
The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents - llambda
http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-will-stop-serving-torrents-120112/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
======
gojomo
Hey! I invented the magnet link, almost 10 years ago.

Great to see it still evolving and spreading, based simply on its loosey-
goosey merits.

~~~
nestlequ1k
It's weird, I've been seeing it for years but I never understood what it is. I
still don't really.

But when I click on the magnets things seem to download immediately. So looks
like you built something pretty amazing. Congrats!

~~~
zcid
It's basically a URI that contains the torrent hash enabling a client to find
peers through a decentralized network such as DHT instead of requiring a
tracker. I believe you can append trackers and other info to the URI as well,
but I'm not sure about that.

~~~
pyre
Note: DHT = Distributed Hash Table

------
chimeracoder
> 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.

I've been saying this for _years_ : governments playing an arms race with
hackers is like playing Whack-a-mole or cutting of heads of hydras. Every time
you block one means of communication (starting in this case with Napster), a
new, more decentralized, harder-to-combat protocol is going to emerge. Even if
you're the MPAA and don't like copyright violations, you have to face that
fact. That doesn't mean you (necessarily) have to throw in the towel and
abandon the idea of copyright infringement altogether, but it does mean you
need to start being creative instead of engaging in a direct legal-
technological battle - an arms race.

I wonder how long it will take before the big players realize this and try to
figure out a way to use this new playing field (the Internet) to their
advantage, instead of trying to squelch any technological development so that
they can cling to old models of payment and distribution. It was nice while it
happened, but let's face it - we're past the point of no return. Even if they
everyone hosted their own copies of TPB on their thumb drives and then they
found some way to shut that down, I'm certain there'd be some hacker smart
enough (like gojomo above) to come up with something that just makes things
even less centralized, more difficult to track, and more difficult to shut
down.

~~~
Helianthus
The big players are defeated by the new playing field. There is no "their
advantage," there's just a major change in how we produce content.

It's away from exploitation of artists and the control of artistic message.

~~~
beedogs
The production, the marketing the, distribution... EVERYTHING has changed for
the music industry in about 15 years. They have no future unless the Internet
is tightly controlled (which it cannot be.)

~~~
cookiecaper
The RIAA and other major music industry players may have no future, but there
is definitely a profitable future for a "music industry" populated by entities
that are willing to adjust to the modification in distribution channels and
consumption habits.

As it stands, the old-fashioned fogies are simply in denial and doing their
best to prevent the marketplace from changing because they don't know how to
use the new technology and they don't know how to succeed in the new
marketplace. That doesn't mean that there's no future for the industry as a
whole, it's simply the way entrenched players eventually die.

~~~
GHFigs
_they don't know how to succeed in the new marketplace_

Who does, in your opinion?

~~~
chrisdroukas
I'm with you on this one. It's less that the RIAA and major labels 'don't know
how to use the new technology and...succeed in the new marketplace' so much as
we're currently (still) in an in-between stage of market control.

Take for example Radiohead or Louis CK. Their previous successes allowed them
to produce, release and distribute independently of big entertainment — but I
don't think we're at the point where a small independent artist can
effectively take their own music to market in a manner comparable to using a
label. I don't have data to back this opinion, but high profile successes in
independent distribution have been biased toward artists who were well-known
and previously successful.

~~~
dfxm12
I don't think it is fair to compare Radiohead or Louis CK to that of a lesser
known artist in this regard, because the bias is all in the media coverage.

Bands have been self releasing (outside of "big entertainment") since well
before digital distribution, because signing to a label isn't always feasible
(financially or creatively). Digital distribution makes just makes this even
easier.

You only know about Louis CK & Radiohead because that is that the media
covering. Digital distribution & artists self releasing material is happening
and has been for a while, but no one knows because unless they are already
into these lesser known bands & record labels. You have to think of it like
this: "Lesser known artists can be more successful by releasing their own
material digitally than they would by signing with a label." Or "This
independent record label can lower their overhead and make things easier for
their bands by embracing digital distribution."

------
Corrado
This site ([http://www.ghacks.net/2010/06/05/what-is-a-magnet-link-
and-h...](http://www.ghacks.net/2010/06/05/what-is-a-magnet-link-and-how-does-
it-differ-from-torrents/)) explains what Magnet links are and how trackers
have traditionally worked in the past.

~~~
ajtaylor
The original article had a link to this ([http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-
future-dht-pex-and-magne...](http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-future-dht-
pex-and-magnet-links-explained-091120/)) which I found a bit more helpful
explaining the concepts.

------
stfu
It is still fascinating how resilient not only Piratebay but also others such
as Demonoid have become. A few years ago it looked like they were close to
getting shut down. It is impressive how they are now able to withstand all the
"forces" and Governments had to shift their focus towards the ISPs.

------
ars
One drawback to magnet links is that you can not in advance see what files are
there.

So if you only want to download some of them, you first have to wait for the
magnet to download the torrent, then go back to it and pick the files you
want.

A magnet link also makes it hard to check if the link you are looking at is a
duplicate of what you have already.

With a torrent you can check the file size and compare to others.

~~~
ben0x539
There isn't really a reason the piratebay web interface couldn't display that
info for you anyway.

~~~
sp332
If users only upload the magnet file, the TPB wouldn't even know how big the
file is, unless their servers queried the DHT for the .torrent file and
extracted the data.

~~~
tdoggette
Right, that's what they'd have to do.

------
atlbeer
Can someone fill me in on the first step a client (BT) would take to find its
first peers? That part is a bit magic to me right now. What would be the first
IP it would query and how would it know?

~~~
bdonlan
There are three main methods (in order of preference):

1\. Use a cached list from a previous run. This is ideal in terms of load
balancing, and also helps with bootstrap time if your IP hasn't changed, so
all major torrent clients have such a cache.

2\. Ask peers you're connected to via a traditional tracker and .torrent file.
This is the next best thing, but can only be used if the first torrent you
download is via a traditional tracker.

3\. Use some bootstrap peers hardcoded into the torrent client. Has a single
point of failure, but it works.

Each torrent client can use a different set of bootstrap peers, note - they're
nothing special, just a DHT peer that has the bandwidth and CPU power to deal
with bootstrap requests (which isn't a very high hurdle - you only get hit
once, on the initial install, or if the client's been shut down for so long it
no longer has any valid peers). Or the user might even supply their own, if
need be.

~~~
kissickas
Thanks for the information, this part was always a mystery to me as well.

To clarify, if someone has never downloaded a torrent before and starts with a
rarely downloaded file, would the use of only magnet links mean they will
probably not be able to find another peer? It sounds like unless you already
have torrents downloaded, your list of possible peers to check for the file is
very short.

~~~
ianlevesque
If your client connects to just one peer you essentially gain access to the
entire bittorrent DHT network. As a dramatic simplification, your request for
the rare torrent would propagate until it found the peers seeding or
downloading it.

~~~
drewblaisdell
But what if the users sharing the file are also connecting for the first time?
It seems like if my friend wants to seed a file and I want to download it, it
only works if we knows peers (who know peers who know peers who...) know peers
of me. Is this correct?

~~~
gnoupi
In theory (assuming that there are links to everyone, and no way to have
separate networks) (it's of course a theory only, but seems very likely that
there are "massive users", who have files of "every kind", connecting the
different groups), as long as you both connect to one who is connected, it
will work.

Although this is quite the extreme case, and not really the purpose for
Bittorrent to begin with, I guess. The main interest is load balancing of
popular downloads, not finding the one person with the one file for you.

~~~
cookiecaper
I've actually found torrents to be a great way to share large files with a
friend. There's no invasive upload dialog or locking, no practical filesize
limitations other than the free space on my friend's computer, you don't have
to upload to a public-facing server before your associate can start
downloading, port forwarding is handled transparently by UPnP, client software
is user-friendly, easily available, and often already running anyway, and it's
easy to scale if another friend wants a copy at some point in the future.

Of course, TPB switching to magnets doesn't really affect this. Torrent files
are still used to provide information on the download, they're just
distributed from within the P2P network instead of TPB itself. If you have a
torrent file to share with an individual or small group instead of the whole
world, there's no reason to stop using torrent files directly.

------
tomkin
For a brief moment, the title sounded like TPB was going to blackout for "stop
SOPA day". Wouldn't that be funny.

~~~
bdonlan
If the TPB were to actively oppose SOPA, it would just give the SOPA
proponents more to work with - "Look, TPB is against it, so it must be a good
thing!".

~~~
nestlequ1k
Brilliant point. Pirate Bay's best approach is to laugh at SOPA and make clear
it will do nothing to stop them.

~~~
jQueryIsAwesome
Actually, one day the placed a video instead of their logo created by multiple
users with messages against SOPA, it was this one:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w6GtwOvnWM>

------
icebraining
So, what if you don't run the client on the same machine you're browsing TPB
with, like people who have torrent enabled routers or VPS/seedboxes? I suppose
you can copy-paste the link to your client, but clients which had automatic
pick-up of .torrent files (like rtorrent) were nice because you could just
drop them on a remote directory and have them be downloaded.

I wonder if I could write a small application just to download the torrent
file from the magnet link/DHT to copy it to the remote server afterwards.

~~~
botker
See the shell script in the top comment here:
<http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ticket/2100>

I tested it, and it works as advertised.

For firefox integration, in about:config create a new boolean as:

    
    
      network.protocol-handler.expose.magnet := false
    

For chromium integration, you need to use Xdg-open.

------
iamandrus
They announced that they were planning on doing this right when magnet links
came out. I haven't used .torrent files since I discovered magnet links and I
actually find they more convenient than downloading a torrent file.

------
Zirro
I've been using mostly magnet links for the past year and haven't experienced
any issues. If people understand that they work just like a normal
link/torrent file, this won't make the process any more complicated. Hopefully
this is another win in the long run, as links are harder to stop than files.

~~~
forgotusername
Only slightly as I understand it, since from a legal perspective the _intent_
of someone providing providing links instead of files doesn't change, and
that's what counts.

From a technical perspective, and as someone who doesn't understand how magnet
works under the hood, I'm slightly concerned that DHTs might be easier to
attack in an underhanded manner than an HTTP server would have been.

~~~
Zirro
"Only slightly as I understand it, since from a legal perspective the intent
of someone providing providing links instead of files doesn't change, and
that's what counts."

Indeed, but a link can be posted anywhere a user can post text. Here, have
Pioneer One:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3a4be1d48c31dfa62bf52958f3fdca3d5ce91cf1&dn=Pioneer%20One%20SEASON1.720p%20x264-VODO

I can see this leading to a block on many sites on all links starting with the
"magnet"-protocol, if it's not in place already. It also highlights the issue
with SOPA further. Had that series not been allowed to be shared, Hacker News
would be in big trouble for hosting the link.

~~~
Joakal
That would be a restriction of freedom of speech and Internet Freedom for
blacklisting magnet urls.

Linux Distro excuse comes to mind.

A cynical person might say that the intent would also further kill free
content creators, restricting the supply of content; consumers then see only
paid content.

~~~
Zirro
Sadly, that hasn't prevented censorship of "neutral" keywords before. See:
<https://torrentfreak.com/googles-anti-piracy-filter-110712>

~~~
Joakal
Wow, I didn't see this before. I can understand filtering certain terms for
court requests, but voluntarily? It looks like Google is attacking
distribution methods of content with such broad filtering. Probably to make
compromises with the anti-Internet activists. Now judges can interpret it to
mean that Google can happily censor any results for certain words as it has
been done in other anti-Internet regimes. What scumbags all round.

~~~
lambda
Note that this isn't filtering the terms for search, just filtering them for
auto-complete. As in, if I type "lord of the rings" it won't suggest "lord of
the rings torrent" even if that is the most common or one of the most common
searches beginning with "lord of the rings."

If you actually type "lord of the rings torrent" and hit return, Google will
still do that search and return relevant results.

They are doing this because for many pieces of popular media, the torrent
search was fairly high in the list of most popular searches, and they don't
want to be seen as suggesting that you download the torrent. Likewise, they
won't autocomplete obscene or porn related terms, but will still do searches
for them.

There is a difference between banning a term entirely from their search
engine, and deciding that it's not something that you want to suggest to
people who haven't requested it, to avoid suggesting illegal acts, avoid legal
trouble, avoid offending people, or the like.

~~~
Joakal
My concern was mostly due to this statement:

"This is something we looked at and thought we could make some narrow and
relatively easy changes to our Autocomplete algorithm that could make a
positive difference, Cano added."

They believe in filtering broad innocent terms in them as a solution to
copyright infringement rather than saying "No no, we can't filter broad terms,
especially innocent uses of it. Not only does the language evolve, but the
infringers can adopt innocent names like congress:<link to song>. We need to
intelligently handle copyright infringement without hurting access to
legitimate websites."

It looks like part of doing SEO now is to be aware of avoiding broad innocent
terms. I hope the unaware people don't get caught in Google's broad
autocomplete filter.

------
GBiT
Talking about magnet links I remembered KAD with ed2k and eMule. Its almost
same. Bittorrent with magnet links just have different chunk size possibility
to make faster download with smaller piece size.

~~~
Hemospectrum
According to Wikipedia, magnet links are in fact based on ed2k and Freenet
URIs.

------
jmtame
From what I understand, DHT has a big trade-off vs BitTorrent: DHTs are
crawlable[1] and copyright holders can more easily track who holds copies of
what yet it's easier to duplicate search engines like TPB within hours for the
same reason.

So the effect seems to be that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. will likely not be able to
take down trackers; they'll have to revert back to suing their "customers" (or
lobbying to pass absurd legislation for that matter).

[1] [http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/osa/unvanish/papers/vanish-
brok...](http://z.cs.utexas.edu/users/osa/unvanish/papers/vanish-broken.pdf)

------
Fester
It seems that TBP just taken another step to push judge and jury's confusion
during next trials even further. "Y'know, we're trying to shut down pirates'
secret base that... doesn't serve a single file!"

------
sjmulder
What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed,
decentralised torrent database.

You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute
the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to
date.

~~~
jxcole
DHTs/Torrents are great for static data (like a movie) but bad for dynamic
data, like a website with a list of movies, their ratings, user comments, etc.

There are, however, other systems that are designed to combat this, like
freenet. They tend to be overwhelmingly slow, because you need to pass lots of
data around to make it consistent.

Then again, magnet links, titles, and a little html are probably not a lot of
information, so it probably could be done. I just haven't heard of any
attempts yet. It's tempting to go and write one. Could you make a
decentralized, P2P version of reddit with distributed trust? I think it's
possible but hasn't been tried.

~~~
icebraining
I think the easiest way is to not make it really "dynamic" but an append-only
structure of static content. For example a Reddit thread might be
representable as a static list of actions (add reply, upvote, downvote, etc),
which the client would process to get the current state.

That way, you could immediately download an earlier version of a resource and
then get the updates as they spread through the network.

~~~
ComputerGuru
a la bitcoin.

They have a big problem in their design where currently it works exactly as
you described, and at "some unknown point in the future" when the database of
all transactions EVER in the history of bitcoin gets too big for each person
to have to have a copy of in order to add another transaction, they'll "figure
out a way" to make it unnecessary.

~~~
Natsu
Can't they somehow publish the current state of things, let anyone who wants
to verify it from the public record building a web of trust, then go from
there forward?

Or is there some subtle flaw in that idea?

------
pornel
I hope that before .torrent files are gone, they (or some scraper) will
publish them all as a torrent.

Somebody did that last time PB was in trouble, e.g. one of the pieces:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4232363a47fe29acdf2c77874365a5e3368854b4&

That's a pretty interesting dataset to mine.

~~~
chimeracoder
Why? What would the point of the .torrent files be if the magnet links are
still there?

------
ward
> _This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands
> ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site._

Is there a list of countries where this has been ordered by courts? I know
it's already the case in my country (Belgium) as well[1].

[1]: [http://torrentfreak.com/belgium-starts-blocking-the-
pirate-b...](http://torrentfreak.com/belgium-starts-blocking-the-pirate-
bay-111020/)

------
nextparadigms
Since they are doing this big change, is there a way to make it more secure on
the user side, too? Like encrypt the traffic and make it impossible for RIAA
to track IP's?

Also since they say that it's like every user would have the TPB site on their
computer, does it mean blocking the site would be completely useless? And
since they are just links, and links are pretty much speech, I figure it would
be impossible to turn it into law as well, to specifically target magnet based
sites like TPB.

~~~
teraflop
The entire design of Bittorrent is predicated on clients advertising to each
other which torrents they're seeding and which pieces are available. You can
encrypt your traffic to get it past your ISP's deep packet inspection, but the
peer at the other end has to be able to decrypt it. And you have no way of
knowing what nefarious organization controls that peer.

------
afhof
Don't the torrent files contain all the hashes for each piece? Doesn't that
mean if a single piece is bad, the entire torrent can't be verified? Torrent
files contain a lot of useful data that isn't found in a magnet URI. Is this
just being ignored?

~~~
skymt
The hash in a magnet URI is of the info dictionary in the .torrent file. It's
used to query the BitTorrent DHT for peers running the same torrent. Once
another peer is found, your client will download the full metadata file from
it, and from there it works just like any other BitTorrent download.

<http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html>
<http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0009.html>

------
sp0rus
This is definitely a step in the right direction. Not saying this is a good
step to increase piracy, but there really is no need for trackers when we have
magnets, and this will lead to a healthier bittorent community.

------
joejohnson
How does this change the process for uploading a new torrent to TPB?

~~~
Refringe
For the time being, nothing. However, once TPB goes full magnet you'll just
submit a link instead of a file. It should make the process easier.

------
instakill
Can anyone say what the gist of this article is? Blocked from torrent sites at
work.

~~~
keypusher
Piratebay will now serve magnet links by default instead of .torrent files.
For the average user, not much will change. For some particular use cases,
there may have to be adjustments.

------
jdefarge
Pirate Bay is the BEST torrent site ever created. It's a pity they are
switching to Magnet. :( It would be so cool if they provided both (Magnet and
Torrent)...

