Part of The Pirate Bay’s decision to go torrent-less was to make the site more resistant to outside attacks, but it also has quite an impact on bandwidth bills. The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today that after the switch the site now consumes 30 percent less bandwidth, while the number of visitors remains stable. Despite some annoyances most users appear to be fine with the new magnet-only site.
Today marks the end of an era for The Pirate Bay. The largest torrent site on the Internet has just removed all popular torrent files and made the switch to magnet links. The Pirate Bay team believes the move is needed to make the site future proof, and is confident that it won’t cause much trouble among users. “Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine,” they say.
The Pirate Bay has confirmed that all torrent files being shared by more than 10 people will be deleted on February 29. The decision is causing a small panic among the site’s users, but in reality little will change as all files will remain available through magnet links. The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that this is merely a “step forward in technology” and confirmed that the site is here to stay.
Soon The Pirate Bay will stop linking to .torrent files. Instead, the world’s largest BitTorrent site will only list so-called magnet links. One of the advantages of the switch is that The Pirate Bay will be much more portable, and easier to copy. A new torrent listing all titles and magnet links on The Pirate Bay proves this point, as the public can download a copy that fits easily on a small USB stick – or even a few dozen floppies.
There has been a lot of talk about magnet links since The Pirate Bay decided to include them on their site recently. Various BitTorrent clients quickly added support for these type of links, and recently the first ‘magnet-only’ torrent index opened to the public.
Torrentz.com is the largest BitTorrent search engine that doesn’t actually host any torrent files. This means that its millions of users still depend on third party sites in order to download .torrent files. That said, all that changes if they have the Firefox web browser installed along with the new Magnetiser add-on.
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Left Quote“The Pirate Bay has been one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship.
Peter Sunde Left Quote
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