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The Pirate Bay Launches Browser To Evade ISP Blockades
hypnosec writes "The Pirate Bay, on its 10th anniversary, has released 'Pirate Browser,' which it claims would allow people to access The Pirate Bay and other such blocked sites. The 'Pirate Browser' is a fully functional browser that currently works with Windows. ... According to the Pirate Browser website, the browser is basically a bundled package consisting of the Tor client and Firefox Portable browser. The package also includes some tools meant for evading censorship in countries like UK, Finland, Denmark, and Iran among others."
The internet sees any blockage as an outage and works to avoid it.
for porn in uk?
naboo needs to use this to escape that blockade
evading censorship in countries like UK, Finland, Denmark, and Iran among others.
So it has come to this.
It'd be ideal, in my opinion, if someone developed an new protocol based on http that did something like that, but I don't think that's terribly likely to happen
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is just a custom variant of the TOR browser bundle set up to be less anonymous...
There are enough sites which have opted for the more sensible way to publish an extension for major browsers that automates the "proxy/alternate DNS" process to circumvent this kind of censorship (e.g., the ton of measures to circumvent websites' self-censorship in Germany due to the damn GEMA).
Having a separate browser for every censored website sounds even more of a waste of space than needing a different add-on for different kinds of censorship measures.
The TOR Project has had the bundle for a while.
UK, Finland, Denmark, and Iran - the axis of evil!
Ship a hard drive around, among a circle of trusted friends.
While the drive stops at its various "nodes", content can be
added.
Let's the the RIAA / MPAA cabal beat THAT.
But I am not installing another browser just for torrenting.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
With Iran, it's about political and religious censorship and online activists.
The Finns have censored child porn sites
I think all censorship is wrong, but frankly putting Iran with Finland, Denmark and the UK in the same sentence with Iran is a bit misleading. And having stumbled on porn sites in past quite easily (Whitehouse.com instead of .gov anyone?), I'm not outraged over the blocking of child porn. If there is a legitimate site being voluntarily blocked by an ISP that I must access for whatever reason, then I'll get around it. But considering the draconian laws against child porn, I'll take the censorship for fear of accidentally being condemned for life over an accident.
What we should really being in an outrage over are the overly zealous laws against sex thought crimes and the fact that these children are being used by sick bastards who produce that shit.
The Pirate Bay hosts some of the sleaziest and malicious advertising banners of any web site. Ads that pop up masquerading as system alerts, porn ads, ads which trigger downloads of files like executables and apks. This is not a site that I would trust in any way to provide the browsing or download software.
I agree. A peer-to-peer http replacement would also mean many more websites could get by without advertisements. With the current centralized model, your traffic load and bandwidth expenses grow as your site gets more popular, meaning that most of them end up having to add advertisements as they get big enough (which isn't necessarily that big), not out of any wish to exploit the users to get rich, but to avoid ruining themselves.
The bittorrent protocol solved this problem for large files by making downloaders participate in uploading too, meaning that a single, low-capacity server can serve a practically unlimited number of concurrent downloads. But bittorrent has too high a start-up cost and too high latency to replace http. I am not sure how easy it would be to build a peer-to-peer http replacement that has low enough latency to be useable for html pages etc., and it would not work for cases sites like slashdot etc., where each user sees the site slightly differently.. And of course, there would be the problem of getting enough users for it to be viable. But I think it could be done, and would be valuable once in place.
Of course, one could try to go a bit further too, and make the site data itself distributed and encrypted, to make it censorship-resistant and anonymous. But that would add a huge amount of overhead, as demonstrated by freenet, which has even larger latency issues than bittorrent (if I recall correctly) due to the need to obsufcate the routing. So while something like freenet is good to have, it would also be nice to have something simpler and faster like what you suggested.
Don't worry, they'll block Tor eventually.
I might well be repeating what others have said already. But, why not have a Firefox plugin (which will then run on all OS's that Firefox runs on)? I already have to have a separate browser if I want to use Tor (and while I understand why, it is a pain in the neck to keep to versions of Firefox up to date).
So, why not just a plugin that can do all that stuff?
The internet sees any blockage as an outage and works to avoid it.
The Internet sees and understands nothing. It is a machine like any other. It can be managed and it can be changed.
The notion that a communications network with a global reach and universal access is inherently anarchic and ungovernable is as old as the telegraph and probably older than the semaphore. The geek should know better.
Surely one of those patch Tuesdays will nuke it out of existance? Or the Windows Malicious Software Removal tool? :-)
VKh
I highly recommend anybody that supports freedom to download and use.
I would love to see people start knocking government and corporate sites off the internet so that anytime somebody tried to get to them, all they get is a FBI page, or DHS, or Anonymous or something of this nature.
Surely one of those patch Tuesdays will nuke it out of existance? Or the Windows Malicious Software Removal tool? :-)
And then there will be a new patched version of the browser that removes the malware (Windows Update service) that nuked it.