How to set-up a The Pirate Bay proxy?

Assuming you have a webserver somewhere in a (cyber|cypher)space and you want to set-up an access to the infamous website thepiratebay.(com|se|org). You need different things:

• A webserver, in this case apache2 but can probably be nginx or any other webserver you want to use
• An up-to-date libssl along with the Perl::SSLeay library
• A dedicated domain name (in this case yar.okhin.fr, can be anything else as long as you own it)
• The patched tpbCgiProxy provided by the pirate bay.
• A little bit of time.

 First some cgi

Since it’s based on CGI Proxy you need to have the NPH support of the cgi scripts in your webserver. It’s included into Apache since the 1.3, but just check that first.

Also, check that .cgi files are interpreted as cgi-scripts not as text. Check in your mime.conf file (in debian it’s in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.conf) that the following line is uncommented:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

Put the nph-tpb.cgi file into your cgi-bin script directory (we will define it later in apache), just be sure that the user who runs the webserver can also exec the file. A good place to put your cgi-scripts is usually /usr/lib/cgi-bin/

It seems the tpb admins have forget one URL in their allowed ones. So, just do it now, using the editor of your choice (at line 528), you need to add thepiratebay.se to the ALLOWED_SERVERS

@ALLOWED_SERVERS= ('thepiratebay\.se$', 'thepiratebay\.org$', 'bayimg\.com$', 'suprbay\.com$', 'bayfiles\.com$') ;

Next, let’s move to apache

So, we will need a nifty file for this virtual host. I’ll paste and comment mine here

<VirtualHost *:80>         ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost         ServerName yar.okhin.fr          RewriteEngine on         RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off         RewriteRule (.*) https://yar.okhin.fr%{REQUEST_URI} </VirtualHost>

The above is just to enforce SSL connexion. In case the user is not using HTTPS everywhere. If you do not want to have virtual host on all your address, you can specify one instead of the ‘*’

<VirtualHost *:443>         ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost         ServerName yar.okhin.fr

The name of the server is important in case of a multiple virtual host. You can add server alias too, if you’d like to access the proxy with different names.

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

I do not like logs. But error logs are, in my mind, necessary to keep the things working. You’re warned, if you crash my server, I’ll know it.

        DocumentRoot /usr/lib/cgi-bin/nph-tpb.cgi/

This is the root of your proxy. This should be the complete and absolute path to the cgi-scripts you’ve installed above.

        <Directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin/>                 AllowOverride None                 Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch                 Order allow,deny                 Allow from all         </Directory>

Add some default for permissions. As we are in the cgi-bin directory, we do not want anyone to list the content of it.

        # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,         # alert, emerg.         LogLevel crit          CustomLog /dev/null combined

You do not want to log anything related to your visitors, or it will defeat the purposes of anonymity.

        SSLEngine on         SSLCertificateFIle /etc/ssl/certs/tpb.pem         SSLCertificateKeyFIle /etc/ssl/private/tpb.key

And this is for SSL. Just be sure that the key is only readable (mode 0600) by the user who runs the server.

</VirtualHost>

Why would I do that?

Well, for once, TPB is now censored in the UK. I personally think it should not happens, and if you like your freedom of speech and have access to a server, you should do it also.

Second, it’s fun to do this kind of stuff. You’ll then be able to use the cgi proxy for different purposes if needed. And, well, you really need another reason?

Legal issues

Well, as for all non-logging anonymous proxies, this will raise a lot of issue. Even if your server do not actually host any of the magnets links of the pirate bay, you could be in trouble.

Do what you want keeping this in a place of your head. Do not do it on a company owned server, or not without the former approval of your bosses.

Besides that… Have fun, proxy the planet, mirror the world, copy the tubes.