The Pirate Bay hosts plenty of legitimate content, of course, from public domain e-books and music to videos and documentaries (including one about the site’s lengthy legal slog). The more people sharing, the faster the material comes down, assembled non-sequentially from scattered bits and pieces residing within a vast network of discrete, torrent-linked computers. In recent years, TPB has shifted to magnet links, which eliminate intermediary torrent trackers and having to download metadata, as well as further anonymizing who’s doing what while making efforts to block content more difficult. Those files are broken into pieces which your sharing client takes (and gives, as you receive the pieces) to constellations of network peers. The site itself is deceptively simple-looking, just a search box that summons links to tiny metadata-laden text files known as torrents, which in turn link to trackers that provide information necessary to assemble whatever files you’re after. Sweden’s The Pirate Bay (TPB) emerged in September 2003 and went on to become the Internet’s go-to repository for peer-to-peer file sharing - some of it legal, some of it not. I’ll talk about how the browser works in a minute, as well as why, contrary to what you might be thinking, it’s not necessarily intended as a workaround for illicit file-sharing, but let’s talk about the site behind the curtain for a moment. Follow its 10th anniversary, The Pirate Bay has released something it’s dubbed PirateBrowser: a mashup of Firefox and Tor (nee “The Onion Router” - more on that in a moment), offering a simple, ready-made way to circumvent what the site says is online censorship by various countries around the globe.

Pirate bay tor browser link