To mark the scurrilous website’s tenth anniversary, the Pirate Bay team has launched PirateBrowser, a re-branded version of Firefox intended to allow users to circumvent censorship for many websites—especially The Pirate Bay itself.

According to the main PirateBrowser page, “PirateBrowser is a bundle package of the Tor client (Vidalia), FireFox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens.”

The use of Tor, a network of sites that anonymizes web traffic by routing requests for content through computers within the network, is particularly interesting. But no one should use the PirateBrowser thinking it will make them anonymous. PirateBrowser simply enables users to bypass any limitations on sites that might be imposed upon them by their Internet provider. Thus, if your ISP was blocking you from, oh, say, the Pirate Bay website, this browser would have another system on the Tor network serve up the site’s pages to you. The browser is pre-loaded with bookmarks for commonly blocked sites such as Bitsnoop, EZTV, H33t and KickassTorrents.

The browser itself is so far only available on Windows for now, though TorrentFreak is reporting that Mac and Linux versions are on the way soon. The Pirate Bay teams members have some additional ideas about how to prevent sites like theirs from being blocked.

The Pirate Bay team informs TorrentFreak that ‘PirateBrowser’ is just the first step in their efforts to fight web censorship. 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.

In theory, this will allow sites to exist and update even without having a public facing website. As a result, it will be virtually impossible to block or shut them down.

The Pirate Bay’s efforts are, of course, self-serving, and will go a long way for keeping the torrent file site accessible to many for the foreseeable future. But there is also a thread of truth in their claims that the mere availability of software packages like this will improve access for many users.

Many, but not all. Even using Tor and virtual private network software for anonymous surfing carries its own risks in truly oppressive regimes. While packets of data within such networks are encrypted and anonymous, Internet service providers are still aware you are using VPN or Tor, and in some countries that may be enough to bring the authorities knocking on your door.

Image courtesy James Losey, via Creative Commons 2.0 license