The Pirate Bay and other supposedly banned torrent sites have found a new way to get past the blocks imposed by Britain's largest broadband providers. Court orders force ISPs such as BT, Virgin Media and Sky to blacklist hundreds of sites that encourage copyright infringement, most notably The Pirate Bay.
However, the torrent sites are using a new DNS provider, CloudFlare, which apparently circumvents the blocking mechanisms used by several of the leading broadband providers, meaning their customers once again have access to the barred sites.
The main Pirate Bay website has reportedly been available to customers of several of the leading ISPs for a number of days (although the site appeared to be offline, not blocked, at the time of publication). Other blacklisted Pirate Bay proxies, such as https://ilikerainbows.co/ were also readily available on our test BT Broadband connection.
The operator of ILikeRainbows explained how CloudFlare bypasses the broadband providers' gateways. "Simply put when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare they remove the HTTP Header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when they try to inspect the header to a list of 'banned' websites it won’t register,” he told TorrentFreak. "So any site that uses CloudFlare, has a properly configured and signed SSL Certificate and enables HTTPS-Strict under CloudFlare should be able to evade the ban that’s imposed by Virgin and perhaps other providers."
There's no suggestion that CloudFlare is deliberately attempting to circumvent the broadband providers' blocks: simply that it's particular configuration makes it harder for the broadband providers to identify banned sites.
The move will once again raise questions over the effectiveness of attempting to block sites accused of piracy. Determined users can easily find ways to circumvent the existing measures themselves, and the process is costly for both rights holders and the affected internet providers. Smaller ISPs are exempt from the court orders, meaning customers of companies such as Zen Internet already have unrestricted access to the torrent sites.