While the UK High Court has been making busywork of blocking access to a myriad of popular torrent sites via the country’s ISPs, users apathetic to the restrictions have been using the sites anyway via the popular proxy site Unblocked.pw. Torrent fans have flocked to the site, using it to circumvent the token efforts of the UK justice establishment to control internet piracy, so much so that Unblocked.pw has become the 192nd most popular site in the country, placing it ahead of Spotify and Skype.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron loves a good block. Only this week, he was threatening to ban internet porn, because “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”. He said:
“Our one nation government is working hard to make the internet a safer place for children, the next step in this campaign is to curb access to harmful pornographic content which is currently far too widely available. I want to see age restrictions put into place or these websites will face being shut down.”
What is a “one nation government,” anyway? How is that any different from a regular government? Or, is Cameron slyly telling Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland that they don’t really count? In any case, the threat to take away the country’s porn is a deep cut, considering Pornhub, XHamster, Xvideos, and RedTube all feature within the top-100 sites in the UK, with TubeCup and YouPorn close behind:
At No. 44, PornHub is more popular than Netflix, even. But it was the position of Unblocked.pw that was most surprising, positioned at #192. The site, which is less than a year old, is already more popular than popular IM service Skype (#195) and music streaming site Spotify (#194).
Fighting censorship has been the primary motivation behind running Unblocked,” the site’s admin told TorrentFreak. “It’s to show that whatever regulators do to censor things online, there will always be a way around it. The initial motivation came from when The Pirate Bay was blocked in the Netherlands. We set up Proxybay.co to maintain a list of Pirate Bay proxy sites and show people how to create their own.”
If porn sites were to go the same way as torrent sites, expect to see the saucy equivalent of Unblocked.pw hit the top-200 sites in the UK soon after.
Thank you TorrentFreak for providing us with this information.
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