Be Excellent To Each Other

http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/

Try that and see if that is blocked.

Ahem...

What are these magnet link things? Most sites used to just have a direct torrent link, these days they are either hidden behind hundreds of ads or they have 'magnet links' which my PC gets confused by.

Fenopy seems to be the only one with a particularly easy and obvious, 'click here for torrent' button.

How Magnet Links Are Different From .Torrent Files

When you download a .torrent file, you're essentially downloading a small file that contains information on the larger files you want to download. The torrent file tells your torrent client the names of the files being shared, a URL for the tracker, and more. Your torrent client then calculates a hash code, which is a unique code that only that torrent has—kind of like an ISBN or catalog number. From there, it can use that code to find others uploading those files, so you can download from them.

A magnet link does away with the middleman. A magnet link is essentially a hyperlink containing the hash code for that torrent, which your torrent client can immediately use to start finding people sharing those files. Magnet links don't require a tracker (since it uses DHT, which you can read more about here), nor does it require you to download a separate file before starting the download, which is convenient.

What are these magnet link things?

But my first point was that Grim's link didn't go to a working page

They're not torrent files, basically. Your client should handle them just fine.

Does for me at home and at work

Hmmm, I'll try again. Last time it wanted to install something on my PC, so I told it to do one.

BitTorrent usage increases in Europe, following the blockade of The Pirate Bay

In a twist that will surprise no one except the RIAA, MPAA, BREIN, and other anti-piracy lobbies, the amount of BitTorrent traffic has stayed the same or increased in Europe following the blockade of The Pirate Bay in the UK, Netherlands, and other countries.

This news comes from XS4All, one of the largest European ISPs, which has published a graph of the network traffic associated with the BitTorrent protocol (pictured below). The left side of the graph is January 2012, the right side is June 2012, and the red line signifies February, when Dutch ISPs were ordered to block The Pirate Bay. While it’s hard to make a qualified decision without seeing data from 2011, it definitely seems like traffic hasn’t decreased — and might have even increased slightly. This data aligns with research from the University of Amsterdam, which also found that the Dutch Pirate Bay blockade had no effect on the total amount of BitTorrent traffic.

BitTorrent traffic, as seen by XS4AllThis data strongly conflicts with BREIN — the Dutch anti-piracy lobby — which, just a few days ago, announced with much jubilation that The Pirate Bay is now unreachable by 90% of Dutch users. How can there be such a disparity? There are three likely explanations: a) The UK and Dutch blockades created a lot of publicity (and no publicity is bad publicity); b) The Pirate Bay isn’t the only torrent site, and most torrents are available from multiple sites; and c) Veteran internet users are a lot more savvy than the RIAA, MPAA, and BREIN give them credit for — it’s awfully easy to circumvent the blockade with a proxy or VPN.

Yet again, this is strong proof that trying to force a change in behavior simply doesn’t work — especially on the internet, where its denizens value freedom above all else. History is full of shutdowns and blockades — Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Megaupload — and yet file sharing is still just as prevalent. Instead of pissing away billions of dollars on lobbying governments and law enforcement agencies, the only way to truly curb file sharing is to provide an equivalent or better service than torrent sites and digital file lockers. Steam and iTunes have proven that consumers want to pay for their multimedia fix.

The sad truth, though, is that it’s actually easier to persecute file sharers than to navigate the insane morass of rights holders and licensees on any given TV show, movie, game, or song. If it was easy to create an official, legal version of The Pirate Bay, then the entertainment industry would’ve done it already — they’re not that stupid. After years and years of evidence that criminalizing file sharing doesn’t improve matters, though, you think that the MPAA and co would invest their efforts elsewhere, though — such as hammering out their own Pirate Bay, or creating albums and movies that don’t suck.

That conflates The Pirate Bay with BitTorrent, which is an awful thing to do - and probably what is wanted by the Powers That Be, because then they can just get BitTorrent banned, even though it's used for piracy, not only for piracy.

I've found piratebay to be blocked using Sky, so we go to another torrent site, and they always have piratebay as a tracker.

Doesn't that link to the standard version of Piratebay though? That's a pain as it's blocked but like everyone else has said, there's plenty of other torrent sites.

Yeah, but that Torrentz site.. whenever I search for anything on there and it gives the Piratebay link, it is blocked meaning I'd have to use that link that Grim... posted and search again.

http://www.finditcheapest.com

Ubisoft say pirated copies make up 93-95% of their total games played on PC.

Maybe the industry will consider moving to cloud gaming as a solution.

Maybe the industry will consider moving to cloud gaming as a solution.

It would be interesting to know how exactly they've arrived at these figures, given that a pirated copy isn't going to phone home or in any way stand up to be easily counted.

A game is an app on demand.

Maybe the industry will consider moving to cloud gaming as a solution.

It could totally phone home.

I suspect they've got to that figure via surveys, though.

I know.. perhaps I for got the sarcastic smilie.

93-95% is too astonishing a figure for me to believe, frankly.

Probably not the case here, but the cloud is banded around all the time by people not understanding what it means.

Probably not the case here, but the cloud is banded around all the time by people not understanding what it means.

That's because it doesn't actually mean anything. It's just a funky new buzzword for something that's existed for years. Same as 'Big Data', which is just data warehousing.