In case you missed the what's going on in the somewhat underground world of torrenting and file sharing with all the talk of Facebook-Microsoft and the supposed tech bubble, there's a bit of a spat brewing. Recently, part of the BitTorrent protocol has been turned closed source, and The Pirate Bay has asserted that this gives BitTorrent, Inc. too much power.
In response, Pirate Bay has been working on a brand new protocol that they hope may come to replace BitTorrent in the near future. The protocol will likely use the .p2p file extension (as opposed to the .torrent extension in use now.
Casual users of torrenting shouldn't see too much interruption in service, as many BitTorrent clients pledge support for the new protocol, and the .p2p protocol promises to be backwards compatible with all .torrents
The new protocol is still in the development phase, but a release may come as soon as early next year. It presently remains nameless, but you can read up a bit on it at the design page.
[via Torrent Freak]
