On 29th February 2012, Pirate Bay, the world’s leading BitTorrent website said goodbye to the .torrent links, and gave an option to its user in the form of magnet links. Now the question is what are magnet links? How are they different from normal torrent links? Let’s find out what are Magnet Links.

Magnet Links

After the govt. started taking some serious action against the file sharing and torrent websites, there was a strong need to make torrents more secure as the agencies could easily track the torrent origin.

So that’s why most of the torrent websites are preferring magnet links. Magnet links uses a technology called DHT (Distributive hash Table). DHT technology is often called as “trackless torrents”. DHT is used to find the IP address of peers.

Magnet links does not require tracker to download a separate file before starting the download. It means that magnet links abolishes the centralized system used in the torrent links for tracking purpose.Magnet Links allows a group of users to share a file faster amongst themselves without having to rely on a server.

.Torrent File

Whereas the .torrent file holds is information about the location of different pieces of the target file. Torrents work by dividing the target file into small information chunks, found on an unlimited number of different hosts. Through this method, torrents are able to download large files quickly.

A torrent file contains the URLs of many trackers and integrity metadata about all the pieces. It can also contain additional metadata defined in extensions to the BitTorrent specification. These torrent files include metadata for stating who created the torrent, and when.

Benefits of Magnet Link:

1) The information about the uploader and the server remains anonymous.
2) Magnet links are just links that have no file associated with them.
3) While using magnet links, BitTorrent indexers don’t have to store any file.
4) Magnet Links can be shared as plain text. That means you can share them via email, chat or on social media website.

Case Study: The Pirate Bay

When TPB (The Pirate Bay) announced that they will be using Magnet Links from now on, there was lot of smoke all over. Everyone wanted to know the reason behind it.

TPB is using magnet links to avoid all their legal problems over copyright issues. So now TPB won’t be hosting anything that contains some copyright material. As magnet Links are not traceable so no one can blame TPB for the copyright material.

Downloading Files Using Magnet Links:

It is as simple as you download normal torrent file. When you will open the TPB website and will go to a download page you will see a link “Get This Torrent”, just simply click on it.