As Internet censorship becomes a weekly topic of debate, there are those who consider it their duty to free the web from artificial restrictions. Interestingly, when TorrentFreak discussed the issue with one of the largest Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents proxy sites, the issue of file-sharing wasn't top of the list. An overwhelming desire not to be dictated to by the money men seemed far more important, that coupled with technical and logistical challenges aplenty.

In many countries across Europe users visiting many of the world’s leading torrent sites are greeted with messages informing them that the domain is no longer available.

These court-ordered blockades requested by the music and movie industries are becoming widespread, but even more common are tools to circumvent them.

One of the most straightforward and popular ways to unblock a site is by using a reverse proxy. There are dozens of them online and they are as easy to use as a regular website. So what makes these sites tick and what motivates their operators to keep them online?

TorrentFreak caught up with dhxr, an operator of PirateReverse.info, one of the largest torrent site proxies.

Censorship – necessary evil or something to be fought against?

“Personally I am against censorship at all levels bar extremities. Essentially there should be no censorship of the internet except for content such as child pornography. These views extend to mediums such as books and other publications,” dhxr explains.

“In the UK the IWF maintains a list of such content that has been blocked for a number of years – but as with every other instance this can be abused and used to block content on political or copyright grounds.”

Dhxr notes that in some cases censorship is acceptable, at work for example when you’re there to a job and not sit around on Facebook all day. But when we get home and are paying for what is now becoming a limited service, things change.

“One might say the definition of being able to access the internet is having the ability to at least connect to all 4,294,967,296 IPv4 addresses and 3.4*10^38 IPv6 addresses if your ISP provides IPv6,” he says.

As each week goes on, however, it’s clear that’s not what we’re getting.

What motivates to create and keep anti-circumvention tools online?

“For me, it was the realization that censorship of this level is wrong and cannot be tolerated. Why should we have some corporate interests govern what we can and cannot see?

“Unfortunately that is the way it is going – because fundamentally it is all about money, despite the many studies that claim blocking sites has little to no effect on record label and film company profits.

“I think most people who run proxy sites also share this realization and wish to help the effort. There can never be too many proxy sites,” dhxr observes.

Why are proxies and reverse proxies so important?

“Proxy sites are important because they are the easiest to use. There is no setting anything up for the user, just type in a URL and see the site you’re used to seeing. Their place in online society has only been formed out of necessity. If no torrent sites were blocked, then little to no torrent site proxies would exist. As it happens, with censorship rife in many countries, the need for accessible proxy sites is ever increasing, and with the more sites being blocked around the world, demand will continue to increase,” dhxr predicts.

Reverse proxies – how do they work?

“The term ‘reverse proxy’ relates to how the servers are configured. Typically a ‘forward proxy’ takes requests from clients (such as a web browser), fetches the content, and sends it back,” dhxr explains.

“An example of this is Immunicity. By requesting and relaying the content from an unblocked server, it allows unrestricted access to specific resources. On the other hand, a ‘reverse proxy’ does the same but rather than being setup in a web browser as a proxy, it is setup as a website, so all the user needs to do is type in a URL and the server requests content from the original site, then sends it back to the user.”

Maintaining a reverse proxy

“Daily maintenance is slim, it consists of checking everything is working as intended. Most other system admin tasks are automated. We don’t log so this removes a large maintenance hurdle of rotating the logs and managing disk space. We cache responses in memory because it’s faster than writing to disk, which is an important part of the process because without it, the proxies would be slow,” dhxr reveals.

Overcoming challenges

“As part of our almost daily routine, I check TorrentFreak and see if blocks against any new sites have been announced. Typically I like to get the domains sorted as soon as the sites are mentioned as candidates to be blocked, then I can get to work proxying them and ensuring they work fine, well ahead of when the blocks are due to be implemented. This can sometimes be challenging because from a technical level every site is different,” dhxr notes.

Interestingly there is one particular site that causes more problems than most.

“We don’t really know why, but Kickass’ servers compress all their content and you can’t ask for it uncompressed like most sites. This makes it very difficult, as many other proxy operators have experienced, to rewrite Kickass’ URLs so images and CSS load from an unblocked domain,” dhxr explains.

“At first we wrote a script that would manually ungzip content but it was slow and inefficient. Now, after much research and testing, we use Apache inbetween our web-facing servers and Kickass, which is configured to decompress content ready for the URLs to be rewritten so the site loads as the user would expect.”

Hardware – the thirst for more power

Initially PirateReverse used a small VPS server located inside the UK but that was soon moved to Sweden where it operated for several months. But due to an increase in demand, an upgrade was in order. Dhxr told us that two additional servers were obtained in Spain and the Isle of Man but a 16Gbps DDoS attack caused the site’s host to lose patience with the service.

“We took this opportunity to move onto our own dedicated hardware, which is what we’re still using today as it provides more than enough capacity which helps ensure our proxies are always fast regardless of how many people are using them. We currently have two web servers, each configured in parallel. There are other servers behind the scenes too that help keep everything running smoothly,” we were told.

PirateReverse are connected with the Immunicity unblocking service, so even more hardware is needed there.

“We have a few servers running the Immunicity website, the load balancer and configuration broker. Then we have two gateway servers, currently running in parallel.

“We have hardware pending installation, which when configured will replace the existing gateways. These new servers are more powerful and will keep Immunicity running for the foreseeable future at least, with 16GB RAM, 2TB HDD and 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E3 processors each,” dxhr reveals.

Looking to the future

Finally, what happens next month and next year? Dxhr says he’s not optimistic and fears for the health of the Internet.

“What was once thought to be open, has slowly started to become compromised by corporate interests. It is hard to predict specifically what will happen, but I think encryption will become a key element in what we do online in future,” he predicts.

“As for proxy sites, they can easily be blocked, and they are. Many of our domains for example are now blocked by UK ISPs. Whatever happens though, there will always be technical ways to circumvent censorship – success of these methods can often be down to the complexity, and the laws surrounding their use,” dxhr concludes.