Pirate Browser a Hit with Torrent Sites

The largest BitTorrent tracker in the world, The Pirate Bay, is now celebrating a massive 100,000 downloads of its own censorship dodging Pirate Browser in just a couple days. The new browser, containing Firefox portable, foxyproxy, and Tor, was developed by TPB team to get around government blockades placed on torrent services and other file-sharing sites.

It’s been a while that a range of European countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, and Ireland, have imposed blocks on accessing TPB and other services. For example, in the UK, online filters will have to become default for all packages offered by Internet service providers. This is why the Pirate Browser has additional purposes beyond torrenting.

It should be noted that the browser by itself doesn’t guarantee anonymity. The Pirate Bay points out that if you really want to get that rare commodity, you can sign up with a trusted VPN in order to route your traffic through. However, even this way won’t secure you 100%.

In the meantime, the immediate success of the Pirate Browser will be a blow to such governments as the UK’s, where its deeply unpopular policy, traditionally dressed up as a moral crusade to protect kids, is actually being used to decide what is and what is not acceptable for grown adults to access on the Internet. The BitTorrent tracker itself has long been a target of entertainment industry backed politicians who are told that piracy is an enormous threat to the world economy. The Pirate Bay, its operators and owners have frequently been vocal about their opposition to such policies, because those are restrictive to online freedoms.