Since The Pirate Bay is censored in countries all around the world, many users have to jump through hoops to access it. The PirateBrowser software allows people to bypass these restrictions, without having to use a proxy site or other circumvention tool.

The browser is based on Firefox and utilizes the Tor network to obfuscate people’s locations. It is meant purely as a tool to circumvent censorship and unlike the Tor browser it doesn’t provide any anonymity for its users.

The browser idea clearly appealed to a wide audience with the number of downloads going through the roof right from the start.

Recently, PirateBrowser achieved a new milestone. The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that more than five million people have downloaded a copy of the tool from the official website. That’s an average of more than half a million downloads per month.

Since its first release there haven’t been any additions to the software, but this will change in the coming weeks. The Pirate Bay team will push out an update soon with upgraded versions of the software. In addition, the new release will have support for social media sites, to serve users in countries where these services are restricted or blocked.

Another new feature will be to have lists of blocked sites per country, so users are only redirected through a proxy site when it’s needed.

In a separate and even more ambitious effort the team also continues the development of a special BitTorrent-powered application, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers. Instead of bypassing external censors, the new tool will create its own P2P network through which sites can be accessed without restrictions.

This “p2p browser” should be able to keep The Pirate Bay operational, even if the site itself is pulled offline. There is currently no estimated release date set for this second project, but it will take a few more months of development at minimum.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In response to these efforts the site launched the PirateBrowser last summer, and not without success. The tool, which allows users to circumvent ISP blockades, clocked its 2.5 millionth download a week ago.

However, there’s a much bigger project in the pipeline, one that will make The Pirate Bay and other sites more resilient than ever before. Instead of bypassing external censors, the new tool will create its own P2P network through which sites can be accessed without restrictions.

“The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site’s indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed/rendered locally,” a Pirate Bay insider explains.

In other words, when users load The Pirate Bay or any other site that joins the new platform, the site’s data will be shared among users and stored locally. The website doesn’t require a public facing portal and only needs minimal resources to “seed” the site’s files to the rest of the world.

“It’s basically a browser-like app that uses webkit to render pages, BitTorrent to download the content while storing everything locally,” the Pirate Bay insider says.

All further site updates are incremental, so people don’t end up downloading the entire site day after day. The disk space users need for the locally stored sites ranges from a few dozen megabytes for a small site, to several gigabytes for a larger torrent index.

The new software will be released as a standalone application as well as Firefox and Chrome plugins.

Since the site data comes from other peers, there is no central IP-address that can be blocked by Internet providers. Site owners will still offer webseeds to speed up loading, but sites are fully accessible when these are blocked.

Another important change is that the new software will not use standard domain names. Instead, it will use its own fake DNS system that will link the site’s name to a unique and verified public key. For example, within the application bt://mysite.p2p/ will load 929548249111abadfjab29347282374.p2p.

“Site owners will be able to register their own names, which will serve as an alias for the curve25519 pub-key that will identify the site,” the Pirate Bay insider notes.

“The “domain” registrations will be Bitcoin authenticated, on a first come first served basis. After a year the name will expire unless it’s re-verified.”

The entire project will be open source and built using existing code such as Libtorrent, Webkit, SQLite v3 and node-js. The Pirate Bay team is still looking for coders to assist, mainly on the Windows side, but thus far the development has been going steady.

It may take a few months before the first version is released in public, but it already promises to be a game changer in the ongoing censorship Whack-a-Mole.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Faced with ISP blockades all over the world, The Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet. The PirateBrowser software allows people to bypass these restrictions, using the Tor network to obfuscate people’s locations.

Unlike the Tor browser, PirateBrowser does not provide full anonymity. It’s only meant to unblock The Pirate Bay in regions where it’s censored, which is good enough for most users of the site. Downloads of the tool are going through the roof.

The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that the PirateBrowser notched up its 500,000th download earlier this week. At the time of publication it has surpassed 550,000 with no signs of a decline in interest.

Aside from the impressive download figures, the browser was also repeatedly linked to another news event this week.

Around the same time the PirateBrowser was launched, the number of users on the Tor network started to grow rapidly. Tor project leader Roger Dingledine mentioned the spike on the Tor email list, hinting that PirateBrowser may have something to do with it.

As can be seen in the graph below, in little over a week the number of Tor users jumped from a stable average of 550,000 to well over 1,400,000.

Daily Tor users worldwide

While it is a coincidence that PirateBrowser was launched around the same time the growth started, it seems unlikely that the two events are related.

First of all, the number of daily Tor users increased by more than 800,000, which is far more than the total number of downloads of PirateBrowser thus far. In addition, looking more closely at the increase in Tor users we see that the spike started August 19, more than a week after PirateBrowser launched.

Finally, the country specific Tor usage shows that the increase is most pronounced in South America. In Argentina and Brazil for example, where The Pirate Bay isn’t censored, Tor usage increased by more than 1000%. In the UK and the Netherlands, where blocks are in place, we only see a “modest” doubling in Tor users.

Daily Tor users Brazil

From the above it is safe to conclude that given that there was no significant Tor related news on the 19th, the most likely explanation is that the growth is unnatural. Perhaps a Botnet might explain it?

While PirateBrowser may not be responsible for the increase in Tor users, the half million download milestone is no less impressive. The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that they will continue developing the browser and Mac and Linux versions will be out later this year.

At the same time The Pirate Bay continues development on another anti-censorship tool, one that is destined to have an even bigger impact. They are working on a special BitTorrent-powered application, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers, making it impossible for third parties to block them.

This new tool should be able to keep The Pirate Bay operational, even if the site itself is pulled offline.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Blocked by court orders all over the world, Pirate Bay is arguably the most censored website on the Internet. The PirateBrowser software allows people to bypass these restrictions.

It appears that the browser idea is right on the money. New statistics revealed today show that blocked users have been downloading the tool en masse.

Within three days of its launch more than 100,000 people have already downloaded PirateBrowser via the direct link, and the official torrent file is being shared by more than 5,000 people at the time of publication.

While The Pirate Bay anticipated some interest it never expected PirateBrowser to generate this many downloads.

“I didn’t think it would catch on so fast,” The Pirate Bay’s Winston tells TorrentFreak. “I guess people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them.”

To cope with the massive demand The Pirate Bay had to upgrade the connection for the download link. Even after three days PirateBrowser is still averaging well above a thousand downloads per hour.

The browser is based on Firefox 23 bundled with a Tor client and some proxy configurations to speed up page loading. It is meant purely as a tool to circumvent censorship, but The Pirate Bay teams wants to reiterate that it doesn’t provide any anonymity for its users.

“It’s not providing anonymity and it’s not secure to hide your identity. PirateBrowser is only supposed to circumvent censoring and website blocking. If we made the browser fully anonymous it would only slow down browsing,” Winston explains.

In addition to the current Windows application, Mac and Linux versions of the PirateBrowser will be released in the near future.

The anti-censorship browser is just the first tool The Pirate Bay will release. They are currently working on a special BitTorrent-powered application, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own computers, making it impossible for third parties to block them.

And so the game of Whack-A-Mole continues.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.