[Infowarrior] - Pirate Bay signs up 113K new anony-service users

[Richard Forno]

The Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Signs 100,000 Users Pre-Launch
By Wired Staff EmailApril 08, 2009 | 12:18:50 PMCategories: Yo Ho Ho

Kerstin Sjoden reports.

Piratebay Over 100,000 people have already signed up for The Pirate  
Bay’s new anonymity service, Ipredator, designed to hide IP addresses  
from the authorities, the Bay's spokesman says.

Last Wednesday, the controversial Intellectual Property Rights  
Enforcement Directive (IPRED) became law in Sweden. Its main goal is  
to enable copyright holders to acquire data identifying people linked  
to illegal file sharing. Wired.com reported last week that internet  
use in Sweden dipped by 30 percent when IPRED came into force on April  
1.

Some 113,000 persons have signed up and are in queue for the Ipredator  
service, and about 80 percent are Swede, Peter Sunde, spokesperson for  
The Pirate Bay, said to the Swedish news agency TT Tuesday. The  
service was originally set to go live on April 1, but the unexpected  
high demand delayed it.

The service will operate much the same way as other anonymity  
services, with one important exception: The Pirate Bay says it will  
not log its data, making it more difficult to trace activity to a  
specific user.

Ipredator is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) which allows users to  
anonymously connect to the internet. Their ISP-designated IP addresses  
remain hidden, revealing only a second IP address provided by the VPN.

Details concerning the service are scant, except that users will pay a  
fee of approximately $6 for the security of knowing that their actions  
will be difficult to trace. The service is expected to start operation  
on April 8.

There are already a numbers of sites online devoted to hiding user IP  
addresses for a monthly fee, and in the wake of the country's new anti- 
file sharing measures, the demand for such anonymity services has  
increased across the board, according to the daily newspaper Svenska  
Dagbladet.

One service, Dold.se, is currently informing visitors that its service  
is "overloaded". Relakks.com, another service, says on its site that  
it's seen a big wave of new customers recently, and that the service  
might be slow as a result.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/the-pirate-bays.html