TorrIndex, World’s First Magnet-Only Torrent Index

Ernesto
January 16, 2010
93
magnet links,
Magnet Torrents,
TorrIndex
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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.

magnets Last November, The Pirate Bay decided to close down its tracker. According to The Pirate Bay team, BitTorrent has evolved up to a point where trackers are no longer needed.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, adding that they might even stop serving torrents in the future.

Following this announcement, several torrent clients quickly added support for magnet links. The format was already supported by uTorrent and Vuze, but Transmission, BitComet and others soon followed after the Pirate Bay announcement.

Although magnet links work very well, BitTorrent cannot rely solely on this type of link just yet. The .torrent files still hold crucial information needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.

Despite this, it is possible to setup a torrent site without torrents, solely relying on magnet links and saving precious bandwidth and resources. This is exactly what the newly-launched TorrIndex does.

Instead of hosting torrent files, the site uses magnet links exclusively. The magnet links on TorrIndex also include the trackers from the original torrent, and they are properly formatted so they look just like regular torrent downloads in your torrent client.

TorrIndex gathers the links from various other torrent sites on the net and also allows users to add magnet links to the site. At first sight it seems that the site uses well respected and moderated sources, since the number of fake and spammy magnet links are lower than on many regular torrent sites.

Aside from the fact that TorrIndex is the first magnet-only torrent index, the site’s setup is pretty straightforward. There is no option to comment on any of the links and there are no other fancy features, it’s just a searchable index of magnet links.

Magnet’s to replace torrents?

magnets

TorrentFreak contacted the owner of the site, who told us that everything is totally automated. The magnet links are put in categories automatically based on the filetype, size and a few other parameters.

Another novelty is that TorrIndex is the first to use DHT information for their seed and peer count, in addition to the statistics reported by the trackers. “We collect the numbers from trackers and the DHT cloud,” the owner said.

TorrIndex is currently still in the Beta testing phase, so don’t be surprised if something appears to be broken. We’re told that the design will be updated and comment and torrent rating features are under consideration.

The site proves that it’s possible to start a torrent site without having to host actual torrent files. We predict that many sites like this will follow in the months to come, and it wouldn’t surprise us if The Pirate Bay also converts to a magnet-only index in the future.

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Amused

I hate it on your great site: I read the news in my RSS reader and can’t find the link. Please post it next time. ;)
otherwise thanks for the news – easy to google. x)
Ace Hall

And the great wheel of evolution continues! The harder they try to stop us the smarter we get. I do hope they add the comment ability, as that is a great way to determine if the content is clean and of good quality.
TheSpark

What interests me the most about a site like this is how it will fair in legal proceedings. We all know the mafia’s will be after this site very quickly, if they aren’t already.

I must say though, I like the clean look of this site. Has potential to become a winner I think.
rawr

>Magnet’s to replace torrents?

lol TF do you even read what you write anymore or do you just spew euronon-sense without thinking?

awaiting moderation!!!!
Dave

I just had a quick look & my first impression is they have cloned Pirate Bay, every file is a 1 to 1 correlation to PB. Consequently I will keep it as a backup for when & if Pirate Bay goes down.

Dave
duane

It’s so ironic that the “pirates” — the ones who are supposed to be stupid and disorganised — are the ones constantly innovating and bringing new technologies for the little people to use.

Just goes to show how freaking outdated and unnecessary those industries are!

I wouldn’t have a problem if it were the content companies doing the innovating, even if I had to pay (reasonably) to see it happen, but the problem is they simply won’t. Get rid of them already! They’re intentionally standing in the way of progress, and that pisses me off.
123456789

How are magnet links with multi-tracker torrents?

I found that magnet links only include one tracker.

Any comments on this?
Phoenix

nice innovation but needs some time to got ppl used to it
Freedom.Fighter

@5 If necessity is the mother of invention, than competition is most certainly its father.
????

@ 6 magnet links dont f*cking work like that they just link to the torrent file in the dht swarm utorrent has to put support do be able to see what you are first downloading like torrent files do i hate adding the magnet then after going to the local folder were the torrent file is saved (yes ppl utorrent does save every f*cking torrent you ever added to it in your app folder)so i can add that file so i can see what im f*cking downloading! and if the dht swarm is weak then it takes forever to find the torrent… magnet links are fine just some things about it that piss me off…
Hom3r

@6
There is support for multiple trackers in the magnet link specification.
However, DHT and PEX can (and should) be used instead of relying on multiple trackers (one is fine anyway).
Both DHT and PEX play a big part in decentralizing Bittorrent, which is one of the main supporting reasons for magnet links; they require no centralized server, whereas .torrents require a server to download from.
You can share magnet links over chat (IRC, IM, etc) or on forums without uploading any files.
Hom3r

@9
May I suggest reading BEP 9 (and related documents) before making stupid uneducated comments?
anon

why does ?Torrent and BitTorrent have 5 film studios as partners???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent,_Inc.
bling

I would rather stick with my pvt site that has over 30 dedicated servers, and less chance of mpaa riaa joining the swarm
poo

If you download pirated content, your soul will be tormented in the ever-lasting fires of eternal damnation.
talorthain

And they just keep appearing… The industry must be pulling its hair out….

Went after people – failed
Went after sites – Failing
Went after ISPs – Failing
Went after internet – Rediculous

Whats next.. Microsoft, Apple, Linux or have these people, groups got to much money and can fight pound for pound?

Innovation and adaption is what moves on technologies… and if they take you to court you was practising your programming
RoestVrijStaal

Ironically enough, magnet-providing sites are older than torrents :)

However, they never became popular till now, because most of the fileshare software who can handle magnet-links have a search function, what torrent-clients not have.

I thought magnetz.org was earlier. It seems so, compare the ‘registration date’ with each other: http://who.is/whois/magnetz.org/ http://who.is/whois/torrindex.com/
Ben Ben

@16 Agreed but what does linux have to do with copyright infringement cases?
mike

well it look,s like china is kicking all the anti pirate laws in the bollox they just fucked google in the arse and explorer all the innocent people being accused of piracy should stand up and say look at the chinese selling software on the streets now you know where its coming from, not victims of acs law and the like,s
x0 Dj EuRoStYlE 0x

Down with the MAFIAA!

The more they attempt to fight, the more people will begin to understand about those greedy corporation. As soon as the first trial against a magnet-only tracker arises, it will receive a lot of publication further hurting the MAFIAA.

It doesn’t seem like they will change their market strategies. They wont be able to contain the flood any longer. Either go pro-p2p or die out.

Simple Darwinism.
RoestVrijStaal

@Ben Ben:
Because MAFIAA goes after GPL and other open source licensed software now.

Open source software (and thus Linux distro’s ) were one of the first content who use BitTorrent for mass distribution. And nowadays most Bittorrent clients and other p2p clients are open source.

The story of Shareaza http://fakeshareaza.com (http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/shareaza/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5)is a good example to MAFIAA vs opensource
phazee

All they need to do now is just add a comment and rating system!! hopefully they take my advice because that is a must!
R

I agree with #20 – the comment/rating system is what made Mininova great! It’s the only way to filter out the crap without getting involved personally (and the isohunt case demonstrated that once you do that you’re liable).
Ninja

@ 7 Jan 16, 2010 at 23:12 by 123456789: Magnets provide hash info and are trackerless relying in DHT and PEX for peers. If you want trackers (and you should want for the torrents health in some cases) add the well known open trackers such as

udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com/announce
udp://tracker.publicbt.com/announce
http://mongo56.co.cc:80/announce

openbt and publicbt support http too (just replace udp for http)

Add those open trackers to the magnet links mix and you have invincibility against MAFIAA and merry friends since it’s completely automated and the operators have no control over what’s being indexed or tracked thus making lawsuits not feasible.

Plain awesome.

Suggestion: TF could you perm link a list/article of open trackers? Maybe there are more than those ones?
Anonymous

All I care about now is the licenses.

Is there a way to see what is what?

I want to find GPL, public domain and CC commons material.
DefaultUser

It it really the first? What about http://magnetz.org/ ?
Anonymous

yeah this will just get spammy pretty quickly unless they add comments soon. Nice idea though; hope it works out for the owners
DefaultUser

@24 http://www.trackon.org/
ET

ooo. finally.
Messi

@7 magnet links can include multiple trackers by having multiple &tr= stamens in the url, the only limitation is the maximum length of a url your web-browser can handle.
Unauthorized Content Consumer

I’m sure that right at this very moment as you are reading that the media corporations ate hurridly talking to their lawyers and trying to find a way to manipulate, extort, threaten and bribe their newly found political friends to make sure that all magnets links fall under the promoting, authorizing and enabling the sharing of copyrighted material. Before too long the site is shut down with a “I’m sorry but we got shut down” notice goes up, and a new ring tones/DRM content web site is born.

Then of course 100 other magnet sites take root, and the process repeats.

The genie is out of the bottle and it can never be forced back in.
Unauthorized Content Consumer

ate=are
anon

please does anyone know why utorrent and bittorrent clients have 5 movie studios as partners as shown on the following website?????

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent,_Inc.
fs

This is far from the “world’s first magnet-only torrent index”. Please don’t make outlandish claims.
markie

Will magnetic links keep the likes of MPAA & RIAA away. From suing people.
Unauthorized Content Consumer

@ 35 Jan 17, 2010 at 05:19 by markie

No. Your IP address is still there for all to see.

Get VPN tunnel to protect your privacy. There’s a small monthly fee but it’s a good investment that might save your family from being torn apart from legal battles and millions of dollars in fines.

Or just do what I do; go through an unsecured wireless router off an unsuspecting neighbour. xD
Anonymous

@36

Or stop using copycrap and start using copyleft stuff.

- Hack 5 and independent show in the Revision3 webTV uses CC Commons ShareALike 3.0 for personal use.

The RIAA can’t touch you if you use services that use copyleft licenses.

http://magnatune.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/en/top
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list
http://www.opsound.org/
http://www.opensourcemusic.com/
DeltaPan

Azureus/Vuse – mainline DHT plug-in.
chaku

so actually what purpose does this serve to the torrent community ??

apart from lesser (apparently) legal troubles to the site admin…which in any case “they” will get to you if they decide to whether u host torrents or not.

For magnet links to work, the torrent file MUST be present somewhere.
Zena

@24 openbittorrent.kg

http://tracker.openbittorrent.kg:2710/announce
udp://tracker.openbittorrent.kg:2710/announce

I still prefer to use places such as
http://www.tvunderground.org.ru and ed2k though. I used tixati for magnets and works as well as torrents, although interface is winmx style. Same speed as regular torrents.
Anonymous

Torrent sites should be founded under LLC’s that shield the owners from responsibility.

Search for “limited liability” and you will see what that means. Big companies use those to hide behind when they know the probability of something go wrong is high and is legal.
Anonymous

In the future, downloading will be so far advanced that all you have to do is think of a movie, and it will automatically start downloading to your computer based off the signals it can read from your brain.

Science fiction? I don’t think so!
DeltaPan

The future is already happening.
Anonymous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_projects_using_Creative_Commons_licenses
AlienDK

I hate magnet links. That I cannot decide where to put my files really annoys me. Cause on public torrents, I don’t bother moving and then finding the correct page and downloading the torrent (OR MAGNET LINK) again and checking and reseeding. Instead of hosting torrents themselfs, they could use Torrage and Zoink. Using a magnet link has to become as easy as using a .torrent file, else it will never become popular.
Reasoned Mind

The future of torrent looks promising
DeltaPan

Still Bit Torrent magnets ya tosser.

Obvious troll is obvious.
Flash

I don’t see how magnet can protect from legal issues in most countries (which is THE problem of filesharing, more than resources consumption) …
DeltaPan

Legal semantics in defence and point of law, essentially.

Have you been following the whole thing?
Reasoned Mind

@47

Eh… are you referring to me?
jhon

what source they using?
Mehz

private trackers dont allow DHT , so i cannot down from this site and from private so will not use this , also magnet links are old , nothing new
Anonymous

@37

Being a supporter of free culture, I thank you for promoting its existence and for the links. :)

Jamendo FTW
adyshor

Trackers will never be replaced by MU. The shutdown of TPB tracker was a bad decision (speed has dropped).

Torrin…..is just a copy of thepiratebay.
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me

@31 UCC: “(…) all magnets links fall under the promoting, authorizing and enabling the sharing of copyrighted material.”

Yes, this is a real possible threat.

However, this can’t stop distribution of magnet links per se, who are so tiny that they can be easily and steganographically hidden inside images, pdfs, and all kinds of other files.

But we WILL need a truly distributed indexing system in the future anyway. Indexing magnet link sites are the next bottleneck, or rather, the next choke points for the MAFIAA’s lawyers and their bribed politicians.

We need to evolve further. Ultimately, distributed bittorrent and e2dk+kad (which already has distributed search) will converge and we’ll be totally decentralized and censorship-resistant.

Finally, we’ll have to move on to anonymizing file sharing techniques, because the MAFIAA will have nobody else to threaten and bully than us end users, which they’ll certainly revert back to when their other tricks stop working.
DeltaPan

Must admit the only time i used a amgnet i hadn’t realised Shareaza had gained focus so it ended up there instead of Azureus.

I prefer torrents myself for some strange reason, even pasted hashcodes into “Open Torrents”, but it’s just us being creatures of habit, we will adapt if necessary.

But the offering of magnets isn’t really catching me, but i will use them if what myself and many others expect, is to be.

The manner some new legislations are being made is less specific, more broadsword.

Comrade Johnson about a month ago announced a new appraoch to ammending the Misuse oof drugs act 1971 by having Spice and BZP added to the act, but also when it comes to Methamphetamine variants in molecular complex to keep them legal as not specifically included in ammendments, the ammendment to include BZP also encompasses all and any future varient of Methamphetamins molecular complex and this is how legislation ammendments to acts are evolving in the future to streamline process and adminstration.

Such as is a new raft of legislation being drafted in the UK in 2011, so shall it be with other nations, it may see problems for any hosting of any torrents soon when multilateral alignment in digital legislations comes to pass, which is what this is all leading to, with broadsworded legislations against torrents and trackers facilitating them and the point of magnets is it’d be hard to legislate them, as too calling downloads via pasted hashcodes, as if actual trackers are banned by ISP’s through increased multilateral pressures, the alternative will mean it’s going to be relatively ethereal to all us lot, because magnets are in place and counters to counters already worked out, much harder to stop tech shift into DHT via magnet or calling by hashcodes which can be sourced from anywhere by way of a search, even on Google etc.

So actual torrent trackers may not be a viable option when the DEB/DRB comes into effect in 2011.

DHT – magnets will circumvent that and legistlations will have to then be drafted to stop us at point of ISP and that would do damage the House of Lords has already stated it wants to avoid.

That’s why more and more people are hailing magnets as being the near future, the way it’s going to happen, if it does, like most everybody, i will adapt, sure you guys will too.

[Borgs say to media corporates in unison, "persistance is futile!", lol's!]

That’s the point.

peace. :)
DeltaPan

And i simply cannot believe i just mispelt every instance of amend…
by adding two m’s.

Like Durrrrrrrr.

:)
lilars

No #36.you don’t steal from your neighbours.Even true pirates have some sense of decency.People like you give the rest of us a bad name.You must be a hit and run driver.
Thunderstorm

@5 Furthermore the brains that invent this ingenious stuff almost certainly wouldnt want to work for a company with a total different philosophy. Being a creative brain myself, I can only speak for me though.
anon

noone is concerned that utorrent and bittorrent clients have partnerships with the following????

20th Century Fox
Comedy Central
Lionsgate Films
MTV
Paramount
Spike TV
Warner Brothers
Netgear
Buffalo Technology
D-Link
New Line Cinema
Manga Entertainment
mister_playboy

I haven’t had much luck with magnet links on TPB so far… many of them only point to the non-existent TPB tracker and therefore don’t work.
Sharingain’tstealing

No big news. TPB is offering magnet links for months.
Apocalypse Now!

Dump uTorrent.. use Miro or Vuze for Legal Torrents
Flash

@49
Yes I can say that many countries courts don’t give a shit about “semantic” but only look at facts.

And the facts are that indexing the name of a content and provides a link to retrieve it with an appliction is illegal in most UE/US countries.
Anonymous

I tried it, it works. The magnet links includes multiple trackers and everything.
John

It gives a pretty wierd snap shot of the public torrent “swarm”. A lot of rubbish is up there basically. Makes you appreciate the power of indexes.
Cyko_01

too bad the magnet links do not include a bitprint, ed2k, or sha1 hash so the files could be downloaded using other P2P networks.
silversurfer

major prob with magnets is theres no way to pervent the fake .torrents being picked up in the swam

likes of http://www.kickasstorrents.com/
most new files are fake
likes of book of eli
the descent 2
are prim examples take 6 days to d/l only to find out its a fake file

so the main question plp should ask is how does using magnets STOP picking up the fakes of public sites
as to use a private site thats monitored on u/l files
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FreeSCV

Way to GO torrindex.com

I was noticing the lack of “sort by seed”.

I use THAT more then browse on Mininova or Pirate Bay!

(yaya build yer OWN website then talk of fancy extras eh? lol)

Anyways if 2.0 could have that it’d rock. (even more! :D)

*added to “downloads” in Firefox Bookmark Toolbar*

Then just export to html in organize bookmarks. PC crashes, new os, whatever, grab a copy from yer email and yer good.

Ya think the site admins just “check their luggage” (few million torrents and html code and a few pics? :D)

Love to see a Yahoo for taking care of bookmarks (sharing them p2p wouldn’t hurt)

Also offline torrent websites that work locally? Thinking the 50mb website as a torrent itself!

I’m not sure how all that could work but YOU GUYS prob can! ;)

I’ll just sort by seed and see some offline torrent websites (organization for the torrent files) and get another 500 mega pack of whatever. :)
azdr

- need to be able to sort by arbitrary column
- needs ratings & comments
- mininova-style rss feeds would be nice
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Duh

So basically we are back to ed2k+kademlia stylings and “Sharereactor” like sites.

Wow, now isn’t THAT “progress”.
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me

Yes Duh #72, that’s progress, as ed2k+kad proved a lot harder to censor than centralized bittorrent trackers. In the current hostile legal and political climate, we need to use ships that navigate storms, and in the future, we’ll need submarines (a.k.a. anonymized networks) too. This is inevitable in our arms race against the crusading worldwide copyright cartels.
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its me!!!!

@13. bittorrent is a company owned by bram cohen which sells films legally….or sumtin like that…I think..
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Magnus007

As usual when trying out magnetic links, most of them don’t work like on the pirate bay.
I always get the message “The server at http://www.h33t.com is taking too long to respond”, when trying to download a magnetic link.
Is this an address on the net that has to be passed always when downloading a magnetic link?
If that is the case it probably is overloaded, which probably is the reason for so many of the magnetic links I try doesn’t work at all.
Add to that the conflict with private torrent sites that discourages dht use and you have something that seems pretty useless for us end-users.
It adds nothing for us, just presents something that doesn’t work most of the time and for this site is very limited.

But I can see that it is an advantage in the way that no tracker can be shut down, since there is no one!
But for now it doesn’t make anything better for us end-users.
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ArkOuroboros

The site looks clean and it really isn’t a bad idea, especially for public torrenting this really takes the load off of trackers although I don’t think private torrents are going away any time soon. Still, I use magnets occasionally but I hope that the DHT system starts to get more robust like KAD for the eDonkey network, the ability to have decentralized comments on files and fake checks would be really awesome.
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