Hackers To Build Pirate Internet With Pirate Satellites

Michael Kwan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:17:25 +0000

All the Internet hackers and pirates out there are still, for the most part, at the mercy of their Internet service providers and the hosting companies. Although many of them are covertly organized within these organizations, there’s big brother on top. They often circumvent the rules set before them, and many of those rules, including the newly debated SOPA, are causing them grief. One way around those rules is to build your own Internet, completely separate from the one we all know and love. And one hacker group aims to do exactly that.

The project is called the Hackerspace Global Grid and the goal is to launch an independent satellite into space. This is meant to “support unrestricted channels on the Internet” and will provide a connection to a series of independent ground stations. The net result is a “network of nodes completely independent from the Internet itself.” No censorship. No rules. No restrictions.

Naturally, the group is going to face more than its fair share of challenges. It has to build the infrastructure of terrestrial nodes, design and build the satellite itself, and then hitch a ride on someone else’s rocket so that they can get the pirate satellite into low-Earth orbit. That’s expensive and complicated, but once achieved, the possibilities are endless. Think, unrestricted satellite telephones, VoIP and even cellular communications.

The project was pitched at the Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin, a hacker conference hosted by the German Chaos Computer Club. Keep up with their progress on the official HGG wiki.

The post Hackers To Build Pirate Internet With Pirate Satellites appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Floodgates Open for Pirates of the Amazon Kindle

Michael Kwan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:59:48 +0000

Say what you will, but the idea of a portable MP3 player didn’t really catch on until the pirates got a hold of it. It was only after they figured out how to rip CDs and operate file-sharing networks on the Internet that everyone wanted to do the MP3 thing. It seems that e-books could be taking a similar turn.

As you may already know, any purchased content for the Amazon Kindle comes attached with digital rights management not unlike what comes attached with msot of the content purchased through iTunes and similar services. Well, the “right” community has figured out how to remove that copy protection.

More specifically, there is an Israeli user called ‘i♥cabbages’ who has managed to remove Amazon’s encryption from its titles. A Spanish user has managed to remove the regional restrictions too. The net result, if you were to do as they did, is that you can have “free” access to anything in Amazon’s Kindle catalog.

Just as with music piracy and the like, you’ll easily fall into all sorts of legal gray areas with these kinds of practices. However, whether you yourself do them or not, it seems that the pirates have got a hold of the Kindle’s DRM and this could bode well for Kindle sales, but not for Kindle content sales.

Source: NewLaunches

The post Floodgates Open for Pirates of the Amazon Kindle appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Mobile Magazine » pirate

Hackers To Build Pirate Internet With Pirate Satellites

Floodgates Open for Pirates of the Amazon Kindle