The Pirate Bay's Torrent Tracker Shuts Down

This perhaps sounds more alarming than it really should, but it is still an event to be noted. Despite the fact that The Pirate Bay has become one of the largest torrent tracking sites on the Internet, today TPB has decided to shut down its tracker for good. Instead the site will be a magnet-link repository.

In fact, TPB's tracker has experienced some downtime of late, and many probably noticed no side effects at all. That's because modern BitTorrent clients also use decentralized DHT and PEX technologies to remove the need for a tracker.

If you make use of clients such as Azureus or BitComet, you will probably notice no difference at all. In other words, piracy, as well as legitimate uses of torrents, which do exist, will continue unabated.

As TPB says on their blog:

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. [...]

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.

It's still the end of an era. More interestingly, or perhaps more alarmingly, TPB have been speaking with other tracker owners and torrent-download sites. They are pushing for all site drop trackers and move towards decentralization. Time will tell what this portends for BitTorrent.