Last week Popcorn Time burst onto the scene, offering content to be found on dozens of other sites but sitting head and shoulders above the rest in simplicity and presentation. But after a dream start and dozens of news articles, it was all over.

Pressure had been building within the project and rather than let things get completely out of hand, a decision was taken to move away. At the start of the weekend the Popcorn Time team called it quits and interest in the project expressed by a dev at YTS was later withdrawn by the site’s operator.

Earlier in the week there had been other complications too, including the removal of the Popcorn Time installer from Mega.co.nz, the hosting service chosen by the software’s devs. So what did Kim Dotcom know about that?

“I just woke up. No idea what happened,” Dotcom told TF at 03:50am local time Thursday. “I’m not involved in Mega’s day-to-day business since I resigned from Management to work on an alternative Internet concept called Meganet, Baboom and the Internet Party.”

Days later we’re still no closer to discovering why the files were taken down, whether that was due to Mega’s own decision based on a ToS violation or if the hosting service was pressured by the MPAA. What is clear, however, is that Popcorn Time, the most elegant unofficial movie-viewing application of recent times, has underlined that the destruction of Mega did little to ease Hollywood’s plight.

“I support innovation,” Dotcom told TF.

“Popcorn Time and countless similar applications show where the road ends for Hollywood. Ultimately it’s a cat-and-mouse game Hollywood can’t win by force but only with smarter Internet offerings.”

Interestingly, it seems that the people behind Popcorn Time actually understand where Dotcom is coming from.

In a file-sharing world dominated by the likes of The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents, Popcorn Time came along this week and took what XBMC has being doing for some time and amped it up to eleven. They took the same content being offered by everyone else and made it more accessible and desirable.

Dotcom says this is what Hollywood should be doing, but instead their anti-piracy fixation remains.

“The destruction of Megaupload did nothing for Hollywood. Piracy is bigger than ever, despite overreaching law enforcement action & efforts by the MPAA and Chris Dodd to buy aggressive copyright laws and treaties. Hollywood made a mistake when they hired a powerful former Senator to run the MPAA in an attempt to fix their Internet problems with a sledgehammer,” he adds.

While Popcorn Time was hardly stealth with its public torrent sources and open source format, Dotcom says that the worst is yet to come.

“The innovators of today are working on fully encrypted parallel Internets which don’t rely on IPs. They are fluid oceans of homeless data that can’t be controlled by anybody. I know of several projects that will make it extremely difficult for Hollywood. How do you take things down that can’t be taken down?” he questions.

“Combine that with apps and sites that provide a no-takedown one-click high-speed content experience and Hollywood’s nightmare is complete.”

The signs indeed point to things getting worse. This week TF spoke to a developer who told us that work is already underway to bring a Popcorn Time-style experience to smart TVs, showing that not only is innovation far from dead, but soon even the likes of The Pirate Bay will have to do something to catch up.

According to Dotcom, however, there’s still time for Hollywood to properly open up.

“It’s not to late for Hollywood to embrace the Internet and offer more appealing services than those unauthorized services out there. Within three years Hollywood could double global income with an ingenious new online content service I have created. It’s so good that International license holders of content would join this offering in a heartbeat. I have offered my help in an open letter to Hollywood some time ago. They still prefer the sledgehammer,” he says.

“Hollywood has built a fortune on stories with happy endings, yet they don’t get it in the real world. The Internet has the potential to be the biggest happy ending for Hollywood – and I know how,” Dotcom concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This week we have four newcomers in our chart.

Oscar winner 12 Years A Slave is the most downloaded movie this week.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(…)	The Wolf Of Wall Street	8.5 / trailer
2	(…)	Anchorman 2 (Webrip)	6.9 / trailer
3	(1)	12 Years A Slave	8.4 / trailer
4	(8)	Bad Country	?.? / trailer
5	(2)	Frozen	8.1 / trailer
6	(…)	Avengers Confidential Black Widow And Punisher	5.6 / trailer
7	(3)	Delivery Man	6.4 / trailer
8	(…)	47 Ronin (Webrip)	6.5 / trailer
9	(4)	Gravity	8.2 / trailer
10	(6)	American Hustle	7.6 / trailer

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In the America, Europe and elsewhere there is a copyright-monopoly-related system with “collecting societies”.

These organizations, which have a practical monopoly on what they do, are tasked with collecting royalties for music performances in various forms, and redistributing those royalties to the artists that were played.

With the support of law, this activity takes place at a best-effort level. More often than not, these organizations don’t actually measure what was played in every individual case, but use a number of formulas to estimate what has been played – like playlists on the top radio stations – and assume a distribution from that data. It’s easy to see how this can be justified as a good enough approximation. This leads to bizarre incentive structures.

So, let’s zoom out a bit and see what has happened here. We have given a private organization an authority-like mandate to collect tax-like fees in the billions backed by threat of force, and tasked them with finding the appropriate receiver of the collected funds. If they don’t find the receiver, with no formal requirement of actual effort to do so, they get to keep the money for themselves. What could possibly go wrong here?

If somebody in the private sector had negotiated a deal like this, they would just not be fired on the spot; they would be sued in civil court for gross negligence for the billions lost by this construction.

Admittedly, the EU directives on the matter changed just slightly this year. Still, there has been decades of this incentive in effect, creating a total morass of a culture in these organizations. The sense of entitlement has become pervasive and the larger mission lost.

The German collecting society GEMA has had no problem demanding royalties for performances that are explicitly royalty-free through Creative Commons licenses or similar, effectively running a large-scale organized criminal operation in that aspect.

The Belgian collecting society SABAM, meanwhile, doesn’t limit itself to collecting royalties for music. When asked, it confirmed that it represented various names (that were actually household brands for everything from kitchenware to restroom equipment) and asserted that these were “100% protected”, and that anybody playing “music” from a kitchen wok must pay money to SABAM.

GEMA again, meanwhile, has accomplished Germany as the most-censored country on the planet from YouTube’s point of view. Not exactly flattering for a country aspiring to Western freedom-of-expression standards. Out of popular videos on YouTube, GEMA has demanded that over 60% of them be censored to the German public.

Following a complaint filed by an artist back in 2004, a judge began investigating SABAM’s finances. His findings mean that SABAM will now face court accused of falsifying accounts to cover up bribe payments, abuse of trust, copyright monopoly fraud and embezzlement.

When looking out across Europe on the behavior of these organizations, it becomes clear that these examples are the norm and not exceptions.

There’s also the matter on how these collecting societies fraudulently claim that they “represent artists”. While it is true that musicians have signed up with the collecting societies, that is because they don’t have a choice in the matter. Cartel-like constructions made sure, for example, that they were not allowed to manufacture music CDs at all unless they were members of these collecting societies, and by signing up as members, they are forced to agree to be represented. They’ve effectively been prohibited from trade in a practically medieval guild-like construction unless they give up rights to representation, business models, and their own political opinions.

To make things even worse, the collecting societies have rights to collect fees on behalf of artists that haven’t even signed up with them, just “in case they would”. This has led to bizarre situations where entrepreneurs can’t play their self-composed and self-performed music in their own hair salon without paying copyright monopoly fees for it to the artist – that is, themselves – because they “may sign up later”. But they’re not getting anything of those fees, as they haven’t signed up.

It’s a complete morass.

At this point, the collecting societies have gathered so much money they’re a vested interest that can pull a lot of weight to preserve themselves; self-preservation has become a much more important goal than fulfilling their tasked duty, as is the case with anything that institutionalizes. The only clean and easy way to solve this problem may be to restore copyright monopoly legislation to its original reasonable requirements of originality, which was a book-size work or up. That would effectively exclude musical works from copyright monopolies altogether, which would eliminate the monopolized mandate from the collecting societies in one much easier stroke than trying to regulate them more. Fortunately, such a move would not hurt modern artists in particular, who have already moved away from copyright-monopoly-based business models.

Of course, the collecting societies would claim – no, scream loudly – that such a move would be a “blow against the artists”, and throw out numbers on how many artists they “represent”. At this point, it helps to remember what choice the actual artists had in the matter due to the decades-long cartelization that has taken place.

The only difference between collecting societies and organized crime is that the actions of collecting societies aren’t, technically speaking, criminal. They would be by a landslide if they were in any other industry, but they’re not. That’s a sign that the entire copyright industry is fundamentally broken.

About The Author

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Book Falkvinge as speaker?

Follow @Falkvinge

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Thanks to Google’s Transparency Report we have the clearest picture yet of the battle taking place between content owners and the indexing and linking of allegedly infringing content online. The search engine takes down millions of URLs every week, a not insignificant amount by any standard.

Fortunately we don’t simply have to take Google’s statistics at face value. The notices received by the company are processed and later sent to the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. There they are input into a searchable database so that the public can cross reference Google’s reports (along with others from companies such as Twitter) with the actual takedown notices, thus bringing accountability to the process.

It is through both of these database that TorrentFreak has been able to unearth dozens of serious errors and abuses carried out by the automated takedown systems operated by the world’s largest copyright holders. While there can be little doubt that Chilling Effects is an invaluable resource for those reporting on piracy issues or tracking DMCA abuses, not everyone is happy with the service being offered by the site.

As detailed in our previous reports (1,2), this week various rightsholders and service providers have been giving statements on the effectiveness of the DMCA. Among them was the Copyright Alliance, an organization that counts the MPAA, NBC, Viacom and TimeWarner among its members. The theme running through CEO Sandra Aistars’ statement is that the takedown provisions of the DMCA don’t work, whether you’re a creator or a website drowning in notices. Surprisingly, Aistars also took aim at Chilling Effects

The project is operated by a selection of law school clinics and the EFF with the aim of supporting lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats, but the Copyright Alliance CEO says the site helps bully artists who stand up for their rights.

“The activities of chillingeffects.org are repugnant to the purposes of Section 512 [of the DMCA],” Aistars reported to the House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing.

“Data collected by high-volume recipients of DMCA notices such as Google, and senders of DMCA notices such as trade associations representing the film and music industries demonstrate that the overwhelming majority of DMCA notices sent are legitimate, yet the site unfairly maligns artists and creators using the legal process created by Section 512 as proponents of censorship.”

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Chilling Effects Project Leader Wendy Seltzer said that the repository exists for informational and research purposes.

“Many of the Chilling Effects participants filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the 9th Circuit a few years ago, in which we describe Chilling Effects’ public purpose at length, and cite 25+ research works that, even in 2010, had been written using Chilling Effects data,” Seltzer explained.

However, continuing her criticism, Aistars told the hearing that by publishing DMCA notices intact, thereby revealing their senders, Chilling Effects had helped subject creators to “harassment and personal attacks for seeking to exercise their legal rights.”

Seltzer, a Fellow with Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy who sits on the boards of both the Tor Project and of World Wide Web Foundation, dismisses the allegations.

“[Chilling Effects] has always had policies of redacting unnecessary personally identifying information, while preserving the information needed for researchers, including members of the Internet-using public, to determine who filed takedown notices and what content they requested removal.”

Finally, in a not unexpected development, the Copyright Alliance CEO said that due to Chilling Effects publishing DMCA notices in their entirety, its database had grown into a huge list of pirate content links.

“Finally, because the site does not redact information about the infringing URLs identified in the notices, it has effectively become the largest repository of URLs hosting infringing content on the internet,” Aistars concludes.

While copyright holders may not like what Chilling Effects does, the site brings much-needed accountability to those using and abusing the DMCA takedown process. Without it the entire process would exist in the dark, and content wrongfully disappeared from search engines and other sites would remain unaccounted for. The site is one of, if not the most important DMCA-related resource online today, and long may that continue.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

By now most Internet users are well aware of the fact that pretty much every step they take on the Internet is logged or monitored.

To prevent their IP-addresses from being visible to the rest of the Internet, millions of people have signed up to a VPN service. Using a VPN allows users to use the Internet anonymously and prevent snooping.

Unfortunately, not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim.

Following a high-profile case of an individual using an ‘anonymous’ VPN service that turned out to be not so private, TorrentFreak decided to ask a selection of VPN services some tough questions.

By popular demand we now present the third iteration of our VPN services “logging” review. In addition to questions about logging policies we also asked VPN providers about their stance towards file-sharing traffic, and what they believe the most secure VPN is.

—

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold and for how long?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

3. What tools are used to monitor and mitigate abuse of your service?

4. In the event you receive a DMCA takedown notice or European equivalent, how are these handled?

5. What steps are taken when a valid court order requires your company to identify an active user of your service?

6. Is BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic allowed on all servers? If not, why?

7. Which payment systems do you use and how are these linked to individual user accounts?

8. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users?

—

What follows is the list of responses from the VPN services, in their own words. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly or failed by logging everything were excluded. Please note, however, that several VPN companies listed here do log to some extent. The order of the lists holds no value.

Private Internet Access

1. We absolutely do not log any traffic nor session data of any kind, period. We have worked hard to meticulously fork all daemons that we utilize in order to achieve this functionality. It is definitely not an easy task, and we are very proud of our development team for helping Private Internet Access to achieve this unique ability.

2. We operate out of the US which is one of the few, if only, countries without a mandatory data retention law. We explored several other jurisdictions with the help of our professional legal team, and the US is still ideal for privacy-based VPN services.

We severely scrutinize the validity of any and all legal information requests. That being said, since we do not hold any traffic nor session data, we are unable to provide any information to any third-party. Our commitment and mission to preserve privacy is second to none.

3. We do not monitor any traffic, period. We block IPs/ports as needed to mitigate abuse when we receive a valid abuse notification.

4. We do not host any content and are therefore unable to remove any of said content. Additionally, our mission is to preserve and restore privacy on the Internet and society. As such, since we do not log or monitor anything, we’re unable to identify any users of our service.

5. Once again, we do not log any traffic or session data. Additionally, unlike the EU and many other countries, our users are protected by legal definition. For this reason, we’re unable to identify any user of our service. Lastly, consumer protection laws exist in the US, unlike many other countries. We must abide by our advertised privacy policy.

6. We do not discriminate against any kind of traffic/protocol on any of our servers, period. We believe in a free, open, and uncensored internet.

7. Bitcoin, Ripple, PayPal, Google Play (Mobile), OKPay, CashU, Amazon and any major Gift Card. We support plenty of anonymous payment methods. For this reason, the highest risk users should definitely use Bitcoin, Ripple or a major gift card with an anonymous e-mail account when subscribing to our privacy service.

8. We’re the only provider to date that provides a plethora of encryption cipher options. We recommend, mostly, using AES-128, SHA1 and RSA2048.

Private Internet Access website

BTGuard

1. We do not keep any logs whatsoever.

2. The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event in which we would even communicate with a third-party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.

3. If serious abuse is reported we enable tcpdump to confirm the abuse and locate the user. These dumps are immediately removed. If the user is abusing our service they will be terminated permanently but we have never shared user information with a 3rd party.

4. We do not have any open incoming ports, so it’s not possible for us to “takedown” any broadcasting content.

5. We take every step within the law to fight such an order.

6. Yes, all types of traffic our allowed with our services.

7. We accept PayPal and Bitcoin. All payments are linked to users accounts because they have to be for disputes and refunds.

8. 256-bit AES is the most secure. However 128-bit blowfish is plenty good. If you’re concerned about surveillance agencies such as the NSA, their capabilities are shrouded in secrecy and claiming to be able to protect you is offering you nothing but speculation. As far as what’s publicly available for deciphering encryption, both of the encryptions I mentioned are more than sufficient.

BTGuard website

TorGuard

1. TorGuard does not store any IP address or time stamps on any VPN and proxy servers, not even for a second. Further, we do not store any logs or time stamps on user authentication servers connected to the VPN. In this way it is not even possible to match an external time stamp to a user that was simultaneously logged in. Because the VPN servers utilize a shared IP configuration, there can be hundreds of users sharing the same IP at any given moment further obfuscating the ability to single out any specific user on the network.

2. TorGuard is a privately owned company with parent ownership based in Nevis and our headquarters currently located in the US. Our legal representation at the moment is comfortable with the current corporate structuring however we wouldn’t hesitate to move all operations internationally should the ground shift beneath our feet. We now offer VPN access in 23+ countries worldwide and maintain all customer billing servers well outside US borders.

We would only be forced to communicate with a third-party in the event that our legal team received a court ordered subpoena to do so. This has yet to happen, however if it did we would proceed with complete transparency and further explain the nature of TorGuard’s shared VPN configuration. We have no logs to investigate, and thus no information to share.

3. Our network team uses commercial monitoring software with custom scripts to keep an eye on individual server load and service status/uptime so we can identify problems as fast as possible. If abuse reports are received from an upstream provider, we block it by employing various levels of filtering and global firewall rules to large clusters of servers. Instead of back tracing abuse by logging, our team mitigates things in real-time. We have a responsibility to provide fast, abuse-free VPN services for our clients and have perfected these methods over time.

4. In the event of receiving a DMCA notice, the request is immediately processed by our abuse team. Because it is impossible for us to locate which user on the server is actually responsible for the violation, we temporarily block the infringing server and apply global rules depending on the nature of the content and the server responsible. The system we use for filtering certain content is similar to keyword blocking but with much more accuracy. This ensures the content in question to no longer pass through the server and satisfies requirements from our bandwidth providers.

5. Due to the nature of shared VPN services and how our network is configured, it is not technically possible to effectively identity or single out one active user from a single IP address. If our legal department received a valid subpoena, we would proceed with complete transparency from day one. Our team is prepared to defend our client’s right to privacy to the fullest extent of the law.

6. BitTorrent is only allowed on select server locations. TorGuard now offers a variety of protocols like http/socks proxies, OpenVPN, SSH Tunnels, SSTP VPN and Stealth VPN (DPI Bypass), with each connection method serving a very specific purpose for usage. Since BitTorrent is largely bandwidth intensive, we do not encourage torrent usage on all servers. Locations that are optimized for torrent traffic include endpoints in: Canada, Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden, Romania, Russia and select servers in Hong Kong. This is a wide range of locations that works efficiently regardless of the continent you are trying to torrent from.

7. We currently accept payments through all forms of credit or debit card, PayPal, OKPAY, and Bitcoin. During checkout we may ask the user to verify a billing phone and address but this is simply to prevent credit card fraud, spammers, and keep the network running fast and clean. After payment it is possible to change this to something generic that offers more privacy. No VPN or Proxy usage can be linked back to a billing account due to the fact we hold absolutely no levels of logging on any one of our servers, not even timestamps!

8. For best security we advise clients to choose OpenVPN connections only, and if higher encryption is called for use AES256 bit. This option is available on many locations and offers excellent security without degrading performance. For those that are looking to defeat Deep Packet Inspection firewalls (DPI) like what is encountered in countries such as China or Iran, TorGuard offers “Stealth” VPN connections in the Netherlands, UK and Canada. Stealth connections feature OpenVPN obfuscation technology that causes VPN traffic to appear as regular connections, allowing VPN access even behind the most strict corporate wifi networks or government regulated ISPs.

TorGuard website

Privacy.io

1. We do not log any information on our VPN servers. The only scenario is if a technical issue arises, but we request permission from the user first, and we only do it for the duration of the job, and then it is removed.

2. We are in the process of moving jurisdictions away from Australia at present as we are unsure what our current government plans to do in regards to our privacy. We have not decided where yet.

3. Only SMTP port 25 is filtered to mitigate spam, but we are working on some tools to make it easier for users to send mail.

4. Any DMCA request is ignored, as we have no logs to do anything about them.

5. Same as above, as we do not log, so we are unable to provide any information. If the law attempts to make us do such things, we will move our business to a location where that cannot occur, and if that fails we will close up shop before we provide any information.

6. All protocols are allowed with our service, with the only exception of SMTP port 25 currently being filtered.

7. At present we only accept PayPal and CC (processed by PayPal), but we are looking into alternative types of payments. We go out of our way to make sure that PayPal transactions are not linked to the users, we generate a unique key per transaction to verify payment for the account is made, and then nuke that unique key. Bitcoin and Litecoin are also on the agenda.

8. At present we offer 128 bit for PPTP and 256 bit for OpenVPN, We plan to offer stronger encryption for the security conscious.

Privacy.io website

VikingVPN

1. No. We run a zero knowledge network and are unable to tie a user to an IP address.

2. United States, they don’t have data retention laws, despite their draconian surveillance programs. The only information we share with anyone is billing information to our payment gateway. This can be anonymized by using a pre-paid anonymous card. If asked to share specific data about our users and their habits, we would be unable to do so, because we don’t have any logs of that data.

3. That is mostly confidential information. However, we can assure our users that we do not use logging to achieve this goal.

4. In the event of a DMCA notice, we send out the DMCA policy published on our website. We haven’t yet received a VALID DMCA notice.

5. We exhaust all legal options to protect our users. Failing that, we would provide all of our logs, which do not actually exist. If required to wiretap a user under a National Security Letter, we have a passively triggered Warrant Canary. We would also likely choose to shut down our service and put it up elsewhere.

6. Yes. Those ports are all open, and we have no data caps.

7. We currently only take credit cards. Our payment provider is far more restrictive than we ever imagined they would be. We’re still trying to change payment providers. Fortunately, by using a pre-paid credit card, you can still have totally anonymous service from us.

8. A strong handshake (either RSA-4096+ or a non-standard elliptic curve as the NIST curves are suspect). A strong cipher such as AES-256-CBC or AES-256-GCM encryption (NOT EDE MODE). At least SHA1 for data integrity checks. SHA2 and the newly adopted SHA3 (Skein) hash functions are also fine, but slower and provide no real extra assurances of data integrity, and provide no further security beyond SHA1. The OpenVPN HMAC firewall option to harden the protocol against Man-in-the-Middle and Man-on-the-Side attacks.

VikingVPN website

IVPN

1. IVPN’s top priority is the privacy of its customers. We use non-persistent logs (stored in memory) which are deleted after 10 minutes. That tiny window gives us the ability to troubleshoot connection issues, whilst still making it practically impossible for any 3rd party to match an IP to a time-stamp.

2. IVPN is incorporated in Malta. We would ignore any request to share data unless it was served by a legal authority with jurisdiction in Malta in which case we would inform them that we don’t have the data to share. If we were served a subpoena which compelled us to log traffic we would find a way to inform our customers and relocate to a new jurisdiction.

3. We use a tool called PSAD to mitigate attacks originating from customers on our network. We also use rate-limiting in iptables to mitigate SPAM.

4. We ensure that our network providers understand the nature of our business and that we do not host any content. As a condition of the safe harbor provisions they are required to inform us of each infringement which includes the date, title of the content and the IP address of the gateway through which it was downloaded. We simply respond to each notice confirming that we do not host the content in question.

5. Assuming the court order is requesting an identity based on a timestamp and IP, our legal department would respond that we don’t have any record of the user’s identity nor are we legally compelled to do so.

6. We ‘allow’ BitTorrent on all servers except gateways based in the USA. Our USA network providers are required to inform us of each copyright infringement and are required to process our response putting undue strain on their support resources (hundreds per day). For this reason providers won’t host our servers in the USA unless we take measures to mitigate P2P activity.

7. We currently accept Bitcoin, Cash and PayPal. No information relating to a customers payment account is stored with the exception of automated PayPal subscriptions where we are required to store the subscription ID in order to assign it to an invoice (only for the duration of the subscription after which it is deleted). Of course PayPal will always maintain a record that you have sent funds to IVPN but that is all they have. If you need to be anonymous to IVPN and don’t wish to be identified as a customer then we recommend using Bitcoin or cash.

8. We recommend and offer OpenVPN using the strongest AES-256 cipher. For key exchange and authentication 2048-bit RSA keys are used (which RSA claims are sufficient until 2030).

IVPN website

PrivatVPN

1. We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and user names but it’s not possible to bind an activity on the Internet to a user.

2. We operate in Swedish jurisdiction. Since we do not log any IP addresses we have nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses and activity on the Internet. Therefore we have no information to share with any 3rd party.

3. If there’s abuse, we advise that service to block our IP in the first instance, and second, we can block traffic to the abused service.

4. This depends on the country in which we’re receiving a DMCA takedown. For example, we’ve received a DMCA takedown for UK and Finland and our response was to close P2P traffic in those countries.

5. If we get a court order to monitor a specific IP then we need to do it, and this applies to every VPN company out there.

6. Yes, we allow Torrent traffic.

7. PayPal, Payson and Plimus. Every payment has an order number, which is linked to a user. Otherwise we wouldn’t know who has made a payment. To be clear, you can’t link a payment to an IP address you get from us.

8. OpenVPN TUN with AES-256. On top is a 2048-bit DH key.

PrivatVPN website

PRQ

1. No. Wo do not log anything and we only require a working e-mail address to be a customer.

2. Swedish. We do not share information with anyone.

3. Not disclosed.

4. Put it in the trash where it belongs!

5. None, since we do not have any customer information and no logs.

6. We host anything as long as it’s not SPAM related or child porn.

7. Visa/Mastercard, Bitcoin, PayPal. No correlation between payment data and customer data.

8. We provide OpenVPN services (along with dedicated servers and other hosting services).

PRQ website

tigerVPN

1. Absolutely not! We built tigerVPN to purge all data once the transmission of a IP package was completed successfully. Its impossible to trace back any customer. On top of that we decided to use shared IPs in order to further randomize and anonymize our customers. The combination of having absolutely no logs at all and multiple customers per IP, wipes our customers digital footprint

2. We are a limited liability company in Slovakia. Slovakia does not have any data retention programs and furthermore encourage ISP’s to protect their customers privacy on the net. We are not required to share any information with 3rd party hence it would be illegal thanks to the law of telecom secrecy.

3. Since we don’t keep logs, we can’t monitor abusive behavior, which is the price for building a customer secure environment!

4. We can’t comply since we can’t identify customers, therefore it’s pointless to follow any requests. We have a specific folder for these eMails ;-)

5. Same as above. We seriously can’t tell which customer did what, when, where, at any given time.

6. It’s allowed on all servers although we gently ask our customers to use either Romania or Netherlands. Some infrastructure service providers do not want file sharing so it happened to us that we were asked to move our servers due to file sharing. We found some reliable partners in Romania and Netherlands which tolerate p2p so we kindly ask our customers to use these server parks.

7. Customers can pay with Visa, Mastercard and Debit. On top of that we also use PayPal. We use hash keys and tokens to identify a payment but it’s not logged or linked to the customer. We had to do this anyway hence we are a PCI Level 1 compliant merchant. Therefore we are not allowed to store any card or payment data with the records of our customers. These keys are pointless for anyone else so there is no chance to build a connection.

8. We offer PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN, while out of nature OpenVPN comes with the highest encryption and algorithm. L2TP and OpenVPN are 256bit SSL encrypted while PPTP comes with a solid 128bit. Although our customers are individual and have their own sense of why and what to use, we recommend L2TP as solid protocol. It’s less geeky and more secure than PPTP, but our customers can pick any of them in all the 47 network nodes around the globe.

tigerVPN website

Mullvad

1. No. This would make both us and our users more vulnerable so we
certainly don’t. To make it harder to watch the activities of an IP address from the outside we also have many users share each address, both for IPv4 and our upcoming IPv6 support.

2. Swedish jurisdiction. Under no circumstance we will share information with a third-party. First of all we take pains to not actually possess information that could be of interest to third parties, to the extent possible. In the end there is no practical way for the Swedish government to get information about our users from us.

3. We don’t monitor our users. In the rare cases of such egregious network abuse that we can’t help but notice (such as DoS attacks) we stop it using basic network tools.

4. There is no such Swedish law that is applicable to us.

5. We make sure not to store sensitive information that can be tied to publicly available information, so that we have nothing to give out. We believe it is not possible in Swedish law to construct a court order that would compel us to actually give out information about our
users. Not that we would anyway. We started this service for political reasons and would rather discontinue it than having it work against its purpose.

6. Yes.

7. Bitcoin (we were the first service to accept it), cash (in the mail), bank transfers, and PayPal / credit cards. Payments are tied to accounts but accounts are just random numbers with no personal information attached that users can create at will. With the anonymous payments possible with cash and Bitcoin it can be anonymous all the way.

8. We use OpenVPN. We also provide PPTP because some people want it but we strongly recommend against it. Encryption algorithms and key lengths are important but often get way too much attention at the expense of other important but harder to measure things such as leaks and computer security.

Mullvad website

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.