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Losing Weight, Pirate Bay Founder Requests Security Downgrade

Posted: 03 Jul 2014 02:46 AM PDT

In February 2012, Sweden’s Supreme Court determined that the sentences handed out to The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström would stand.

Carl Lundström’s sentence was quickly served but there was a months-long delay before Gottfrid Svartholm could be removed from Cambodia and placed in Swedish detention. It took even longer to trace and detain Peter Sunde.

More than two years had passed when the former Pirate Bay spokesman was eventually captured on May 31, 2014, the eight year anniversary of the 2006 raid on the infamous site. A special police unit dedicated to tracking down fugitives found Sunde on a farm in Skåne, Sweden.

Sunde is now detained in Västervik Norra, the prison originally allocated to him in 2012. Converted from a hospital over the past nine years, in 2012 the facility had 262 inmates and 250 staff. Sunde feels that the establishment is an inappropriate venue for his incarceration.

In a letter recently sent to the probation board, Sunde asks to be removed to a location more in keeping with his offenses.

“I hereby appeal the placement decision regarding the institution I am in. I believe that the safety class is too high for the crime I have been convicted of,” Sunde writes.

Sweden prisons are split into three security categories. Category One is reserved for the most dangerous of prisoners. Category Two covers the majority of the country’s closed prisons, while Category Three contains trusted prisoners who are believed to pose the lowest risk.

Sunde was found guilty of non-violent copyright-related offenses which means he should pose little to no risk to the public. On this basis Sunde believes he should be transferred to a Category Three prison, specifically Tygelsjö, which is close to his family. He says there is no risk of him trying to escape.

Health issues also feature prominently in Sunde’s plea to the authorities.

“I’m suffering tremendously – socially, physically as well as psychologically – by the shortcomings of Västervik,” he explains.

Those shortcomings include problems with food. While Sunde has described himself as a vegetarian, on occasions he has expressed a clear preference for vegan food. It’s not clear where the diet in Västervik falls short, but Sunde says he’s suffering to the point of going hungry. The 35-year-old reports that in the last four weeks he’s lost 11 pounds (5kgs).

While Sunde evaded capture for two years, that time didn’t go to waste. Before running for the European Parliament with the Finnish Pirate Party this year, Sunde invested in several tech-focused startups including the micro-donation service Flattr and the NSA-proof messenger app Heml.is.

While those operations are likely to continue in his absence, Sunde’s incarceration has already led to issues with a historic domain. Piratbyrån (The Bureau of Piracy) was the group behind the founding of The Pirate Bay and although it disbanded in 2010, Sunde remained the person responsible for administering Piratbyran.org. That domain now has issues which Sunde clearly can’t solve, although others are currently trying.

In the meantime, Fredrik Neij – who is also required to serve a Pirate Bay-related 10 month prison sentence – remains a fugitive and currently resides in Asia.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

UK “Porn Filter” Triggers Widespread Internet Censorship

Posted: 02 Jul 2014 09:11 AM PDT

Internet filters are now on the political agenda in many countries around the world. While China and Iran are frontrunners for political censorship, the UK is leading the way when it comes to porn and other content deemed unsuitable for children.

In addition to the mobile restrictions that have been in place for years already, last summer Prime Minister David Cameron announced a default filter for all Internet connections. This means that UK Internet subscribers are now required to opt-in if they want to view ‘adult’ content online.

These default filters have led to many instances in which perfectly legitimate sites can no longer be accessed. This very website, for example, was inaccessible on Sky Broadband after it was categorized as a “file-sharing” site. The false positive was eventually corrected after the BBC started asking questions, but that didn’t solve the underlying problem.

In an attempt to make it easier to spot overblocking the Open Rights Group (ORG) has today launched a new site. The embedded tool runs probes on all the major broadband and mobile filters of UK ISPs, and allows people to check which sites are blocked and where.

The first results are quite scary. A review of the 100,000 most-popular sites on the Internet reveals that 20% are blocked by at least one of the filtering systems.

“We've been surprised to find the default filtering settings are blocking around a fifth of the Alexa top 100k websites. That's a lot more than porn, which accounts for around 4% of that list,” ORG’s Executive Director Jim Killock informs TorrentFreak.

The list of blocked domains includes many legitimate sites that aren’t necessarily harmful to children. TalkTalk, for example, blocks all file-sharing related websites including bittorrent.com and utorrent.com. TorrentFreak also appears to be listed in this category and is blocked as well.

Linuxtracker, which offers free downloads of perfectly legitimate software, is blocked by Sky, TalkTalk and Three’s filters, while the blocked.org.uk tool itself is off-limits on BT, EE and Virgin Media.

Perhaps even worse, the BT and TalkTalk filters also categorize social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as potentially dangerous to children, and the same applies to Reddit.

Reddit is blocked as well

With the new tool ORG hopes to provide more insight into what these filters do and how many sites they block. The ISPs themselves have thus far failed to reveal the scope of their filters.

“People need to know what filters are, and what they block. They need to know they are inaccurate, and also disrupt people's businesses and speech,” Killock tells TF.

“If people feel they need them, that is their right, but they should at least know they're very flawed technology that won't protect them very much, but will also be likely to cause them problems. In short, they are a bit rubbish,” he adds.

The current results of the tool are based on various filtering levels. This means that the list of blocked sites will be even longer when the strongest settings are used.

It’s worth noting that all ISPs allow account holders to turn filters off or allow certain sites to be unblocked. However, many people may not even be aware that this option exists, or won’t want to unblock porn just to get access to file-sharing software.

The results of ORG’s new tool show that what started as a “porn filter” has turned into something much bigger. Under the guise of “protecting the children” tens of thousands of sites are now caught up in overbroad filters, which is a worrying development to say the least.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.