Several U.K. ISPs can now access the supposedly blocked torrent hub, The Pirate Bay, following the file-sharing website's switch to CloudFlare's SSL service. 

In a recent report by TorrentFreak, majority of U.K. Internet subscribers can access The Pirate Bay for a few weeks despite being one of the first sites to be included in the blocked list of the High Court from the time the site transferred its servers to CloudFlare. The U.K. Internet service providers that can now access The Pirate Bay include Virgin Media, BT, TalkTalk, and EE. Because of this, direct U.K. traffic for the website has increased at a steady pace. 

One of the operators of the recently blocked TPB proxy ilikerainbows.co speculates that the reason why the unblocking happened is because of the use of https strict. 

"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," the operator told TorrentFreak. 

Also, the report mentioned that it would be harder to block TPB by its IP-address because the real location of the site is hidden by the network of addresses that CloudFlare network has. 

Meanwhile, ChinaTopix earlier reported that The Pirate Bay is now filled with more popup ads and malware. Thus, those who are planning to download from the file-sharing site can expect to encounter popup windows that alert them to download some codecs to allegedly enable the downloading process. However, they need to be wary as the links provided often only lead to malware infecting a user's computer. 

Even Peter Sunde, the founder of TPB, is reportedly disappointed with the recent development of the website. Although he is not connected with The Pirate Bay anymore, Sunde said that it would be better to shut down the site completely because of the rampant popup ads and malware that infests it.