Not only is the Pirate Bay back up and running, but now UK users of the internet's most notorious website used for illegal BitTorrent file sharing are able to access it directly without needing to use a proxy.

The Pirate Bay has been officially back up and running since 31 January, almost two months after its servers were raided, and it seemed that life was back to normal, with one exception – UK users can now access thepiratebay.se domain directly, even though the website remains blocked by UK internet service providers (ISP).

The reason this is now possible is because the Pirate Bay switched to CloudFlare, a free global content delivery network (CDN) and DNS provider.

By using CloudFlare's SSL service and enabling HTTPS Strict on it, the Pirate Bay is able to now slip through the nets of the ISPs as when the ISPs try to inspect the header of the website, the http header has been removed.

According to Torrent Freak, The Pirate Bay is not the only blocked website from the list of banned websites given to UK ISPs that is now freely available – users can also access the https versions of Torrentz.eu, Rarbg.com and Isohunt.to.

As for other popular banned websites like Kickass.to and Extratorrent, it varies according to the ISP whether the user is able to connect to the website or not.

The Pirate Bay has been officially banned in the UK following a ruling by the High Court in London in April 2012, which ordered all ISPs including Sky, TalkTalk, Everything Everywhere, Virgin Media, and O2 to block their customers from accessing file-sharing website The Pirate Bay.

It is very difficult to completely block illegal file sharing websites, however. Proponents of the Pirate Bay have repeatedly found workarounds and solutions to enable users to access the website, such as proxy servers, of which there are many.

Also, file sharing websites no longer host any incriminating content, but rather they contain magnet links to users who have the music and films available to share on their computer hard drives.