The Pirate Bay’s own PirateBrowser Web browser has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times since its launch in August last year, but the filesharing site is already working on a successor.
PirateBrowser was designed to help people access The Pirate Bay and other torrent services even if they were blocked by their ISP, while also circumventing other kinds of Internet censorship in countries including Iran and North Korea.
It reached 1 million downloads by mid-October last year, and has added a further 1.5 million since then, but it seems set to be replaced by a new client later this year that will use peer-to-peer technology to evade ISP-level blocks on people’s online activities.
“The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site’s indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed or rendered locally,” an unnamed Pirate Bay “insider” told TorrentFreak.
“It’s basically a browser-like app that uses Web kit to render pages and BitTorrent to download the content, while storing everything locally,” he said.
The story claims that the new software will be made available as a standalone Web browser, or as a plugin for Mozilla’s Firefox — on which PirateBrowser was based — and Google’s Chrome browsers. The first version is not expected to be released until later in the year, with The Pirate Bay recruiting coders to help with the project.
News of the new project comes at a time when The Pirate Bay is being blocked by a growing number of ISPs across Europe, often as the result of court rulings following cases brought by music or film industry rightsholders.
That includes the UK, where a case brought by music industry body the BPI resulted in a British High Court ruling in April 2012 that five of the largest British ISPs must block their clients from accessing The Pirate Bay.
The site reached its 10th birthday in August last year, but was forced to change its domain name six times that year.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not