Pirate Bay Releases ‘Pirate Browser’ to Thwart Censorship | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay Releases ‘Pirate Browser’ to Thwart Censorship

torrentfreak.com

119 pointsderpenxyne41 comments

> They are also working on a special BitTorrent-powered browser, which lets users store and distribute The Pirate Bay and other websites on their own.

Great idea.

If this came as a plugin, it would probably spread faster.

(This is btw how I think any next-gen social network should work - no more central servers, everything distributed.)

We could call it Diaspora!

The link shown in the screenshot is http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ but I thought TPB's "TOR hidden service" link was http://jntlesnev5o7zysa.onion/ . I wonder what's going on.

You can use tor2web to (slowly) browse .onion sites. https://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.tor2web.org/ looks like TPB to me.

But that was my point; both sites look like TPB. Which is the real one and which is a potentially logging proxy?

What guarantees do you have that the real one doesn't log?

OK, none. But at least the real one has a proven history of not injecting malware. Or something, I don't know. Logging was just an example of what a malicious middleman might do.

The real one that peddles trashy spyware, scamware and toolbars for revenue?

Obvious cheap shot is obvious.

Here I was wondering if your statement was FUD from someone who revenue comes directly from the game industry, or if the statement was based on facts.

To that, I went to the old hidden service url, and looked at what kind of ads was presented[1]. Did I see any spyware? No. Did I see any scamware? No. Any toolbars? No.

What I did find was sex ads of plenty. That makes sense. What other businesses would risk being accessory to copyright infringement, but an industry that often need to hide themselve (unjustly, but that's an other story)? An obvious observation from the trial is that any kind of trading with the TPB, be that bandwidth, hosting environment, electricity or anything whatsoever can be enough to land you in jail for accessory charges.

Conclusion. benologist comment was FUD, likely influenced by his own revenue source. However, if he provide a source for his statement, I am fully willing to change my opinion.

[1]: (first time I ever went and looked for ads)

http://imgur.com/Bma34Ml http://imgur.com/eDcgGKJ

1) Those big green buttons everywhere are some adware-slash-spyware-slash-shitware-hard-to-remove installer for iLivid which hijacks browsers, installs toolbars, etc: http://community.norton.com/t5/Norton-Internet-Security-Nort...

2) The banking thing is a get rich quick scam: http://www.banker-secrets.com/

3) "Anonymous download" is another random installer.

4) The "play now" / "watch now" images are ads for some scabby online streaming video site that doesn't even have the advertised video, just a Google Adsense block over a different video.

5) Unseen, below the fold they recommend a torrent client that is "No Spyware, 100% Free 100% safe and Trusted", and pays for every install that kindly bundles even more shitware: "Nortan Security Scan", "Babylon Toolbar", "IWantThis", "DealPly", "BrowseForChange", a Firefox addon and a Chrome addon: http://www.bitlordapp.com/uninstall

6) Also unseen is a popup peddling some shitware called MacKeeper: http://www.cultofmac.com/170522/is-mackeeper-really-a-scam/

It doesn't take billions of pageviews a month riddled with this garbage to pay for servers or bandwidth unless they got locked into a multi-decade contract a decade ago and now operate on an enormous fleet of decade-old servers at decade-ago prices.

Conclusion: It's really easy to believe these guys are "fighting for you" because that's the image their PR machine has very carefully cultivated while exploiting everyone.

I guess you must be visiting their regular un-tor site, and not the two tor addresses above. The ads there wouldn't even load, and only showed "Your ads here" text fields, except for the pop with porn/gambling. The green bars to iLivid is still there through, a fact they share with download.com

Disliking the download manager is indeed a fair point, but I don't see how its connected to which tor site is the official one. Both links to it.

What would it log?

tor2web is actually faster for accessing .onion sites than using the standard Tor client. From the Tor docs:

  Tor2webMode 0|1
    When this option is set, Tor connects to hidden services non-anonymously.
    This option also disables client connections to non-hidden-service
    hostnames through Tor. It must only be used when running a tor2web Hidden
    Service web proxy. To enable this option the compile time flag
    --enable-tor2webmode must be specified. (Default: 0)

What it actually does is reduce the number of hops that the client uses for connecting to the rendevouz point from 3 to 2.

Only the second one is known publicly, there's no results anywhere for the one in the screenshot. I'm very curious why there's two.

Maybe this is just full of backdoors for the Russian Mafia to turn your rig into another node of their botnet?

They should have named it after a real pirate ship : http://www.noblesandcourtiers.org/famous-pirate-ships.htm

Delivery sounds fine.

I've frequently heard complaints that bittorrent folks using Tor put unhelpful strain on the network--is the distribution of this browser going to be a problem in that way?

This has nothing to do with routing Bittorent traffic.

Yes, the package as is will not route the bittorent traffic over tor, but since this is for people who don't even know how to use proxies, some of them will probably start configuring their torrent clients to use the same proxies.

If they don't even know how to use proxies, I somehow doubt they'd even consider fiddling about in their BitTorrent client's proxy settings. How would they even know what to put in there?

Checked out YouTube lately? Some content isn't bad, but there seems to be just as much noise that gives horrible advice and no one should waste their time watching.

Potentially stupid question – how is this different from the Tor browser bundle?

It appears that this is designed to prevent censorship, as opposed to Tor's broader goal of anonymization.

You can't trust it. Seriously, TPB is constantly full of spam and exploits inside of spam and spammy exploits. Why would you ever run an executable from TPB? What a joke.

It's not that much different, just a rebranded version with a configuration that prioritises speed over anonymity (by permitting single hop relays so it effectively works like a normal http proxy), and doesn't select exit nodes in countries that block their website.

Cool, but why not Opera in off-road mode?

Because opera is just reskinned chrome.

And that stops UK users accessing TPB how?

How so? There's more to a browser than a rendering engine you know.

And until recently Chrome was just a re-skinned Safari?

Right.

Safari is just a re-skinned Konqueror, anyway.

Firefox is open-source and can be legally modified. Opera isn't.

True but not relevant. This isn't a privacy thing, its just purely about accessing pirate bay and other blocked sites. So open source and so on is irrelevant in that goal.

Edit: Quote added. "“This browser is just to circumvent censorship, to remove limits on accessing sites governments don’t want you to know about,” The Pirate Bay notes."

Does the Opera license allow to distribute modified versions setup to automatically use Tor for .onion URLs, without getting special permissions from Opera Software?

In addition: Why Opera? I don't see any significant advantages over Firefox. There are probably more users who are familiar with Firefox than with Opera.

Also, being open source, one can evaluate the source code and check the "secure browser" isn't leaking secrets.

Maybe they just wanted to use Firefox.

Why not explain why they should use Opera?

Because some people don't use un-free software.

And that's why this ‘Pirate Browser’ only runs on Windows...

I know you are poking fun, but it is legitimate to start working on something that is opensource and free on an unfree OS to one day offer the minority that are on a free OS the option.

Looks like they're basing it on previous work done by the Tor Browser Bundle (which actually does have Mac and Linux clients).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com