The Pirate Bay’s VPN Service Launched

The Pirate Bay Team has announced on their blog that IPREDator, their VPN service, is finally running. Previously announced for 1st of April,  the service was delayed due to stability problems.

The service is available only for the first 3000 people on the beta-list. Gradually more people will be invited but right know there’s 180.000 (wow!) people in the queue. They estimate it will take about a month to make the service available for all of them. After that the service will be public (i.e. everyone will be able to subscribe and use the service).

IPREDator comes in response to the introduction of Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) legislation which empowers copyright holders get personal details of file-sharing users from ISP’s. The release of IPREDator was initially scheduled exactly on the same date when IPRED got into effect (1st of April 2009).

According to TorrentFreak, the IPREDATOR service would be more secure than other virtual private networks (VPN), by encrypting a user’s traffic stream. This way, it is theoritically invulnerable to interception by a local ISP, or intermediate carriers.

“The weak link in any VPN/anonymity service is always their willingness (or otherwise) to hand over your customer data when pressured under the law. However, with IPREDATOR this should not be an issue since the service is promising to keep no logs of user activity whatsoever,” TorrentFreak said.

[IPREDator | The Pirate Bay Blog]