* Swedish Net War diary Options

[TankGirl]

Pippi Långstrump, a popular anarchistic children book character created by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Like the Swedish pirates, Pippi is smart, resourceful and does not fear to challenge the bad guys or the authorities. Pippi's entire name in English is Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraim's Daughter Longstocking. Digg this story?


Latest developments from the Swedish Net War

Ahoy! The pirate ship is sailing again!

Pirate Bay is back online running on new servers located in Holland. Despite the forced move into a new hosting service in another country the site seems to have succesfully restored virtually all of its indexing data from the backups, and the functionality of the site is also being quickly restored. The first new video posted to the site was a control camera capture from the police raid that shut down the site three days ago.

Demonstrations in Stockholm and Gothenburg

Support demonstrations for Pirate Bay are taking place today in the two largest cities of Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg (Göteborg). The demonstrators, backed by four official political organizations, demand the returning of the seized servers, a stop to all raid-related police inquiries, destruction of the DNA samples taken and answers to a number of tough questions from the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who was responsible for initiating the Pirate Bay raid.

A 17-year old hacker took down the Swedish police website

Newspaper Aftonbladet has found out that a 17 year old high school student was responsible for the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that took down the website of the Swedish police for over a day. The hacker told Aftonbladet that it took 10 minutes from him to engage the attack. Thousands of compromised 'zombie computers' were used in the attack, and the effect of the attack was further amplified by the curious surfers from around the world who went to browse the website from the links posted into popular sites like Digg.

Aftonbladet: "Generation War"

"The entertainment industry has no chances against the youth", writes journalist Lena Mellin in her Analys (Analysis) column in the large Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet. "The shutdown of the pirate site Pirate Bay has led to a generation war. On the other side are the old people and the law. On the other side are the young people and the Internet." Her view is supported by the official participation of several political youth organizations in today's support demonstrations for the Pirate Pay. Many well-known younger politicians of the established Swedish parties have already openly challenged the official copyright policies of their respective parties.

[Wobbel]

ps, like the 'enhanced' logo

 pbay.jpg ( 40.54K ) Number of downloads: 0



ps, this is their new hosting company : http://www.leaseweb.com/
Other sites they host are : filemp3.org, torrentbytes.net, filelist.org. and others, looks like they are p2p/torrent friendly

[Lion7718]

Good to know...thanks

[TankGirl]

Pirates recover faster than the Swedish police

Newspaper Aftonbladet organized a humorous online poll asking people to guess which of the two websites, Pirate Bay or the Swedish Police, will manage to come back online first. Indicating the huge public interest in the pirate drama, nearly 70,000 people participated in the poll, with 93 % of the people putting their bets on Pirate Bay. And indeed, at the time of this posting, the Pirate Bay website is online while the website of the Swedish police is still down.

Pirate Party keeps growing at record rate

With demonstrations underway in Stockholm and Göteborg, new people keep joining the Swedish Pirate Party literally by the minute. The member count is 4958 at the moment of this posting. The Party will need 225,000 votes in the parliamentary election to be held in September to pass the 4 percent thresold required for parliamentary representation. This is not an unrealistic goal considering there are an estimated 1,3 million active filesharers in Sweden, a country of 9 million inhabitants.

Led by a charismatic 34-year old IT specialist Rickard Falkvinge from Sollentuna, the party has set 10 candidates to its national candidate list, including the leader of the party, plus 12 local candidates. The party has only three issues on its agenda (in English, worth reading!): a radical reform of the copyright law, abolishment of the patent system and the securing of people's right to privacy. In the relatively split Swedish political field even a small number of parliament members might give them a good strategic position to advance these goals.

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Rickard Falkvinge, the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party

[TankGirl]

Peaceful pirate demonstration in Stockholm

Fresh pictures from the demonstration in Stockholm:

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Swedish Television reported about 500 people participating in the demonstration. In his speech one of the Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, asked the Swedish officials to calm down and stop fighting against the Internet. "It's a battle you are never going to win", he said.

According to blog reports the demonstration went peacefully and in the spirit of unity despite the diverse political groups being represented. Also the police was reported behaving friendly and peacefully.

Pirate Party keeps growing

Pirate Party's member count has just gone over 5000. It is now approaching in size the Greens (Miljöpartiet) who have 17 seats in the 349-seat Swedish Parliament. It took 4.6% of votes in the last parliamentary election for the Greens to get their 17 seats.

Pirate Bay to operate from four countries

According to Pirate Party, Pirate Bay will operate in future from four different countries - Holland, Russia, Ukraine plus one unnamed EU country. The sites will mirror each other so that a possible takedown of one site should not even cause any service breaks for the customers. The Pirate Bay staff called out for help on Internet after the police raid, and "when we told people that we are from Pirate Bay, Sweden, needing help with hardware and hosting, offers of help started to flow in immediately. Pirate Bay is now stronger than it has ever been!"

[poisomike87]

This is really coming to bite them in the ass.


If you kill me I will come back stronger

[JackSpratts]

additional sources

swede snid dolkow has been busy on his blog translating the coverage into english for all us swedishly challenged readers. so busy in fact that he had to pack it in abruptly the other night after working a marathon session. also, from the reboot conference in copenhagen chaos radio has an in depth interview with the pirate bay's peter (40 meg mp3). dig those cool accents.

- js.

[bmc]

this is damn awesome, just goes to show that NOTHING can keep the pirate bay down

[NitnayLion]

Just where are they getting this idea that it's the young against the old ?

[multi]

17 year old high school kid admits to taking down Swedish Police website

Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet is reporting an exclusive interview with an unnamed 17 year old high school student who claims it was him that took down the Swedish Police website as revenge for the raids against the Pirate Bay.

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The 17 year old did this as revenge for the raids on Pirate Bay on Wednesday. He claims it took him only 10 minutes to organise the attack. The attack was done by setting up a website containing a simple page with links to the biggest pictures he could find in the Police website's press archive. He then went into a discussion forum popular with young people in Sweden and asked them to visit his new site as many times as they could and to ask friends to do the same. However IT experts contacted by the newspaper say that it is unlikely that the 17 year olds actions we enough on their own to take down the site and suspect that more organised D-DOS attacks were also involved.
The kid has owned up to his parents as he became very scared when he saw reports on TV that the police website was down. His parents haven't decided yet whether to tell the police or not.
digg

[TankGirl]

Latest developments from Sweden, June 4.:

Swedish government website collapses

Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reports that the website of the Swedish Government has collapsed. The problem seems to be so serious that the Government representative does not expect them to get it up overnight even if they are constantly working on it. The website serves as a portal to all government departments, including the Foreign Ministery and Immigration Officials.

Antipiracy Bureau goes voluntarily offline

Dagens Nyheter also reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization financed by the media cartels will shut down its homepage for the moment "because it is rather lively right now out there in the Internet", in the words of Henrik Pontén, the nationally hated lawyer head of the organization, responsible for the raid against Pirate Bay.

700 people in demonstrations

An estimated 500 people in Stockholm and 200 people in Gothenburg took part in the Pirate Bay support demonstrations organized by the Pirate Party and three political youth organizations. The Swedish Television was present, interviewing participants. Image galleries from the demonstrations here and here. Pirate Party leader's speech in English here.

Pirate Party soon larger than the Green Party

Pirate Party's member count keeps soaring. At the time of this posting there are 5215 members in the party - up from around 2000 before the police raid on Pirate Bay. At this rate it will take only days for the Pirate Party to become larger than the Green Party, already represented in the Swedish parliament.

[TankGirl]

Further developments from Sweden, June 4.:

400,000 Swedes in Antipiracy Bureau's secret register

There's a new piracy-related scandal brewing in Sweden. Newspaper Aftonbladet reports that Antipiratbyrån, the Swedish antipiracy organization, is keeping a secret encrypted register in its Stockholm offices holding detailed records of the download activities of some 400,000 Swedes. Such registers are illegal in Sweden, where personal privacy is highly appreciated by the law and guarded by state officials. Göran Gräslund, the director of Swedish Data Inspection office, has promised to take a closer look at the issue. "Antipiratbyrån having the IP addresses of people in encrypted form is unlikely to make any legal difference", he says. "The personal information is still there and can be decoded back to plaintext as wished."

Swedish press siding with people in the "Net War"

Despite the approaching FIFA World Cup football tournament (a big media event in Europe), it is the unfolding piracy drama that has captured the main headlines in the Swedish press. The press is showing little or no sympathy to Antipiratbyrån and to the media cartels financing its operations. The online reader forums of the newspapers are filling up with hundreds of furious posts from the readers protesting the illegal police action against Pirate Bay and demanding the resigning of the Justice Minister Thomas Bodström who seems to have been the key official to fold under the pressure from the U.S. government and the American movie cartel MPAA.

Government website comes back online, police website still down

The web portal of the Swedish government came back online this morning, bringing some relief to the various Swedish officials who need it to access their respective data systems. The website of the Swedish Police is still down under a continuing DDoS attack. Earlier yesterday Antipiratbyrån voluntarily went offline, obviously to avoid an inevitable crashing or worse under the attacks coming from the Internet.

[TankGirl]

Latest developments from Sweden, June 5.

Cultural Chief confesses filesharing publicly, defying the new copyright law

Swedish TV reports that the Cultural Chief of Karlskrona, a city of 61,000 people in southern Sweden, reports himself voluntarily to the police, confessing publicly that he downloads music from the Internet. He says he started filesharing as a protest against the new stricter copyright laws in Sweden, in effect from July 2005. He emphasizes that he is filesharing only from his home, not from the workplace. "I'm doing it just as a private person. Internet is the world's best music library." According to the new law he risks a two year jail sentence.

Swedish Security police to investigate Government website crashdown

Dagens Nyheter reports that the Swedish Security Police will make a criminal inquiry regarding the recent crashdown of Swedish Government's website. The police is already busy investigating the crashdown of its own webpages, back online after a two day's downtime due to DDoS attacks.

Digged! Pirate Captain's speech gets international attention

P2P Consortium, a 'roof' website linking numerous p2p communities together, gets to taste the dreaded Digg Effect as the English version of Rickard Falkvinge's (Swedish Pirate Party leader) inspired speech from the Stockholm demonstration found its way to Digg's front page in less than a day from its posting. Digg comments available here. The speech has also started to spread as copies in Blogosphere. The voice of Pirate Captain will be heard by an international audience of tens of thousands!

[JackSpratts]

it's about time somebody in our community got dugg. kudos tankgirl for your translation scoop and keeping us all up to the minute on this fascinating and fast breaking story! no one deserves it more than you tg.

- js.

[rastaX]

it's about time somebody in our community got dugg. kudos tankgirl for your translation scoop and keeping us all up to the minute on this fascinating and fast breaking story! no one deserves it more than you tg.

- js.

TG is awesome!


What a great story.............

[pimpinaman]

Much appreciation TankGirl for keeping us in the know

[TankGirl]

Arrrrrrrrrrr, shiver me timbers! Let's make those bilge-sucking, poxed MPAA landlubbers walk the plank!

Thanks guys!

[Roadblock]

Knowlege is power. You da woman TG.

[An Awesome Guy]

its unsinkable -- very much unlike the titanic

[TankGirl]

Latest developments from Sweden, June 6.:

Swedish police prepares for National Day unrest

Today is the National Day of Sweden, and the Swedish police is preparing for violent clashes between various political youth groups - mainly the neo-nazis and the radical leftist antifascistic movement, both to have their own meetings in the centrum of Stockholm. An additional worry for the police are the Net activists who managed to shut down both the police and the government websites in the aftermath of the Pirate Bay raid a week ago. The situation in downtown Stockholm is bound to be tense tonight, and the police has told in advance that they will be present with a large riot control force.

Green Party echoes Pirate Party's criticism in filesharing issues

The approaching Parliamentary election starts to show in the Swedish political discussion, even if the large government parties have not yet really started their own campaigns. Peter Eriksson, the spokesman of the Green Party (Miljöpartiet), attacks in today's Expressen Justice Minister Thomas Bodström and his views on Pirate Bay. "It is totally absurd to try to stop new technology with police and repressive laws", he tells Expressen, echoing the criticical voices of the popular Pirate Party. He also addresses filesharing issues in his blog in sharp terms, demanding Swedes to accept the new technology and to start thinking about new ways to compensate copyright owners. The credibility of the Greens as a pro-p2p party is questionable though as they have earlier voted for the new stricter copyright laws and also negotiated possible minister arrangements in a post-election government with the anti-p2p Social Democrats. A more likely explanation is that the party is alarmed by the record fast growth of the new Pirate Party. Should the Pirates manage to attract enough younger voters, the Green Party might be left under the 4 % vote thresold required for parliamentary presence.

New study: every second Swedish schoolchild downloads from Internet

Aftonbladet has just released a new study revealing that every second child in the age group 10-16 is downloading copyrighted material from Internet. Children typically have their own computers in their own rooms, with parents having little idea of what their offspring is doing online. The study also shows that less than 10 % of children have bought music online - most prefer to get their online music for free. However, about 40 % had spent money on CDs during the month before the study.

Pirate Party member lists circulating on Internet?

Aftonbladet reports that copies of Pirate Party's member lists are circulating on Internet. The newspaper claims the lists to be genuine but hasn't given the Pirate Party a chance to verify it. With the election approaching, and with Pirate Party's membership tripled within a week (current member count is 5910) misinformation and scare campaigns are a real possibility.