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The Pirate Bay To Stop Serving Torrent Files
An anonymous reader tips news that The Pirate Bay is making a move away from .torrent files in favor of 'magnet links.' On Thursday the site made magnet links the default, and TorrentFreak reports that they'll stop serving .torrent files altogether in about a month.
"The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that one of the advantages of the transition to a 'magnet site' is that it requires relatively little bandwidth to host a proxy. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."
What the hell is a Magnet URI?
You could read Wikipedia but the short answer is that it's a file hash, meaning there's no centralized server; just a description of the file that can be downloaded automatically from various decentralized file sharing networks.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Well, I don't know to be honest. I could pull numerous possible reasons out of my nether regions:
1) Smaller bandwidth footprint due to the size. Each small file adds up. Making the files smaller helps a lot. If the Pirate Bay has to resort to another ISP with lower quality bandwidth.
2) If the entirety of Pirate Bay can be hosted on a thumb drive then it is hard to simply nuke the Pirate Bay. Just give a few trusted people thumb drive copies as backups.
3) If the Pirate Bay gets torched, you can have many clones pop up in no time. You could do 1A with bigger storage mediums, but if the site is fitable on a thumb drive then it is small enough to get these clones uploaded quicker.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
If you can get a .torrent file onto a remote downloading host you can get a text file with the magnet link there.
Alternatively, you can use a client-server torrent client (like deluge), where the GUI appears on your workstation but the downloading happens on the remote system.
Oh, it will work as intended alright. It won't stop piracy, but that is not what it's for.
Doesnt magnet require clients to communicate with each other using DHT? Whats stopping the ISP's from blocking DHT itself, atleast this way they have to block individual sites If everything went magnet they can wipe it all out by just blocking DHT
Simply put - no it doesn't need DHT.
Magnet URI scheme on Wikipedia explains that a magnet link can contain anything from a standard URL, to P2P (DirectConnect, Gnutella, eDonkey), a list of keywords to search for, or a BitTorrent tracker (with DHT or with tracker URLs). They can contain a list of one - or many of these different sources too, and even include CRC and MD5.
the .torrent files are hosted by the peers, instead of on piratebay. When you join the DHT network (by running a bittorrent client), you are assigned a number, based on your IP. In a similar manner, all torrent files are given a number based on a hash of their contents.
If you are given the number 5 and the next client on the network has the number 9, you must host the torrent files numbered 5-8 (if they exist). You can get those files from the client behind you, as he must have had them before you joined.
You must also know some of the other clients on the network. This is normally some of those close to you, and some of those furthest away from you (as in, you have the IP for client 505, assuming the network goes to 1000).
There are of course backup hosts for the files etc, but that's the general idea
What?
People torrent those, too!
Slashdot -- feature request: allow filtering based on username/UID.
That feature has existed for the longest time as the Friends/Foes" list.
Click on a user's name, then choose "Friend this user"
You'll get a menu offering you three choices:
Friend
Neutral
Foe
It's three clicks, assuming you already have the friends/foes modifiers set.
If you don't... go into your comments preferences
https://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
and set Foes to whatever negative modifier you want.
-6 means you'll never see their posts unless you browse in the gutter.
While you're in there, consider changing your default posting method to Plain Old Text.
Links will automagically get urlified and you'll stop posting blocks of text, because your line breaks will carry over
/unless you try to use a forward slash at the beginning of a line
//you can still use html with POT
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's all well and good, but how do you tell if the hash in the magnet link you're hovering over is the hash of the file you want, rather than the hash of some different (and possibly malicious) file? Sure, a torrent file could also have a deceptive filename, but at least with a torrent you can see it's contents before you start downloading anything. With a magnet link, you have to wait for downloading to begin before you can actually tell what the contents of the torrent are.
That is what they want you to believe. The reality was that at that moment there was no copyright. Everything was public domain.
Even when Gutenberg started, all people did was copy the books others wrote by hand.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I found instructions on various sites for how to do it, but none of them work.
I run Firefox (9.0.1), Fedora and Azureus. I don't really want to change that combination. No matter what I add to the about:config of firefox, it always says there is no application associated with the magnet: URI handler.
Okay, just as I was writing this, I thought "what if Firefox is now relying on the OS to manage this the way it does for the mailto: handler?" Sure enough, I found a way.
http://maketecheasier.com/open-magnet-link-in-browser/2010/02/19
I hope this helps someone else.
Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that.
But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent.
Try Wikipedia.
There are lots of other explanations of the protocol out there, but ... really? You're too lazy to query Google on your own?
Magnet URIs take longer to "download" because they're a hash check on the target file's content, not just a text file, like a .torrent file. The advantage of .magnet links over .torrent links is that .magnet links don't require trackers, so even if the MAFIAA manages to get every tracker on the planet shut down, .magnet links will still work.
The disadvantage of using .magnet URIs is that you wind up with your download directory cluttered up with pointless and annoying subdirectories filled with ads for wanker "warez" groups and "samples" about which you couldn't possibly care less (I'm looking at YOU, TVTeam), or - again, pointless - RAR files (I'm looking at YOU, scenebalance) that are totally unnecessary with .magnet links, because the hash check eliminates any possibility of file corruption in your download (n.b. - If the original file is corrupt when it is uploaded, all the hash checks and RAR archiving in the world won't fix it. Or, in other acronyms, GIGO).
Check out my novel.
Last I checked, magnet links arent files to be downloaded, but a link similar to a URL.
Exampe:
magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZO5C
If it is slower, it is because your torrent client has to locate a known peer with information about the magnet-link, and then get the torrent information from it. Unless your computer is insanely slow in handing off the data from your browser to the link-handler.
"But in practice, I'm finding it takes 50-90 seconds to download a .magnet vs. 2-3 seconds for a .torrent, so it must be a HORRIBLY inefficient protocol in the way it uses bandwidth, 'cause the end result is the same checksum and peer search data as a .torrent."
Downloading a .torrent file gives you all of the info needed to start the swarm in one file transfer.
Downloading a magnet link uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT), which is a distributed mechanism that does a huge amount of work in order to spread information across a huge swarm of peers in a resilient way, with tons of redundancy and checking, such that there's no dependency on any one server. That means that, for example, if the Tracker is shut down, the system keeps working. Resiliency is great, but the cost is that instead of a single action to retrieve the torrent file, you put out queries to your peers, who ask their peers, and so on, performing thousands or even millions of queries between peers in order to retrieve the torrent file. Aside from being slower, it's also less reliable, in that there's a limit to how many times the query message gets repeated (so that each query doesn't spawn off an infinite number of queries) you might be downloading something obscure that your peers, their peers, etc., don't know about.
"Can someone explain how a .magnet bypasses .torrent blocking? I don't see how changing the file suffix could do that."
Magnet links aren't links to files ending in .magnet, they're URLs with a different protocol label (magnet: instead of http:) which are passed to a BitTorrent client to handle. If the blocking is looking for an HTTP request of a filename ending in .torrent, it won't see one.
Of course, if a firewall is blocking the BitTorrent protocol, then it'll be blocked whether the transfer is started by a .torrent file or a magnet link.
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