Torrenting behemoth The Pirate Bay has launched a parallel version of its website, which is specifically designed to circumvent its controversial block in the UK, as well as in countries like the Netherlands and Italy.
In April 2012, the British High Court forced five major internet providers to block access to the torrent site. Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media all had to stop their users from accessing the infamous file-sharing hub.
When The Pirate Bay first commented on the block, it provided users in the UK with numerous ways to circumvent the filter -- including VPN servers, DNS tweaks, and the Tor Browser Bundle. Now, it has launched a new website to help bypass the block by itself.
The site is operating from a new IP address, which will make it immediately available to users who had previously been barred from visiting the website.
Should broadband providers extend their block to cover this IP, The Pirate Bay has tweaked the site to be specifically optimised to work with proxy servers.
Proxies work as intermediary points between a client and a server, so users can access websites anonymously or pretend to be connecting from another country. In the case of The Pirate Bay, users in the UK can disguise themselves as a user from a nation where the file-sharing site is not yet censored.
The special block-circumventing site also disables the login, register, comment and upload functions and only show links to magnet files, not torrent files.
The Pirate Bay reported record traffic in the days after its block was announced in the UK. A spokesperson for the site told blog
Torrentfreak, "thanks to the High Court and the fact that the news was on the BBC, we had 12 million more visitors yesterday than we had ever had before. We should write a thank you note to the BPI (British Phonographic Industry)."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
