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The Pirate Bay Launches Browser To Evade ISP Blockades

Posted by timothy on from the speak-friend-and-enter dept.

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."

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. As always... by djupedal · · Score: 5, Informative

    The internet sees any blockage as an outage and works to avoid it.

    1. Re:As always... by pipatron · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's "just" the tor browser bundle and firefox portable, they link to both, where sources can be had. The custom configs are (naturally) included in this release for inspection. It seems that they configure Tor to be as fast as possible while removing some possible anonymity, and they block certain countries as exits to remove censorship. Then they have a dynamic proxy to automatically route torrent sites through Tor.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  2. Evading from... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    evading censorship in countries like UK, Finland, Denmark, and Iran among others.

    So it has come to this.

  3. What could have been pretty cool.... by mark-t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... is if the browser distributed any (unsecured) content which is currently loaded into a tab or window, in addition to any the inline media content such as images or embeded video all via bittorrent... potentially reducing the impact that "flash mobs" might have on websites to the extent that people adopt use of the browser.

    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'
  4. P2P HTTP would be great by amaurea · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.