Relakks, It's Sweden
I perused the Digg Security page and read news from Sweden's Pirate Party. They've teamed up with a Swedish company called Relakks to provide a subscription VPN service.
Pay 5 EUR per month (or 50 EUR per year) and you get access to a PPTP VPN hosted by Relakks. (There's a FreeBSD port of a PPTP client that should work with Relakks.) According to their legal page:
If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned – fined not enough).
RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that’s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.
For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over “traffic data” including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.
Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.
Just recently Slashdot featured a thread on a fairly lame and non-revolutionary way to try to avoid Google tracking one's searches. (I think this is probably as good, if not better.) It reminds me of MegaProxy too, except Relakks is a true VPN for all services (theoretically).
I'm wondering if we're starting to see some resistance to the idea that we "have no privacy anyway."
I might give this Relakks a try, to see what they allow outbound.
Has anyone seen something like this before, on a subscription basis for any takers?
Pay 5 EUR per month (or 50 EUR per year) and you get access to a PPTP VPN hosted by Relakks. (There's a FreeBSD port of a PPTP client that should work with Relakks.) According to their legal page:
If Swedish authorities can prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have a case for demanding subscription information from RELAKKS (they have to be of the opinion that if convicted the user will be imprisoned – fined not enough).
RELAKKS then have to hand over the subscription information entered by you (but that’s all). RELAKKS do not store any subscribtion information about you except what you entered yourself when signing up for the RELAKKS Safe Surf service.
For Swedish authorities to force RELAKKS to hand over “traffic data” including your RELAKKS IP at a specific point in time, they will have to prove a case with the minimum sentence of two years imprisonment.
Regarding inquires from other parties than Swedish authorities RELAKKS will never turn over any kind of information.
Just recently Slashdot featured a thread on a fairly lame and non-revolutionary way to try to avoid Google tracking one's searches. (I think this is probably as good, if not better.) It reminds me of MegaProxy too, except Relakks is a true VPN for all services (theoretically).
I'm wondering if we're starting to see some resistance to the idea that we "have no privacy anyway."
I might give this Relakks a try, to see what they allow outbound.
Has anyone seen something like this before, on a subscription basis for any takers?
Comments
Freedome and privacy are pretty important to people, obviously. Usually people don't want to think about it...I mean, how long have we used telephone technology and somewhere someone has always been able to listen in, even if just to troubleshoot the systems. The general public would rather just not think about it and live with the ignoring of that reality. But with the RIAA suing people based on P2P IP addresses and quite obvious blocks on certain programs or websites on campuses and corporate environments, people can't just ignore network-based privacy issues. Not when they butt up against them or read about them regularly now.
They are based in the states. Relakks looks like a better solution for securing one's privacy once they sort out their capacity issues.
They offer a similar service, but aimed at anonymous web browsing (stunnel->HTTP proxy)
... based in the Netherlands and logs are deleted after 7 days
TOR: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en
and Dr. Kaos and company released a new TOR embedded live CD - SAMAEL, which builds on their prior Anonym.OS project.
kaos.theory: http://kaos.to/cms/
Their so-called 'service' actually worked properly for a very few days immediately before my first month's fee ran out. I paid a month's renewal. It failed immediately. They won't respond to emails, even to requests for refund of the rip-off fee. We'll have to see what Visa says about that.
IT WORKS VERY FINE INDEED!! AND THE SPEED IS 100%!!
BUT THEY HAVEN'T REPLIED ME YET THOUGH.
RELAKKS DOESN'T SEND USERNAME AND PASSWORD TO EMAIL. YOU SEE IT ONLY ONCE WHEN YOU ARE REGISTERING AND THATS ALL YOU HAVE TO WRITE IT DOWN SOMEWHERE..ENCRYPTIN IS 128 BIT.. AND WORKS FINE ALL THE TIME!!