TorrentFreedom Offers 100% Anonymous and Unrestricted BitTorrent
With a militant style more associated with the crew of The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreedom promises to put the user back in control, by offering a new BitTorrent-optimized, zero-logging, 100% anonymous VPN service, guaranteed to punch a hole through throttling ISPs. Be quick for a free account!
Born out of the VPNTunnel Project, the TorrentFreedom ‘manifesto’ is an interesting document, particularly if you’ve ever worried about being tracked, traffic shaped, blocked or censored on the Internet. With a suitably clandestine feel, the manifesto states:
“Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an ‘arms race’ between the unwashed filesharing masses and the forces of Big Brother - we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”
TorrentFreak got in touch with ‘Faust’ of TorrentFreedom to find out what on earth they’re talking about.
TF: Tell us about this ‘creative destruction’ and what inspired you to create TorrentFreedom.
Faust: It’s all but trite to point out nowadays that we’ve undergone a revolution in how human knowledge is created, stored, and shared. And, much as Schumpeter himself had predicted, the creativity unleashed has more than made up for the detritus of old forms of information transmission that now scatter the landscape like broken, forgotten toys. This is as it should be. The backlash from the praxis of stasis threatens to drown the organic reinvigoration that innovation technology has always brought forth - there would be no 95 theses without Gutenburg, remember.
So our inspiration comes from a deeper, historical appreciation for the transformative role of new technologies in human social organization. Nobody knows where creativity, academia, and knowledge creation will evolve as our tools allow for more and deeper interconnection between physically disparate peoples - but we do know that hampering that process isn’t part of making a better world for all beings. We’d like to see people keep sharing, keep learning, keep exploring. . . and they can’t do that if there’s roadblocks and threats of censorship every step of the way. Make it easy and make it work, that’s our approach - then the creative destruction can continue apace.
TF: There are number of evils you appear to tackle head on with this service, such as traffic shaping, packet raping, blocking, censorship etc. I expect lots of Comcast customers will be interested as you specifically mention the ‘Sandvining’ technique they employ. How does your system work and how will it benefit each type of problem?
Faust: Metaphorically, the system is quite simple: think of the difference between sending postcards in the postal mail, versus sending sealed envelopes. A postcard can easily be read by anyone along the way, and if they don’t like what it says (or who it is addressed to), they could just throw it out - oops! A sealed letter isn’t vulnerable like that - the contents aren’t readable whilst in transit. Even more than that, our system protects the address (sender and receiver) on the envelope as well - so nobody can block the message just because they don’t like where it’s headed (or where it’s come from).
At a deeper level, our server farm is based in the Netherlands. Everything passes in and out of these machines, and all IP addresses are associated with them. The activities of our customers - once their sessions decrypt and leave our server farm - are fully and unambiguously decoupled from their RL info (including local/physical IP address). Big Brother isn’t going to show up at their doorstep with a fishing-expedition summons or subpoena. We took it a step further, however - we’ve broken the link between RL info and public IP for our customers inside our systems as well - once an account is set up, it is methodologically impossible for anyone to back-connect a given external TF IP address to a customers’ specific account, ever.
TF: You’re called TorrentFreedom so it’s fairly clear which crowd you’re aiming your product act. What sort of dedicated optimizations can BitTorrent users look forward to when using your service?
Faust: We’ve tested the service extensively with just about every BT client out there. They all work seamlessly. We also don’t penalize our customers for running lots of network traffic over TorrentFreedom - there are no monthly caps, and no drama if someone uses a lot of gigs with us. That’s cool - it’s why we built the system!
OpenVPN, in its rawest form, will work with BT traffic - but getting it to do so consistently and smoothly is nontrivial. We’ve done all that work, so our customers don’t need to become experts in subnet addressing, MTU window sizing, and the 100 other little tweaks one needs to do to really make BT over a VPN sing. We also hand out real, public IP addresses - so no port forwarding garbage, just fast connectivity.
TF: Please give us a brief rundown on how your system works.
Faust: On a technical level, it’s an implementation of the TLS-based OpenVPN project’s codebase (which itself implements various OpenSSL crypto algorithms). Starting from there, we’ve created a Java-based client that handles all the encryption and coordinates OpenVPN’s handshake tasks, to ensure that every packet coming and going from our customers’ PCs is tightly encrypted (including DNS queries, unlike pptp). The really cool stuff comes in the firewall-busting tricks that our client has up its sleeve - there’s very few local network configurations that we can’t tunnel through. . . with no customer tweaking of the software needed. We’ve also implemented a rather clever port 443 wrapper so that, unlike many VPN instantiations, the TorrentFreedom service can’t be blocked unless the entire HTTPS capacity is also shut down - unlikely.
We’ve built most everything with open code, and we’re pushing further in that direction (with perhaps full distribution of the source for our client extensions in the works). “Just trust us” crypto isn’t worth anything - if it’s not open, it’s not reliable. We run 2048 keylength RSA algorithms so, to the local ISP or anyone else “listening in” to our customers’ packets, the data all looks like a stream of secure web traffic, back and forth. This is true for ALL IP traffic coming off a machine, all protocols and all applications. So there’s no need to tweak individual applications to get them to “work” with TorrentFreedom - just set up the client, connect, and everything is encrypted all the time.
TF: There are other well known VPN services that say they are strong on anonymity and hide your IP address, yet all of them will give up your personal details at some point. How is TorrentFreedom going to live up to the claim in the manifesto that BitTorrent users using your service will be “just about as traceable as dusty footprints in a windswept street. You can’t subpoena what doesn’t exist” ?
Faust: Ok this is where the rubber really meets the road. An “anonymizing” service that keeps detailed records of their customers’ activities is just a problem waiting to happen. There’s no point in hiding an IP address only to keep records that connect that IP address to the one that’s used to cover for it! And, reality is that there is no place in the world that isn’t subject to some form of legal jurisdiction - just saying “we won’t turn over records” is silly. When the authorities show up - with court orders or guns - and people start talking about jail time and contempt, those records are going to get coughed up, period. Despite our respect for the company overall, Hushmail’s admission that it provides “secure” email information to certain government authorities demonstrates all too well that even a good team will fold if the pressure gets too high - and if they have information to provide in the first place!
We built the system from day one so that there’s no correlation between an IP+timestamp and a username - this means we can’t hand over logs of “who was on what IP at what time”, and therefore the user can’t be tracked back from their online activity. Our payment system is fully abstracted from the operational environment - billing events are passed to the VPN engine via temporary “tokens” that are one-way-factors - there’s no link between the VPN account and the details of the billing transaction, ever.
We keep a little bit of data on file to make sure we can monitor the performance of the system overall, but we don’t have “server logs” like everyone else does. They don’t exist. So, we can be forced to turn over those logs - but they don’t link back to anything. Not to mention all of our operational VMs run in fully-encrypted partitions, etc. Someone seizing any of our servers has nothing but an expensive doorjam for their troubles. Even someone with full access to every machine we have cannot link people to their past network traffic through TorrentFreedom. It’s structural anonymity, at the most fundamental level.
Now, there’s lots of other VPN services out there and some of them are sorta ok. Most, let’s be honest, are based on pptp - it’s really insecure with several known weaknesses. Plus, it’s closed-source/proprietary, so who knows if it has backdoors or not? The reason people use it is because it’s easy to set up - Windows machines come with it pre-installed. Well, we did the hard work of getting a real VPN implementation (OpenVPN) to work just as easily as pptp - but without the security problems.
Some of the stuff we did is a little complex, behind the scenes, but the end result is a service that’s really easy to set up and use. We’ve got clients for Windows, Macs, and Linux. We don’t limit bandwidth, and we’ve got some very fast servers backing it all up. It’s all done right.
TF: Any final thoughts?
Faust: Using TorrentFreedom for online security is like bringing a machine-gun to a knife fight. . . it might not be ‘fair,’ but the outcome isn’t going to be in question either.
TF: lol ;)
Update: the free invites are gone.
Alternatives: (not free)
Previously: Free The Pirate Bay, Wear Yellow for Sharing
Next: The Pirate Bay and Filesharers Backed by Swedish Politicians
217 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
Signing up now… =]
look’s absolutely gteat…thank’s!
how do you get the free subscription?? Surely I’m on of the first right?
Mmm, how do we take advantage of this first 50 free subscription for one month offer?
“consider yourself one of the chosen - our first 50 customers are getting a month’s torrentfreedom service gratis, so. . . congrats, no need to pay, have fun!”
BOOYAKASHAH! =]
P.S. Site only works in Firefox.
yeah, where is the free signup link? :P
Just signup for a one month subscription and you will get the above message ^^
Yea where’s the free signup link? lol…
Are sign up’s supposed to be open, just had a look on TorrentFreedom.com and can’t see anyere to sign up?
http://www.torrentfreedom.com/buy.php
Go there and signup for the 1 month of TorrentFreedom Service - $17 - (one-off) and you will get it free!
ah your supposed to buy it, but you then get a torrentfreak free account :p
http://www.khellmirror.com/oh.jpg
Yep, just sign up like you would if you were going to pay for a subscription.
Hello high-speed VPN!
Cool! Good thing I did the logical thing! So what happens now, I’ve downloaded the client and logged in, and also logged in on the site, how does it work? Does it simply annonymie my utorrent now?
w00t
Anyone else wearing yellow?
Great news.
Yep. Just login through the client and you’re automatically anonymized.
Check whatismyip.com with it on and then turn it off and check it again to be sure. Currently browsing TorrentFreak using it and being thousands of kilometres away from their servers it’s lightning fast!
Great :)
Right, nice advertising. How much does Torrentfreak earn by this? FUCKERS.
looks like they’re already out of the free accounts…
Interesting. :-)
Got account for free.
awesome)
TorrentFreedom is an RIAA/MPAA scam.
DON’T FALL FOR IT
For those with an x64 system, download the OpenVPN installer at http://openvpn.net/download.html and just tick the TAP-Win32 adapter driver. That will get it working on your x64 system.
Sign me up m8!
They are gonna make sooooo much money from this… but rather give them the cash then the RIAA..
And so the arms race continues…
Looked up TorrentFreedom on WHOIS and it seems they do a normal VPN service using the same technology as TorrentFreedom too.
goldensVPN (http://www.goldens.com).
hey quite fast[quote comment="284604"]TorrentFreedom is an RIAA/MPAA scam.
DON’T FALL FOR IT[/quote]
with servers in the netherlands?
LOL
I already got Relakks :D
Gief subscription!
wow looks awesome.
gief plx!
Oh, and yeah. isnt taking paid for bittorrent service against the whole idea of free sharing?
The site is a scam.
If you want to be anonymous use Relakks, its free, fun, and has a nice design.
You shouldnt have to pay for torrents, the end. TorrentFreedom my ass.
$17 ???
safer to buy my stuff in the shop…
so what if my admin closed all of the “HTTPS” connections and only opened it for a limited websites???
can I connect to their servers???
@31
Relakks is free? The homepage tells me different.
[quote comment="284619"]If you want to be anonymous use Relakks, its free, fun, and has a nice design.
[/quote]
Relakks is free? Since when?
How do I get mine to try out?
Signing up for free subscription! : )
Everyone screaming that their service should be free are retarded, they have to use a lot of servers to tunnel all that traffic and I suspect that as soon as they will encounter a lot of real high traffic downloaders/uploaders they won’t even break even on those subscriptions…
the 50 must be full I don’t see anything to indicate that I would get a free month
No.
good news;)
[quote comment="284619"]Oh, and yeah. isnt taking paid for bittorrent service against the whole idea of free sharing?
The site is a scam.
If you want to be anonymous use Relakks, its free, fun, and has a nice design.
You shouldnt have to pay for torrents, the end. TorrentFreedom my ass.[/quote]
Free? No, lol, relakks cost 49 crowns a week, and that’s about 7.5 US dollars.
Edit: I didn’t mean week… I ment month.. my fault
very nice :)
Wouldve been nice with one of those (;
I think I’ll pass - I’d rather pay for VPN Tunnel and skip this. You may all wish to read the terms here - http://www.torrentfreedom.com/terms.php - just in case there is something there you don’t like.
I didn’t like the terms so I’m skipping it.
Blatant plug by TF IMHO - what’s the kickback for TF for referring others to TorrentFreedom I wonder?!
So, relakks sucks, i feel a loss of speed - and it’s definitively not free
I hope torrentfreedom is 4 real, sounds a bit too agressive and I’m wondering if MAFIAA or such a f*cking organisation won’t take legal action…
$ 17 … it’s ok
Well 17$ vs. 6.5$ (Relakks). Well I keep Relakks :P
TF: lol ;)
what a plug.
somewhat expensive this $17 monthly charge. Relakks costs me only €5 /month.
Nope.
Definitely not going to be jumping in to this. For those of you who have got free account/paid already, I’d like to know the results.
Oh and the comparison of speeds :D
Oh, I registered compulsively but then I remembered I don’t need it anyway >___>…
Here’s a free account if anybody cares:
user: pcruzm
pass: 123456
(First come first serve, you may change the password in the support page)
I like their attitude ;)
TF FTW! (both lol)
Ive been throttled before on certain ports, and imho it should be illigal for a ISP to do sutch.
Thats like having a car renting service and providing skateboards or lollerblades..
Might test in the future, bit poor because of gaming addiction… xd
who said pirates dont BUY stuff? =o(
Best of luck TF, hope your service does well because its realy needed!
pcruzm, your account isn’t verified.
The problems with relakks is they link user data and ip logs so that could be given out if demanded by authorities. You can find this out by reading the legal page at relakks. So not only do they log your traffic they also link it to user data, which basically makes them useless IMO.
From reading this article it would appear TF solves these problems. I’m not sure how TF stands in a legal view point. I thought some form of logging was mandatory under EU rules.
#57, the Swedish (etc. TPB) and the US lov isnt the same. You have to have comitted a crime up to 2 years jail before they can hand over the information. With not will happen. So Im glad for Relakks and max my 20/1 connection :) However Im from denmark and how will they trace me when I have a swedish IP in torrent? They are not the authorety! ;)
These guys don’t even have a dedicated server (do a reverse ip check), how can they handle all that traffic?
This looks phishy (pun intended) to say the least.
aaaand now the site’s spewing out php errors. very odd, references to “geoip” and “tracker” php files.
that’s pretty shady.
Hmm, this is hosted on the same ip as TF:
Goldens.com
http://goldens.com/whatitis.php
Let me guess, it’s the same service but under a different name? ;)
pcruzm’s account was verified as i just logged into it, but it looks like the account has been disabled by torrent freedom.
Let’s see how this turns out. It sounds a little bit too good to be true. Well, I sure hope it works like advertised.
The ‘problem’ with a service like this is that ‘everything’ you do goes thru that link… web surfing, e-mail, im’s… it’s not limited to bittorrent traffic.
They also seem to have the same attitude as TPB - “their arrogance will be their undoing”.
I’m already paying $50 for HSI access. Smarter and better to get a Usenet account.
here is what they andwered me when i emailed them:
“Hahaha… A month free? You’re funny. You seem to think we haven’t thought this one through. Do you know what a gigabit port is? You also assume that we’re not the owners of the other domains…
You forget: We *are* a server provider. That entire server and the network it’s on belongs to us.
You ought to read the Terms of Service. We do offer refunds. ”
bunch of a$$holes..this is how they treat possible customers and they expect that people to do business with the. Bunch of idiots.
…and of course, a little grammar would not hurt either, so bear with me.
why not just use usenet? I use to use relakks and torrents but since trying giganews/newleecher I will never go back.
But that cost money :)?
Contrary to the article, DNS *can* be tunneled through PPTP.
i stopped reading their ramblings at “nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction”. epic fail.
too good to be true and you know what that means
first you need to know who the operator is, it could be anyone, and that should not give you a warm feelin. we need some kind of independent validation of who they are before trusting them. perhaps an EFF certification
second the legalese, the last para of their small print:
[quote]
The buyer shall indemnify and hold Torrent Freedom harmless against all third party claims, demands, suits, actions, judgments, losses, costs, damages (direct, indirect and consequential), attorney’s fees and expenses that Torrent Freedom may sustain or incur by reason of any breach or alleged breach of any term or condition of this Agreement any other policies enforced by Torrent Freedom’s administration.
[/quote]
it translates as:
[quote]
if we get sued because of something you do then you pay us all our costs everything
[/quote]
i have a couple of real issues now:
1. how do they know it was you who did something bad if they do not log?
2. why does the contract contain an inoperable clause which contradicts the service?
assuming these guys are no amateurs, there is a real problem. contradiction in the contract, at the basic legal level means danger
Like I said in #64… “their arrogance will be their undoing”.
And so it is.
Good thing it’s free right now - I’d be pissed if I spent all day trying to get this up with no success… But time is money too, so I don’t know if this is worth it…
Ps, On a whim I installed OpenVPN (don’t install the TAP virtual adapter) and that fixed my problem. Seems to be working now.
I’d rather pay for a Usenet account.
Holy Christ!
Someone needs to throw away this guy’s Thesaurus!
H33t (post #71)
Basically what they’re saying there is that if you’re stupid enough to do something on their service that leads to you getting caught (like signing your real name on an NFO file), that you’ll pay their attorney’s fees if they get sued too.
That is very standard, harmless text. It doesn’t mean that they’re in bed with Big Brother.
TorrentFreedom: I’m concerned about HelpDeskconnect — it records a lot of discoverable information from the users who submit through it.
For the users that do not use it, it is no problem.
You may want to warn your users to be careful about what they disclose through it and that their logging and retention rules are different from your own.
[quote comment="284604"]TorrentFreedom is an RIAA/MPAA scam.
DON’T FALL FOR IT[/quote]
I’m tempted in believing in this, so I wont suscribe
10 British Pound for 50 GB is really not cheap.
[quote comment="284604"]TorrentFreedom is an RIAA/MPAA scam.
DON’T FALL FOR IT[/quote]
And who says you’re not just another RIAA/MPAA internet troll? Anyone believing you must be retarded. Do you have some proof to support your claim? No? Eat shit and die, you little retard.
I got myself a free account and I’ll use it to it’s maximum.
Sorry, but I refuse to pay to download torrents. Id rather just pay my ISP to browse AND download.
Besides, theres no such thing as 100% anonymous bittorrent usage.
Goddamn it, you people are seriously demented. You don’ t pay to download torrents! You pay for a secure VPN tunnel, and you use it as you’re pleased. What the fuck is wrong with you?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network
[quote comment="284896"]Goddamn it, you people are seriously demented. You don’ t pay to download torrents! You pay for a secure VPN tunnel, and you use it as you’re pleased. What the fuck is wrong with you?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network/quote
QFT
hmm torrentFreedom - and you have to pay to join…. interesting
People saying I refuse to pay for that or that because i can download etc etc… obviously never heard of donating something for a specific service to help them.
Greedy people.
I occasionally donate private bittorrent communities as example because of what they are providing.
This might be alright as long as they have good hardware and connectivity behind them- but given that the site looks like it was written by high school kids, it’s probably going to be useless.
[quote comment="284908"]hmm torrentFreedom - and you have to pay to join…. interesting[/quote]
Are you living in fantasy land?
“We offer servers with 100Mbps down and up.”
“We don’t cap your speeds and we’ve got the bandwidth to keep everyone going at full throttle.”
Maybe its just me but i would think that stuff costs moneyz..
*smacks head in keyboard*
Odds of needing this…Not very high.
Most likely you aren’t going to be in trouble for just d/l over Comcast/ATT/Cox/etc…
And…if you are concerned…just switch to Verizon internet. The president already said its not going to track the ips of its customers at all for anything. Verizon FTW!
obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.
looks too good to be true.
but the reality cannot catch up to the fantasy.
wish i can use it… im sad!
[quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
Obviously you have no idea of what your talking about…obviously
If this post wasn’t sponsored I’ll eat my hat. This place is going down the pan.
[quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.
He can’t speak human English.
I’m calling Admiral Ackbar on this one.
seoursly have torrentfreak became a fucking sellout site? this shit sucks and i guess they made lots of money on this shit
PS: i dont give a fuck
Until they can match/beat the ~$8US I pay a month for Relakks, I’m not going to bite. Besides, Relakks has been significantly more reliable within the last 2 weeks than it has ever been. TorrentFreak should run a story/interview with them on how they’ve improved their service. I used to get disconnects all the time, but I’ve been logged in for the past week+ without trouble. Hopefully some Relakks users switch to this to take the load off their servers!
Can anybody who got a free account to to like speedtest.net and give me the speeds (or just link me to the speedtest image)? Relakks comes nowhere near to maxing out my 8 MBPS/0.5 MBPS connection, I’d grab an account if this could.
I managed to get 500-600KB/s downloading last night on a torrent with around 799 seeders and 41 peers. That’s nowhere near maxing out my 15mbit download but it’s the average I get being so far away.
One thing though - you CANNOT seed using the VPN. 3KB/s upload was the max I could get.
Firstly, fuck off with this shitty advertising for your ‘friend’.
The point of using bit-torrent is that its free, relativly quick and easy to use. Unless your planning on uploading a crazy amount of data (and lets face it folks, the average bit-torrent user is a hit and runner unless your on a private tracker) then the added security is pretty much going to be useless, specially as there are alternatives out there.
Good luck with it, but I can see it going down the pan faster than the shit I took moments ago.
[quote comment="284957"][quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.[/quote]
p2p = free, this service = not, comprende?
[quote comment="285039"][quote comment="284957"][quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.[/quote]
p2p = free, this service = not, comprende?[/quote]
It’s VPN and gigabit ports costs money. Comprende? Fucking imbecile.
BTW, YOU CAN SEED WITH VPN YOU FUCKING MORONS!
And this VPN totally owns that piece of shit Relakks.
[quote comment="285057"][quote comment="285039"][quote comment="284957"][quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.[/quote]
p2p = free, this service = not, comprende?[/quote]
It’s VPN and gigabit ports costs money. Comprende? Fucking imbecile.
BTW, YOU CAN SEED WITH VPN YOU FUCKING MORONS!
And this VPN totally owns that piece of shit Relakks.[/quote]
Looks like someone’s being paid to promote a service…
[quote comment="285057"][quote comment="285039"][quote comment="284957"][quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.[/quote]
p2p = free, this service = not, comprende?[/quote]
It’s VPN and gigabit ports costs money. Comprende? Fucking imbecile.
BTW, YOU CAN SEED WITH VPN YOU FUCKING MORONS!
And this VPN totally owns that piece of shit Relakks.[/quote]
Looks like someone’s in bed with torrentfreedom…
THE INTERNET ISO = 45,792,698,635 YB
kB (kilobyte) 1000 to the power 1
MB (megabyte) 1000 to the power 2
GB (gigabyte) 1000 to the power 3
TB (terabyte) 1000 to the power 4
PB (petabyte) 1000 to the power 5
EB (exabyte) 1000 to the power 6
ZB (zettabyte) 1000 to the power 7
YB (yottabyte) 1000 to the power 8
PRESS >>HERE<< TO START DOWNLOADING
TorrentFreedom = scam
You know, I’ve been wanting to do something similar to this. Many of you know about TOR-Privoxy, but they discourage its use for P2P traffic due to the limited number of exit nodes. Why doesn’t someone make a hybrid BT-TOR P2P client, where all clients are forced to act as exit nodes? Just its existence would be able to make it impossible to prove who did what. It’d be interesting to see how that went the first time it ends up in court.
for what they charge a month you might as well just by an account from a usenet isp. same price (some are cheaper), amazing content and speeds that will go as fast as yor connection can handle. oh yeah and they don’t store logs and you don’t even have to mess with this type of service.
[quote comment="284978"]Until they can match/beat the ~$8US I pay a month for Relakks, I’m not going to bite. Besides, Relakks has been significantly more reliable within the last 2 weeks than it has ever been. TorrentFreak should run a story/interview with them on how they’ve improved their service. I used to get disconnects all the time, but I’ve been logged in for the past week+ without trouble. Hopefully some Relakks users switch to this to take the load off their servers![/quote]
Anyone using Relakks should realize they’re going to have fewer connections as all of Relakks’ IP’s are blocklisted on PG and other IP blockers.
I wish I could just get the facts on this rather than this ridiculous flame war going on here. To me, it seems like this service is really just a VPN that does not keep logs. So, you send traffic through the VPN, which is encrypted; the only place/site that has your IP is torrentfreedom. But because they do not keep logs, the only time they have your IP is when you are currently downloading on/connected to the VPN. Now, with the way bittorrent works, Now lets take a for instance; if the RIAA/Mediadefender etc are collecting IPs that try to use trackers, they will just get the IP of torrentfreedom (the VPN). Thus you would be “safe” from an IP tracking standpoint and from any logs of your IP or internet activities… making you 99% safe to use bittorrent. Is this correct?
[quote comment="285134"]I wish I could just get the facts on this rather than this ridiculous flame war going on here. To me, it seems like this service is really just a VPN that does not keep logs. So, you send traffic through the VPN, which is encrypted; the only place/site that has your IP is torrentfreedom. But because they do not keep logs, the only time they have your IP is when you are currently downloading on/connected to the VPN. Now, with the way bittorrent works, Now lets take a for instance; if the RIAA/Mediadefender etc are collecting IPs that try to use trackers, they will just get the IP of torrentfreedom (the VPN). Thus you would be “safe” from an IP tracking standpoint and from any logs of your IP or internet activities… making you 99% safe to use bittorrent. Is this correct?[/quote]
they claim they don’t keep logs…this whole thing seems suspisous.
http://www.slyck.com/story1376_BitTorrent_vs_Usenet
Privacy - Decisive Usenet Advantage
A major concern for many file-sharers is security. With the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) promising to conduct 1,000 copyright enforcement actions per month, and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) having already sued almost 20,000 individuals, retaining one’s privacy is an understandable concern.
To understand how people become a copyright enforcement statistic is to understand why Usenet has the undisputed advantage over BitTorrent - or any other P2P network. Virtually every instance an individual has been sued has been the result of sharing material online - otherwise known as uploading. BitTorrent depends on uploading for its very survival, Usenet does not.
Unlike P2P networking, Usenet does not encourage or otherwise recommend that its userbase upload any material. There are established responsibilities within the Usenet hierarchy – those who provide and those who download. This is the way Usenet has functioned since for it’s nearly 30 year history, and shows no signs of deterioration. For now, as no one has been sued for merely downloading material, Usenet is far and away the most secure way to obtain information online.
It should also be noted that most Usenet clients and servers support end-to-end encryption, which adds an additional layer of security.
“‘Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an `arms race` between the unwashed file-sharing masses and the forces of Big Brother - we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”" … VPN proxy tunneling services may be the last recourse for people trapped in regions where a single ISP such as Comcast has a monopoly and is your only available choice for broadband internet access … this country was founded on the idea of `we the people` — but now, its become `we the corporate` … and `we the people` need to get our political representatives to restore our country before we become another former lost democracy turned fascist state.
88 Feb 09, 2008 at 01:00 by AnonymousQuote This might be alright as long as they have good hardware and connectivity behind them- but given that the site looks like it was written by high school kids, it’s probably going to be useless.
QFT, i’ll watch in obeyance and see what happens. Just gut feeling something aint quite right here.
The owner and operator of this site is better known as “Fausty”, or Douglas Spink. He is an animal molester, his name appears on sites such as “Beastforum” and “Elitezoo”. He was also caught trying to smuggle several hundred kilos of cocaine into Canada in early 2005.
He is dangerous. Stay far, far away!
TorrentFreak has been invaded by anti-pirate trolls…
I don’t know what all the fuss is here(as well as on digg).
I bet if all these “skeptic” complainers were given a free signup most of them would try it.
I was lucky enough to be one of the early ones, and I will try it out, seems good for now.
so does there service hand out ip’s when you connect to it or is one assigned to your account?
I was just stating that the name compared to the service was quite ironic
this is a VPN service, not a torrent service. torrents ARE free! fuckwits
SubQ : they are not charging you for torrents, they are chraging you for setting up and running VPN-servers
with a big fat pipe . And relakks isn’t free .
You don’t have a fucking clue, do you ?
@ post 122: not quite sure what you mean, but I’ve had the same IP (which points to Norway) so far. I think. whatismyipaddress.com has always said it’s Norway anyway
I mean the Netherlands.
Ok, I should let you know that Faust is a KNOWN crook.I wouldnt trust this service even if it was free!
He has left a string of disgruntled people who have lost 1000’s of dollars to this chump!
I should also point out that he was once caught smuggling many lb’s of cocaine over the US border. For all those who have seen the damage crack cocaine does to people, do you really want to fund his future drugs empire? I sure wouldnt!
Be warned! He is a rip off merchant. keep your money in your pocket.
TorrentFreak: I will be emailing you some details on this person and you can then make up your own damned minds if you want to ‘endorse’ his service.
@126
relakks gives you a new ip every time you connect to it, very useful for circumventing rapidshare and other ip based blocks. Seems like this service not very good for trolling and getting B&
i hope their service are better than their web site!!!
I can confirm that Goldens.com is owned by a man who goes by the handle “Fausty”, and he advertises it regularly on a zoophile website called “Elitezoo”. Anybody who cares to register there (it’s free) can view his signature on his posts, which links to goldens.com. (I’d hurry if you want proof, because he’s probably monitoring this thread and will change it if he notes this comment). Run a google search for “Fausty” and “cocaine”, and then follow the links from there. He is a nasty piece of work, and is undoubtedly being monitored by the feds due to his drug bust.
WE MUST SUPPORT HIS AWESOME LIFESTYLE BY GIVING HIM MOAR MONEYS, IS A MAN NOT ENTITLED TO HIS DRUG OF CHOICE?
I can verify that this guy is who they say he is (”Fausty”) and what they say he is. I’ve had some personal and painful experience with him.
They forgot to mention that he got out of the fed prison by rolling on his buddies.
You want to trust him not to keep logs or permit anyone else to?
If you are given a real IP from TF’s pool of IPs - what is to stop ISP’s just blocking traffic to these IPs?
ISPs traffic shape as there isn’t infinite bandwidth - in theory by trying to bypass traffic shaping you eventually saturate the link you are using and everyone ends up with a slow connection.
Ok, I just got it up and running with Leopard.
It wasn’t easy… if you want to find out what I did, send me an email to tf-stevenknightswood[dot]net.
My results are not surprising at all… yes, you WILL lose speed on your connection to your machine, because you are diverting your (now encrypted) traffic from the US to NL and then somewhere else.
My connection to the internet is pretty fast. Speak Easy’s speed test normally shows it as 6866 down / 3424 up, but while connected to TF it is only 3268 down / 969 up… so I lose a *LOT* of speed.
But it is something that I can live with during those times when I need anonymity.
Peace.
As TorrentFreedom spokesperson, you Faust should get your act together, you dont sound reassuring mate, more like like a silly clown messiah. what? discovered the cure for cancer or something that important? :(
I got this from, well not a torrent tracker btw, can’t quote the source, but here’s what the siteop there posted about p2p.
“P2P HAS NOW BECOME STRICTLY BUSINESS HOWEVER RUN BY INCOMPETENT AMATEURS AND DUBIOUS CHARACTERS
As 2008 really takes off now, there isn’t a single shuttle from P2P quarters, programmewise, and not a single new site, no new “private tracker” as they call it (mind the quotes, they are meant to represent their demoralisation) to fill the huge vacuum left by dead giant Demonoid or niche Oink, buzzwise.
And there aren’t going to be any. The reason is quite simple. No one really clever and capable of developing new and strong ideas and technologies is interested in becoming part of such a shady and boisterous clique. This clique is formed by most BitTorrent site owners and staff, together with most of their coders and biased promoters who have again and again proved to be not only dismayingly incompetent and irresponsible, but also cynical and hypocrite to a nauseating degree. The only professionalism they seem to have graduated in is one of Lies & Rumours.
And if P2P has become P4P (Piracy for Profit) because of them and there seems to be no way out due to the vicious circle it created, including large chunks of the Scene, with some Topsites turned into greedy pay-for-leech machines. And if P4P is all about vanity and lies and fierce competition. And if it has now become a sizable though illicit business with all this unaccountable money and the huge userbases of blind torrentians, then WHY should it not be run by pros?
I say bring in the pros so at least those hordes of gullible users get some proper privacy and protection against systematic scamming and data mining from their “private trackers” and the whole BitTorrent network.
However, if BitTorrent management becomes efficient and reliable as a professionally kept service, it will fade away as its interest only resides in the slightly underground aura its users once believed it to have. To make P2P legal is to rob it from its “sex appeal”: no matter what those “politically aware” torrentian voices claim, what they really want is free lunch forever, relatively safe but only if it still feels like a “forbidden fruit”.
[quote comment="285057"][quote comment="285039"][quote comment="284957"][quote comment="284924"]obviously this company don’t understand the point of peer to peer.[/quote]
obviously this poster don’t understand the point of VPN.[/quote]
p2p = free, this service = not, comprende?[/quote]
It’s VPN and gigabit ports costs money. Comprende? Fucking imbecile.
BTW, YOU CAN SEED WITH VPN YOU FUCKING MORONS!
And this VPN totally owns that piece of shit Relakks.[/quote]
I know what VPN is dipshit, I fucking run one you prick. But using one for general usage such as downloading your latest gay porn video is just plain dumb.Hence why this article is just purely ad spam when this site is all about torrents. Now fuck off under your hole you appear to of come out of.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare checkemailorpassword() (previously declared in /home/tfreedom/public_html/scripts/lib.php:4) in /home/tfreedom/public_html/scripts/lib.php on line 4
Looks mickey mouse. I wouldn’t give them money.
“Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an ‘arms race’ between the unwashed filesharing masses and the forces of Big Brother - we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”
Obnoxious prick. No surprise he calls himself “Faust”. Maybe he’ll sell you all out to the RIAA to save his arse like Faust did with the devil hahaha.
Paying 4 warez ?
LOL!
[quote comment="285425"]Ok, I just got it up and running with Leopard.
It wasn’t easy… if you want to find out what I did, send me an email to tf-stevenknightswood[dot]net.
My results are not surprising at all… yes, you WILL lose speed on your connection to your machine, because you are diverting your (now encrypted) traffic from the US to NL and then somewhere else.
My connection to the internet is pretty fast. Speak Easy’s speed test normally shows it as 6866 down / 3424 up, but while connected to TF it is only 3268 down / 969 up… so I lose a *LOT* of speed.
But it is something that I can live with during those times when I need anonymity.
Peace.[/quote]
What’s your full email? I’d love to know how you got it set up since I’m experiencing some trouble. Thanks!
Who the fuck pays for what they steal online? Might as well just buy the cd/dvd/album knowing the money goes to the people who actually made the product, not the schiesters who set up some bit torrent site and had the nerve to fucking charge money over it.
Get fucked, torrent freedom. Hope you go down in a firey blaze.
i find that shallow and pedantic.
i tot chickens ate cheese!
i think humanity and fish can co-exist peacefully!
the ring came off my pudding can, use my penknife my good man its monorail!
monorail!
MONNNNOOOOOOOOOOOORAIL!
@FTS, amen brotha. Who pays for what they steal? If I could pay for a service, I’d go the legal route, really. I also agree with paying the artists rather than the pirate! That is completely ridiculous. They are the junkies on the steal corner selling pirated DVDs with no lables and pour sharpie skills.
Once membership fees come into play, it is no longer about the community and more about turning a profit.
But then, Faust is all about making profit and to hell with who is paying.
File sharing has, and always will be free. Shitesters like Faust are just proffiting from dumb net users fear of the RIAA. Wake up people! You have more chance of being struck by lightning than be sued for stealing warez and movies.
Would you really want to put your money into the pocket of a drug smuggler/animal molester/scam artist/narc? since Faust is all 4 of these.
…and, just when you thought you were safe?
http://www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/
So much for anonymous eh?
[quote comment="285621"]…and, just when you thought you were safe?
http://www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/
So much for anonymous eh?[/quote]
Ahahaha
never mind. Its a forbidden link now, but a few minutes ago, that oage revealed all the IP addresses connected to torrentfreedom. And he seriously wants people to pay for such amauter security? Oh please say this whole page here is a bad joke!
For those interested, I just viewed the Apache logs of his server using a link on digg.
well, thats pretty much blown his whole operation down the toilet.. oh dear.
I AINT DOIN THIS THEY DONT HAVE NO SIGNUP FOR GAY REDNECKS… THIS IS A VIOLATION OF MY RIGHTS!
Im sure one of Faust’s animal molesting friends could give you free membership Bubba,or maybe one of his drug traffiking friends. Take your pick!
Here’s a question about this service, relakks, and others that are sure to come in the future. The assumption is that they protect you, because if the cops come in and say - give me all your logs - you’re safe because they don’t have anything in their logs. But… if you’re sharing the same IP as folks that use the service to browse kiddy pr0n and animal pr0n and all that (who would be naturally attracted to a service like this as well)… then the cops reeaaally have justification to get a warrant to come crashing in on the server room with full access to do whatever they want. so, then, they just snoop in on the traffic at the server and BAM. you’re busted anyway.
just a thought.
Oh. My. God.
Sorry to break it for you but I see two fundamental problems with this service.
1. So, you *trust* these guys?
How do you know this is not some
RIAA sponsored initiative to
monitor/catch a lot of
filesharers at once?
2. You may not like the laws but
don’t assume law enforcement
is stupid.
I’ll elaborate on 2 and explain how
this technical implementation is
trivially broken:
1. Arrest all staff
2. Leave the platform running so
users don’t get suspicious.
3. Analyze the platform
4. Add your own monitoring code
to the software that creates
a nice logfile, linking real
ip addresses to real filenames.
This has been done before (back in the BBS days) and should work in this case just as well.
Remember admins: Law enforcement doesn’t have to ask for your logfiles. They can put you to jail
and alter your software to create their own logfiles.
Remember kids: Your traffic passes through their servers. Whoever owns the servers can watch and analyze it.
Remember everybody: The *only* known approach to true anonymity on the internet would be onion routing as implemented by TOR and freenet.
Unfortunately the overhead of this
approach makes sharing of large files rather infeasible.
If you really want to understand who Faust or Fausty is, then look up Doug Spink. He’s a total scumbag…
Crazyness they left server status up, looks like they took it down. Here is a google cache of it: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:d4ARg-esnQUJ:www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/+http://www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
Have you seen the perl script that is used for starting the vpn at a unix? Urls like