Pirate Bay's VPN goes public: Ipredator

As governments around the world consider proposals to hand surveillance powers to the entertainment industry and twitchy cops, the Pirate Bay is striking back. Its new €5/month IPRedator service is an encrypted VPN that you can use to hide your traffic (whatever it may contain) from prying eyes. The name comes from Sweden's adoption of IPRED (the "IP Rights Enforcement Directive," a punishing piece of anti-Internet legislation). I've been looking for a reliable VPN to use on public hotspots -- this might just be it. Ipredator is currently using the same platform as several other VPN franchises including Relakks, which means it's not really anything we haven't seen before. The servers are maintained and provided by Pirate Bay affiliates though, which may be more trustworthy to the average BitTorrent user than a random VPN provider. That aside, we were told by former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde that contrary to what the legal page states, no logs of any kind are kept by Ipredator. The text that is in there is a left over from the standard template they got from the provider of the VPN platform. And, according to Sunde, there will soon be even more advantages and added security to Ipredator.

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/20/pirate-bays-vpn-goes.html

German government warns against using MS Explorer

The German government has warned web users to find an alternative browser to Internet Explorer to protect security. The warning from the Federal Office for Information Security comes after Microsoft admitted IE was the weak link in recent attacks on Google's systems. Microsoft rejected the warning, saying that the risk to users was low and that the browsers' increased security setting would prevent any serious risk. However, German authorities say that even this would not make IE fully safe. Thomas Baumgaertner, a spokesman for Microsoft in Germany, said that while they were aware of the warning, they did not agree with it, saying that the attacks on Google were by "highly motivated people with a very specific agenda". "These were not attacks against general users or consumers," said Mr Baumgaertner. "There is no threat to the general user, consequently we do not support this warning," he added. Microsoft says the security hole can be shut by setting the browser's security zone to "high", although this limits functionality and blocks many websites.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8463516.stm