Pirate Boxes / Phones for the Olympics

[borgs8472]

Right, a combination of three ideas here I thought I might write down.

#1 Pirate Bay onna drone
#2 Download pirate bay in 90 megs
#3 Pirate Box
#4 USB dead drops

What will people want around the Olympics? Wireless internet access. Will they get it very easily? Well maybe on the underground. Most services will require free or paid registration in any case.

With an exceptional (even though it's normally high in any case) amount of people looking for internet access, I'm wondering whether designing the contents of a microsite to host off one's wireless enabled phone or flashed router could have some legs to it?

The operating cost would be that of wireless power as this would not connect to the internet. Features I can imagine having on such a site:

* SSID either 'Pirate box' or 'Free internet' depending on approach. Anything official would have to not be misleading.
* Encryption (?)
* Http or self signed https website / webserver
* Front page, big PPUK banner, transitioning into something that looks kinda like our home page, but more full of links
* Contents of the PPUK website (flat html of course)

Also

* Structured listing of the pirate bays torrents, complete with guides on 'save these links to download later' etc etc
* Other useful technical guides and information a wireless network user might find useful such as more and less trustworthy wireless providers.
* There are mutual exclusive elements with official elements here.

Hell, if such a resource existed I'd fork out £30 for a box and run it 24/7 from my house. (would be office too, but I am contracting )

The floor opens for discussion.

[aramoro]

Do you think aligning the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay so officially is a great idea? Makes you kind of the political wing of a commercial entity then, more of a lobbying group than political party.

[Razeth]

I kinda agree with aramoro, though the idea of spreading free net for the Olympics is an amazing idea, right now thanks to mass media TPB has a ridiculously poor image. I'm not saying we should desert them, but considering we're trying to promote ourselves as a trustworthy and legitimate party brandishing our connection with them won't win us any favours. Why not torrenting as an ideal rather than mentioning names?

You probably can get a wireless router that can be set up in the way you asked for £30, but range would be pathetic Plus, anything they download using your free intranet (link wise) you will end up responsible for, so when BT/InsertYourISPHere knock on your door asking why there are currently 50 connections downloading Harry Potter movies from TPB using links you provided you may want to set sail hehe.

P.S. I know they won't be downloading directly from your broadband (intranet after all) but you know all it takes is one cop/journalist to connect and it'll be on our laps

[Gavman]

Do you think aligning the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay so officially is a great idea? Makes you kind of the political wing of a commercial entity then, more of a lobbying group than political party.

Sorry I missed the part where the Party endorsed an individuals view as it's own?

[Razeth]

Do you think aligning the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay so officially is a great idea? Makes you kind of the political wing of a commercial entity then, more of a lobbying group than political party.

Sorry I missed the part where the Party endorsed an individuals view as it's own?

Well, borgs is bouncing the ideas off of us and asking us to give our opinion (as part of the party and as an individual) so surely on behalf of the party it's good to point out it's not a good idea to link ourselves to TPB, considering if we don't we're basically silently agreeing by viewing and not providing constructive criticism.

Not only that but even if we do not officially endorse it sticking the party name and logo next to it really doesn't do much to help the image we're trying to project. Just a thought..

[Gavman]

Do you think aligning the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay so officially is a great idea? Makes you kind of the political wing of a commercial entity then, more of a lobbying group than political party.

Sorry I missed the part where the Party endorsed an individuals view as it's own?

Well, borgs is bouncing the ideas off of us and asking us to give our opinion (as part of the party and as an individual) so surely on behalf of the party it's good to point out it's not a good idea to link ourselves to TPB, considering if we don't we're basically silently agreeing by viewing and not providing constructive criticism.

Not only that but even if we do not officially endorse it sticking the party name and logo next to it really doesn't do much to help the image we're trying to project. Just a thought..

On re-reading I perhaps jumped to the conclusion he was implying that the suggestion was official whereas he may have been just questioning whether it would be a good idea or not were it taken up as an official idea so my apologies for my earlier remark.

[aramoro]

Yeah I was just questioning if it was a good idea to make policy. I mean obviously the Party is linked pretty intrinsically to torrenting and media downloading, that's the main thrust of it. But choosing a specific commercial company and promoting their products and brand, for want of a better word, just seems wrong. Especially with the names being so similar, you'll be conflating the two things for people, that The Pirate Party == The Pirate Bay.

[borgs8472]

If I had a completed idea I'd set about initiating it myself. It's because I don't that I collected my ideas and put them out there for discussion.

My last campaign for instance used a unexpected use of the DNS system to created a dynamically created website. Not the first person to ever do this, but AFAIK the first person to do it with political message.

The pirate ideology (not that I would say it's a very substantive or complete one) features evolution of communication ahead of the mainstream, in anticipation of a world where information is free and massively decentralised creating new social, legal and commercial paradigms. If sticking some kind of campaign or resource on an unexpectedly located wifi hotspot is a decent pirate campaign tool, I don't know what is. (and I do know what is as previously mentioned.. .anyhow...)

I've decided I'm going to discover more about what sort of person might or might not connect to a random wireless hotspot and what interaction can effectively be had. To this end I'm going to mess with setting up my smartphone (Android) up with a simple webserver and guest book functionality to see what usage patterns I can detect. I travel by tube so I should be exposed to a lot of smart phone users.

Again, this isn't the first time someone's run a webserver on a wireless hotspot or phone, but if it can be done even semi effectively it'll be another important milestone for hi tech political campaigning.

The content is doable in any flavour, please don't get too hung up on it.

[Razeth]

I've been on the tube a good few times...am I the only one uncomfortable with playing with my phone in the middle of London? XD

[borgs8472]

Indeed. But free wireless is coming to the tube and very shortly, everyone will be playing with their phones in London, on the tube...

[Razeth]

Then surely they'd all be connected to the free wireless o.o considering a Pirate Boxes effective range you would probably need one per train. So what, buy an all day zone 1 ticket, take a train each and just circle around and around? XD


EDIT: Btw borgs, if it's handy at all, I'm a web developer who owns 6 CISCO networking degrees.. if you would like a micro-site making and putting into a pirate box I'm PRETTY sure I could do it xP

[cabalamat]

The idea of software and hardware that enables freedom of communications is one that I'm very much in favour of.

While I'm not an expert on hardware I do know a bit about software, so I've decided to build a project whose long-term goals include:

(a) allowing anyone to say anything publicly with both anonymity and verifiyablre identities (so everyone can verify that a series of messages were written by the same entity, without knowing who that entity is).

(b) allowing anyone to say anything privately to anyone else, without third parties knowing what they said, or even that those two individuals communicated with each other (i.e. to defeat traffic analysis).

These functions will make it attractive to dissdents in prepressive countries and to privacy advocates. But i don't wasnt it used just by them, for it to be fully effective it should be used by everyone. So I'm building it as a general-purpose text-based communication system: it'll be eaasy to use and have the features that people want so they'll (hopefuly) choose to use it over twitter, blogging, forums, email, facebook, etc. The first iteration is a twitter-replacement that can also be used for blogging.

It's very unpolished at the moment, but it's up and running and you can have a look at it and use it. It's called MeowCat. I'll be working on it after the election.

If MeowCat becomes successful, it'll also address another problem the Party has: lack of funds.

[aramoro]

Now I might be being a bit critical here, but how is MeowCat going to achieve the kind of market penetration is needs? What's the strategy? What kind of Bandwidth per user are you looking at and how do you expect to fund it? A small forum can easily run in to $300-$400 a month in costs, this paedophile playground of anonymous image sharing will easily sail through that with embedded images. I don't see how this is going to solve PPUK's financial issues.

[borgs8472]

Now I might be being a bit critical here, but how is MeowCat going to achieve the kind of market penetration is needs? What's the strategy? What kind of Bandwidth per user are you looking at and how do you expect to fund it? A small forum can easily run in to $300-$400 a month in costs

I would say that's a massive over estimation, I ran a medium forum on $200/year hosting costs, vbulletin, mostly text.

[aramoro]

I would say that's a massive over estimation, I ran a medium forum on $200/year hosting costs, vbulletin, mostly text.

One of my friends is running a Forum with ~3000 active users and his bandwidth costs are in the $300-$400 a month range which is why I say it. It may be entirely possible to run it for $200 a year but not when your intention is to replace Twitter.

[cabalamat]

Now I might be being a bit critical here, but how is MeowCat going to achieve the kind of market penetration is needs? What's the strategy? What kind of Bandwidth per user are you looking at and how do you expect to fund it? A small forum can easily run in to $300-$400 a month in costs,

Like borgs, I feel this figure is somewhat overstated.

[/quote] this paedophile playground of anonymous image sharing will easily sail through that with embedded images. I don't see how this is going to solve PPUK's financial issues.[/quote]

Meowcat ATM doesn't host images. I'm not planning to add image hositng to it, since services such as Imgur do that already.

[aramoro]

Like borgs, I feel this figure is somewhat overstated.

It's your prerogative to think that, I'm not going to push it. I just know that a forum with ~3000 active members, 500 online at any one time, ~1 million posts runs to that kind of figure a month.

Meowcat ATM doesn't host images. I'm not planning to add image hositng to it, since services such as Imgur do that already.

That's my mistake, I took from your statement that you embed images that you were in fact embedding images not linking to them. Like I say my mistake, I apologise.

[cabalamat]

Like borgs, I feel this figure is somewhat overstated.

It's your prerogative to think that, I'm not going to push it. I just know that a forum with ~3000 active members, 500 online at any one time, ~1 million posts runs to that kind of figure a month.

How many pageviews is that? And is the limiting factor on cost the bandwidth, disk space, or processor usage?

[aramoro]

Page views I don't know, the limiting factor is Bandwidth costs , everything else is well within limits.

[liamreed]

It's very unpolished at the moment, but it's up and running and you can have a look at it and use it. It's called MeowCat. I'll be working on it after the election.

I've signed up and it looks good i would prefer if it was a little more graphical i like having candy eyes but all in time eh? XD