Get around Virgin's blocking of TPB

I have Virgin Media internet, and I live in the UK. This means that, as of the 3rd of May I can no longer access thepiratebay.se due to a court order demanding that all major British ISPs block it.

Solution 1 (good one)

Just change your current DNS servers to Google's ones:

8.8.8.8
8.8.4.4

These are the main and backup DNS servers for Google, respectively. Instead of blocking requests to translate thepiratebay.se to it's IP, Google's DNS servers will still allow the connection.

I had to change the DNS servers of both my router and my PC. If just changing your router's DNS servers doesn't work, change them on your PC too.

Solution 2 (bad one)

For Linux and Mac users (most of them), there's a simple fix to get round this (albeit quite hacky).

There's a convenient subdomain of www.pirateparty.org.uk which mirrors The Pirate Bay (presumably as a proxy service), which is tpb.pirateparty.org.uk. It's easy enough to type that into a browser, but why not add a single line in /etc/hosts to map the original domain to the proxied, unblocked site?

Let's do that. As root:

$ nano /etc/hosts

Then add

95.172.29.92    thepiratebay.se

Underneath any existing entries. Save using Ctrl + O, then quit with Ctrl + X (assuming Nano commands), and you should be able to navigate to www.thepiratebay.se while what is actually served is content from tpb.pirateparty.org.uk.

There is probably a Windows solution too, but I can't be bothered to find out what it is. Anyway, the IP shown above is the IP of tpb.pirateparty.org.uk, and may change, so this isn't an absolutely permanent fix, but it works for now.

Enjoy.