The release went viral and by now more than 200,000 people have installed the add-on. ICE wasn’t happy with this and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. However, Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

Today MAFIAAFire delivers a new release that aims to thwart the increasing censorship efforts in countries worldwide. Named “The Pirate Bay Dancing,” the Firefox add-on undoes local DNS and IP blocks by routing users through a series of randomly picked proxies.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that the development of the plugin was partly motivated by SOPA and PIPA, the pending anti-piracy bills in the US.

“DNS and IP blocking is probably the most dangerous part of SOPA/PIPA in terms of ‘breaking the Internet,’ so we tackled that first. We will be going after the other parts of SOPA in later releases but probably not in ‘our usual plugin form’ – the other parts require different solutions that we have already started work on,” we were told.

Although the add-on carries The Pirate Bay in its name it also works with other sites such as Newsbin2 and BTJunkie which are blocked in the UK and Italy respectively. In a broader sense it can also be used to bypass national “firewalls” such as in China, and soon perhaps the US.

Putting the add-on to work only requires two clicks and is completely free.

After the add-on is installed users can specify the websites for which they want it to work, and these sites then trigger a response from the plugin. If someone from Italy for example chooses to unblock The Pirate Bay, the add-on will save this preference and load the site through a proxy on the next visit.

MAFIAAFire is using thousands of proxies which will be rotated constantly, hence the (dirty) dancing. The current version is fully working but TorrentFreak was told that the functionality will be expanded in future releases.

The MAFIAAFire team told TorrentFreak that they were eager to help The Pirate Bay out, as the site’s operators have been an inspiration to them. The Pirate Bay team on their turn will soon feature the add-on on their homepage.

“Saving TPB was a big deal to us, we love the site and how it has stood the test of time while dozens of others fell, bent over or were run over. The MAFIAA have been trying to take down TPB’s sails for years, country by country, this extends its life a little more to give it smooth sailing,” TorrentFreak was told.

“In the bigger picture, other than the US’ SOPA we also have each country experimenting with its own mini-firewall. This makes all those blocks in all those countries, and all the millions the MAFIAA have spent to get to there, useless,” the MAFIAAFire team added.

While the latest MAFIAAFire add-on shows how easy it is to bypass these censorship attempts, supporters of the measures would argue that it will nonetheless stop the vast majority of casual pirates.

The creators of “The Pirate Bay Dancing” are not ignorant of this, but aside from delivering a working product, one of their main goals is to send a signal that censorship is never the right path to take. Judging from the recognition they’ve received so far, they sure have succeeded on that front.

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

Releasing the browser add-on had a bigger impact than the MAFIAA Fire team could have ever hoped for. The U.S. Government was not amused by this “uncensor tool” and asked Mozilla to pull the it from their site. However, Mozilla refused to do so and the add-on gained Internet fame as a result.

This success motivated the MAFIAAFire team to come up with more anti-censorship tools. Two months ago they released the “Gee! No evil!” plugin which thwarts Google’s search engine censorship, and today they introduce a fresh add-on for Firefox and Chrome, which allows people to find alternative URLs for blocked content.

Named “Slash Unblocker” – a reference to a recent South Park episode – the add-on provides a quick way for people to submit and obtain links for videos or other content that has been taken down or removed.

“The idea is born out of the general frustration you have when you go to a page and see it has been taken down for some stupid reason. Or because the page is “not authorized for viewing in your country”,” the MAFIAAFire team explained to TorrentFreak.

The plugin is pretty straightforward. Whenever you run into a page that contains content which is blocked in your country, or has been taken down entirely, you’ll click on the “Slash Unblocker” button to see if there are alternative sources. The system relies on participation from users, who are encouraged to submit alternative sources when there are none available.

The video below explains in detail how the process works.

With more than 100,000 downloads the previous MAFIAAFire plugins have been a great success. This motivated the team to continue working on new projects that they believe are needed to stop the ever-increasing censorship attempts on the Internet. Not just because the tools are useful, but also to make a statement.

“The message is you CAN fight back, the time to fight back is NOW, we outnumber them in numbers, intelligence, and will,” the MAFIAAFire team told us. “The fact that the U.S. Government tried to interfere with what we are doing is testament to it working.”

Although not everyone will agree with the tactics used, MAFIAAFire is once again proving John Gilmore right:

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

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

The add-on maintains a list of all the domains that ICE (hence the antidote, ‘fire’) has seized and redirects their users to an alternative domain if the sites in question have set one up. The developers told TorrentFreak that they coded it to demonstrate the futility of the domain seizures, which they find objectionable.

Homeland Security’s ICE unit got wind of the add-on and almost immediately took action to have it taken offline. Although the add-on can be hosted anywhere, they asked Mozilla to remove it from their repository just a few days after it first appeared there.

“Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and requested that we remove the Mafiaa Fire add-on,” explained Mozilla General Counsel and Vice President of Business Affairs Harvey Anderson. “The ICE Homeland Security Investigations unit alleged that the add-on circumvented a seizure order DHS had obtained against a number of domain names.”

However, where ICE might have expected a swift take down from Mozilla, the legal and business affairs department of the tech company was not planning to honor the request so easily.

“Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order,” Anderson explains.

According to Anderson complying with the request without any additional information would threaten open Internet principles. So, instead of taking the add-on offline they replied to ICE with a set of 11 well-crafted questions.

Interestingly enough, Mozilla never heard from ICE again.

We can only guess how often U.S. authorities try similar mild censorship requests, but if we look at all the companies and services that kicked out Wikileaks last year we have to assume that it’s not the first time. Only a few dare to stand up to such requests, which is a worrying situation.

“One of the fundamental issues here is under what conditions do intermediaries accede to government requests that have a censorship effect and which may threaten the open Internet,” says Anderson.

“Longterm, the challenge is to find better mechanisms that provide both real due process and transparency without infringing upon developer and user freedoms traditionally associated with the Internet,” he adds.

TorrentFreak got in touch with one of the MAFIAA Fire developers, who told us that ICE never contacted them with a takedown request. And although the add-on would still be available on their own website if Mozilla pulled it, he was happy that they chose to put up a fight.

“Hats off to Mozilla for sticking up to them, at first we weren’t sure if Mozilla would even host it due to its controversial nature, but they truly backed up their open source supporting words with actions,” the developer told us.

Indeed, Mozilla deserves to be applauded here for judging ICE’s request by its content, and not by the envelope in which it was sent.

Meanwhile, the MAFIAA Fire team has published a Chrome version of the add-on today. Both add-ons are Open Source and available on the official website, which also has a mirror here to ensure continuity.

Looks like ICE’s request to Mozilla just backFIREd…

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

ICE director John Morton confirmed last week that the seizures will continue in the coming years. But at the same time the authorities amp up their anti-piracy efforts, those in opposition are already coming up with ways to bypass them.

One of these initiatives is the “MAFIAA Fire” add-on for Firefox that was officially published today. The plugin, which will support the Chrome browser at a later stage too, maintains a list of all the domains that ICE (hence the fire) has seized and redirects their users to an alternative domain if the sites in question have set one up.

To start the ball rolling the add-on’s developers have redirected some of the seized sites for which they know the alternate domains, such as Torrent-Finder.com and Rojadirecta.com. In addition, they are offering webmasters the option to register an alternate domain in anticipation of an eventual domain seizure. These domains will then be verified and the site owners can “activate” them in case they’re needed.

TorrentFreak got in touch with the MAFIAA Fire developer, who told us that this is just the beginning. Inspired by a quote from John Gilmore who once said “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” they are determined to retaliate against these and other censorship attacks.

“This is just a start, now that we have opened this can of worms people can expect many add-ons, extensions and plug-ins from us,” TorrentFreak was told. “Our goal is to reverse governments attempts to censor the Internet, and nearly anything the anti-piracy people put up to protect their dinosaur business models.”

“Imagine the old game of whack-a-mole, now imagine playing on multiple machines all around you at the same time.”

“We really are tired of the corruption at the highest levels of government by these people. Enough is enough. There is a time to moan and there is a time to take action – and taking action has been long overdue,” the MAFIAA Fire developer said.

According to the add-on developer, something has to be done to stop the Internet from falling under the control of the entertainment industries or other hidden agendas. This add-on is a small step, but a start according to him.

“Governments around the world are either censoring for the entertainment companies never ending woes, or using that as an excuse to slowly get more control over the internet for their own agendas – and trampling over our rights in the process.”

“Our right to privacy should outweigh any outdated business model, unfortunately average Joe cannot afford a $10,000 plate dinner to speak to their representatives and his voice is drowned out by the vultures who have been doing this for decades,” he concluded.

Aside from redirecting seized domains, the MAFIAA Fire developer is also planning something for the websites of the various anti-piracy agencies worldwide. For this project, he is encouraging people to send in the domains of anti-piracy sites around the world, and more specifically, the country they’re operating from.

The MAFIAA Fire add-on can be downloaded from Mozilla and the official website, which also features a FAQ for those who want to know all the juicy details. The add-on code itself will be open source and released to the public in a few days.

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