If you’ve heard about Pirate Bay changing its from tracker to magnet links, DNT & PEX but like me didnt know the technology behind or how magnet links worked. Dont worry because the crew at Lifehacker has answered all your questions.
Magnet Links Explained
Traditionally, .torrent files are downloaded from torrent sites. A torrent client then calculates a torrent hash (a kind of fingerprint) based on the files it relates to, and seeks the addresses of peers from a tracker (or the DHT network) before connecting to those peers and downloading the desired content.
Sites can save on bandwidth by calculating torrent hashes themselves and allowing them to be downloaded instead of .torrent files. Given the torrent hash – passed as a parameter within a Magnet link – clients immediately seek the addresses of peers and connect to them to download first the torrent file, and then the desired content.
It is worth noting that BitTorrent can not ditch the .torrent format entirely and rely solely on Magnet links. The .torrent files hold crucial information that is needed to start the downloading process, and this information has to be available in the swarm.
More information on Magnet Links, DHT and Pex Peer Exchange can be found here
Via Lifehacker
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