Scammers and con artists on the internet generally make their money by tricking the less web-savvy amongst us into parting with either their credit card or login details through fake sites, or convincing us that by paying them you can get unfettered access to all the pirated bounty of movies, music, and software that resides online. People are generally getting wiser to these tricks, but when there’s easy money conned out of people – there will always be someone ready, willing, and morally shady enough to oblige.
It would be difficult to have missed the recent UK court case in which the copyright industry have managed to get the major UK ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay – the famous bittorrent site that offers easy access to all types of pirated content. In response to this, various people and organisations have created proxy sites to enable users to access The Pirate Bay and skirting around those technical blocks (I wrote previously how pointless these blocks are in reality). Most of these proxies have been set up by people aligned with the Pirate Bay’s free culture philosophy and are free to use, however there are a few that alter the Pirate Bay site through their proxy and only provide access to the torrent files once a user has “donated”. Whatever your stance on “illegal” downloading, there is no doubt that if you are paying money for content then that money should go to the creators.
Luckily those behind the Pirate Bay are onto the problem and are breaking through these proxies as they find them and redirecting users to their blog post describing the problems. Moreover, they have also set up Pirate Reverse which both explains to users how to set up their own proxies to the Pirate Bay and actually works as a proxy itself to the Pirate Bay, Torrentz, ISOhunt, and others. Technological censorship simply does not work, it is about time the legal system starts to appreciate that.