Whatever else you may say about The Pirate Bay, you can't deny that it's an interesting organization. This past summer the group announced plans for a "beautiful" NSA-proof messaging system they call Hemlis (Swedish for "secret"). Also this past summer co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg sentenced to two years in Swedish jail for hacking. Now they're planning something truly remarkable; a torrent-based parallel Internet that can't be blocked or censored.

Reasonable Skepticism

Last August saw the release of Pirate Browser, a mashup of Firefox Portable and TOR (The Onion Router), with some special sauce to circumvent censorship in various countries that limit Internet access. However, analysis by PCMag experts turned up some serious limitations in the product. It does offer access to various torrent sites (including The Pirate Bay, of course) that might normally be blocked, but it doesn't actually make use of TOR's anonymizing proxy features, and doesn't even include a BitTorrent client.

Given that track record, I initially viewed the latest news with a certain skepticism. It's true that nobody ever promised that PirateBrowser would provide anonymous Web surfing, but users might easily assume anonymity due to the use of TOR. In addition, this browser disables a number of security protections normally found in Firefox. Our review gave it just two stars.

Torrent-Style Internet

The wildly popular BitTorrent protocol allows users to share files without requiring a server for storage. Files reside on other users' computers, and a BitTorrent download will come from many different PCs. This peer-to-peer file sharing is especially useful when the files being shared are pirated, as there's no central server that authorities could locate and shut down.

According to Torrent-tracking news site TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay plans to create a Torrent-style system for censor-proof transmission of Web pages. "The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site's indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed/rendered locally," according to "a Pirate Bay insider."

In the normal course of things, your browser consults the Domain Name System to find the IP address of the site you want to visit. It sends a request to that site's server and gets back the page you requested. Under the proposed system, your browser will find the desired site using a parallel DNS system, and will download the page from the BitTorrent swarm of other users. The page will be stored locally, and future visits will download only changes, not the whole page.

Can It Work?

The BitTorrent website states, "More than 170 million people use our products every month. Our protocols move as much as 40% of the world's Internet traffic on a daily basis." That's a pretty successful operation, especially considering the substantial pushback from governments and other groups trying to prevent sharing of copyrighted materials.

Unlike the misbegotten mashup released as PirateBrowser, I think this thing could actually work. As the TorrentFreak article pointed out, "It may take a few months before the first version is released in public, but it already promises to be a game changer in the ongoing censorship Whack-a-Mole."

Image courtesy of Flickr user taymtaym.

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