{"id":44575,"date":"2012-02-29T09:37:12","date_gmt":"2012-02-29T07:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=44575"},"modified":"2012-02-29T10:59:26","modified_gmt":"2012-02-29T08:59:26","slug":"the-pirate-bay-mostly-torrent-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/44575-the-pirate-bay-mostly-torrent-less.html","title":{"rendered":"The Pirate Bay mostly torrent-less"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well-known file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay<\/a>, changed its colours early this morning (29 February 2012), replacing its infamous pirate ship logo with a horseshoe magnet – with the words \u201cThe Magnet Bay\u201d below it.<\/p>\n

The change is not only cosmetic: the site has removed links to many of the torrent files it once hosted, leaving only \u201cmagnet links.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Pirate Bay website is what\u2019s known as a BitTorrent<\/a> index – essentially a directory of content that can be downloaded using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.<\/p>\n

To download and share files with this technology, you first need a torrent file. Indices like The Pirate Bay offer large, searchable repositories of these files, which let users find and download them easily.<\/p>\n

Until now, index sites generally hosted torrent files that users had to open in their BitTorrent clients before they could download the files.<\/p>\n

\"The

The Magnet Bay, by The Pirate Bay<\/p><\/div>\n

With magnet links, users no longer download the torrent file directly from the index, and instead get it from peers \u201cseeding\u201d the content they want to download.<\/p>\n

This means that, instead of downloading a torrent file with a web browser, and giving that file to a BitTorrent client, the magnet link is passed immediately to the client software, which searches for the torrent it points to.<\/p>\n

In a blog post published yesterday evening, the website elaborated on their reasons for switching to magnet links<\/a>, which is quoted directly below:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s simpler for us and no more hassle for you. It\u2019s more resilient than .torrent files, and it uses much less bandwidth for those who want to mirror. Also, since the magnet links are just a hash, it\u2019s on every single torrent detail page – so no-one knows that you actually downloaded a file or not.<\/p>\n

This means that no-one can block torrent files without blocking data within a webpage. So far, few countries have implemented such harsh censorship tactics. Countries, particularily in EU, seem to moving towards total censorship, so we do all we can to avoid our users ending up with less freedom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an earlier blog post<\/a> announcing that these changes would kick in from today, The Pirate Bay explained that .torrent files would still be served for those torrents with 10 peers or less.<\/p>\n

Related articles<\/strong><\/p>\n

ThePirateBay to be blocked in the UK<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Court orders block on ThePirateBay<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you call a torrent site without torrents?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":41099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[3536,35,9321,9325,9323,8033],"class_list":["post-44575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-bittorrent","tag-headline","tag-magnet-links","tag-p2p","tag-peer-to-peer","tag-the-pirate-bay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44575"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44581,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44575\/revisions\/44581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}