With its ongoing efforts to censor the Internet, the UK has been developing quite a reputation recently.
This week prime minister David Cameron’s announcement that ISPs will be instructed to implement a ‘default on’ filtering scheme to deny access to porn and other yet-to-be-defined content has only added to the controversy.
Of course, it’s almost inevitable that when content is blocked there will be those who seek to unblock it. That’s been the case with the High Court-ordered blockades of various torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and, as reported this week, against popular TV torrent site EZTV.
But while dozens of proxy sites have appeared to offer workarounds, those too are slowly being added to the UK’s blocklist. If only there was a proxy service to unblock torrent sites and unblock the proxies too, people have cried.
Well now there is.
Called Immunicity, it’s from the people behind Torrenticity and it’s the first web-based tool to offer both a torrent site and torrent site proxy unblocking service.
“We are angered by the censorship that is happening in the UK and in other countries across the globe, so we got our thinking caps on and decided to do something about it,” Immunicity’s operators told TorrentFreak.
“We saw that there was a gap in the market for anti-censorship services. VPNs are great but they often require a subscription, Tor is great too but it’s very slow and getting it running just to browse a few torrent sites can be cumbersome. Immunicity is different because it is free and implemented in such a way that the end result is seamless access to previously blocked content.”
Immunicity currently unblocks a range of sites listed here. It can unblock censored websites over http and https, route censored sites over its own servers, and will work for users in any country, not just the UK. It’s free to use, there’s no software to install and registration is not required.
“All it needs is for the user to change one setting in their web browser, then when they next attempt to access a blocked site, it will be seamlessly routed via our proxy servers to get unblocked,” Immunicity’s operators explain.
Users of the service have to follow a specific set of instructions depending on the browser they’re using but it’s really simple. In Firefox, for example, users only have to click options, network, settings, click a checkbox, paste in a URL and click OK. To turn the service off again is even more straightforward.
Interestingly, while Immunicity unblocks torrent sites now, it will also unblock porn sites in the future.
“With Cameron’s upcoming porn ‘opt-in’ filter, we intend to include many of the web’s porn sites in our offering. The end result will be seamless access to pornography that would typically be blocked under his plans. When these sites are added, users will not have to update their configuration or do anything else, they can simply start browsing like they did before,” Immunicity explain.
“We are planning on having multiple configurations, ‘all’, ‘torrent sites’, and ‘pornography’, so users can decide which type of site they want to use with Immunicity. Changing will simply be a case of entering a different PAC file. Of course we’ll be adding more and more servers as and when we need to in order to handle all the traffic,” they conclude.
Update: The site’s operators also inform us that they do not log.
