As anti-piracy activity and subsequent court rulings attempt to cut off users from The Pirate Bay, those affected by the blockades are taking the setback in their stride. There are hundreds of proxy-type services facilitating access to the supposedly blocked site and have become so popular that according to the operators of The Pirate Bay they’re currently providing at least 8% of the site’s traffic.
As the ISP blocks against The Pirate Bay continue to roll in across Europe, so do services offering workarounds to the censorship problem.
A common way for BitTorrent users to circumvent ISP blocks and protect themselves at the same time is to use a VPN service. These products do the job particularly well, but of course they do cost a small amount of money.
The original Pirate Bay servers ran on 21 “Raid-Proof” Virtual Machines To Avoid Detection
Those who prefer a free solution for unblocking their favourite torrent site are increasingly turning to dedicated proxies. These sites are as simple to access as typing a URL into a web browser and provide immediate access to sites such as The Pirate Bay and the more recently blocked KickAssTorrents.
Nevertheless, anti-piracy companies continue to claim that blocking is a success. In carefully worded statements they state that blocks are effective since visible traffic to domains has reduced since they were censored. Of course, those statements are technically true, but what they do not take into account is the number of users now accessing blocked sites through VPNs and various proxies.
And, according to the operators of The Pirate Bay, proxy websites are now driving a substantial amount of traffic to the world’s largest torrent site.
“A total of 8% of all Pirate Bay page views go through the proxy IP-address now, so I’m guessing the blockades are not working too well.” Says a TBP spokesman.
But even that number is a lower-end estimate. The TPB insider states the figure only relates to proxy sites that connect to TPB using a dedicated IP address.
“The 8% is just what goes through the dedicated IP-address, a lot of proxies use the site’s domain name instead,” he added.
Exactly how many proxy sites are out there is unknown, but TorrentProxies currently lists more than 200. The ones generating the most traffic at the moment appear to be PirateProxy.net (way out in front) followed by PirateReverse.info and ProxyBay.net.
“So far in 2013 we’ve had 4,964,424 unique visitors to our pirate bay proxies,” the operators of PirateReverse cited in a statement. “That equates to 61,546,871 pageviews, with a rough average of half a million a day.”
Finally, it is pretty much common knowledge that there are more dedicated Pirate Bay proxies around than those serving other blocked sites such as KickAssTorrents, H33T or Fenopy. As a result, PirateReverse stated that their KAT.ph proxies (kickassunblock.info and katunblock.com) are now generating more traffic than their Pirate Bay services.
There used to be a popular phrase which went something along the lines of “kill one file-sharing site and 10 more will appear in its place.” These days that’s probably untrue, but in the case of The Pirate Bay it’s fair to say that blocking one site has led to the creation of 200 new sites specifically designed to unblock it. That’s undoubtedly a powerful message.
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Documentary is an extremely powerful film which shows what the creators of TBB went through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCAGb7oSwDs
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