Last year, we set up a proxy to assist in providing access to the Pirate Bay for those facing various forms of censorship and blocking of the site in their local environment (anyone using cryptostorm faces no such issues, of course, so this is a service for the wider community).
Since then we've added several more such proxies, having watched as these blocking regimes have spread to additional trackers.
From time to time, as the underlying trackers mutate and evolve, our proxies will become decoupled from the backend. We really haven't put any high-end performance and uptime tracking on these things, since they're more of an informal resources than something we deploy with an aim for big-percentage uptime as a primary objective.
So the goal of this thread is twofold:
- One, we ask that folks post here if one of the proxies goes unavailable or otherwise has issues. That way, we can take a look at what's happened and hopefully get it patched up quickly; also, if you have information or suggestions on where a given tracker has moved, let us know and it'll speed the process of patching our proxies.
Two, this opening post in the thread will keep a current list of all the proxies we are currently supporting. That way, when one drops we can remove it here and hopefully dispel any mystery about what happened. Note that, in general, if a tracker drops in what looks to be a permanent, we'll redirect that subdomain to one of the still-active proxies, so folks don't just get a dead page. This seems fairest and most useful, to us, but if you're the admin of a now-dead proxy and this is not your preference, let us know and we'll be happy to follow your lead.
Naturally, any feedback or suggestions on the proxies is more than welcome. Often these things end up creating "grey zone" questions about what's right and where we should steer them; we'd be much happier to be making these decisions collaboratively, versus doing our best as a team and not really knowing if we've hit the sweet spot, or not, in terms of a broader perspective.
To they copytrolls and other various media oligarcy goons who will surely end up reading this thread, please understand: these are proxies, ffs! We "host" no content, and sending us "takedown notices" is supremely silly. We've nothing to take down. Nor are we a "search engine" that can "remove links" if you spin magic legal-sounding words at us. We proxy connections through, that's it. Screaming at and threatening is will, quite literally, get you nowhere. True, that can be entertaining - and we do occasionally post such missives here (like this, or this) for public enjoyment - but it's like demanding that the sky block raindrops so you don't get wet. Not only does the sky not care if you get wet, or not, it is not in its capabilities to block raindrops headed your way. Becoming "angry" at it for this putative failure is, well, supremely silly.
Our support for these proxies does have a heavy impact on our google search rankings for our main cryptostorm.is site. As the media spambots report "DMCA violations" for hundreds and thousands of torrents being listed via the underlying trackers, google categorizes these "files" as being "hosted" on cryptostorm.is. It is in the nature of a well-run proxy that, indeed, it appears publicly to be providing the data directly (which is not, behind the scenes, the case). So google gets increasingly angry at cryptostorm when we fail to "take down" these "files" after being warned by google's automated tools. We try to explain the nature of the proxies, but we're probably about 200 layers of bureaucracy away from an actual human being at google who might actually care. Worse, google perhaps is more than willing to kneecap a troublesome network security provider who doesn't bow down to the big media cartels when threatened with specious, spam-delivered doom.
So if you search for us on google and find we're oddly low in every possible search category, now you know why. Sorry about that. You also know, by definition, that those way up the search lists from us aren't doing proxies like ours, and won't stand firm against copytroll spam that comes their way. Which is an interesting bit of data, when you think about it.
We've been supporting filesharing and the privacy of shared data, in peer to peer settings, for more than six years - our tech team launched TorrentFreedom.net back in the day when everyone was blocking torrent traffic on "VPN services," and we helped change the dialogue about whether filesharing was "acceptable" or not in a network privacy services. So, needless to say, our philosophical stance on shared data is pretty well-rooted by now, and we've become accustomed to paying a commercial/business price as a result of that stand. Whatever, that's how the cookie crumbles (as Graze often says). There is no legal basis, under the American DMCA or any substantive international legal framework, to "demand" we edit the functionality of a transparent protocol-based proxy; claims to that effect are utterly ridiculous. And yet we get, on an average day, perhaps 200 copytroll "demand letters" via email - most relate to the proxies, on balance. Nearly all have clickable links where you can "pay your fine" with a creditcard and "avoid the risk of litigation" by doing so. In other words: extortion. Extortion spam, which is illegal in just about every jurisdiction in the world. But which is never prosecuted in these situations, for obvious reasons (media oligarchies have money and political power).
Anyhow, the proxies!
baystorm.org
- We've got a skunkworks project afoot - codename 'baystorm' - to do a syncretic mix of blockchain, deepDNS, & @dnschain-based resolver functionality to make a "tracker" meta-resource immune to censorship and entirely free of need for any extra client-side fiddling, tools, or changes to currently-deployed torrent-client applications.
No ETA yet, but the architecture is already proving itself out in non-production context.
cryptostorm.org/kickass
- This is Kick Ass Torrents... which does, indeed, pretty much kick ass. Note that we've added a pingdom uptime status & performance stats page here: cryptostorm.is/kat_stats
We used to have a h33t proxy, but we've been told that tracker has gone walkabout. If this is wrong, please do let us know. Edit (18 Feb 2015) same goes for our Fenopy proxy; down 'cause Fenopy is down.
Ok, that's about it. Have fun.
~ cryptostorm_team
