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The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

torrentfreak.com

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Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#3
post #2

Talking about magnet links I remembered KAD with ed2k and eMule. Its almost same. Bittorrent with magnet links just have different chunk size possibility to make faster download with smaller piece size.

According to Wikipedia, magnet links are in fact based on ed2k and Freenet URIs.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#4
So, what if you don't run the client on the same machine you're browsing TPB with, like people who have torrent enabled routers or VPS/seedboxes? I suppose you can copy-paste the link to your client, but clients which had automatic pick-up of .torrent files (like rtorrent) were nice because you could just drop them on a remote directory and have them be downloaded.

I wonder if I could write a small application just to download the torrent file from the magnet link/DHT to copy it to the remote server afterwards.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#6
What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed, decentralised torrent database.

You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to date.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#7
post #6

What I’m wondering is whether it’s not yet possible to have a distributed, decentralised torrent database. You could already put up a copy of the database as a torrent and distribute the magnet link, but you’d need some method for efficiently keeping it up to date.

DHTs/Torrents are great for static data (like a movie) but bad for dynamic data, like a website with a list of movies, their ratings, user comments, etc.

There are, however, other systems that are designed to combat this, like freenet. They tend to be overwhelmingly slow, because you need to pass lots of data around to make it consistent.

Then again, magnet links, titles, and a little html are probably not a lot of information, so it probably could be done. I just haven't heard of any attempts yet. It's tempting to go and write one. Could you make a decentralized, P2P version of reddit with distributed trust? I think it's possible but hasn't been tried.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#8
I've been using mostly magnet links for the past year and haven't experienced any issues. If people understand that they work just like a normal link/torrent file, this won't make the process any more complicated. Hopefully this is another win in the long run, as links are harder to stop than files.

Re: The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents

#10
post #8

I've been using mostly magnet links for the past year and haven't experienced any issues. If people understand that they work just like a normal link/torrent file, this won't make the process any more complicated. Hopefully this is another win in the long run, as links are harder to stop than files.

Only slightly as I understand it, since from a legal perspective the intent of someone providing providing links instead of files doesn't change, and that's what counts.

From a technical perspective, and as someone who doesn't understand how magnet works under the hood, I'm slightly concerned that DHTs might be easier to attack in an underhanded manner than an HTTP server would have been.

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