The Pirate Bay To Stop Serving Torrent Files

[wraggster]

An anonymous reader tips news that The Pirate Bay is making a move away from .torrent files (http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-will-stop-serving-torrents-120112/) in favor of 'magnet links (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_link).' On Thursday the site made magnet links the default (http://thepiratebay.org/blog/197), and TorrentFreak reports that they'll stop serving .torrent files altogether in about a month."The announcement is bound to lead to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little will change for the average Pirate Bay visitor. Users will still be able to download files, but these will now be started through a magnet link instead of a .torrent file. 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. This is topical, since this week courts in both Finland and the Netherlands ordered local Internet providers to block the torrent site. Perhaps even better, without the torrent files everyone can soon host a full copy of The Pirate Bay on a USB thumb drive, which may come in handy in the future."

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/01/15/012200/the-pirate-bay-to-stop-serving-torrent-files