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Hacking collective's Anontune project lets you stream music Anonymous-ly

Hacking collective's Anontune project lets you stream music Anonymous-ly

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Anonymous is preparing to launch Anontune, a free music streaming service which aggregates music from third-party services such as YouTube and Soundcloud.

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anontune

Members of the hacking collective Anonymous are in the process of creating a social music platform that will let you anonymously stream tracks for free. According to a Wired report, the service will be known as Anontune, and is currently around 20 percent complete. Rather than hosting music themselves, the creators will aggregate songs from around the web, pulling in tracks from YouTube, Soundcloud, Yahoo! Music and others. The site will organize the content and allow users to make playlists and share tracks in a similar fashion to subscription services like Rdio. It uses a Java applet to do so, and masks your identity from the original content provider.

Although they're not doing so at the moment, if the creators were to only pull in officially sanctioned videos and tracks, we imagine this project would actually make long-time adversaries of Anonymous, such as the RIAA, happier than having users illegally download music. Having said that, attempting to play an official video for Joy Divisions's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" through the service brings up a message that WMG has blocked the embed from playing through the website. How Anonymous will deal with such blocks is unknown, but given their "field of work," we'd imagine they'll find a workaround. Although we have our reservations about using an applet coded by a notorious group of hackers, the creators have responded to fears about security by saying "why would we harm our users? That would really be a little counter-intuitive to our cause."