Several major UK ISPs began blocking requests for The Pirate Bay this week, thanks to a court order coming into effect. The Pirate Bay reports that it saw an extra 12 million visitors on the first day of the block, and is pleased by all the publicity. They offer the following tips for anyone looking to circumvent a national Pirate Bay block. From TorrentFreak:

"Another thing that's good with the traffic surge is that we now have time to teach even more people how to circumvent Internet censorship," the insider added…

First off they advise that the most simple solution is to use a VPN, such as iPredator or other similar services that carry no logs.

These VPN providers cost money but there are free solutions too. Companies such as VPNReactor offer a free service that is time limited to around 30 mins per session, but that's plenty of time for users to get on Pirate Bay and download the torrent files they need. Once users have the torrents in their client, the blocking has been bypassed and even with the VPN turned off, downloads will still complete.

Pirate Bay are also recommending the use of TOR but only for the initial accessing of their website and the downloading of the .torrent files. Torrent clients themselves should never be run over TOR, the system isn't designed for it and besides, transfers will be pitifully slow. TPB also point to I2P as a further unblocking option.

While the above options will cut straight through any kind of blocking with zero problems, Pirate Bay are also advising people to change their DNS provider. By permanently switching to a DNS offered by the likes of OpenDNS and Google, users of UK ISPs that censor The Pirate Bay purely by DNS will have a free and effective work around.

