While authorities worldwide are still engaged in blocking torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, their efforts are proving to be insignificant, as torrent seekers are finding it much easier to download content from The Pirate Bay and similar torrent downloading sites while Internet Service Providers are finding it harder to block out these sites, much more than they have previously believed. 

The Pirate Bay seems to be back with a vengeance. As reported by Engadget, the torrent site was closed down abruptly in December last year, owing to a raid by Swedish authorities. However, in February, the torrent site came back and got a new distribution partner, CloudFlare. It is this partnership deal that makes The Pirate Bay stronger. 

CloudFlare is a middleman service that manages the information highway between users and Web hosting servers. It decreases bandwidth burdens for the torrent sites and protects them from DDoS and other security threats. When The Pirate Bay engaged CloudFlare's services, it came with a caveat — the service also includes hiding information from ISPs, thereby effectively overcoming ISP efforts to block TPB's web portals. While most ISPs have high-level blocks that were put up previously, most of them no longer work. 

In the United Kingdom, for example, the only ISP able to block The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites completely is Sky, who is using unconfirmed advanced monitoring tools. Others ISPs like Virgin Media and TalkTalk have not been able to block torrent sites. 

According to an operator of the recently-blocked ilikerainbows.co site, as reported by Torrent Freak, "I believe it's because of how CloudFlare works. Simply put, when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare they remove the HTTP header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when they try to inspect the header to a list of 'banned' websites it won't register."