9% of the votes, you are crushed, down and out. In (most of) Europe, when you take 9% of the votes, you get 9% of the seats.

That’s why it is fantastic that the German Piratenpartei is polling at 13% and that several more are on the verge of breaking through.

I was struck at the meeting by how many new Pirate parties are on the rapid rise: Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Slovenia, Slovakia, Serbia, the list goes on.

When I was at last year’s PPI meeting, I confided in some people that I thought we could approach 15% long-term. If somebody had told me we’d be there in 12 months, I would not have believed them. Would Not. Things are progressing much faster than I have anticipated.

As I held the closing keynote, I noted that two countries are currently polling at parliamentary levels – Germany and Austria – and made a bold prediction: one year from today, between two and five more countries’ Pirates will be polling at parliamentary levels, meaning they’d enter their parliaments if elections were held.

Czech media was everywhere during the international meeting. The Greek Pirates are polling at one percent, just three months after founding. PP Luxembourg is showing clear signs of making the next election.

And as I flipped open my Android netbook to write the summary of the meeting, I learned that the Austrian Pirate Party had just taken its first parliamentary seat, in the local election of Innsbruck.

This journey is great to be part of.

Source: Impressions From The Pirate Parties International Conference

One of the main drawbacks of using P2P software such as Limewire, is that the content on the network (Gnutella) is unmoderated – anyone is free to put up whatever they like, be it music, movies or TV shows. Of course, others use this lack of moderation as a green light to upload viruses, spyware and other malicious software. Equally, one of the great strengths of BitTorrent (at least from a harm-reduction point of view), is that .torrent files are uploaded to torrent sites where staff work hard to filter out as much of the malicious software as they can, making BitTorrent relatively malware-free.

Of course, this great system falls apart if you can’t trust the people running the site. People expect anti-pirates like MiiVi to be ‘the enemy within’, but who needs those when you have ‘friends’ like the guys at new torrent site, TrafficLoader.com.

TrafficLoader.com (and its forum, pdls.info) hasn’t been setup for the benefit of BitTorrent users, it will be used by spammers, scammers and virus peddlers to spread their malicious software among the community (and make money off it). One of the admins called ‘Satty’ says that no registration is needed to upload torrents to the site and none will ever be removed. The site does have a notice – ‘Viruses, spyware, affiliate links and everything related is strictly prohibited’ but don’t believe it – Satty says these rules don’t apply to his friends in the PPI (Pay Per Install) community.

A few days ago the site was pretty bare with relatively few torrents and it was clear that most of them contained malware. It was suggested to Satty that it might be a good idea to have some genuine torrents too, to help disguise the bad torrents. Now things are starting to ‘improve’ on the site with many more torrents added recently which don’t immediately appear to be malware.

In the last few days, TrafficLoader cosmetically ‘cleaned up’ the site to remove porn adverts in order to appear more genuine but unfortunately, someone as well as TorrentFreak noticed that they made a big mistake:

“Why would you [Satty, admin] put a forum for ppi on a publicly scraped site, a.k.a here?? Do you just want ppl to find out shit is full of malware?”

Just in case they did want people to find out, hopefully this post will help them get the word out.

For those that want advice on how to avoid bad torrents in the future, try one of our guides.

Update: The site was taken offline a few hours after this article was posted, that’s our good deed for the weekend.

Source: TrafficLoader.com to Infect BitTorrent Users with Malware