Life of Peter

We’re finally in Bolzano!

After travelling from Sweden, through Berlin, Ingolstadt, some parts of Austria and into Italy, we’ve now arrived to Bolzano for the Manifesta art biennal.

There’s alot of stuff happening. It’s too much to write about right now, but I still wanted to update a bit. Pictures are available, they’re awesome! This trip is very special. It will never be copied, it’s impossible!

I’ll update more later. Tomorrow is opening day!

Last night we arrived in Berlin. I went to sleep after we parked the bus, and woke up early.

Todays plan is to have a big party. You’re very welcome to join the party if you’re nearby - more info on the s23m site.

System 23 Modified (S23M) arrived in Malmö today. We took some photos of the extraordinary system! Tomorrow I will embark together with my fellow art loving pirates to travel with the system to Bolzano. Hope to see you on the road!

Today, S23M embarked on it’s virgin voyage from Stockholm to Bolzano, Italy. Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay have been invited to Manifesta 7, the big artbiennal.

Tomorrow the bus leaves from Malmö. I’m joining the trip and I’m looking forward to do some art together with my friends. For me, this will be a very analog tribute to the past years or working with the art of kopimism! I’m super happy about it and I hope I will meet a lot of our fellow pirates on the road to Bolzano.

For more information, please visit the S23M project site!

Granted, The Pirate Bay has been initiating a lot of projects that we want to do. The Video Bay, Playble and Secure P2P are all ambitious projects that we’ve embarked upon and still not finished.

To those who complaint - well, fine. Most of the projects are projects that we’ve started, someone from our nearby area has then leaked it and then it’s all over the news. We get pushed to do stuff then instead of doing it for pure fun which is when we work the best together.

We’re only three people doing these projects. Most of the time, we’re actually only two. And we have day jobs as well. And everytime something happens on the Internet, the media requires us to take action or talk about it. I myself would spend around 4-5 hours - daily - to talk to the media about various issues. That’s not a joke, it’s 4-5 hours _daily_ that I spend just talking. It’s hard to keep up your dayjob and also a relationship at that pace.

Playble is still coming along. It hit some barriers with both cooperation within the team and with problems with Stim which I’ve written about before. It’s still on the todo-list. Same thing with The Video Bay - but we decided to put it on hold until there is a good enough p2p-streaming system. We where planning to release it without p2p but decided not to do that since we want it good or not at all. Secure P2P is the project of Tiamo but then we started to talk to BT Inc if they would implement some of the ideas instead and also we’re trying to convince them to put out a license that would prohibit them from making BitTorrent a closed system. That way they would have to stay true to the community, which we found a better idea then re-inventing the wheel all over again.

We’re sorry for being slow - but it’s also that we have lots of ideas and ambitions but we’re too few people. Instead we would love for some actually skilled PHP-coders and webdesigners to join our team. The problem we have is that every time we go look for them, they turn out either to not be flexible our the good ones disappear among the crappy ones. So if you know someone - who is REALLY skilled, and flexible when it comes to payments and who understands IRC - tell him (or preferably her) to talk to us.

Also, I’m working on another system, which is my baby. It’s going to be released soon, actually, as it’s closing to finish. And that’s what’s been stealing most of my working time right now, besides all the ACTA, FRA demonstrations, interviews and legal matters.

To close off - yes, we’re not wearing suits to work, we’re just too in love with the internet and have too little time.

Today I received a notification from the prosecutor that they will not investigate Jim Keyzer and his connections to Warner Brothers where he was employed during the investigation he did against The Pirate Bay.

They state they there are “no reason to believe that a crime has been committed by anyone employed by the police”. I must point out that they have decided not to start the investigation. They have not closed the investigation since there will not be any.

This is just so fucked up. Justice for… some? He should be put to jail, as a minimum sentence. More information will follow. And yes, we will appeal.

Today I held a speech in Malmö against the FRA law. Here’s the speech, for those interested!

Som involverad i The Pirate Bay har jag från första parkett sett hur Sverige givit efter för
påtryckningar från utländska makter.

Med det i bagaget - och med vetskap om avtalet som skrevs i April 2007 mellan Sverige och USA om informationsutbyte angående terrorism - så kan vi inte blunda för att systemet kommer utnyttjas till andra saker än vad det är framlagt som idag.

Det är inte omöjligt att USA kommer få direkt tillgång till FRA:s övervakningsmaskineri. Och även andra EU-länder har visat intresse för ett sådant samarbete!

FRA-lagen i sig är redan idag en katastrof för den personliga integriteten, speciellt med tanke på att den - tekniskt sett - inte ens är speciellt effektiv.

Därför är det viktigt att vi inte ser kortsiktigt på FRA-lagen. Ändamålsglidning är något som
historiskt sett nästan alltid skett med register i Sverige.
Vi måste sätta ner foten, oavsett vilka goda intentioner politikerna påstår sig ha just nu!
Nästa regering kanske vill utöka befogenheterna.

Idag kan vi skydda oss relativt enkelt med krypteringstekniker och liknande.
Något som terrorister såklart insett för flera år sedan.
Men i t.ex. England är det för privatpersoner idag olagligt att inte ge ut sitt krypteringslösenord när polisen ber om det.
Med enbart misstanke om brott så kan man få upp till fem års fängelse om man inte ger ut den.
Även om man faktiskt glömt sitt lösenord! Är det kanske nästa lagförslag i Sverige?

FRA-lagen är onödig, ineffektiv, oönskad och inte minst dyr. Regeringen borde lyssna på folket, det går inte byta ut oss. Vi har däremot makten att byta ut regeringen.

(Sorry for the usual Swedish, it’s probably not interesting outside Sweden anyhow…)

I tried holding a 2 min speech and I think it was almost that length. Also, I’m so happy that all parties currently holding positions in Riksdagen decided to join. And I’m happy that Jason showed up even though it ruined his schedule a bit. Over 1000 people joined the demonstration. There’s some movie footage (raw format, released under Creative Commons) downloadable.

(Update: Even though I hate watching it - my speech is viewable on facebook)

I’m not a big fan of politics. I’m not a big fan of voting. Especially not for a party that only cares about one cause. That’s my biggest problem with the Swedish Pirate Party. I prefer to vote for a party that has a sound idea about all the questions that are important, not only one. A lot of people have asked me why I’m not that fond of PP and that’s essentially the answer they’ve got.

However, during the past few months, I’ve been frequently amazed at how great the people within PP has behaved. Especially their work with the FRA-law has been something that impressed me. That’s why I today decided to support them a bit more, not just morally as I’ve noticed I have done more and more. Don’t get me wrong - I’m all for their changes they want to do (I say they’re not even going far enough, but still better than most) - but now I know that they’re needed and I know that they’re doing a good job. I will keep on having a nice relationship with them, and I decided today to put in a monthly monetary transfer to them. I suggest all of you to do this! Go to http://www.piratpartiet.se/donate (International) or http://www.piratpartiet.se/guldpirat (Swedish). Do it right now, everything helps. Also, when The Pirate Bay are getting questions about cash donations we’re now sending them the link to PP’s donate page. I hope they will gain some from this. (But just to be clear - the profit made on the TPB merch store will of course still go to Piratbyrån, who also do a really important and I would say even more interesting work.)

(No, I will not join the Pirate Party though - I’m not allowed to vote in Sweden anyhow).

Another suggestion - I just read the book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. You should also read it.

So, it’s the second day at Reboot. It’s as always very nice people here, but I was a bit scared by one of the speakers that made the whole audience hug eachother and now he’s playing “Somewhere over the rainbow” which is supposed to be heartful and needy. Holding my lecture with Magnus in two hours, I have a surprise for him. Just an internal joke.

Anyhow, so many people have a hard time following the news flow about FRA so I made a small surveillance site. It monitors the news flow and collects all relevant data about FRA - just as they want to do. It’s based on some AI, which is kinda what FRA wants. But for us who wants to follow the debate, you can go to http://piratbyran.org/franews/ to see it. There’s also an RSS feed in there for those who need it. Oh, and it’s free, breaks no privacy and it’s smart. And yes, there’s a problem with the RSS containing nothing but links for now. All big Nordic media and valuable blogs are monitored by the system, so you should miss very little of the interesting news.

(For those who missed it: http://piratbyran.org/pbnews/ is the same type of thing but for piracy / file sharing related news.)

Tomorrow I’m going to Reboot10 in Copenhagen. On Friday I will hold a lecture together with Magnus from Piratbyrån. The topic is ACTA and what to do about it, hope to see you there for these two days. The event is always very interesting and I really enjoy to meet the people there.