All the torrent addicts out there should keep their eyes open for the new technology that is going to change the game very soon. If you are hunting in The Pirate Bay for your favorite movies, music albums or the latest games, or highly priced software you should know that the company is considering replacing torrent files with magnet links.
As TorrentFreak reported, an anonymous source from Pirate Bay confessed a while ago: “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore.”
The move has its advantages and disadvantages as well. While magnet links require significantly less bandwidth, they also need more time before the download starts. The explanation relies on the fact that although a magnet link contains all the needed information for the user to get the desired files from peers, the download is not made directly form the site. For the Bittorrent indexers this means that they don’t have to store the torrents on their servers.
In addition, the pressure from outside parties motivated by the piracy aspect of the whole situation is significantly reduced. For users, the advantage comes from the convenience of having magnet links that can be easily distributed by email or even messaging.
[ttjad]
