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Torrents - I'm the only guy on the planet not doing it
Nightslyr
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I know of torrents, but I've never actually used one/obtained one/whatever the terminology is. This is where you come in:
1. What's a good, lightweight, small footprint program to use for torrents? Something that's not filled with adware, won't run on startup, and is intuitive to use?
2. Where do I get goodies once I start torrenting? Are there safe (i.e., virus/malware free) places?
3. What's the legality of this? I'm sure some stuff is legal, while others aren't.
4. What do you guys get through torrents? What makes it worthwhile to use/do instead of other methods?
1. What's a good, lightweight, small footprint program to use for torrents? Something that's not filled with adware, won't run on startup, and is intuitive to use?
2. Where do I get goodies once I start torrenting? Are there safe (i.e., virus/malware free) places?
3. What's the legality of this? I'm sure some stuff is legal, while others aren't.
4. What do you guys get through torrents? What makes it worthwhile to use/do instead of other methods?
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As for safety in the torrents you get.. that's a whole different subject and probably nothing I could safely discuss on this board. It's a wild world out there, if you're unwilling to risk an infection you probably shouldn't be downloading anything.
torrenting itself is legal, stealing copyrighted works (games, movies, music, etc) is not. A legal torrent, for example, would be downloading a new distribution of linux. Or a copyleft music album.
I was curious about it because it seems like a popular thing to do, but it's not really up my alley, from what I can tell. I don't feel comfortable pirating software or music, and I know where to find porn for free elsewhere ( :winky: ). I just wanted to know if there was some big, obvious thing I was missing, but it essentially looks to be like the old days of Limewire.
Well, thanks for the answers, guys.
In my mind it is the way to transfer large files to a large population, but so many companies kill torrent traffic at the firewall it's pretty much guaranteed to never do anything positive.
The comments section is excellent and I have rarely if ever have had a problem with malware in my downloads when I use "reputable" vendors and double check the comments (as some people like to post things making it look like it is from a reputable vendor) whereas limewire you never really know what you got until you downloaded it.
Satans..... hints.....
For the most part, I agree with what xzzy said, though; it's fantastic tech that got a mostly undeserved bad rap. Imagine if the same thing happened fifteen years ago, when FTP was the serious warez kiddie's tool of choice?
If you get into a good torrenting community, you will actually get banned if you have a poor ratio.
Upload as much as you can, and no less than 3 to 1.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
I mean, that's not entirely true. I know a lot of companies tend to avoid it in end-user situations, I guess because of the stigma surrounding it, but I have seen it used quite a few times for downloading Beta Clients and stuff.
It's kind of hard to configure (well, not really, but still harder than opening internet explorer and clicking "download") as well so that kills off some potential.
Anyway, Nightslyr The Pirate Bay is a site with (some) legal torrents in amongst the other stuff, and if you're interested in seeing what's out there that's a really really good place to start. As far as free trackers go, The Pirate Bay is pretty much the best there is in my experience. A bit like the Google of the Torrent world, light, fast, neat and effective.
I was talking more in the other direction. A handful of companies have no issue distributing things with bittorrent. But letting employees use bittorrent to download stuff? Good luck with that. If the traffic is not outright blocked, you'll probably trigger some watchdog and get IT harassing you.
If only there were a place that only offered Legal Torrents.
Might I suggest the work of a certain Mr. Jonathan Coulton to get you started?
Robots Will Be Our Superiors (Blog)
http://michaelhermes.com
Usually. Once in a blue moon they will do open registration, but they do regulate their active member accounts. I am not sure what their registration status is right now, but yes, Demonoid is tops for *most* things. There are some things that Demonoid stays away from intentionally like teh pronz.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
If you have a router you'll pretty much have to figure out port forwarding which is a little daunting and embarrassing when you finally figure it out and it turns out to be really easy.Portforward is a good site to help you figure out your router. Once you get that out of the way it is usually a matter of finding torrents. If you are looking for something specific you often do not need to use some large indexing site. It takes some looking but most applications will have a torrent available somewhere on their site.
Still can't see it? Hint: Bottom-right.
"Hmm, now where's that torrent link... oooh shiny!"
I think uTorrent lets you set priorities for downloads, but it's only in a high/normal/low sense iirc. Also you can adjust a few behaviors like 'upload speed' and 'upload speed when not downloading.'
You can move downloads up and down the queue with utorrent. The low/medium/high settings are used to set which individual file within the torrent downloads first.
That's awful advice. Ratios are a zero sum game. Getting 3:1 means depriving 2 other people of even getting to a 1:1 share ratio.
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also, utorrent is the best for windows, but if you have a mac, transmission is the best way to go, hands down
As far as ratios go, uploading is the same as seeding. Seeding simply means having uTorrent (or the software of your choice) open with torrents in your queue.
Download is easy - everything you download goes towards your download amount. Let's say, for example, I download a 1 GB Linux distribution. Sweet.
Once that file has been download (or, more accurately, even WHILE it's downloading), I am seeding that file. That means that while uTorrent is open and active, every once in a while someone else will need packet X, and their client will talk to mine (or however the hell that works), and packet X will be grabbed. That counts toward the ratio.
In theory, if I download a 1 GB file and just leave uTorrent open, eventually enough people will grab enough chunks of it to to total 1 GB. Hooray! I now have a ratio of 1.0. If I just left uTorrent open all day long, enough people would keep grabbing chunks of the data I have downloaded, and eventually my ratio would go up... 1.5, 2.0, etc. I could get a ratio of a million to one if I just downloaded one file and left uTorrent running all day long, never downloading another thing again.
So why don't more people have high ratios? Leaving uTorrent or any other client uses a lot of bandwidth, and a lot of people just grab what they need and close it. As DL speeds are much faster than UL, their ratio suffers as a result.
Getting a good ratio isn't about physically adding torrents and such, it's just about leaving your client open when you're not around and letting other people have access to all the goodies that you just acquired. (Just as someone else would have had to do to let YOU get them... you can see how the system works better with more participation.)
Robots Will Be Our Superiors (Blog)
http://michaelhermes.com
If everyone downloads the file once and seeds it forever, no one's ratio will climb above one.. because there are so many copies of the file available, people only get asked for a small percentage of the file.. ideally, the total percentage will be the size of the file divided by the number of seeds.
I always shoot for 1:1, I give what I get.
...yeah, I guess, but that's a hypothetical situation. Even in a "closed" community like Demonoid, however, the reality is that some people seed, some people don't, and ratios are all over the place.
The entire discussion is kind of moot because the ratios are often fairly inaccurate and can sometimes "reset" with little or not warning. Just like TF2 stats!
Robots Will Be Our Superiors (Blog)
http://michaelhermes.com
In an actual closed community people who don't seed get banned. And quickly (it doesn't take much longer than your grace period).
I've received requests from admins to not seed as much because I was in the group of members that some liked to call "ratio whores". New members were having trouble breaking even, let alone doing better than 1:1 so we all got PMs.
edit: thinking about it, what would be optimal would be that downloaders with higher ratios should be preferentially offered seeders with higher upload bandwidth. It's too bad torrent-tracker interaction isn't robust enough to allow this yet.
Yeah. Or there's people like the person who invited me who have 800 gigs of cap before they dip below 1:1 and don't even bother seeding half the time because they don't need to.
we also talk about other random shit and clown upon each other
Yes, this. One of the communities I participate have a seed-points system, it gives you fake ratio for leaving the torrent up after finishing downloading even if noone downloads from you. It's the only way that people with low upload speeds like me can keep up.
I saved the main page, for history's sake.
Remember Napster? Hope it doesn't end up like that. Almost has the same ring to it. Anti-Establishment Company X gets sued, sells out to Corporate Company B to cover legal fees. Company X goes bye bye.
The comments on Pirate Bay's blog are hilarious. "Oh noes you sold out! You said it was piracy 4 eva!"
I'll be surprised if anything happens other than New Pirate Bay going bankrupt within a year and the sudden appearance of another torrent tracker (Privateer Cove?), possibly with more discretion from the owners.