Negotiations between ISP and copyright owners

According to the French PCINpact, some classified negotiations are being held with the support of European Commission between Internet Service Providers and copyright owners. It is possible that much stricter rules of internet usage will be introduced for all EU countries with the omission of all democracy rules. Companies like IFPI, ETNO, EuroIspa, Vivendi, Virgin Media, BT, Ofcom and also Amazon, Google, and Yahoo! are part of this action.

What do they want?

Apparently, copyrights holders wish for monitoring and filtering of internet traffic. All websites that will be marked to hold illegal material (or the ones that are a middleman) should be cut off (if they are in EU) or access to those sites will be denied.

Another plan is to closely watch every internet user, just in case illegal actions are performed. It is like in everyday life there would be a policeman following our every step and watching our every move. Just in case we would do something illegal.

The result?

Once the new law is introduced a lot of people in EU would receive letters with a warning (or bill) like French internet users because of their HADOPI initiative.

The Impact of Hadopi and MegaUpload Closure on VPNLifeguard Downloads

VPNLifeguard recently published some interesting stats that show an important increase of the application downloads related to the introduction of  Hadopi in 2010 and the recent MegaUpload closure.

What is VPNLifeguard

VPNLifeguard is a free application that makes sure your computer does not access the Internet when your VPN connection drops. Thus it prevents unsecured connections after your VPN disconnects. The application is very useful for browsing or goes behind a P2P VPN without being exposed during disconnection issues.

Advantages of VPNLifeguard

• It’s free!
• Blocks P2P traffic in case of disconnection of the VPN
• Protects browsers (and other apps) for possible disconnection of your VPN
• Supports VPN protocols (PPTP – L2TP) that appear in the “network connections” for Windows.
• Automatically reconnects the apps

VPNLifeguard stats

The stats published by VPN Lifeguard show that both Hadopi and the closure of Megaupload increased the number of downloads. This is the case for VPN Lifeguard and it’s probably the case for the major VPN services list.

All these anti-piracy actions are more and more driving the Internet users towards anonymity (hide IP) applications. Recently, TorrentFreak reported that 15% of US file-sharers are using a VPN or a proxy service. I’m sure that this number will heavily increase in the next months both in the US and Europe.

What do you think about the new possible law? Do you think it will be adopted? Do you use VPN to protect your privacy and anonymity from your ISP? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Internet Freedom – Tech solutions

Indeed, we’ve come up with technical solutions that either rely on proxies or VPN solutions. I guess most of our readers know, by now, my favorite VPN solution providers who are ibVPN (read our complete ibVPN review), PureVPN, Private Internet Access, HideMyAss, NordVPN or IPVanish. But the Internet has grown so vast; it has proven to be a media that can drastically make a change. We all know how the Arab spring sparkled from the Internet, but if we dig further, there’s a lot of stories to be told concerning how the internet has changed this world.

But at some point of time, solutions can’t be technical anymore – and with the pressure of different lobbying, we all know that there’s a fear of the internet becoming a closed wall. By “controlling” the flow of information on the Internet, big companies, as well as governments, are given the power to censor it, or actively push forward the dissemination of “their point of view.”

Declaration of Internet Freedom

It is where the “Declaration of Internet Freedom” comes in. I like the way it is put forward since it reminds us of the “declaration of freedom” or some of those “human rights” declarations that a lot of people swear with. Truth to be told, this declaration has to be known and applied by the highest number of people. And, for that to happen, it has to be translated into the highest number of languages available. It is the time where we praise the efforts made by GlobalVoices Lingua project (and its translators) since they have launched a worldwide effort to translate this “declaration of Internet Freedom.”

Quoting some figures of a GlobalVoices article, there are 6 909 living languages used on this planet. Holy cow, that’s a considerable number. While it’s clear that on the internet, only a few of those languages hold for 90% of the content published, this doesn’t mean that this “Declaration of Internet Freedom” shouldn’t be translated into other languages.

So here’s the deal: we know that our readers are coming from different parts of the World, and we bet you are all familiar with some “non-popular internet language.” So why don’t we give a hand to this global translation effort and make this declaration one of the most popular crowd-translated documents?

Translation day

Wait, wait, wait. I know that the official “translation day” already happened on August 3rd (according to ), but I’m sure no one will say no if some volunteers still want to join in and help with translating for languages that haven’t found any translators yet.

So it’s not like we’re late on this, but we want to share the info and mobilize our readers to contribute to this worth-mentioning and undoubtedly important project that is in line with what we are trying to achieve here on How-to-hide-ip.

So anyone feeling motivated enough for translating?