This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead.

One of the consequences of this move is that The Pirate Bay has seen a massive drop in bandwidth consumption. The size of the impact became clear today when the site’s operators informed TorrentFreak that bandwidth usage has dropped by nearly a third.

“We now use 30 percent less bandwidth, but the number of visitors to the site remains the same,” we were told.

The drop is even more impressive, approximately 60 percent, when the Pirate Bay’s RSS-feed is excluded. Of all bandwidth generated by the popular file-sharing site today nearly half comes from the RSS feed.

But there are not only upsides to a torrent-less Pirate Bay. Large groups of users have experienced problems when trying to overcome the minor annoyances that magnets bring with them.

One of the most heard complaints is that it’s impossible to select individual files before starting a download. This can be problematic when people need only one single file from a huge archive. When downloading a .torrent people can select the file in question in a window before starting the download, but with magnets uTorrent users can’t (it it supported by BitComet and Vuze).

A possible fix for this can be to keep the detail window open until the full torrent has been downloaded. Obviously, these are issues for BitTorrent client developers and not The Pirate Bay.

Following The Pirate Bay’s switch to magnets the uTorrent development team have already addressed one magnet-related bug, one that made it impossible to resume or reseed downloads when a magnet was re-added to the download queue.

Despite the issues mentioned above the transition appears to have gone smoothly.

For The Pirate Bay the switch to magnets was necessary, as it makes the site more resistant to being shut down. It’s easier to move around and takes only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed. And as an added bonus it reduces the bandwidth bills.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today, all torrent files being shared by more than 10 people have been replaced by so-called magnet links.

This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead.

While a torrent-less Pirate Bay may sound like small disaster, in reality not much is going to change.

“It shouldn’t make much of a difference for the average user. At most it will take a few more seconds before a torrent shows the size and files,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak today.

“Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine”

Torrents that are only shared by a handful of people (<10 ) will remain available for now, to ensure that the files remain accessible. For magnet links to work at least one person in the swarm should have the complete .torrent file and a BitTorrent client that supports magnet links.

"We put the 10 peer limit in just in case someone who created a torrent has an outdated client that doesn't support magnets. By now all common torrent clients support magnets," TorrentFreak was told.

The lack of support for magnets is one of the reasons why The Pirate Bay waited more than two years after first announcing that they wanted to remove all torrents. BitTorrent developers heard this call, and in the months that followed many improved or added support for magnet links.

In addition, Pirate Bay users should make sure that they have DHT and PEX enabled in their clients.

While the change doesn’t impact users much, external sites that rely on Pirate Bay torrents will have to implement a few changes. If they want to continue serving .torrent files the sites will have to fetch them from DHT. Also, hotlinks to .torrent files will stop working and will soon redirect to The Pirate Bay’s detail page for the files in question.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the transition to a magnet site is necessary, as it makes the site more resistant to being shut down. It takes only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed.

“The new site will be better protected from outside attacks. It uses less bandwidth, less servers, and can even run off a decent home connection,” The Pirate Bay team said.

“It’s the future.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The first step in this direction will be taken on February 29, the Pirate Bay announced today.

Instead of deleting all torrent files at once, the Pirate Bay crew will start with all files that have more than 10 peers. This is to guarantee that people will still be able to download less popular files, which tend to start slower through magnets.

While there are fears that this is the end of The Pirate Bay, nothing could be further from the truth. For users of the site the upcoming switch is expected to go smoothly.

People will be able to download all files as usual, but instead of using a .torrent file downloads will be initiated through a magnet link. The actual content of the .torrent file will then be downloaded from other people instead of the Pirate Bay’s servers.

Although it might take a little longer for less popular downloads to get started, all files will remain available. Also, users will still be able to upload .torrent files, which will be converted into magnet links by The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak that the transition to a magnet site is “a step forward in technology,” and one that will make the site more resistant to being shut down.

Without torrents it takes less bandwidth to host a Pirate Bay proxy site which are used to circumvent ISP blockades in countries like Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands and Belgium. In addition, the Pirate Bay will become much more portable and thus easier to move around.

How easy it is to carry a copy of a torrent-less Pirate Bay became apparent last week, when a user reduced the entire site to 90 megabytes – small enough to fit on a tiny thumb drive. The Pirate Bay team likes the idea of a “portable” backup of the site and told TorrentFreak that they are considering releasing an official version in the future.

It’s quite remarkable to see how The Pirate Bay has transformed in recent years. The site is no longer hosting a tracker, and soon .torrent files will be entirely replaced by magnet links. Despite these changes the iconic file-sharing site is picking up new users every week.

The Pirate Bay crew told TorrentFreak that users can be assured that they have no intention of going anywhere in the near future. With or without torrents, the site is here to stay.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This change is expected to go into effect before the end of the month. From then on, Pirate Bay users can only download files through magnet links.

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 site. This is needed, because The Pirate Bay is currently blocked in several countries, and more are bound to follow in the months to come.

Without torrents, the Pirate Bay also becomes extremely portable which makes it possible for people to download a personal backup. As we said before, such a copy would easily fit on a thumb drive. Pirate Bay user “allisfine” was intrigued by this idea and decided to find out how small a copy of the torrents site would be.

“I did a complete snapshot of ALL the Pirate Bay torrents, in case somebody wants to close it or something similarly crazy,” he told TorrentFreak.

Using this script, “allisfine” managed to copy the title, id, file size, seeds, leechers and magnet links of 1,643,194 torrents. Comments were not copied to keep the files as small as possible, and the end result is a full copy of all magnet links (magnet) on The Pirate Bay in a 90 megabytes file, 164 megabytes unzipped.

There is some confusion as to whether the 1,643,194 torrents are indeed a full copy of the site, as The Pirate Bay itself lists 4,199,832 torrents in the footer link on its site. However, the latter stats apply to the number of torrents that are available on several public trackers, The Pirate Bay itself only hosts a fraction of those.

With the release of the copy everyone can now download a personal backup of The Pirate Bay in a few minutes. Although searching the copy isn’t as convenient as using The Pirate Bay itself, there is little doubt that someone else will soon come up with another script that solves this problem.

Recent history has shown that when a site is threatened with shutdown, or censored, the Internet is very quick to come up with a workaround. And with thousands of backups of The Pirate Bay floating around, it will be very hard at this point to get rid of the famous torrent site.

What’s perhaps even more striking is that the greatest arch rival of a billion dollar entertainment industry is nothing more than 164 megabytes of text. Something to think about.

Update: Here’s a copy of 17 million torrents from Bitsnoop.com, pretty much the same format but nicely categorized. It’s only 535 MB.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“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.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The link uses the torrent hash and DHT to download content and allows for additional trackers to be added. Thus far, most BitTorrent users have ignored this alternative download method, but thanks to the Magnetiser Firefox add-on, this might change.

The idea behind the add-on is simple. It allows users of meta-search engines, such as Torrentz.com, to download a torrent’s magnet link without having to go to an external site where the torrent is hosted.

“I’ve recently written an add-on for Firefox that generates magnet links for torrent pseudo-indexers that don’t host torrents but does list them by their hashes. So far it supports Torrentz and isoHunt, but the code is simple and could be extended to any searchable indexer that shows the info hash either in the URL, or on the torrent page,” the coder of the add-on told TorrentFreak.

Once the add-on is installed, users can click the ‘magnetise’ link at the bottom right of their Firefox window when they are on a torrent detail page on Torrentz. This will launch a new window that will prompt you to pick the torrent client of your choice.

We have to say that this usage of magnet links is a great idea, and it works like a charm. Not only does it save time, it also comes in handy when a torrent is no longer available on the external site. The only downside is that the title of the download as it appears in your client will not be very descriptive.

The add-on is not available on Firefox’s add-on section just yet, but those who want to try it can download this xpi file and drag it into the Firefox browser window. After it’s installed users can add additional trackers, but since it includes the most-used trackers by default, this is not really needed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.