In a month The Pirate Bay will no longer offer downloads of .torrent files. Instead, the largest torrent site on the Internet will only provide so-called magnet links to its visitors. The first step in this direction was made today with The Pirate Bay replacing the current default torrent download links with magnets. Could this be the end of an era?

One of the potential downsides of using magnets is that it could take a bit longer for downloads to start, especially if there are relatively few people sharing a file. This is because the .torrent file has to be fetched from other users instead of being downloaded directly from the site. More background on these and other technicalities can be found here.

The good news is that all mainstream BitTorrent clients support magnet links. This wasn't the case back in 2009, but when The Pirate Bay hinted that in the future they could become a magnet-only site, all developers quickly made their clients fully compatible.