Slashdot Mirror
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."
more like isp level blocking. they will just make tons of mirrors of the site everywhere. kinda like how i said with sopa etc it does not matter what law you pass or how many sites you take down 50 more take its place.
Eh I'm kinda torn on this. I don't support piracy at all, but I laughed when I read how magnet links worked and realized that all the protect ip sopa stuff has no good way of protecting against this. It would be good if they realized that there was nothing they could do (at least not as far as blocking sites goes), and therefore did nothing.
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?
there was nothing they could do (at least not as far as blocking sites goes),
...but it looks like joining the swarm, logging IPs, and writing John Doe lawsuits is still just as must an option...
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.
You are writing in the future tense but this is already happening... I use http://malaysiabay.org/ because it is nearer to me and therefore quicker...
If they take that down I am sure that a copy will be up within hours... As usual the only people that will really benefit from all this are the lawyers.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Because sometimes there are things it is useful to pirate. Such as losing a Windows install CD, or ending up with a film that is so full of DRM you cannot watch it in the way you want so you download a copy that you can. Legal consumers circumventing their asinine protections are just as much frequenters of TPB as those who just download movies and TV shows every day compulsively.
rember the http warez of the old they would try taking down the sites and they would be back up in hrs with 10 new mirrors. there was even a tool that would generate accounts on every free hoster and upload your site all with a click. went threw this in the 90s and did just fine the only reason it quit was stuff like bittorrent took the need for it away. its the same game over again and the pirates know how to win.
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.
Yes. anything to avoid paying close attention to what we're doing.
Dilbert RSS feed
Will I have to go to Pirate Bay to get a copy of Pirate Bay for my thumb drive or will I go to a thumb drive copy for the latest version :-D
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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?
Look before you leap. Hover before you click.
Depends what the goal is. If the goal is to stop piracy, no, it won't work and never would have. If the goal is for politicians to throw a bone to the content owners in exchange for big time donations, then I suspect it will work quite well.
Why is that good?
Because the shows I download legally and pay for are not available in my country with the subtitles that I need to understand them. If the Powers That Be would provide those, I wouldn't need to download a copy from the Pirate Bay. As it is, I buy the download legally off iTunes, because I have a vain hope that some of the money I pay might make it to the artists responsible for the show rather than the accountants who fleece them, and then I download the torrent off the Pirate Bay so that I can understand what I watched.
TPB is useful for filling in the gaps that iTunes and the like leave open. The quality and service that the pirates provide are better than what the authorized distributors provide.
Plus, I can rest assured that my pirated copy will work on any device I may happen to purchase and at any time; I don't have to worry about region locking, permissions servers being taken offline (anyone remember PlaysForSure?), or other arbitrary and unnecessary constraints placed on my purchases. So long as standards like AVI or DIVX or H264 can be read, I'm good to go; there's no threat to the longevity of my purchases.
So, using TPB to provide open standards-based backups that are free of useless and arbitrary impediments that add no value to me ensures that I'm no longer placed at the whim and caprice of the content industry. I give them money (I legally download a copy via iTunes) and in turn receive the goods without any restrictions (I download a copy via the Pirate Bay).
That's why the Pirate Bay is good.
Bonch is a known troll. Slashdot -- feature request: allow filtering based on username/UID. For the time being, Bonch is the only user who posts things that I'm consistently not interested in reading, and, well, I've been active here for years, but there could eventually be someone else that's worth ignoring completely. Sure, you can call this flamebait if you like, but I've got karma to burn and I know I'm not the only person who thinks that bonch is best left alone and ignored.
Facts have a liberal bias.
Yeah, pretty much. e.g. I own Diablo II. A few weeks ago I looked around for my CDs, but was having trouble finding them. My only options were to pay for it twice, pirate it or to give up. I picked pirate... you tell me why that's morally wrong.
Hint: because the government said so isn't a real answer
...how do they work?
People torrent those, too!
Enjoy the show as it's guaranteed to be better than another movie with Shia LaBeouf.
Why is that good?
Because infringing copyright is what will preserve the last few generations of copyrighted material whose owners have/will disappear and leave them orphaned?
Because not making copyrighted content available across large parts of the world does nothing to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts?
Because 120 years of copyright is not what most of us would call a limited time?
Copyright infringement has been around since we started carving into clay tablets.
It's not going away.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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!
Or he could've lost the CD-keys and since you need a valid one to do even Single Player...he'd have to either keygen or crack the game (or buy a CD-key), which are still bad in the eyes of Blizzard-Activision.
Of course, if he did the smart thing and kept a personal-use ISO on his hard drive of the disc he made a copy of himself, he'd still be seen as a criminal...by somebody, anyway.
I did the same thing with Spore recently : i still had the manual, with my key, but i couldn't find my dvd anymore.
So I went to TPB, downloaded the dvd , installed and played.
You should consider that this takes maybe 20 minutes to do. Searching trough all my stuff to find a scratched dvd, is going to take much longer.
It's not theft : you already payed for it. No one is losing money.
Mod up! Why'd you post AC? You've made some bloody good points there.
I'm the same. I've got, for instance, all the "24" boxsets, but I want to watch it on my netbook on the many long and boring train journeys I must endure. TPB is extremely handy for me, because while the DVDs are at home I can *legally* download DVD-quality rips on my torrent aggregator for my *own personal use*.
Score one for sensible: no external DVD reader required, no discs to lose or damage (they're nice and safe at home), and only 2lb to carry!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Piracy is good because we don't live in a world where people create something, and then through copyright get to make some money off of it. We DO live in a world where rights to large numbers of works are bought up by a very small number of corporations, who pay governments to be able to keep those rights forever. They collude together to fix prices, and make sure that only their entertainment can ever reach the shelves of your local bookstore or video store.
Piracy hasn't gone far enough. This system they've created is something I will fight against will all my being. They are stealing and controlling our culture. My hope is that piracy is so pervasive and easy that even currently released blockbuster movies or bestseller books make no money. Yes, there will be collateral damage in terms of artists not being able to support themselves entirely through their art, and a drop in new entertainment produced in the near future. This is an acceptable price.
downloading from a torrent (or any other source) most certainly is not illegal in the UK. What is illegal is the unauthorised availing of copyrighted content (ie uploading), in any format.
What makes it worse in that respect is the fact that public authorities over here in around 2005 enacted ordinances preventing trade in secondhand goods (ie VHS, DVD) without:
1. proof of identity (including address) from transient sellers;
2. booked recorded transactions between transient sellers and shop buyers;
3. open-door access to police, authority agencies and Performing Rights Society, BPI, BSA and other private enforcement agencies to inspect all aspects of the dealers' trade with zero notice;
4. publicly displayed certificates of compliance with the ordinances;
5. Cash transactions only. No credit notes, barter or swapsies.
So if you want rid of your copy of Apocalypse Now Redux or Munch's Oddysey, now you have to give over your ID to the dealer and you can only deal in cash. So HMRC get their unearned piece of the pie as well. If you're dealing music the BPI want their cut in the form of a license, and if you have a radio playing in your shop loud enough to hear from the counter PRS wade in and extort £400/year out of you (though you can get away with this if all you play is KLF! Seriously! Been there, pissed all over BPI in court!).
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
It's not theft : you already payed for it. No one is losing money.
But if you would've paid them again, then they would've had more money. You stole their potential profit!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
As we all know, in the dark ages societal or technological progress were at standstill because of rampant copyright infringement. There were entire monasteries full of people making manual copies of valuable manuscripts, without compensating the content providers! Some people claim that it was Gutenberg that made the breakthrough that lead to the renaissance and modernity, but the real advance was the invention of copyright laws. Of course at the time the laws were still primitive, allowing only a few decades of copyright protection and with no provision for modern usage restrictions that are essential for many innovative business models.
Piracy is good, yes. Have you been drinking Rupert Murdoch's Famous Internet Censorship flavored Kool Aid? Piracy is good. Even Bill Gates said that piracy is good - what greater authority on the subject can there be?
http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/2803
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9
WTF is with this globalization, one world government view that pirates are a cancer, eating at the world's economy? There are probably tens of thousands of people in China who could never have been able to buy Windows, who are working in the tech world today, because pirated copies of Windows were available. Ditto with India, and God knows how many other countries. EVEN THE UNITED STATES!!! (How many American parents were unable to purchase, or see the wisdom in purchasing, Windows 95 in 1995?)
Of course, we're back to the definition and purpose of copyright law. Copyright law was never intended to ensure that an author would make a profit. It was only intended to ensure that IF THERE WERE A PROFIT to be made, then the author should get some of that profit.
Piracy is good, if for no other reason than underprivileged people acquiring educational tools. Games and music? I just don't give a rat's ass about the music syndicates, movie syndicates, and games. They can all go belly-up if they lack the imagination to find new business models.
Piracy is good. I got my first Windows NT via torrent. I got my first Linux via torrent. I got my first MacOS via torrent. I'm among the wealthiest 1% of the world's population, and I couldn't afford everything that I've ever played with on the computer. What about that other 99%?
I support piracy, whole heartedly. My counterparts in backwoods African and Asian and South American countries NEED piracy, if they are ever to join the 20th century. You know, the century that we retired a decade ago?
Hey, one of the women I work with went home on vacation a few weeks ago. She has already overstayed her stay. I asked her husband how I could email her. I learned that her hometown only got electricity about 25 years ago, and there IS NO INTERNET!!! Cell phones don't work. If I were to communicate with her, it would be via POTS, at some exorbitant cost.
Now, pull your head outta your butt, and support Pirate Bay, and the Pirate Parties. They provide a crucial service to huge segments of the world's population.
Oh - I'll note here, that I've not personally pirated anything in a long time. Today, I don't need WinNT, anything that Adobe makes, or even Sun/Oracle. With OSS, it's free anyway. I still get most of my stuff via torrent though!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Unlike Anonymous Coward, I can openly say I use Pirate Bay exclusively to get the software and media I want, when I want it. I haven't purchased a DVD, CD, or many games in years. I have hundreds of gigabytes of downloaded data. Piratebay is good because its convenient, that's all.
Because Copyright is an out of control monster that needs to be opposed.
Adderall!
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.
You are writing in the future tense but this is already happening... I use http://malaysiabay.org/ because it is nearer to me and therefore quicker...
If they take that down I am sure that a copy will be up within hours... As usual the only people that will really benefit from all this are the lawyers.
Why would you use http on a torrent site? That's silly. If you use https, get magnet links, and disallow unencrypted downloads in your bittorrent client, you have full privacy. malaysiabay.org, contrary to thepiratebay, doesn't seem to provide ssl, so I wouldn't use it.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
OK then. The reason is a combination of two points:
1) You have no clear entitlement to another copy of CDs. This is important to mention, because some people believe they do. They believe that if they bought something, this gives them a right (morally, if not legally) to use it in perpetuity, transcending any physical representation of the object. What is less clear is exactly why this is. It doesn't appear to be derived from any analogy in traditional physical property, as there is no such right in physical property. If you lose your physical property, you have no right to another instance of that property. You cannot demand it from the manufacturer, the retailer, or the government. It therefore must be a right unique to non-physical property.
So then, the question still remains, from where does this entitlement come? Is it just an arbitrary rule? Perhaps it's derived from the fact that copying is possible. However, the possibility of an action certainly does not imply that you have the right to that action (since there are plenty of immoral actions that are possible).
Perhaps it's not so much the possibility of obtaining another copy as it is that you could have taken better care of the disks, or backed them up, while completely avoided the business of piracy. That certainly seems like one of the most plausible of the possibilities, however this doesn't seem to be completely justified. We couldn't, for example, apply the same logic to the lottery without defeating its purpose. Every time someone plays the lottery, the numbers are essentially arbitrary, and had they taken the winning numbers, they would be a lot better off. Does this mean that they are entitled to a share of the winnings, even if they lost? No. The system relies on people failing in order for it to succeed. There needs to be some kind of evidence here that people are entitled to reap the rewards of potential actions they could have taken, that they failed to actually take.
So, to conclude part 1), I hope you at least see why taking an extra copy is at most morally neutral. There's nothing wrong with taking something you'rey not entitled to, so long as it doesn't hurt other people. If you find a broken computer in a ditch, you are perfectly welcome to take it, even though you had no specific right to it, simply because taking it does not harm anyone else. However, if you take a computer out of someone's place, you still have no right to it, but you are also harming the owner, so the theft is actually morally wrong.
2) You are harming the producers. The copy you co-opted for yourself reduces your demand for the game, drastically reducing the possibility that you'd buy it (again). All the usual piracy arguments apply here: they need the revenue to keep creating games and we have a moral obligation to fulfil our promises to them as outlined in copyright law. Now, I realise you've already paid for the game, but you paid for that single copy of the game, which is no longer available to you, and you have no entitlement to another. This puts you an even standing with anyone who has never owned the game. If you want another copy, the law says you must buy it. Since you are not entitled to it, and taking it would harm others, it is morally wrong to take it.
Oh wait, was that question supposed to be rhetorical?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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.
The difference is that with some software, producers are making the claim that the sale is a non-transferable license to use the software in an attempt to eliminate the secondary market. They want to eat their cake and have it too, by forcing people to pay for both use (licensing), and also for ownership (physical media). However, there's often no concession offered for such a restriction. That is why people feel entitled to re-download copies of software to which they own CD keys, but have since lost the media. If it's morally gray, it's because the whole situation is tit-for-tat.
In this example, someone else pointed out that Blizzard actually appears to do the right thing: they honor your purchase of the license by letting you re-download with a known CD key.
Are you really trying to link IPv6 to Revelations?
You don't need to be entitled to receive what others are voluntarily sharing with you (that's how P2P works).
The question is why some people feel entitled to prevent others from doing what they want with their legally bought property.
Dilbert RSS feed
"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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!