By munroe on Nov 17 2009

So The Pirate Bay shut down its tracker today. That shouldn't come as a shock to anyone following the shenanigans surrounding the Swedish-run website, which has been battling foreign media companies for years. A big verdict was handed down to the site on April 17, 2009 (TMT News), ruling all the involved parties guilty of facilitating copyright infringement. Each Pirate Bay member was sentenced to a year in prison and had to pay a combined 30 million Swedish krona fine ($3.5 million in U.S. dollars).

But what should come as a shock is the site itself is not being shut down. The owners of The Pirate Bay have opted to continue running the site without a tracker. Briefly, a BitTorrent tracker is what currently powers the technology. A tracker does not house any content itself, instead it contains information about all the places where you CAN get the data, mainly end-user computers. Trackers have been the source of litigation for just about every site that's been shut down, as it can be successfully argued that, while the trackers do not house copy-written data themselves, they facilitate the transfer of said data.

So how the hell is this torrent shizz gonna work without a tracker? And the Hydra replied: DHT, PEX, and Magnet links. I'll explain each briefly, then use a hot analogy to show how they click together like sexy Lego.

- DHT is a technology that predates BitTorrent, and it's currently available in just about every torrent client out there. It works by building a web of data behind the scenes, which can provide information on a needed basis. Think of it as a phone book (remember those?) split apart. Every household has a chunk of the worldwide phone book. Whenever you need some data that's not in your piece of the phone book, you shout real loud until somebody hands over the relevant chunk of the book.

- PEX is a fairly new technology that still has some kinks to work out. It works in a similar fashion to DHT, but instead of compiling data, it compiles clients/nodes/people. So to continue our phone book analogy from above, instead of running around screaming your head off until you get what you want, you politely go ask your neighbors if either they have the chunk you need or if they know somebody who does. If your neighbors have no clue what you're talking about, you're still free to run around shouting until you find it.

- Magnet links are the last piece of the puzzle. They work by providing a link to the data, rather than to where the data is located. So, to keep with this phone book angle, let's say you don't even know the page on which the information is held. Using either method described above, you ask for the page that contains the relevant information. Somebody will eventually tell you the page, then you're free to either run around like a nut or ask politely. It's up to you.

Now, you might be thinking "this is boring," and you would be correct. Stay with me for another paragraph, because the interesting part in all of this is that The Pirate Bay is taking the first step towards a continual night terror for the media industries. There is NOBODY to sue except the end users. The Pirate Bay will house magnet links only. Magnet links don't contain any data outside of a random string of numbers and letters. The Pirate Bay is no longer running the service that allows people to connect to each other. All that is handled within your torrent program. I wouldn't doubt it if the next step is for the torrent programs to include some kind of search capability, making The Pirate Bay and other sites irrelevant. It took about 10 years, but we've finally come full circle with a quality replacement to Napster. Since all this new technology is based on open standards and protocols, anyone can design a program that will be play nice with the existing data. So even if Vuze or uTorrent gets shut down, another program can pick up the slack; it's all the same phone book.