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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'
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.
There's an old joke:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. --Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (1996). Computer Networks. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. p. 83. ISBN 0-13-349945-6.
Upgrade that to an SUV filled with Multi-Terrabyte hard drives. Latency's a bitch but throughput is pretty damn good.
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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!
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