Relakks – Don’t do it

August 23, 2006

Relakks.com is a new service (a Virtual Private Network) for those who want to send information over the Internet with anonymity. The encrypted connection service is fully supported by the Swedish Political ‘Pirate Party‘ – who have been know to support the activity of the Bit Torrent site – Pirate Bay.By producing this darknet for those who don’t want to be tracked, regardless of legal or illegal activity, the impact on culture as a whole is far more disruptive. The users of Relakks will, on the whole be the web savvy youngsters who are actively creating and sharing cool innovation and ideas. Once this is removed from the public domain and shown only through a darknet we are likely to suffer a drought of fresh ideas.

It could be argued that a service like this is driven by the pressure of copyright holders who don’t want their movies and music being shared. By supplying a commercial available darknet

Like Pirate Bay this is an extremely well organised project, they know what they’re doing. Any they will have records on what you do. It’s an incredible amount of trust and freedom for the bargain cost of 5 Euros a month.

Adding any layer of encryption is a kin to Digital Rights Management system, except now, sub cultures can reverse the effect and lock out media owners.

If the darknet is the answer to online freedom, then the main losers will not be those who demand copyright be upheld and respected, but everyone who thrives on a rich and varied culture of sharing.

This article was first published on openbusiness.cc
The “Relakks – Don’t do it” article is part of wider research available here.

14 Responses to “Relakks – Don’t do it”

  1. Alex Says:

    None of this is really an issue because they have no support and they suck.

    I purchased their service, prepaid for 1 year over a week ago. Have been able to use it maybe 3x for 10-15 minutes each time. Sent 3 support requests over a week ago and have gotten nothing back.

    I’m not a newbie and I’m using pptp on Linux. The connection borks horribly on WinXP as well. Their VPN service is unusable.

    As far as a I can see, Relakks is a scam. Take your money, give 10-15 minutes of service, then bork the connection.

    That’s one way to keep bandwidth costs down and offer a low price. Great business plan.

  2. anonymous Says:

    Actually, I’ve had very good service from Relakks, and I hardly think the venue matters for creation or technical ideas and content, a safe VPN encourages technical innovation and the ceation and distribution of content, especially content that the powers-that-be disapprove of. Good thing for social change.

  3. Rich Says:

    Relakks is fine, but serious privacy seekers should check out our service:

    Perfect Privacy – Free people need no supervision! High anonymity second level ISP protecting the privacy of individuals and businesses on the Internet. Anonymous Internet Access through 256-bits encrypted offshore SSH Tunneling & Secure VPN. Accepts cash, e-gold, Pecunix, PayPal and Epay.vg.

    http://www.perfect-privacy.com
    forum.perfect-privacy.com

  4. sophie Says:

    I would say Relakks – DO it! :)

    Relakks is great. If you dont know what Relakks is, just look at this short movie, where they intervjue Jonas Birgersson about Relakks. Link: http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.201364


  5. Hi Sophie
    Thanks for posting this.

  6. Yoodedoo Says:

    I’ve used Relakks on Xp, Os X and a Linux box. I had a few problems with using it on the Linux box, but I suspect the problem was with the pptp, vpnc etc programs and not the service. It works without a hitch on my Xp box and my Mac and I download just as fast as normally. A few webpages don’t work, but I suspect that the providers of banners and stuff are to blame for that, it just keeps trying to load from some ad service.

  7. Brian Says:

    Hi,

    We started few weeks ago a Relakks-like service.
    We don’t have more than 50 persons per server so you can fully use your 20Mbit/s connexion.

    If you want try it for free contact us : http://www.linkideo.com

    See you soon

    Brian

  8. wondering Says:

    Brian,

    Why on earth would I want to use your service?

    As a British company you know good and well you will hand over my ISP and personal information to anybody who comes knocking- especially somebody like the RIAA.

  9. secretdubai Says:

    Relakks for many people is not about privacy. It’s about getting round the draconian censorship in many countries.

  10. brendan Says:

    signed up for a year subscription

    service works fine when connected but connection drops out a lot and getting connected can be instant or take many attempts

    connection dropping out not so good when you leave pc on overnight and you go check peerguardian to see who has been snopping

    can not be relied upon 100%

    currently looking at ivacy monitor but cant get my head around their pricing structurer

  11. Ziingo Says:

    I have been useed relakks.com for month now and it never happend that it goes down, it works very fast and stable, i also use Virtualbox to run Linux from my windows, and i am vpn connected there also without setting up anything…

    I dont have any bad to say about relakks before i can find better one which will be hard.

  12. groovy Says:

    hi i ,ve used relakks over the past few yrs and a had few connection problems a year or so back but this past few months have been having a good service my i recommend that if your using any vpn with a torrent client ie utorrent bind you vpn ip address and add it to net out going ip. reason if the vpn connection drops your real ip will not be seen and if your lucky the vpn will reconnect and the torrent will pick up again or worst thing if there server crashes your ip won,t be seen but the download stops. i also use torrentfreedom.com which is more money but good service

  13. Dan Says:

    I agree w/ the above responses to this post. I don’t think the author clearly understands what the Relakks service is. A VPN service is not a darknet, only a more private way for people (geeks) to move content to and from the (public) web.

    It’s a temporary solution to changes in privacy legislation and a mechanism for maintaining anonymity and (re-assuming) freedom of speech on the web.

  14. Trip Says:

    Got the service a few weeks ago.
    I wanted to use it on my mac (osx 10.5.7/8), but uploads are horrible.
    I set up a pptp connection to another vpn provider on my mac, and don’t see the upload problems there.
    Support is non-existant.
    Stay away from this company.


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