In many countries arount the world, ISPs have been ordered to block pirates sites.
While these measures are somewhat effective, they also triggered the developments of proxy sites. These proxies allow people to access the blocked sites and effectively bypass the restrictions.
The copyright holders are obviously not happy with these workarounds. What’s less known, however, is that many operators of the original pirate sites would rather like to see them go as well.
At least, the proxy sites which they are not running themselves.
This is also true for ExtraTorrent, one of the largest torrent indexes on the Internet. The site operates several proxies of its own, such as Extra.to, but a lot of traffic goes to unofficial proxies as well.
Starting a few days ago, the torrent site changed the way its site content is loaded, hoping to make these proxies unusable.
“ExtraTorrent has built in protection against proxies who are stealing our traffic,” ExtraTorrent operator SaM tells TorrentFreak.
“So, no one can steal ExtraTorrent content again. Our traffic will be protected and our users will be safe from any harm they may get for accessing ET through any of those proxies,” SaM adds.
Part of the site’s content is now encrypted and will be decoded by users’ browsers through JavaScript. This makes it harder for proxies to serve their content directly. Instead, many of these sites will show an error message instead.
Official proxies will still work as usual, of course, but ExtraTorrent wants to block all leeching proxies that “steal” traffic and revenue.
“90 percent of the proxies are not working correctly anymore, and if some proxies are still working they will be dead soon,” SaM says.
While several proxies are indeed unusable now, others may have found some sort of bypass since they are still working. Then again, that’s not really a surprise as circumventing blockades is the core business of these sites.
