Month: March 2016

Founded ten years ago by Rick Falkvinge, over the years the Swedish (and first) Pirate party grew into a considerable political movement.

Against what some believed were insurmountable odds, Pirates were even able to put their representatives into the European Parliament, where German politician Julia Reda has been a Member since 2014.

While local variants continue to ebb and flow elsewhere, over in Iceland there’s an intriguing situation playing out which has seen the Pirates transform from fresh-faced upstart to political powerhouse.

In 2013 (and after just a few months of existence) the Icelandic Pirate Party picked up a notable 5.1% of the vote, meaning that the party entered the national government with three Members of Parliament. But now, just three years later, a dramatic situation is playing out.

According to the results of a new poll published Friday, the Icelandic Pirate Party now appears to count on the support of a staggering 38.1% of the population. To put that into perspective, that means that if elections were held today, the party would leap from the three seats it currently holds to a massive 26 seats.

While all survey results should be received with caution, if these figures can be maintained it means that the Pirates would oust the incumbents to become the most significant player in the country’s parliament.

The survey, carried out by 365 Media, found that The Independence Party
is roughly maintaining the 27.6% of the vote it achieved in the 2013 elections. However, The Progressives have dropped from 24.4% to 12.8%.

If that prediction plays out the two parties combined would plummet from the 63 seats they currently hold to just 27, meaning that if people went to the polls today the parties would lose their parliamentary majority.

In fact, as the Grapevine frames it, not only are the Pirates now the country’s largest political party, but no two-party ruling coalition could be formed in Iceland without including the Pirates.

Typically, however, the Icelandic Pirates are taking the latest poll results in their stride. Instead of the unbridled celebrations one might expect, they’re remaining ever level-headed.

“I just do not know. I do not judge it,” says “shocked” Pirate MP Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson.

While the Pirates are exercising caution, the pattern seems clear. In early 2015 the party was predicted to take 23.9% of the votes, a figure that had swelled to 34.2% last October.

Nevertheless, there is still a way to go. Elections don’t take place until 2017 and the party has already made it clear that it is seeking change rather than the ability to take power.

“We don’t really want to govern, but rather have the system working as a whole where everyone in it has responsibility for their actions,” Pirate MP Ásta Helgadóttir previously told TF.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Kung Fu Panda 3 is the most downloaded movie.

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.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

It would appear that when a subject is sufficiently peripheral to policymakers, slow incumbent industries can get whatever repressive and counterproductive policy they want, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the opposite for about 40 years.

In 1968, at the height of the hippie movement when everybody and their brother were doing joints, everybody and their brother were equally convinced cannabis would be legal in just a few years. How could it not be?

Twenty years later, in 1990, the war on certain species of plants was harsher than ever before.

Around 1995, at the dawn of file-sharing with ZModem over BBS networks and early dialup, and even more so with the advent of Napster a few years later, everybody and their brother were convinced copyright monopoly laws needed to be updated to reflect reality – like you unceremoniously adjust a map to the observed factual terrain. It was deemed to be a couple of years out, five years tops.

Here we are, twenty years later, and utterly insane corporate power grabs in the name of TPP, TTIP, and TISA are being cooked, while policitians remain dangerously clueless on the matter. Meanwhile, respect for the copyright monopoly as a law is considerably lower than the respect for speed limits.

The pattern here is that while the delusion and the disconnect remains active, punishments become increasingly harsher as policymakers desperately try to align the terrain with the map in their delusional heads, kind of how a military force with a bad mapmaker need to use an ever-increasing amount of explosives to fix the terrain instead of the map.

This goes on until the system comes down, until the hypocrisy ends, until people just stop pretending.

Slow cracks in the facade start appearing before the 40 years are up and you hit some sort of tipping point: in 1992, Bill Clinton famously said that he had smoked cannabis, but defended himself saying he “didn’t inhale”, as if that somehow made it politically acceptable in the eyes of the vested interests.

In 2007, a full fifteen years later, Barack Obama said “of course I inhaled, that was the point”, and didn’t try to excuse himself in the slightest. That was forty years after 1968. (Well, 39.)

The pattern here is that the people with crazy delusions of entitlement, such as the copyright industry, simply take forty years to die, so those ideas get naturally erased from the group and the population at large. This is not a new pattern; it is present as early as the Christian/Jewish/Muslim sacred texts, when Moses led a bunch of people from Egypt to the Levant, which according to said texts took 40 years.

Now, it doesn’t take 40 years to walk from Egypt to the Levant. It takes two months to walk westward from the Levant across all of Europe, and Egypt is one-tenth that distance. The only way to make it take 40 years is to walk around in the desert at random, making 40 years of time pass.

We’ve frequently said that the current idiocy will solve itself once the people of the net generation come into the string-pulling positions of power, but that’s still some time out, and we gotta hold the barricades against dark-black dystopia until then. If we’re extrapolating 40 years from Napster, that puts us about 2040. People with the most political power are usually 50-60 years old, which means they will have been born in 1980-1990: the net arrived when they were in their late childhood to early teens. The people born in this time understand the net, and they have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the parasitic copyright industry swimming in its despicable and damaging delusions of entitlement.

But should we really have to wait another 25 years for the blatantly and painfully obvious to become apparent to policymakers? Can’t we use, you know, this Internet thing to make ideas move just a little faster today?

As a complete side note, another plant was banned earlier in history with the roughly same pattern and the same arguments. The plant was coffee.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

AUSTIN, Texas—South By Southwest Interactive is currently in full swing, and in addition to hundreds of panel conversations, the festival also includes a giant trade-show floor full of attention-hungry startups. The floor is covered in a mélange of start-up-styled nonsense, and it ranged from intriguing (custom-molded earbuds) to awkward (a 3D food printer that was down due to Windows PC crashes) to creepy (an app-controlled plastic mask meant to be worn overnight for beautiful skin) to outright awful (a wobbling surfboard-like rig meant for standing desks that we almost immediately fell off of).

NASA's presence at the 2016 South By Southwest Interactive Festival. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

In short, this isn't a scene in which you'd expect to find established, beloved companies—you're more likely to find your Samsungs and Googles throwing parties or hosting dedicated venues around downtown Austin—which made the startup convention room's one exception to that rule seem all the more curious: NASA.

NASA's SXSWi presence looked a little like a county-fair setup, with a foam-board sign advertising real astronauts stopping by to speak, some giant models of NASA spacesuits and rockets, and some scaffolding-held signs about Mars aspirations and strides towards innovation. Of most interest to us was a single, nondescript cubicle at the edge of the staging, which contained a pair of HTC Vive headsets.

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(credit: HBO)

AUSTIN, Texas—During the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley, the megalomaniac CEO of the search giant Hooli offers protagonist Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) $10 million for his still-nascent startup, Pied Piper.

The initial script called for a much bigger offer, but show creator Mike Judge thought that was over the top.

Judge said, "that's too much, no one is going to buy that it's $100 million," Middleditch said at a South By Southwest panel on Saturday featuring Judge, writer and producer Alec Berg, and several of the show's stars. "So we turned it down to $10 million, and then during season one the news came out about Snapchat turning down that offer of five or six billion, so, egg on our face, I guess." (The offer from Facebook was actually $3 billion.)

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