14 DAY TRIAL // The City of London Police may have managed to shut down the proxy service Immunicity last week, after its owner was arrested, but that doesn’t mean the service will simply disappear.
Clones of the service have already started making their way to the surface, offering people a way to access sites that are blocked within their country, including The Pirate Bay.
The site itself was created as a protest to the increasing censorship efforts within the United Kingdom, where more and more sites were becoming blocked. Of course, the UK isn’t the only one trying to take down sites that may contain illegal content, so the service became popular in numerous countries in the world.
Immunicity offered users a way to route around the blockades imposed by ISPs at the order of the governments within the countries they operate in. By setting up the browser to work with Immunicity, people could get access to blocked sites since their traffic was run through a proxy server. Any censored data could be reached with just a few clicks and without much knowledge about the technical details of the process.
However, copyright holders see any such tools to be just as bad as the sites that are hosting illegal content, so they were quick to complain about the proxy service to the City of London Police who labeled Immunicity as a criminal operation. The fact that the service could very well be used by people in countries where services such as Twitter, Facebook or news sites are censored seems to be of absolutely no importance to rights holders.
Alas, the police wanted to make it harder for people to get their hands on a proxy service and circumvent the censorship efforts of the British government, but managed to do exactly the opposite.
Two clones have already made their way online, TorrentFreak points out. Immunicity.co.uk and Immun.es offer the same functionality without requesting a dime.
The operator of one of the sites says that he took special precautions to stay under the police radar while purchasing the domain and server in order to avoid the same fate as the 20-year-old owner of Immunicity.
So, instead of a single Immunicity out there, there are now two of them; not to mention the countless other proxy tools in the wild, the VPNs and other circumventing methods available just a few clicks away on the Internet.