Relakks – The World’s First Commercial Darknet

By | August 14th, 2006 comments icon (6) Comments


relakks logoToday, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a “darknet”. The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

“There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,” says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. “If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void.”

File sharing of music, films, and other forms of culture is where the surveillance of Internet addresses has attracted the most attention, largely because the entertainment industry has been so aggressive in suing Internet users for copyright infringement, suing college students and single mothers alike without concern.

“But there are much more fundamental values at stake here than copyright,” Rickard Falkvinge says. “The new technology has brought society to a crossroads. The only way to enforce today’s unbalanced copyright laws is to monitor all private communications over the Internet. Today’s copyright regime cannot coexist with an open society that guarantees the right to private communication.”

“Until we have changed the laws to ensure that citizens’ right to privacy is respected, we have a moral obligation to protect the citizens from the effects of the current routine surveillance,” Falkvinge continues. “This is our technical means to do just that.”

The service is provided by the Swedish high-tech company Relakks, which offers a neutral IP on top of your existing ISP service through a strongly encrypted VPN connection. Basically, this gives users the advantage of a Swedish IP address from anywhere in the world.

The cost of the service is 5 euros per month, and it is available now at www.relakks.com. A portion of the subscription fees will go towards the Pirate Party’s work in changing the copyright and privacy laws and making the service obsolete.

About the Pirate Party:
The Pirate Party is Sweden’s largest political party outside Parliament. It was founded in January, 2006, and is running for office in this fall’s general elections. The party only has three issues on its agenda: shared culture, free knowledge, and protected privacy.

About Relakks:
Relakks provides services to help individuals to assure the security and integrity of their information. Relakks’ responsibility stems from the strong Swedish tradition of protecting the integrity of private life and all forms of communication between individuals. Relakks – broadband Swedish style





Filed in: Industry Buzz

  • Transversal

    Way to go Piratpartiet! I’ve been waiting for this for months.

    You’ve got my vote.

    Integritet, anonymitet och ett fritt internet. Leve Piratpartiet!

  • PoorGreg

    You can always get insurance that protects you from RIAA fines. You can download all you want, and if the RIAA identifies you, just get your insurance company to pay the fine.

  • Transversal

    You are missing the ssential point PoorGreg, this is not about whether to get caought or not downloading copyrighted material. This is about protecting your integrity on the internet. No one should be able to monitor or trace your wherabouts on the net. Protect this and you will protect the essence of the internet.

  • dco

    I decided to test Relakks and unfortunately they know nothing about security or
    privacy. After you set up an account (using https) with a username and password,
    they immediately send you an UNENCRYPTED email repeating the username and password.

    Yup! So anyone on the Internet remotely able to read traffic now knows my username
    and password. Sadly, since Relakks uses https to set up the account, I asssumed
    they understood the basics of security and I used a username and password I use
    on most of my financial accounts, so now I have to change all of them. I have told
    Relakks to cancel my account and not charge my credit card.

    As we all know, security is only as good as its weakest link. And Relakks is clueless.
    By the way, by publishing my username and password (by which anyone can obtain private information about me), they are susceptible to various worldwide laws on not protecting private information. Too bad, I liked their idea. They should have at least learned about all the internet security issues before they tried solving just one of them.

  • http://www.alexandergrundner.com Alexander Grundner

    Thanks for posting the information, dco. It’s good to get relevant feedback like this.

  • jc

    Well, sending unencrypted passwords is quite common, but I don’t see the true problem: can’t you just change the password after first logging in? After that, the only thing left is the username. And if the username is something like “asdczxcwd9824″, well, it won’t give up any information whatsoever. After starting to use the VPN, all you can say is that, yes, YOU are using the service, but what you are doing with it, is still unknown to anyone but the company. CORRECT ME IF I’M WRONG!!

    The username is sort of a problem, but so is the fact that you have a connection to that server – both facts tell “malicious” instances the same fact: You indeed use the service. This could be of harm if 1) the use of that service is criminalized or 2) the actions of the company are criminalized, in turn making your account an asset in the court case – possibly against you.

    What worries me the most is that the company admits, that it keeps IP logs. What this means in detail, I don’t know, but the worst it could mean is that anyone accessing those logs could tell exactly what you (or I) have been doing. For example: countries that have strict rules on opposing the government, could prove that you have violated their laws for instance by visiting prohibited sites (like Amnesty). Or that it can be proved that you WERE in contact with instance X, which in turn proves something else.

    Please, if you have detailed knowledge on these techniques, let us know. This is all guessing, I’m an IT student but only second year, so I do not have intimate knowledge of this all. And no experience on the service whatsoever.