This week censorship of The Pirate Bay is the hot topic and inevitably online discussion has centered on the main issue – how this censorship can be circumvented.
A selection of methods were suggested by the site’s operators, all of them very easy to carry out. In fact, some of the best solutions, such as the proxy being provided by the UK Pirate Party, require absolutely no technical knowledge. Indeed, they require no thought at all.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a brilliantly simple solutions, they are perfect for those who just want to get a job done with minimum fuss. However, to those who like to pop the hood and have a tinker, there are more interesting methods available too.
And there’s a point to making things harder than they need to be. One day – maybe next year, maybe five years on – censorship will be worse than it is now. Legislation like SOPA may have been defeated but it will be back, probably worse than ever. Preparing for the worst never hurts.
Luckily, this isn’t a tough challenge. While previous generations may have stretched their brains with a challenging crossword, the Internet generation relishes the kinds of mind-boggling puzzles thrown up by games such as Portal 2. Unblocking a website? -Yawn- Come on, that’s child’s play in comparison, so lets be a bit more obscure – just for fun.
So users of UK ISP Virgin Media can no longer access The Pirate Bay? Well, presuming you still have access to Google there are a few little tricks we can try. First, to access TPB paste this URL into your browser.
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=en&js=n&u=thepiratebay.se&sl=es&tl=en
With this technique everything works apart from one key feature – the ability to search. Any attempt goes straight back to the piratebay.se domain directly which results in a Virgin block. But importantly it is possible to use The Pirate Bay’s most important resources – its index, magnet links and hash codes – without ever going to the site.
If you want to download Dan Bull’s song from TPB even if Virgin are blocking you, click here to search The Pirate Bay for “Sharing is Caring” using Google.
The same results as you would get on The Pirate Bay are now shown in Google’s results instead and if you hover over the correct link, Google will even show you a cached copy of the Pirate Bay page in question. Also, as you will have noticed, to make things more interesting we’ve added the term “info hash” to the search in order to make sure the hash code for Dan’s song is shown in Google’s results.
Now, if we copy that hash code into the entry box on this site, it will kindly generate a magnet link for us. In my case clicking that magnet link will open uTorrent, and Dan’s song begins to download.
A similar result can be achieved by conducting a search like this, finding and copying the TPB URL (in this case https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7205038) into the clipboard, then pasting that here and generating a magnet link.
This magnet fetching site goes about the same task in a slightly different way.
The important thing to note here is how important hash codes and magnets are. Once a hash code is known it can be converted into a magnet. With the help of uTorrent that magnet can be converted into a torrent. Have torrent, will download.
After going through the silly long-winded exercises above, a couple of things should be clear. One, you can’t stop people accessing the resources of The Pirate Bay, even if it’s successfully blocked. Two, you can’t block text and if you can’t block text you can’t block this CF87CC0D6B0DB21D2221694EFFAE3758479AD4D1.
And if you can’t block that then the web blocking brigade have already lost.
