Help Fight Internet Censorship with the Pirate Bay's New PirateBrowser

Help Fight Internet Censorship with the Pirate Bay's New PirateBrowser

To celebrate it's 10th birthday the worlds most infamous censored site, The Pirate Bay, has introduced its own Internet browser to enable people to access its website even if it's being blocked by your ISP.

Most big ISP's have blocked The Pirate Bay for its users claiming it breaches copyright by allowing people to download Torrents of films and music.

If you don't know what a torrent it it's a movie split into thousands of small pieces. Each piece is stored on various computers so that each user is not in theory holding a full version of a film that may be breaching copyright. When you download  the torrent the files are all put together and downloaded from their various locations.

However most ISP's still see this as copyright violation and even though The Pirate Bay is just like Google in the fact they are just a search engine and don't actually host the films or music they have been attacked from all quarters.

Is Your ISP Blocking You?

You can quickly test whether you are being blocked by your ISP by clicking these links which all point to the Pirate Bay Website.

http://thepiratebay.org

http://thepiratebay.sx

https://piratereverse.info

Check More Pirate Bay Proxies

If you want a PHP script that will scan a number of known Pirate Bay Proxies then you can download this one I quickly knocked up from here: Pirate Bay Proxy Checker Script.

Just change the file extension to .php and either run it from your local computer or server. If you are running Windows I recommend downloading WAMP so that you can run an Apache server on your PC.

I also recommend changing the port number the server runs on to 8080 or 8888 so it can run side by side with IIS. This article will explain how to set WAMP up.


Use Pirate Bay Tor Browser

If you are being blocked from the Pirate Bay by your ISP then you have a number of choices.

1. Find a working mirror to the site - e.g search for Pirate Bay Proxies on DuckDuckgo.com or try this page: http://torrentproxies.com/ to find some not blocked by your ISP. Many mirrors will first open up in something called adf.ly with a JavaScript countdown. After a few seconds a link will appear saying "click here to continue". On clicking the page will change (usually to an advert with a blue bar at the top) and in the top right corner will be another countdown saying "Please Wait". Usually after 5 seconds it will say "SKIP AD" and on clicking it you will end up at the Pirate Bay mirror site.

2. Use a proxy to access the Pirate Bay. There are many free proxies out there and you can find a good list at http://nntime.com/proxy-list-01.htm. Use a tool like FoxyProxy to manage your proxy lists and toggle between them. Or you can go into your browsers network / proxy settings and manually enter the IP address and port number you want to use.

3. Download the new Pirate Bay Browser or the Mozilla TOR Browser. Both of which access the TOR network to help disguise your internet footprint by bouncing your HTTP requests through a series of servers.  As the TOR website explains.

"Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol."

With all the outrage surrounding the NSA spying on ALL American citizens and the recent revelations that they are using this information not only to catch terrorists but to catch petty criminals, drug dealers, tax avoiders and to spy on and blackmail politicians and judges it is in everyone's best interests that they tighten up on their Internet Security.

As this article I wrote explains there are a number of measures you can take to reduce your Internet footprint and whilst you might be totally invisible you can blend into the background.

So do yourself a favour and use the Pirate Bay browser or the TOR Mozilla Browser. Not only does making use of the TOR network help protect your privacy but the Pirate Bay Browser will let you access a number of Pirate Bay Mirror sites and bypass any censorship that your ISP or country may have introduced.

Download the TOR Browser

Once installed when you open the .EXE you will connect to the TOR network.



Once connected you can use the Firefox browser to surf the web. All your Pirate Bay Mirror sites and other Torrent sites are linked at the top in the icon bar. Pick one and then carry out your search for movies, applications or other content.

As you can see it's just a search engine like Google which makes it very unfair that the Pirate Bay is being blocked by ISP's as Google also indexes illegal content such as porn and copyrighted material.

This is a search for the US TV show Dexter.



Like most search engines once you run a search you get your results.



As you can see from the results on the right there are two columns, seeders and leachers.

You want to choose an item with as many seeders (uploaders) and as few leachers (downloaders) as possible to get a quick download.

You can also tell from the names of the file what sort they are e.g if the file has the word CAM in it then it's a poor quality camera in a cinema job. If it's HDTV quality it will be a bigger better quality file and BRRip is a BluRay copy.

Clicking on the file you want will open up the result page. Hopefully you will get comments telling you the quality of the file. Click on "Get This Torrent" to download your torrent file.



When you want to download a torrent from the Pirate Bay you will first need to have a torrent client. There are many out there including:

www.utorrent.com/downloads/win

bitlord.soft32.com/

www.bittorrent.com/

Once you have one installed your application of choice you can just click on the torrent in your search results and it will open up in the client and start downloading.

As you can see whilst you download the file you will also be uploading at the same time. This way you are not just taking without giving back the files you have already leached. You can control the bandwidth ratio between upload and download as well as set limits on the rate you upload.



However bewarned, ISP's are also on the lookout for people downloading (leaching) and uploading (seeding) torrents so you need to protect yourself.

Some of the ways include:

-Using someone else's WIFI or network.

-Using an anonymous proxy that doesn't leak identifying information or even better a VPN. A paid for tool like BTGuard which is both a proxy and encryption tool which helps prevent your ISP throttle your traffic.

-Using a block list which will mean that all traffic is bounced around ISP routers so that they cannot scan the traffic.

-Setting your download port to a common port for other traffic such as 80 or 8080  (HTTP) so that it doesn't look obvious you are downloading P2P data. Most people use a "random port" but it is better to look like you are downloading HTTP content especially if you are encrypting your traffic as well.

-Limiting your upload rate to a minimum. Although this violates the spirit of P2P (sharing) the people going after you for stealing copyrighted material are more interested in those spreading (uploading) the content rather than downloading it.

-Ensuring you force outgoing traffic to be encrypted. This will help prevent your ISP see that you are using BitTorrent traffic and may prevent them throttling your bandwidth.

-Set a download cap on your traffic. Even if you are encrypting your traffic some ISP's may see the amount you are downloading and throttle it if they think you are up to no good.

-Using an application like PeerBlock which will block traffic from known bad IP addresses such as P2P blocklists, known bad IP addresses, spyware, FBI and copyright monitoring sites and so on. It is worth downloading and just sits in the background running as you do you're downloading.

As with most security measures a wide range of different measures is much better than just relying on one system.

Hopefully this article will help you make use of The Pirate Bay if you have been blocked so far from accessing it.