New Pirate Bay site skirts standard ISP blocks
Facing censorship in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy, the file-sharing giant launches a site at a new IP address.
May 22, 2012 4:36 p.m. PT
File-sharing specialist The Pirate Bay has launched a site that appears to be designed to help subscribers get around court-mandated blockades in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.
According to TorrentFreak, the new site is also optimized to work with proxies, in case its Internet Protocol address gets blocked.
"In most countries where The Pirate Bay is blocked, it's done by a domain and IP address filter," TorrentFreak writes. "But since TPB added a new IP address at 194.71.107.80, blocked subscribers can access the site again without problems. At least for now, that is, since in some cases, the copyright holders have the power to add new domains and addresses upon request."
The new site, accessed at that IP address, is different from The Pirate Bay's original site in several ways: it is set up to guarantee maximum compatibility with the many proxy sites, it only shows links to magnet files, and the log-in, registeration, comment, and upload functions are disabled for security reasons.