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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."
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
Enjoy the show as it's guaranteed to be better than another movie with Shia LaBeouf.
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.
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.
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!
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
If a list of filenames is all that separates your ideas of a "good" and a "bad" torrent, then I suspect that you'll have other problems soon enough.
Kid-proof tablet..
Because Copyright is an out of control monster that needs to be opposed.
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.