IPredator was a
VPN service
A virtual private network (VPN) service provides a proxy server to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geoblocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks.
A wide va ...
offered with the stated goal of providing
internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Pr ...
. It was co-founded by
Peter Sunde
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi (born 13 September 1978), alias brokep, is a Swedish entrepreneur and politician. Sunde is of Norwegian and Finnish ancestry. He is best known for being a co-founder and ex-spokesperson of The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent s ...
,
as a response to the introduction of
IPRED
Directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (also known as "(IPR) Enforcement Directive" or "IPRED") is a European Union directive in the field of intelle ...
in
Sweden, which will allow
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...
holders and
law enforcement
Law enforcement is the activity of some members of government who act in an organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring, rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules
Rule or ruling may refer to:
Education ...
officials to request personal information about
copyright infringement
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...
suspects.
History
On 12 August 2009, beta testing invitations were sent out to those who entered their email addresses into the beta signup form. Additionally, the homepage has changed to reflect the beta. The service initially only used
PPTP
The Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) is an obsolete method for implementing virtual private networks. PPTP has many well known security issues.
PPTP uses a TCP control channel and a Generic Routing Encapsulation tunnel to encapsulate PP ...
(supported natively in XP, Vista, Windows 7, OS X and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...
through the use of PPTP-linux) to tunnel the connection through servers (vpn.ipredator.se which resolves to multiple IP addresses) located in Sweden.
On September 14, 2009, IPredator "The Second Batch" became available for public consumption.
On November 28, 2009, IPredator became publicly available and exited the beta stage. This was done in response to the
FRA law coming into effect on December 1st, a law which would allow the
FRA to intercept internet communications crossing the Swedish border. In concert, The Pirate Bay changed its logo on December 1, 2009, to an image depicting FRA as Glass Joe, the first and weakest opponent from the video game
Punch-Out!!
is a video game series of boxing created by Nintendo's general manager Genyo Takeda, and his partner Makoto Wada. The first game was '' Punch-Out!!'' made in 1984 as an arcade unit, which was followed by a sequel '' Super Punch-Out!!'' (1984) ...
. The image linked to IPredator's website with the message "FRA vs IPredator - It's on!"
OpenVPN support was added in August 2012.
In July 2013,
PayPal
PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
stopped providing payment services to IPredator. In addition, all the organization's funds had been frozen for up to 180 days. The account was reinstated the next month. Conversely
paysafecard, to which many customers had switched while PayPal was unavailable, canceled support for iPredator.
In October 2020, IPredator was merged into
Njalla, a privacy-focused domain name and hosting service also founded by Sunde.
See also
*
Comparison of virtual private network services
A virtual private network (VPN) service provides a proxy server to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geoblocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks.
A wide ...
References
External links
* {{Official website, https://www.ipredator.se/
The Pirate Bay
Virtual private network services