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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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
But it is the same thing. This IS political censorship. In both places censorship tries to block what is against the law. In both places people use programs to get around it because they don't agree with those laws.
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.
Because the plugin would be Tor.
c++;
I don't think so, Governments use Tor for sensitive communications, if they banned Tor for civilians then only Governments would be using it. If you want to hide a tree, you hide it in a forest, not the middle of a wheat field!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Surely one of those patch Tuesdays will nuke it out of existance? Or the Windows Malicious Software Removal tool? :-)
VKh
We are still not talking about any serious violation on human rights or free speech as long as we are only talking about blocking copyright-infringing warez sites.
In Finland the access to the site has been restored for most places when they moved to the thepiratebay.sx domain.
So a malum prohibitum or civil offense is enough justification to make something blockable? That's not even a slippery slope, that's halfway down the hill. Build the infrastructure and it WILL be abused, particularly if it's all behind closed doors.
Oh yes we are. We are talking about the control of information. We are talking about giving to a few the control over what we could repeat, express or comment about. The same laws that allow for blockades against warez sites allow for blockades against any site that breaks copyright in any way, no matter how marginal or subjective that may be, and it is not a novelty or a rarity to see people using copyright to attempt to block ideas they do not wish to spread.
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.