What's the beef with torrents? aren't they similiar to Limewire and such like?
nope, they are a gazillion miles from limewire. 'Limewire' is code for give me viruses and spyware please
Limewire is single peer to peer
torrents are multi threaded trackers
limewire you download from one person who has what you want, they turn off, download stops. you're download is governed by there upload speed
torrents track every machine on the web that has declared the file you want to be available, and will download from all of them at once wherever a possible, a bit from each one then put it backk together again. So if one person turns off, the download continues by getting missing bits from other machines, so even if all the machine out there with the file you want only had dial up, if there were 50 of them you could potentially download at 50x dial upspeeds
its also very very difficult for 'authorities' to trace the downloader
you need a bittorrent app first of all -
BitTorrent
then you go to a web site where you can download a torrent file for what you are after
isoHunt - the BitTorrent and P2P search engine is a good start
a torrent file is a tiny little file, 48k or so. open that in a BT app and off it goes finding what you want from as many sources as possible
when you look on a torrent site to download a torrent, it will tell you how many seeds and leechers there are, the more the merrier. Seeds are the number of full copies of what you are after that are available, leechers are how many partially complete copies there are
so if there are 100 seeds of what you're after, and they are all broadband users, you could potentially get 100 x 512k a second minimum - so its fast!
so when the torrent sets off, it will start downloading from as many sources as possible, it will get bits from the incomplete copies (leechers) and from the seeds at the same time and keep going till its got the whole thing and put it back together
so download torrents with as many seeds as possible
on a good day, I download whole albums in 10-15mins, dvd's in an hour or 2
fill yer boots while you can. Pressure is being brought on isp's to block the bittorrent network, individual users being so difficult to track down, mainly because you are downloading little chunks from all over the place, each little chunk is just a load of 1's and 0's, which out of context is meaningless and cannot be proven to be a copyright infringement.
to prove that they would have to pounce on all the seeds and all the leechers for the same file at exactly the same time, and as they are likely to be in any number of countries on several continents its virtually impossible
other reasonable torrent sites include
http://thepiratebay.org/
Mininova : The ultimate BitTorrent source!
Demonoid.com
TorrentReactor News - Latest Torrents - TorrentReactor
Komodo Island
Bitenova
or
TorrentResource - Torrent Sites
which is just a directory of torrent sites!
here endeth the lessen and there goes you're bandwidth!
)..with LOADS of pretty cool vids
