LOS ANGELES—That was fast. No sooner did British Prime Minster David Cameron finish explaining his plan to intercept porn at the ISP-level than a new free service to unblock the blocked sites was announced. TorrentFreak is reporting on the service, which it says “not only unblocks torrent sites, but also unblocks proxies. It’s called Immunicity—and it’ll crack Cameron’s porn filter too.”
Game on!
Immunicity’s website explains how it works: “Once you have configured your browser to use Immunicity,” explains the company, “when and only when you attempt to access a website that is typically censored, your browser will route your request via our servers. Any other request, for example to Google or Facebook, will go directly to the destination without passing through our servers.”
The technical details are almost s simple: “When you configure your browser to use our service, you are entering the location of a PAC file (‘proxy auto-config’). This file contains the latest list of URLs that are commonly censored in the UK. When your send a request to one of these sites, your browser is instructed to route that traffic via our HTTP proxy server gateway.immunicity.net:8080 which will fetch the content and send it back to you. When you send a request for a website that isn't on our list of URLs that are commonly censored, your browser connects directly to that site, bypassing our servers completely.”
Unfotunately, however, the service seems to exist solely to enable piracy, and has compiled a list of currently blocked sites that it says it can redirect people to, all of which appear to be peer-to-peer in nature. But it also says that it will soon offer the same service for porn sites.
There, too, however, the porn sites it lists that it says it will soon provide access to are all large tube sites offering free content. Needless to say, Immunicity is all about providing freeloaders access to free content, most of which is probably pilfered.
The next anticipated move by the UK government is to make such services illegal, if they are not already so.
