I read an article about future option in (i) legal sharing. Any one knows about magnet links? or something like that. The article claims with magnet, you won't even need trackers like mininova or piratebay to download data.
I am interested in technical aspect of magnet, if any 1 knows.. please share.
Ah yes, magnet links.
In a Nutshell:
Worlds most resiliant tracking
You might have noticed all the new magnet icons everywhere?
These are "magnet links", a link that lets you download a torrent directly in your BitTorrent client, instead of your browser. Most clients supports this (uTorrent, Vuze, rtorrent, whatever) and will get the relevant torrent data over the DHT network.
And DHT? It's a de-centralized peer to peer network that all modern clients join by default, even if they are currently not downloading any torrents. DHT can help you find peers and metadata when you choose to start a torrent download.
(If you want to learn more about DHT this Torrentfreak article might be a good place to start)
You might also have noticed that the tracker has been down lately? And that the upload page don't recommend trackers anymore! The development of DHT has reached a stage where a tracker is no longer needed to use a torrent. DHT (combined with PEX) is highly effective in finding peers without the need for a centralized service. If you run uTorrent you might have noticed in the tracker tab of your torrents that the [Peer Exchange] (PEX) row is often reporting a lot more peers than the trackers you might have for that torrent. These peers all came to you without the use of a central tracker service! This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.
Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It's the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.
By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages:
With decentralized peer acquisition, there is no central tracker that can be down.
With decentralized fetching of metadata (torrents) we don't need to rely on a single server that stores and distributes torrent files.
(Before you tech geeks out there start complaining about the info_hash in the magnet links being in HEX ("isn't it supposed to be in base32?") - No! According to the BitTorrent specification it should be in HEX but the client may choose to also support the old base32 encoding. If your client doesn't support the HEX encoding, please upgrade to the latest version of you client! If it still doesn't work, send an email to the developers of your client and ask them to add support for it.)
This is the future. And the present.
------------------------Source: ThePiratebay.org.
Very Detailed yet confusing article(programming skill needed a bit)- *en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme
Also remember when downloading from Mag links the torrent file is downloaded from the DHT network itself. so you can't make choices till the torrent file is itself obtained. With Magnet links and DHT, trackers are no more needed, no downtimes, no court cases etc etc, the only one they can sue is utorrent or azureus(vuze) devs but it won't work, specially since vuze is OSS.
And lastly- something bit interesting pulled from alexa for Mininova.com
*img37.imageshack.us/img37/4846/20091202223231.png
Long live mininova and go set up your server where TPB servers are set, since mininova has no tracker its like tpb, transferring the database should be easy.
*traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&r=1m&u=thepiratebay.org&&
*traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=t&b=ffffff&r=3m&u=thepiratebay.org&
Unstoppable.
After mininova went down, tpb came up.
-----------------------------------------
Posted again:
-----------------------------------------
1. ThePirateBay.org=== Dead technically
2. Mininova === Dead
3. Demonoid ===AWOL
4. Isohunt == Alive
5. BTJunkie ====Alive
6. Torrentz === Alive
7. Meganova == Alive
8.Fenopy ===Alive
9. Sumotorrent ===Alive
10. TorrentBox === Alive
11.Seedpeer ===Alive
12.Torrentportal ==Alive
13.onlytorrents ===Alive
14. nowtorrents==alive
15. torrents.to ===Alive
Torrents rule
PS--> Above list is operational as of 29/11/2009. 1900hrs.
No promotions of sites intended.
Courts should not use this post as a possible hit-list .
ThePiratebay is not dead, you do know that they(the tracker) are operating under openbittorrent.
OpenBitTorrent (commonly abbreviated to OBT) is an open BitTorrent tracker project for BitTorrent protocol.
OpenBitTorrent's initiative to provide a free stable service with no ties to indexing sites or even hosting torrent-files has been a huge public success and it has spawned several copies with almost identical services.[citation needed]
OBT has commonly been mixed up as being a part of and/or a side project to The Pirate Bay. The reason for this is that during the startup period during February through August of 2009, they shared the same hosting company and to some extent used the same tracker cluster IP-address space provided by DCP Networks, the same service provider as The Pirate Bay used. OBT is also a customer of Fredrik Neij, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay.
Misleading conclusions such as, has lead to widespread acceptance of this rumor.
The operators of OBT have been rumoured on IRC as being from Spain.