After building a reputation as the most resilient torrent site in the galaxy, The Pirate Bay is now the most blocked torrent site on the internet. Over a decade ago, an explosion of Pirate Bay proxy sites helped break the blocks, but how are they doing today? As rights holders commit to the long term, is the hydra still fighting form in 2023?
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium and Brazil; just two letters of the alphabet and there are already five countries that have implemented the ISP block against The Pirate Bay.
The growing list, which continues with Denmark and persists in Finland, France and Germany, does not stop until it reaches the United Arab Emirates and finally the United Kingdom.
That's about 30 countries overall, give or take, that have resorted to ISP blocking because no matter what comes your way, The Pirate Bay just refuses to die.
At least in part, the site lives on after more than a decade of widespread blocking due to the existence of proxy sites. These sites tend to look and feel like The Pirate Bay, but they operate from different domain names that are not yet on the ISP block lists.
This means that blocked internet users can generally enjoy the same Pirate Bay experience as before. At least for a while.
Rights holders also block Pirate Bay proxies
As reported Yesterday, one of the most popular Pirate Bay proxy indexing sites recently disappeared from GitHub.
ProxyBay was a major player, having helped tens of millions of users gain access to The Pirate Bay by directing them to active Pirate Bay proxy sites. However, like The Pirate Bay, proxy sites are also subject to ISP blocking, which can make some of them redundant, not to mention inaccessible.
Since proxy sites and proxy indexes contribute to the overall health of the Pirate Bay 'hydra', that got us thinking: Is the hydra alive and well? Or has it lost too many heads over the years?
Data sources used
While we are aware that proxy sites are facing blocking in various countries, we have never delved into the details until today. It quickly became clear that a full description would require a lot of time and resources, but our short report today should help set the tone.
To gauge rights holder responses to strictly Pirate Bay proxy sites, we obtained block lists of domains used by ISPs in the UK, Denmark and Italy. The original plan was to include Portugal, India, and a handful of other countries, but the volume of data soon became overwhelming.
Rather than include those additional countries, we use data from the Infringing Websites List (IWL) operated by the UK Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit.
Proxies face a massive block
After merging data from all four sources, we removed duplicate proxy domains, domains that were not clearly dedicated or targeted to Pirate Bay, as well as domains where their key function could not be identified due to downtime or other reasons.
The final total of Pirate Bay proxies, all of which are subject to blocks and/or trade restrictions due to their appearance on IWL, is 670-690 domains, give or take. While that's still a large number, including other countries' block lists would have inflated that number considerably.
The big question is if all those domains are active, working and helping to unlock The Pirate Bay. The simple answer to that is 'no'. While we were able to test if the sites were active in any way, we couldn't determine exactly what they were doing unless we visited each one and took a screenshot as evidence.
โฆ..So that's what we did
The image below is made up of about 670 screenshots showing obviously live proxies (mostly white), many apparently dead (dark) proxies, and a surprising number of domains for sale (mostly blue). (Click to enlarge)
It is not possible to determine the exact reasons why so many proxies seem to have thrown in the towel, in some cases across multiple domains. That being said, it's very likely that ISP blocking played a part in dampening enthusiasm for spending more money on another domain.
Since the data was available, we decided to throw all active domains into your DNS and then wait for a list of IP addresses to appear. We feed them in a IP location service which produced the map in the image below.
The large blue blob on the left, which represents the location most of the Pirate Bay proxies point to, is the home of Cloudflare and another type of proxy: a reverse proxy.
That means that, in all likelihood, Pirate Bay proxies are hosted somewhere else entirely, not unlike The Pirate Bay. For now.
