Just weeks after the High Court confirmed its order to BT to block link aggregation site Newzbin2, a new plug-in for Firefox has made the ban irrelevant.
The plug-in, called The Pirate Bay dancing, after the well known Torrent site, and made by a group called MafiaaFire, routes requests for banned sites through random proxy servers. This prevents an ISP from finding out that a user, who has clicked a link, selected a bookmark, or typed an address into their browser, is navigating to a banned site.
Once the plug-in is installed, the user just browses as normal. The list of sites covered by the plug-in includes The Pirate Bay, hence the name, and Newzbin2. MafiaaFire says more will be added as they are banned in countries in Europe, as well as the US.
MafiaaFire recently produced another plug-in which was designed to re-route requests to domains seized by US Customs and Immigration Enforcement via proxy servers.
The group told MacUser it is currently working on a plug-in for Chrome, but have no plans to make an add-on for Safari.
The availability and ease of use of the plug-in is significant. ISPs argue that blocking websites by blocking IP addresses or altering DNS records is trivial to work around and therefore pointless. Rights holders argue that it’s non-trivial and so blocking is worthwhile. If it can be shown that ISPs are right, the next time the MPA takes legal action to force an ISP to block a site, the ISP may have a stronger argument.
