Pirate Bay launches anti-censorship browser

Nobody is more surprised than the administrators of the Pirate Bay that the site has lasted this long. But it’s made it to the end of its first decade, and celebrated by releasing a free web browser designed to circumvent site blocking.

The site, which provides torrent files allowing users to share content via peer-to-peer networks, is currently censored in Iran, North Korea, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland. But in a years-long version of Whack-a-Mole, users have managed to continue accessing the Pirate Bay through proxy sites that have popped up in their dozens.

Pirate Bay’s anniversary present to users, though, is PirateBrowser, designed to bypass any blocks from internet service providers completely. “It’s a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible. No bundled ad-ware, toolbars or other c**p, just a Pre-configured Firefox browser,” the group explains.

PirateBrowser consists of a combination of Firefox 23 and a Tor client, with Foxyproxy add-on, tailored for faster loading. It loads the Pirate Bay by default, but can be used to access other torrent websites, of which a number are listed in its Bookmarks bar, as well as pretty much any other website. Unlike the Tor Browser Bundle, though, it doesn’t hide the user’s real IP address. Right now, it’s available only for Windows, but Mac and Linux versions are in the pipeline.

The team describes PirateBrowser as a present to its users following “A decade of agression [sic] repression and lulz”. However, even the Pirate Bay’s founders are now concerned that it’s no longer fulfilling its aims. “It’s time to replace @tpbdotorg with a less centralised system, with less/no ads. Won’t happen until tpb is gone. It’s its own worst enemy,” tweets former spokesperson Peter Sunde.

The problem is that many of the Pirate Bay’s services have turned out to be installing adware on the sly. And another of the original founders, Rasmus Fleischer, tells me that, largely for this reason, he believes the site is experiencing an irreversible decline.

“The thing is that we don’t know who is running The Pirate Bay these days, which is indeed a result of the civil lawsuits against it – if you run The Pirate Bay you have to keep quiet about it or be sued to hell. It has now also become impossible for ‘legitimate’ companies to buy advertising space there, because they would also be threatened with legal action,” he says.

“The result is that The Pirate Bay is pushed towards a rather ugly kind of commercialization – towards that corner of the internet where pornography meets spamming and malware. I don’t think that the people who now run The Pirate Bay has chosen this way because they’re evil or greedy, but they are obviously very opportunistic and don’t hesitate to sell out the site’s reputation slowly.”

And this sleazy image does nothing to help the site present itself as a bastion of internet freedom, undermining its attempts to emphasize the anti-censorship features of PirateBrowser, rather than its ability to let users access copyrighted material for free. It makes it easier for governments such as, most recently, the UK’s to conflate the very different problems of child pornography and copyright infringement; and, ultimately, justify more censorship.