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The Internet Censorship Piracy

The Pirate Bay Launches Browser To Evade ISP Blockades 118

Posted by timothy 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."
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The Pirate Bay Launches Browser To Evade ISP Blockades More

The Pirate Bay Launches Browser To Evade ISP Blockades

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  • As always... (Score:5, Informative)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @11:22AM (#44530689)
    The internet sees any blockage as an outage and works to avoid it.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Needs a Linux version.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It is a game of chess. ISPs will move to block this (no surprise to anyone, including PB) and another move will be made. Wash, rinse, repeat.

      What the censors don't understand is that their actions are actually resulting in new tech and new approaches to evade and avoid their censorship. They are creating a self fulfilling prophecy and fueling the actions of their targeted "victims".

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It is a game of chess. ISPs will move to block this (no surprise to anyone, including PB) and another move will be made. Wash, rinse, repeat.

        What the censors don't understand is that their actions are actually resulting in new tech and new approaches to evade and avoid their censorship. They are creating a self fulfilling prophecy and fueling the actions of their targeted "victims".

        Yes, and the only ignorance in that mentality is thinking that the citizens will be the ones who will ultimately "win" here.

        Chess game? No, not quite. More like cat and mouse. When governments find they've had enough of that shit, and you suddenly find you need to pass a background check and obtain a personal license in order to simply obtain internet service, along with new federal law making all public (read unregulated) internet access points illegal, then you may find yourself thinking differently ab

        • Actually cats, like most predators, fail to catch their prey way more than they succeed. That is to say, the mouse usually escapes.

        • the only ignorance in that mentality is thinking that the citizens will be the ones who will ultimately "win" here.

          I'm afraid you fail to see a much bigger ignorance in your mentality. You talk about citizens while you should rather say the tiny % of citizens who actually give a damn about internet freedom (or lack of control and regulation).

          People make revolutions for things they care about; unsurprisingly, they let politicians do what the lobbies command on all the other issues.
          In my country I can't see thousands of protesters in the streets on this issue. Not even dozens. Not even one.

          Politicians are evil, but on th

        • I'll just leave this right here...

          The Right to Read [gnu.org]

    • Re:As always... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by buchner.johannes ( 1139593 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @11:52AM (#44530867) Homepage Journal

      I am still waiting for a SSL-only browser. And no old buggy versions enabled please.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

        From their page it looked like it used open-source components, but I didn't see any links to source code. I think I'd want it available for inspection and recompiling and letting people make modifications like you suggested. If I were in one of the countries listed on their site I'd sure want it -- but I'd still be paranoid and want the source code.

        If the source is available I apologize for my ignorance.

        • Re:As always... (Score:5, Informative)

          by pipatron ( 966506 ) <pipatron@gmail.com> on Saturday August 10, 2013 @01:25PM (#44531495) Homepage
          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.

          • It's "just" the tor browser bundle and firefox portable, they link to both, where sources can be had.

            I use TOR; it claims it wasn't ment for the downloading large files, some of the sites take forever just to load the graphics.

        • Why? Are you going to review it yourself? If not, what makes you think others will?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

            I would certainly look at it. I think others would as well. But this browser won't help those of us in the US.

      • Just block everything outgoing except port 443. It would be a rare site that would serve http on 443. If you're less paranoid, you could block just outgoing port 80.
      • SSL is flawed as implemented. Unless you are planning to remove all the CAs from your browser and validate each cert out of band yourself, all the government needs is to have one of the root CAs approve a certificate to impersonate whoever they want.

      • I am still waiting for a SSL-only browser. And no old buggy versions enabled please.

        How does that fix things when not every site offers SSL sessions?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brit74 ( 831798 )
      If this were true, then why did it take 10 years for the PirateBay to create it?
      • You mean this specific solution? Because they had the idea just now. They have been evading and routing around censorship for all these 10 years, though.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Sweden has long ping times, on account of the cold, and being frozen 6 months of the year.

        Also they were busy building Volvos.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PaddyM ( 45763 )

      If only it wasn't conceived as a communications network designed to survive a nuclear attack!

    • 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.

      • The conditions of the machine are such that the ground state is to route around damage. You can can put in a raised floor that captures the run off and prevent it from going to ground, but thats not the same thing. As originally designed, the internet routes around damage.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        The internet is different. Older networks were mostly point-to-point, with blockages being very difficult to route around. The internet is awash with alternative routes to places. We have darknets too, so you can be on the internet and create a web site or send a message completely anonymously and in a way that is almost impossible to block.

        It is of course an arms race, but unlike previous networks the internet makes it easy for people to create new protocols and routes themselves. Look at how ineffective t

  • Evading from... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 10, 2013 @11:28AM (#44530723)

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

    So it has come to this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That moment when you realize your nation is mentioned in the same sentence as one of the most backwards places on Earth.

      *facepalm*

      The Netherlands is missing from this list. So is China...

      • The Netherlands and China is covered in this browser bundle. They specifically block dutch and chinese exit nodes, among others.

  • What could have been pretty cool.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Saturday August 10, 2013 @11:38AM (#44530783) Journal

    ... 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

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The problem with that would be the time it takes to begin download, rather than the download itself. With HTTP, you already know where to download from so the setup time is relatively miniscule; with bittorrent, you have to turn the metadata into a location and then turn around and connect to there. People already complain about how slow HTTP is, so I'd hate to see the reactions to this new hybrid.

    • P2P HTTP would be great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by amaurea ( 2900163 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @12:07PM (#44530943) Homepage

      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 [wikipedia.org], 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.

      • You're thinking of Freenet and its' "freesites".

        • Re:P2P HTTP would be great (Score:4, Interesting)

          by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @12:57PM (#44531299)

          He did mention Freenet. Specifically saying that it did exactly what he wants to see done, but the level of anti-tracking anti-censoring built in comes with severe performance penalties.

        • I mentioned freenet in the post you just replied to. I like the concept of freenet, but I think anonymity and distributed storage has too great an overhead to be a viable http replacement. But perhaps I'm being pessimistic here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        The entire Pirate Bay database is about 100MB. It seems like it could easily be built in to a torrent client and updated in a distributed fashion.

        I'm not sure if that includes comments though, which are worth having. Even so, a few hundred megabytes is nothing these days. Finally BitTorrent could be completely decentralized, independent of both trackers and websites.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hicksw ( 716194 )

        How's this?

        Create a Magnet hash from the URL you seek.
        Use DHT to find a swarm and get a copy.
        If you can't find a swarm, and are not worried about privacy, GET the file and advertise the Magnet hash for a while.

        The minor drawback is that this gets slower as we flood the DHT hash space. The huge drawback is that this only works for static content. Not much of that around these days.

        Dynamic content forces us to each download our own personalised packets.
        Sadly, these mostly differ only in the (blocked) target

  • 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.

    • Isn't this simply a tor/firfox bundle though? You could simply download it and check whatever blocked websites you want, if I understood correctly

  • Sneakernet beats all countermeasures ... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by brit74 ( 831798 )
      Sneaknet is such a stupid idea. It's horrendously slow and takes a lot of work. You really think lazy pirates are going to be happy about having to get off their asses and physically move stuff around in order to get copies of stuff? In a sneakernet environment, most will start paying for the shit they steal. Not to mention that any hard drive that exists is only going to contain a small subset of all the stuff they want to steal ("What? This hard drive only has Photoshop from 2009 and no music? I wan

      • These issues can be solved using a very simple piece of technology: The great big drive. We're up to four terabytes now, and growing rapidly. With advances in compression, a sixteen-terabyte box could easily hold enough media in diverse enough tastes to keep anyone happy for a year. The hard part will be just finding the good stuff.

        • We're up to four terabytes now, and growing rapidly.

          Maybe I'm nitpicking, but we are not growing that rapidly... The 4TB disk has been available for over couple of years already. The next bump will require the research in perpendicular recording or heat-assisted magnetic recording to be incorporated into a real manufacturing process. The labs are probably working on it, but it's unknown when they have something which can be made into a serially manufactured product.

          • It does seem to have hit a rut, true. But we are a long way from fundamental physical limitations still. Even four terabytes can store a lot of piracy.

      • As The Man makes it harder and harder for the average person to get stuff off the Internet, you're always going to have some number of people who find a way to do it anyway, and damn the inconvenience, specifically *because* they (The Man) have shoved it up their (the people's) asses so far.

      • Back in the day, sneaker net was all we had. On floppies. The bandwidth of a 4tb hard drive being hand carried is a lot higher than your typical dsl or cable connection by the way.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Really?
      What about being searched as you cross borders/state/count lines?

      Anything physical can be confiscated.

      I travelled extensively in Eastern Eurpoe when the Iron Curtain was up. People used to lob western magazines out of the train window for their relatives to catch as we sped past. Then they started searching everyone who got in the trains.
      Then the people would travel to their relatives and recite the stories that the police (viz Stasi) had banned. They would be copied down much like you see prisoners

    • Re:Sneakernet beats all countermeasures ... (Score:4, Funny)

      by captjc ( 453680 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @12:27PM (#44531057)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        If you could sustain a 120MB/sec copy speed a 3TB drive would still take over 7 hours to duplicate. We need faster storage.

  • But I am not installing another browser just for torrenting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

      You need more coffee, RTFS again. It has nothing to do with torrenting, it's for evading government censorship while visiting web sites.

  • And why should people trust it (Score:4, Informative)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Saturday August 10, 2013 @12:07PM (#44530937)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by melikamp ( 631205 )
      That may be, but unlike other sites, TPB looks and works great without JavaScript, and the ad blocker does the rest. FORCING users to run non-free code and watch ads before they can get to the content is way sleazier than anything TPB does.
    • AdBlock/Ghostery helps a lot. But yeah, I agree that they have intruding ads. I guess there are not a lot of advertising companies that would allow advertising on such websites.

      • AdBlock/Ghostery helps a lot. But yeah, I agree that they have intruding ads

        Never heard of Ghostery so gave it a try, had a version for Opera which I thought special (Opera being the black sheep of browsers).

        It's been mentioned that Windows will disable a HOSTS file, I've wondered about mine recently as sites are getting through that shouldn't.
        Logging on to /. Ghostery claimed it was blocking two Google analytics sites and doubleclick; Ghostery should of never seen them.

        Thank you for the heads up.

        • AdBlock/Ghostery helps a lot. But yeah, I agree that they have intruding ads

          It's been mentioned that Windows will disable a HOSTS file, I've wondered about mine recently as sites are getting through that shouldn't.Logging on to /. Ghostery claimed it was blocking two Google analytics sites and doubleclick; Ghostery should of never seen them.

          Ok, my bad; Ghostery doesn't block sites, it blocks scripts "which are objects embedded in a web page"
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostery [wikipedia.org] so even when it mentions what it's "blocked" it's already been blocked by the HOSTS file.

          Is interesting to see just what's blocked for each web site/page.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      Use adblock while browsing the pirate bay. The pirate browser is a really cool idea for those that don't know how to set up individually the tor bundle and make it work with a generic (IE, Opera, Chrome, Safari or Firefox) browser. Just go to the torrent website through the pirate browser and download the torrent you want. Game over.
      And for those that talk about a decentralised p2p web community somebody mentioned the old freesites on freenet, but there is also Osiris. And Osiris doesn't use fucking java an

    • Ads that pop up masquerading as system alerts, porn ads, ads which trigger downloads of files like executables and apks.

      Those with enough knowledge and credibility to have valid perspectives and opinions regarding this subject also know enough to run Adblock and NoScript. Since the latter doesn't seem to apply to you, I suspect the former wouldn't, either.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I suggest in future you read the topic and comprehend the context and concerns in which I responded. It might allow you to formulate something a little less condescending and a little more thoughtful than the mastubatory ego trip you posted this time around.

    • Because of the dubious-at-best legality of the site, more 'respectable' advertisers refuse to do business with them. They have to take what they can get.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mrbcs ( 737902 )
      Ever hear of a hosts file? Never seen and ad. The pop-up pops up to a blank page. Then I close it.
    • I just opened up ThePirateBay, and I didn't see any ads. Just disable ads with whatever means you have available, and donate if you feel the site is worthy of your money. Just one donation of a few dollars will offset probably hundreds of casual users that disable ads. Let's be honest, you weren't really going to click any of those ads, so you might as well disable them.
  • Surely one of those patch Tuesdays will nuke it out of existance? Or the Windows Malicious Software Removal tool? :-)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mysidia ( 191772 )

      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.

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