Pirate Party Proxy

The Pirate Party UK has hosted a proxy (tpb.pirateparty.org.uk), allowing people to connect to the Pirate Bay via Pirate Party servers, since the 19th of April 2012. We provided the proxy as a tool for users on networks where the Pirate Bay is blocked through filtering, and in support of our sister party in the Netherlands.  

Our proxy continues to be a legitimate route to the Pirate Bay for those affected by court orders issued to some (but not all) UK ISP's requiring the site to be blocked. Whilst some providers continue to allow access to the web in an unfiltered manner, others are unfortunately choosing (or being ordered by a court) to deliberately try and limit access to specific parts of the internet.

As a result of today's blocking of the Pirate Bay by BT we've seen an approximate increase of 9% total requests via the proxy.  At one point over 10% of proxy traffic appeared to come from BT connections.

Random sampling indicates that 30% of traffic comes from VirginMedia, with 15% from Sky
and 11% from BT connections.  That sampling is carried out without the need to log or store the details of individual connections. 

Pirateparty.org.uk is currently ranked as the 599th most popular site in the UK and 22,541st in the world by Alexa.com.  Visits to the main (non-proxy) site are up over 1000% since 01 April 2012 with the most popular areas for visitors being our press releases, discussion about the tpb proxy, membership, our policies and the party blog (in order).