The piracy landscape has changed a lot in the last decade. Prominent peer-to-peer services have been abandoned due to legal threats, torrenting emerged as the gold standard for grabbing content without paying, and lots of relatively inexpensive legal alternatives have sprung up (at least for music). There's been one constant in that landscape, however: The Pirate Bay. Perhaps the most notorious torrent-tracking site of our age is celebrating its 10th birthday; on its blog, those behind TPB have posted a message commemorating "a decade of agression [sic], repression, and lulz." It goes on to say that TPB team didn't think they'd "make it this far" — not because of "cops, mafiaa [sic], or corrupt politicians," but because they thought they'd "eventually be to [sic] old for this shit."

To go along with that anniversary, The Pirate Bay has just released its new "PirateBrowser" — essentially a modified and pre-configured version of Firefox for Windows. The browser will supposedly let users bypass any ISP blockade that keeps them from visiting TPB or any other site being blocked. According to Torrent Freak, the browser is based on Firefox 23 and includes a Tor client and proxy configurations to speed up loading times. Despite the inclusion of Tor (free software that helps anonymize your browsing experience), Torrent Freak notes that PirateBrowser doesn't actually provide anonymous browsing — it's simply to get around ISP blocks.

It's the latest tool in The Pirate Bay's "mission," but things haven't exactly been smooth sailing for the site, not for some time. Its founders recently served jail time for their activities, with one of the founders going back to prison in an unrelated Swedish hacking case. The site also stopped hosting torrent files, instead opting for "magnet" links — though it wasn't a move that really cut down on the site's usefulness to pirates. The site even had to be relocated out of Sweden recently in an effort to find more favorable legal footing. Despite all of the complications, however, the site still persists — and while we wouldn't be surprised one day to wake up and find the site finally shut down for good for one reason or another, it seems just as likely that The Pirate Bay will continue to persist.