Zuckerberg. Jimmy Wales. Christopher 'moot' Poole. Aaron Swartz. BitTorrent Turns 10: Happy Birthday! When Bram Cohen first revealed BitTorrent on a public message board on July 2nd 2001, he never imagined it would quickly become one of the main generators of Internet traffic.
Now, exactly a decade later, BitTorrent is used by hundreds of million of people worldwide. To celebrate BitTorrent's 10th anniversary, Bram Cohen joins us to look back at the past and ahead to the future. “My new app, BitTorrent, is now in working order, check it out here,” Bram Cohen wrote on a Yahoo! Message board on July 2, 2001. It was the first time a working copy of the BitTorrent code had been made available to the public, but the initial response wasn’t exactly overwhelming.
“What’s BitTorrent, Bram?” Despite this underwhelming response, BitTorrent was born. “Early tests used losslessly compressed audio files from Etree, a fan community where people could upload self-recorded concert footage by artists who allowed recordings. It turned out to be the start of something big, something really big. The Pirate Bay Will Stop Serving Torrents. In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files.
Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era? After half a decade of loyal service, The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker in November 2009.
The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. “We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Now, two years later, that date is coming soon. Today, The Pirate Bay made the first step towards this new future by making magnets the default download links instead of torrents. Magnets are default. The Pirate Bay, Now Without Torrents. Today marks the end of an era for The Pirate Bay.
The largest torrent site on the Internet has just removed all popular torrent files and made the switch to magnet links. The Pirate Bay team believes the move is needed to make the site future proof, and is confident that it won't cause much trouble among users. "Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine," they say. As announced a few weeks ago, The Pirate Bay has now largely stopped serving torrents.
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. “Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine” “It’s the future.”