The Pirate Bay website allows users to search for and download BitTorrent files (”torrents”), small files that contain machine-readable information necessary to download the data files from other users^[1] thought a peer to peer application like µTorrent.

It seems that most Italian ISP have been trying to block access to the Pirate Bay website since this weekend, following a court decision. A post has been published on their blog, violently attacking the decision and Silvio Berlusconi.

These blocks can be bypassed very easily:

• Pirate Bay changed their IP address, which seemed to solve the problem for users connecting though some ISP
• Pirate Bay opened a new website very quickly, called http://labaia.org which should be working though most ISP
• The user can change their DNS settings in seconds, by using the service provided by OpenDNS instead of the servers and filters of their ISP

In fact, it’s so amazingly easy to bypass the blocks that one can wonder if Pirate Bay will really be affected by this decision, or if it will be a great source of advertising, which completely overrules the initial intention.

^[1]From Wikipedia