Although I’m not a big time user of torrents and the like, I do not like the BREIN imposed blockade of the piratebay. There are multiple reasons for this, but first and foremost is my opinion that the Internet should be a freely accessible medium. Blocking sites does not fit in that philosophy.

Therefore I installed squid on my server to act as a proxy for me. The installation is fairly straightforward:

• Install squid3 (apt-get install squid3 squid3-common)
• Configure security settings for squid:
  • Configure localnet to contain only your IP address (otherwise you’re making an open proxy, which might not be what you want)
  • Configure http_access to allow the localnet
  • Optionally change the default proxy port (which is security through obscurity, but if it makes you feel better it’s fine)
• Restart squid

That’s it. Configure your pc to use the newly configured proxy and you should be able to bypass the blockade. Off course your server should not be behind a Ziggo or XS4ALL connection.

If you don’t want all your traffic to pass through the proxy you could use the Firefox plug-in called foxyproxy. You can use it to automatically use the proxy for some websites and not for others.