The Pirate Bay has broken through the UK ISP bad curtain

The PirateBay

UK CITIZENS ARE ABLE to access the Pirate Bay today without having to circumvent service provider-installed blockades thanks, apparently, to its new relationship with Cloudflare.

The Pirate Bay was shut down recently after a raid on its host. Then it returned, but its resurrection was mired by suggestions that things did not look quite right. One of those things was its association with Cloudflare.

However, it seems that that relationship has had the unexpected benefit of giving the site and its access to magnet files an air of respectability. TorrentFreak reports that blocks have dropped to the .SE domain all over the place, and we can confirm that access through the Virgin Media internet service is as smooth as you like.

TorrentFreak believes that it is the simple addition of the S to HTTP that has cleared the for landing on UK computers without the need for a proxy. It spoke to the operator of a proxy site, who also suspects the same.

“I believe it’s because of how CloudFlare works. Simply put, when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare they remove the HTTP header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when they try to inspect the header to a list of ‘banned’ websites it won’t register,” said the operator of recently-blocked

“So any site that uses CloudFlare, has a properly configured and signed SSL certificate, and enables HTTPS-Strict under CloudFlare, should be able to evade the ban that’s imposed by Virgin and perhaps other providers.”

Via: The Inquirer