Sunday, June 5, 2011

As if free porn weren't enough: torrenting 101

Hi all, and welcome to the first post of my blog, "compluvium". The compluvium was an opening in the roof of a roman house, over a sort of garden in the middle, which allowed rain, air, and light inside. The goal of this blog is to bring in knowledge and wisdom, how ever pomposity and arrogance will probably fly in as well. 

Ok, now that I'm done with my pretentious introduction I can get to the good stuff; This blog will mostly be about technology and other stuff. I can't promise you I'll stay on topic but I can try my hardest to keep you entertained with stories that I hear from second hand sources and facts that I believe to be true, yet are completely wrong. Today I think I'm going to talk about torrents and their usefulness. If you don't already know what they are, its worth learning (especially since you don't have to know shit about computers to use them).

First off, I have a little disclaimer, there may or may not be sarcasm in this disclaimer, however I'm obligated to make this statement: I do not recommend you use torrents to get free software or copies of other copyrighted materials such as games, movies, television shows, books, or music. Even if you can find them using torrents, everywhere, for free, and you most likely will never get caught, and you'll save tons of cash, I don't recommend you do it. Its illegal, sort of, and i agree with piracy laws, sort of. I am in no way saying that it is ok to knowingly download pirated media or software. 
Torrents can be your best friend  when trying to back up media that you already own or share files that you own with your friends and other internet users. Or, If you're a bad person, you can use torrents to download  pretty much any media or software you could imagine for free (see disclaimer above).  I won't get too technical on you, mostly because I probably couldn't explain it, but ill give you the gist of what torrenting is about. When you torrent something, you connect to a number of people and download pieces of that file directly from them. The people you connect to are called "seeders" (i'll get into seeding in a bit), and the people who are downloading that file at the same time as you are called "leechers"or alternatively "peers". The seeders and leechers are connected by several "trackers"  which is an online service that allows different bittorrent clients to communicate easier and share the files. Every seeder uses a bit of their bandwitdh to upload small bits of the files simultaneously, which actually makes the download process go faster. Thats pretty much all the glossary terms you need to know.

The first thing you need to get is a bittorrent client such as utorrent. This program can be downloaded for free from the website i just linked. If somebody wants you to pay for it, don't be an idiot. Utorrent is a program that will allow you to open torrent files, which essentially connect you to the seeders and leechers through trackers. Torrent files can be found for all sorts of things such as movies, games, and music. Its kind of like using limewire, except without all the viruses and porn. To find torrent files you can search for them on all sorts of sites such as this one, Thepiratebay.org. For example, say I lost my favorite brittany spears cd; instead of buying a new one, I go to the pirate bay, search for "brittany spears", find the result with the best seeder to leecher ratio (more seeders=good more leechers=bad), download the file, double click it to open it with utorrent, hit ok on the popup when i have the files i wish to download selected, and wait. After that, its all pretty easy, the file will be in your downloads directory when the bar reaches 100%. (however some things you may download, such as pc games or software may need to be cracked, which is a topic ill cover another day)

Alright, so that was great right? You're rocking out to oops i did it again once more, however your job is not done here. You gotta seed and not be a dick. All you need to do to seed something, is absolutely nothing. If you leave the file where you downloaded it to, and don't stop the torrent file after its done, it will automatically use minimal amounts of your bandwitdh to upload the files you downloaded. You don't need to seed forever, most bittorrent clients have upload/download ratios on the display for each torrent, and i usually seed until my ratio is 2/1 then stop the individual torrent. The whole point of this is not just to be a good guy (as people who download and then dont upload are total dickheads) its also to make your downloads go faster. Trackers also keep track of what your ratios are for each torrent, and if you're a good boy you get rewarded with more bandwidth on your downloads when they use that tracker, however, if you're a bad boy, you get shitty download speeds like 5/kbs a second (if this happens by accident don't be discouraged: you are always uploading while you're downloading, and you will automatically build up high ratios when your bandwidth is bottlenecked like that).

welp, I think that covers torrents. Comment me if i said something dumb or made a stupid mistake, as I'm sure I have. Even if you have more questions, hit me up. have fun out there in the swarm, but again, I didn't tell you to do anything illegal. Just covering some awesome peer to peer filesharing techniques.

peace

   
               

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