Famous and very popular media search engine, The Pirate Bay, perpetually in the crosshairs of Big Media to shut it down, is to shift away from torrent files from next month and replace them with Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Peer Exchange (PEX) technology reports ExtremeTech. They have actually been using these for quite a while now, as this is the technology underlying their Magnet links which have appeared next to the torrent links as an alternative way to download. They have done this, because torrent files are stored centrally on a web server, which makes them vulnerable to aggressive rights holders who want to take them down, while Magnet links are decentralized "trackerless", removing this vulnerability. Also, at the moment, it's impossible for anti-piracy outfits to tell how many files a user is sharing when using Magnet links, or what they are. From next month therefore, only Magnet links will be available. Note that Magnet links are compatible with various anonymizing services, for anonymous downloading, but there can be a significant performance impact on those services. In fact, TPB has been using Magnet links with torrents for some now too, but just did so quietly, without telling anyone.

Popular BitTorrent clients such as uTorrent already use Magnet links as easily as torrent files, so there won't be much difference to the user experience. The main difference, is that they can take a bit longer to get going, but the final download speed isn't any less, due to the cascading exponential pyramid nature of incoming peer connections guaranteed to max out any internet connection, when there are enough peers.

Three weeks ago, we brought you news that researchers had apparently found serious vulnerabilities in the firmware of HP printers that can allow hackers to cause the fuser to overheat and almost make the paper inside catch fire. HP dismissed these claims as exaggerated, but said that they would look into it. Three days later, we reported that some enterprising New Yorker called David Goldblatt sued HP, alleging that he would not have bought their printers had he known about this problem beforehand, which seems a bit unlikely when you consider that HP is the number one printer brand by a mile. Now HP have released patches for these vulnerabilities and issued the following press release: