Pirate Bay Simplifies Circumvention of ISP Blockades

 

In their ongoing effort to circumvent the court mandated blockades in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, The Pirate Bay has added a new website. The site in question is operating from a new IP-address which makes it available directly to blocked subscribers. In addition, the new site is optimized to work with proxies in case the IP-address is blocked in the future.

Within a few days, five of the largest UK Internet providers will all have to censor The Pirate Bay. Virgin and Orange have already implemented the block and the rest must follow before the end of May.

The music companies who asked for the blockade hope it will decrease piracy significantly, but it is doubtful whether this wish will come true.

Already we’ve seen a massive increase in traffic to proxy-websites from the UK, and this is only expected to increase during the coming days. In addition, The Pirate Bay team isn’t sitting still either. They’ve now rolled out a new site which circumvents the UK measures before they’ve even started.

In most countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked it’s done by a domain and IP-address filter. But, since TPB added a new IP-address at 194.71.107.80, blocked subscribers can access the site again without problems. At least for now that is, since in some cases the copyright holders have the power to add new domains and addresses upon request.

The Pirate Bay team is no stranger to this. However, circumventing the blockades directly is not the main reason the IP-address was added. Regular users of TPB will notice that the site hosted on the new address is slightly different from the standard site.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the new site is setup to guarantee maximum compatibility with the many proxy sites that are out there.

“It is made so the people who setup proxies can use the new IP-address instead of coming up with complicated rewrites for static content and stuff. Instead of pointing their proxies to thepiratebay.se they should point it to that IP-address,” we were told.

Aside from making it easier to setup a proxy, the new page is also optimized for proxies in other ways. It will only show links to magnet files for example, and the login, register, comment and upload functions are disabled for security reasons.

So, even if the new IP-address is added to the various blocklists, the new site still functions as a basis for proxy sites.

The above once again shows that it’s virtually impossible to completely prevent people from accessing The Pirate Bay. There are simply too many options for people to route around the block. From visiting a proxy, to simply adding a few lines to their “hosts” file to access the site directly.

It appears that the only working option to stop people from accessing the site is to DDoS it into oblivion. But then again, that’s not really sustainable. 

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