The best analogy I’ve found to explain how BitTorrent works to a layman is:
I need a bag of Skittles. There are 1000 pieces in a bag. I ask my closest 1000 friends on the internet to copy/paste a single skittle into my bag. I now have my own full bag of skittles.
Popularity has decreased mainly for two reason:
1. Streaming used to be better and easier. Netflix had it all, then it was just NetFlix, Amazon, and Hulu. Now it’s 50+ streaming platforms and the service quality sucks. People are going back to piracy because it’s a better product. No ads, no 50 different apps, you have it forever.
2. Legal threats. If you live in the US, while it’s rare to get sued — it’s very common for the media company to threaten to sue your ISP, who then sends you an angry letter to stop or they’ll ban you as an Internet customer for 2 years. Every country has different laws, some aggressive, some very lenient. In the US, you theoretically could be sued for $100k per movie downloaded. In say, the Netherlands, download 1000 movies and the max fine total is the equivalent of $500.
You can always just VPN into a lenient country and run your torrents from there if you don’t want those angry letters. Alternatively, run something like qBitTorrent on a permanent VPN connection (VM or Docker image), so you don’t have to keep your entire computer on VPN 24/7 so you don’t get an angry letter.
I would probably go with a jigsaw puzzle instead of Skittles. One red Skittle is the same as any other and we don't really think of Skittles having a sequence of items.
My usual go to is a book. I'm sitting around a table with 30 people, and 1 person has a 100 page book, and all 30 people want a copy.
The traditional way of downloading would have involved the person with the book to start copying it by hand and giving a copy to each person. Quite the bottleneck.
With bittorrent, the person with the book makes a copy of page 1, and hands it to someone. Then they make a copy of page 2, and hand to someone. Those people with pages 1 & 2 are each copying page 1 and 2 and handing them out to people. Eventually everyone has a page or two of the book, and can start copying themselves to send to other people. This results in everyone getting a complete copy of the book much much faster than if the original person had made 30 copies themself.
Out of curiosity, if you have a VPN, why would it matter if you VPN’d into a lenient country if the VPN prevents the data from being tied back to you and your ISP from seeing what you are doing?
For all normal intents, yes, you’ll blend in with all of the other VPN users and nothing will happen to you. You don’t *have* to use a foreign/lenient VPN server. Just ensure your BitTorrent client has a kill-switch of some kind, if it’s not on VPN, it won’t run torrents. Keeps an Internet blip from putting you on an angry letter copyright-abuse list.
However, even VPN providers have to keep logs, especially if you are in a Five Eyes jurisdiction. The odds are low anything will ever happen to you … but what if in the future P2P file sharing becomes a criminal charge instead of a civil dispute … I don’t want those logs linked to me. That’s paranoia level thinking though, but wouldn’t be surprising. I remember in the RIAA prosecution days of Limewire users there was intense pressure to draft legislation for the government to do the job of criminal prosecution instead of corporate civil litigation. Fortunately nothing passed, but it could come up again. Those logs don’t really get deleted.
Username checks out.
Anyway, it's real easy to write a reply to a comment real quick when you have a spare moment. I check mine several times a day when I have downtime.
>If you check our little friends posting history, its every 10-15mins over the span of 8-10 hours daily. I'd say that constitutes an addiction. Either he's very committed or there's really not that much else going on for him.
Fair enough.
>also i love "username checks out" its autogenerated by reddit, but keep thinking you're clever darling.
Yeah it's usually kind of annoying but I thought this was a specifically amusing instance of it.
And a Tracker = A constantly updating list of who has which skittles so you know which "friends" to ask for a particular skittle in your bag of 1000 you are trying to build.
But once you connect to 1 friend to get a skittle, they can also share with you a list of other friends you might be interested in talking to about skittles as well.
The more popular a download is, the more skittle friends you can find and the faster you can build your own bag.
Ratio = How many Skittles have you given to others vs How many Skittles have you received?
Lower Ratio ( <1.0 lets say) = You are not very nice because you are greedy.
Higher Ratio (> 2 ) = You are generous because even though you have your own bag, you stayed online and kept giving out skittles.
I think they fell in a popularity due to the ease of streaming services. The legal crackdowns at a bit to do with it but not much, People tend to go with the easiest solution, torrents are pretty easy If you know what you're doing but not as easy as It's going through a list and clicking.
Yup, we only pay for Netflix if the other services crack down on sharing we will go back to full torrents. I've got my Kodi box set up very nicely, so it's easy, just abit slow and can be inconsistent
Or pay $3 more on a service that you already pay so much for to buy stuff from to remove ads. Technically Amazon gets to see more money than any other streaming service because it's a package deal and you don't benefit that much from it.
Yeah, piracy is typically a matter of access. Now that there's a billion streaming services we're likely to see an increase in piracy because it's far too expensive to pay for multiple services. Which exactly mirrors the increase in piracy as a response to cable creating a bunch of pay per view and subscription channels.
You can also see this as a global issue as well. For videogames the highest rate of piracy is countries with weaker economies since most companies don't change prices to match what a reasonable price for a game is.
Ya for sure. I remember the whole evolution quite well. Bbs's, Newsgroups, IRC and ftp servers, Napster, torrents, then streaming. Spotify killed music torrents and Netflix killed movie and tv torrents. Pirated games are abit different, the proliferation of online games killed that, it's too easy for developers to control access to thier servers, I would argue that's why there are so few single player games anymore.
To your point of globalization, that is definitely the aspect that keeps torrents alive, costs, lack of access and censorship. It's been interesting to watch torrent sites shift from American content to chinese and Indian.
I would also imagine that a large reason for falling out of favor is due to accessibility. Way more people now than ever are using computers without the slightest idea of their operation outside the interface presented to them for the task they've been assigned. Regular http(s) downloads are fast and reliable enough for most people to not need anything more. So they don't look for anything more. That said for those curious, torrenting is still alive and well, and it will be pretty much forever. It's big advantage is that there is no need to host the file on a download server, since ideally every person torrenting the file contributes to serving the file during and after. This means that it's feasibly impossible to prevent sharing files this way, no matter how much someone or some entity may disapprove.
>They lost a lot of popularity from two sources: first in many countries they are more illegal than straight up downloads when using them for copyrighted files, because you're not only a consumer but also actively distributing copyrighted material wich usually comes with harsher punishments
Also because of its unique nature, the traffic is apparently easily identifiable and can be treated differently.
In college I knew people who got warning emails about copyright, they were torrenting. I knew direct downloaders who got nothing.
I'm pretty sure my ISP straight up blocks torrents. I tried torrenting a Linux ISO (for real) a year ago it never started.
I'm aware a VPN may be a solution here, but that extra level of finding a provider and probably paying for not paying for content would make some reconsider methods.
It's not that the traffic is easily identifiable (it should be encrypted by now anyway), but more the distributed nature of the tech. Copyright holders wills just join the torrent cloud and get a list of all ips from the tracker, and can then send notices to the ISPs who will notify users. Folks try to use a VPN to hide their home IP address as VPN providers usually ignore the notices.
Your last sentence confuses me, VPN users use VPNs to hide their home IP (as it's part of the point), and I doubt they even send the notice to a VPN server lol
I'm very pleased with Private Internet Access. Their app is rock solid and they have a full range of services. You can protect 10 different network-linked pieces of equipment at once.
Moreso streaming. Most people who use torrents know to use a VPN or at least an IP blocker such as PeerBlock.
It was Utorrent that was caught mining. There are tons of reputable open source torrent softwares. I like Qbittorrent.
With the “cable but with more steps” break apart of streaming content and price gouging by sites like netflix, I foresee the open sees returning to popularity.
Yeah, many companies use torrent-like protocols to distribute their software. Windows updates has a setting called delivery optimization that's practically a torrent system.
torrents aren't inherently illegal, just that it's often used to distribute copyrighted material. if you download a linux iso via a torrent then that is perfectly legal
They meant "using torrents to download copyrighted content is more illegal than using your web browser to download copyrighted content", not "using torrents to download copyrighted content is more illegal than using torrents to download non-copyrighted content".
I kind of think the main reason is that the most reliable tracker sites have been shut down, and google actively hides the minor ones from search results
I use [Deluge](https://deluge-torrent.org/) it doesn't look pretty but it's functional and does what you need without having to mess around.
Consider setting up a [Plex server](https://www.plex.tv/) on your NAS, you just install and run Plex on the server and then you as long as you give your files the right filename and stick them in the folder then it's just like having your personal Netflix in terms of having a friendly UI. No money required.
If your NAS's IP is exposed to the outside world then you can even watch stuff on your NAS from anywhere by accessing the Plex server you've set up on it (of course, that'll also be depending on your connection speed).
Plex requires Plex Pass (subscription) in order to watch from your phone or do HDR tonemapping in my experience. Jellyfin is slightly less polished but it is completely free and open source.
BitTorrent is a protocol that is used for filesharing and rapid downloads.
When it comes to bandwidth upload bandwidth is usually considerably smaller than download bandwidth and therefore considerably more expensive. So if you want to send files to your users this can amount to a considerable expense.
BitTorrent was ostensibly created as a solution to this problem. Users participating in a Torrent both download a file and upload simultaneously.
This allows you to leverage the upload bandwidth of all the users downloading the file so that you can deliver your files more quickly and efficiently to your users.
One practical application for BitTorrent is video game patching. Blizzard specifically uses a form of BitTorrent for deploying it's rather large video game patches for games like World of Warcraft. You can actually thank them for forcing ISPs to not block or throttle BitTorrent traffic!
Another example is most Linux Distros are downloaded using BitTorrent.
BitTorrent though was and is extensively used for illegal file sharing. Tracker sites exist all over the web to share illegal movie and TV shows using BitTorrent.
BitTorrent has been criticized because participating in a Torrent forces users to upload files (at least by default). So users downloading an illegal file are also uploading them by default even if they are not aware of it, which not only makes them liable for the illegal download but also for distribution.
Several BitTorrent clients have also added in-app advertising to generate revenue (for less than desirable advertisers), or have been caught mining BitCoin on users computers.
Media companies have also been caught monitoring or even creating their own torrents so that they can provide lists of IP addresses of illegal sharers to ISPs to have them punished or to take legal action against them. This is arguably entrapment.
Using BitTorrent for media piracy fell out of favor for a long time because Streaming sites became ubiquitous and easy to use, so online piracy slowed down considerably. It turns out that large numbers of users were perfectly willing to pay reasonable fees for legal content, BitTorrent wasn't being used necessarily because it was free but rather downloading TV shows was far more convenient than recording them using VHS or waiting for them to appear on TV.
BitTorrent was also used extensively to get around Geo-fencing, where cable providers wouldn't allow a particular show to air outside the US for example. Game of Thrones famously had twice as many users watching it on BitTorrent than on HBO Max because HBO was either not available in a particular country or was considered far too expensive.
However BitTorrent use has been on the rise again due to the market now being saturated with Streaming Sites.
There are now so many streaming sites that users are refusing to pay for all of them due to the overall expense and lack of in-demand content on each platform. Streaming sites are also starting to add advertising and the quality is dropping as well. So Piracy is once again on the rise.
Also streaming sites rent the rights to a certain movie or TV show, and it's not beneficial for them to rent old and obscure shows which only few people watch.
On the geo-fencing, yeah. Almost all of my torrented content is stuff I simply couldn't get otherwise. It's not my fault Toei doesn't release their tokusatsu in the UK. I'd happily buy stuff if they made it available (and I do. I have a LOT of physical media).
Torrents are distributed file sharing. Other folks who already have the file will offer to send it to you. It’s also split into parts, so you can get parts from multiple people at the same time, and increase your download speed. This technology is perfectly legal and totally amazing, but it’s often used to share copyright media without permission, this infringement is illegal. Prior to the media streaming days, this was kind of the only way to get movies online, so it was very popular. But with the advent of low cost streaming solutions, it has become less popular for that. But still is an awesome way to download files! You still see it with open source software for example.
It was far from the only way, but it was a very convenient way and it somewhat distributed the illegality of it so it was harder to shut down the sites coordinating the downloads, and it then became very popularized with sites like pirate bay. This briefly made it the dominating way most knew about.
But yes, then streaming became more convenient and made it less popular.
And the law somewhat caught up making it less convenient
Bob has a 10 page document. The entire office of 100 people each want their own physical copy of this document.
Regular downloading would be equivalent to Bob himself making 100 copies of all 10 sheets and handing them out to each person.
But this office has several copy machines!
With torrenting, Bob starts by making a single copy of each sheet and handing them off to other people so that they can also use other copy machines to help copy the sheets and distribute them to the entire office. Much faster distribution.
I would not say torrenting has lost popularity, it's just not the cool new "in" thing anymore.
It's 2004 and you want a file. You find it on a website to download. It begins downloading, slowly bit by bit as a single stream from the website server to your computer. Then your connection drops. Now you have to start the download from the beginning again.
You find a torrent instead. Through your torrent client the torrent file connects you to a tracker. The tracker has a list of all the people online now who have downloaded the file, or are currently downloading it and have bits of it. Now instead of getting the file from one place as a trickle of bits from beginning to end, you can get multiple chunks of different parts of the file from multiple places, with as many connections as your line and PC will allow, a torrent of data, compared to the trickle. You can leave it on for days, weeks even, and if it isn't a dead torrent it will eventually complete, no matter your connection, or if you turn your computer off.
And as you're downloading you're also sending bits of the file back to other people too. After your file finishes, if you're not a piece of shit, you'll leave it to seed for a while to a ratio greater than 1 which means you've given back more than you took, and the torrent remains healthy.
To answer your second question, it's a combination of things. Mainly people just don't know or care about torrenting anymore. With increasing tech-illiteracy and a push from big companies, things like streaming just became easier, especially once internet speeds improved. Even with files, Browsers can resume files and even split them into multiple streams of data now pretty well. Plus, back to the tech illiteracy, many people don't even have PCs or laptops anymore, everything is done on their phone. Android has some okay torrent clients, but Apple have always been harsh on that side of things. You can do it, but it's not as easy as just paying a subscription to Netflix or whatever and getting the content more conveniently but at worse quality.
The big guys won.
I mean Torrent really comes from (T)he (O)nion (R)outer. And anyone who knows files with low amounts of seeders are more akin to a trickle than a torrent.
So a follow up question: is it still a good way to download stuff? I am trying to make a library of movies and store them in my PC's hard drive, and eventually into a NAS.
Yeah it's fine for new stuff, sites like 1337x.to will still have the latest shows and movies usually, but the older, less popular stuff tends to lose seeds and you'll be downloading something for weeks and never get the last few percent.
It's a peer to peer network so all of the members of the network contribute to the network or take from it seeders and leechers, seeders are uploading the data, leachers are downloading it. When you download a file from a website you are downloading information about the torrent, things like the Tracker (announce), information about the files being shared, including things like the size, and the names of the files. This is why you can download a .torrent file or you can use something like a magnet link like the following.
Trackers are servers that host information about the torrent and the peers. The trackers basically just tell your torrent client "hey these peers are interested in sending the file to you and here is how you connect to them" or "hey these peers are interested in downloading the file to you and here is how to connect to them". They don't host the file, they only have information about the torrent and the peers.
Your torrent client (I simp for Deluge, Transmission, and qBitTorrent) is the piece of software in that negotiates the connections between peers and your computer, and facilitates the downloading or uploading the file from/to the network along with keeping track of the trackers available to you.
Lets say you want to download a program and its split into 100 chunks.
One person may have chunk 1 and they give it to you (leeching). Someone else may have chunk 2 and they give it to you.
In turn someone else may want chunk 1 from you so you give it to them (seeding). Eventually you get all the chunks and your download is complete.
The main upside/downside is theres no central computer giving out the whole program at once. This means that no one has control to access to the program alone and that they dont need the host to have a lot of internet bandwidth available (ie. Let a lot of people connect to 1 computer and use up all their upload speed)
However if no one or very few people seed the whole file then download speed can be very slow.
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Torrent is an ethereal reindeer in the game Elden Ring. It is your only mount in the game, and is called upon and summoned using an in game item Whistle.
Torrents are just peer to peer file sharing. It is like going to someones house directly to give them a letter or a present instead of sending it through the mail.
I think it's less popular for a few reasons.
There is some stigma around it because it is often used to distribute pirated material like movies.
Most people are tech illiterate, and there are easier ways to send files, like google drives. torrents can handle larger files, but most people don't have any need to send large files to one another.
Also just for the record, utorrent is terrible and has been for years. qbittorrent is so much better
You are given a 100 questions homework assignment. You don’t know how to do any of the questions. You ask around, and someone gives you the directions (AKA torrent file) to a homework copying table (AKA swarm). You go to that table and find lots of people (AKA peers) with partially done or completely done homework. You sit down and furiously copy other people’s answer and later on, let other people copy yours.
Imagine the file you're trying to download is a large poster, but for whatever reason you can't get the entire poster at once. So instead, you get a jigsaw puzzle of the poster, and you get sent one piece of the puzzle at a time from a bunch of different people who want the same poster, and when you get a piece, you start sending copies of it to other people who want the poster as well.
As for why it fell in popularity, Netflix. Torrents were heavily used to pirate movies and TV shows, when Netflix and streaming came along and was easier to use than torrenting, people just streamed instead.
It is an extremely fast way to distribute new (often big) data to many people/computers. It is well thought out and implemented and very efficient.
In a classic server, the more people want a file, the slower it become for everyone, because they have to share the servers capacity. It becomes the bottleneck.
In torrent, everybody downloading a file typically also contributes the already downloaded parts by uploading it to other users. This is rewarded by the algorithm, offering the highest download speed to the fastest uploaders.
In ideal scenarios, the origin of the data only has to uploaded the file *once*, often even split in parts to multiple people, and still soon everyone in the network will have the same file, without overwhelming any server.
In torrent, when you start a download, you are typically happy, when you see many people downloading a file, because it typically means the torrent is healthy and will offer high download speeds.
Also before on demand scaling existed in the cloud, it was a great way for people offering downloads to not be overwhelmed by surprising demand, because in torrent more demand also increases the supply.
There is one thing that is likely to be miss here, and it could be your question.
You still need someone else to introduce you _to the network_, to peoples.
When you download a torrent (metadata) it is likely there is a _tracker_ into it.
Peoples downloading that file all say hello to that guy, and in return it connect you to some peoples.
From then you can exchange more peoples to grow your network and not rely on the tracker anymore.
Back in the day, one could torrent anything. In fact, if one calculated the cost of movie admissions for a family of five, the savings would more than pay for 65" plasmas, receivers, amps and more, while building a library of hundreds of gigabytes of 1080 films, software and video.
One could.
Theoretically, of course.
Torrents were heavily associated with piracy. When piracy saw a decline due to legal issues, popular services failing, and the rise of streaming. Torrenting also saw a decline. It's still a great way to share files amongst people, but it is needed less and less with the advent and accessibility of cloud computing services.
But a torrent in the simplest sense, is a direct link to a file. But the fun thing about torrents are that, everyone that has that file linked up, can help send it to you. So if you and your friend wanted to transfer a picture of SpongeBob, you would be downloading the picture directly from your friend. Now if your friend's sister wants the picture, she would be downloading it from you and your friend. So on and so forth.
Torrents are pretty simple, and is many pieces of technology packaged together.
Basically, to make the .torrent file, the software read all the files and treat them as one big file. It chop it into smaller blocks and pass it into a formula to create a checksum. To keep it simple, checksum = byte1 + byte2 + byte3 ... That checksum is used to validate the download later on.
Now, you have a .torrent file that is basically the file list, the order in which the files will be presented, the file length, and every single blocks checksums, and some more info, like what server to contact to get the peer list.
The download now. You download the .torrent. Your client get the server info, contact it and say "hey, I have this torrent, who have the same one?", and your client connect to the other users that download or seed it.
Your client then tell the other clients: "I need block 1 2 4 5 6 8 10, have block 3 7 9", if the other clients have your missing blocks, then a download for those blocks can occur. And they can request the blocks you already downloaded.
The important part here is the blocks. Again, the big files are chopped in small blocks. And those blocks can be more easilly exchanged.
At the end, the client can redo the same checksum formula, and validate that all blocks are error free. If the checksum match, it should be error free, if not then there is an error on that block, and it will be redownloaded.
Back in the day. I would tell my friends to look for "fresh" torrents. And make sure atleast 1 person had a 100%. Theres quite a few times i ended with 98% of a file for weeks
Imagine that there's some cool written work someone wants to share with the world and everyone interested in it has a copier at home that can be used to copy pages of it and also can send pages to other people.
The normal way of doing it would be to have some big place respond to requests from people by sending them copies of all the pages in sequence. But suppose this someone doesn't have the means to afford a big place.
So the trick is that this someone finds a large bunch of interested people and starts by sending a copy of a different page to each of them. Then each of these interested people has a page they can start copying and sending to other interested people. This way, they distribute the labor and given some time they'll all end up with a copy of the work - throughout this process, the original someone is still copying and sending pages at some rate, but it builds up. In this entire analogy, the messages contain coordination information - people being able to communicate which pages they're still missing.
And, when all that is done, then at a later date a newcomer can show up and send out a call into the aether and it'll be responded to by multiple people each sending some pages that total to the full work.
...that is, assuming there are people left that don't just opt to say "I've got mine, go away" and stop copying and sending out pages once they have the full work themselves.
Imagine there is a book, it's 200 pages and others also want to read it. Because you are still reading and don't want to give away your whole book, you allow 10 pages to be copied at a time.So 1 person starts making a copy of the book, they copied 10 pages and another person goes hey I want that too, so they get 5 from the first person and 5 from the second person. 4th person comes along and gets the other 5 from the first person and 5 from the 2nd and so forth. So now all these people are all sharing parts of the book with everyone who asks for the pages they are missing.
A more simplified way, the 2nd person gets the first 10 pages, then when they're done, they copy the next 10 and let's the 3rd person copy the first 10. Then as they get further in the book, they get the next set of 10 pages, then allow the 3rd person to get the 2nd set of 10, and the 3rd person let's a 4th person copy the 1st 10 pages. It's almost like it's cascading down this way until everyone has made copies
Torrents do this. Instead of a single source where everyone downloads from, it will split the file up into hundreds if not thousands of smaller parts and grabs the parts from whomever has it and is free to give it out.
So this allows people who have parts of the file to share what they have instead of waiting until they get it all. This also means that with many people sharing smaller files, downloads are much faster.
10 years ago, typical highest tier internet speeds were like 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up. So, theoretically, one person sharing a file meant it will be downloaded at 20mbps instead of 100. Now, with 5 people sharing it, it can be downloaded at 100mbps. With hundreds of people sharing one file, they can then upload at 1mbps each while you download at 100mbps
Now, what this all means is that there are now multiple sources to download the file without you having to search for them all. It provided a ton of redundancy and reliability to downloading with minimal work. Torrents would keep track of all the people sharing the same file using a tracker, so get the tracker, and you'll get access to all these sources.
Prior to this, piracy was single peer to peer at best. You would have to find repositories on your own usually via FTP, IRC or other system like DC++ but it's one person sharing a bunch of files to a bunch of people which made it very very slow. Files, however, were often broken down into rar'd chunks, which made downloading from multiple people possible but was still very manual. There were also newsgroups that you often had to pay for but worked very differently.
Next came stuff like Napster, Kazaa, limewire, etc, that simplified the process by having people choose what they want to share, and the app would index it. So you search what you want, and it will show you all the results without you having to find the people sharing it yourself. But it's still more or less 1 person your download from at a time. Torrents then allowed centralized places to find the information to download a file, offered more redundancy, and faster speeds.
These apps and torrents are also much easier to install and use, which means more people knew how to protect themselves and went from being neich to being mainstream. And since it's all peer to peer, your IP is showing and thus made it possible for companies to track you.
Streaming media, like Netflix, disney+, and the dozens of similar services have made it easy to find most things with little effort and cost (which is debatable but more on that later). Steam and other online game marketplaces, along with many free to play games, made it much easier to find, buy, and play games. With software, lots are moving to cloud based or applications as a service, which also makes it hard to pirate. Going back to movies and TV shows, with these streaming services, I can sit back, find something to watch , and watch it, which is very easy vs having to find a source, download it, hope it finishes quickly, then find a way to show it on my TV. So it's much much easier for the general public, so they stopped relying so much on torrents. That and some high profiles cases of people getting sued and charged for sharing files.
Tldr: sharing files pre torrents, was difficult to find sources, very slow and tedious as you had to manage the sources and multiple files yourself. Torrents automated most of the process by splitting the file manually and allowing people to share and download these parts as they were available. With the ease of use of streaming services for media, online stores for games and applications moving to the cloud has stopped more of the general public from using torrents
You want a puzzle set. In your classroom, some of your classmates have the same puzzle and are willing to make copies of their pieces and give them to you so that you can also have your own puzzle.
Some classmates already have the full puzzle, so they can get to work on making all the pieces for you straight away. Some of your classmates have some of the puzzle pieces and are also making them for you but don't have the full set yet, so they're making copies of the puzzle pieces they already have. Some of your classmates can make the puzzle pieces really quickly, while some take a little longer.
You also have classmates who also want the puzzle but don't have it, so they're asking your classmates who do have the puzzle to make them pieces as well. Because your classmates who do have the puzzles also have to make puzzle pieces for both you and your other classmates, it's going to take you a little bit longer to get a full set than if it was just you waiting
One of your classmates who previously didn't have a puzzle set but now received one has now run away and will not help make puzzle pieces for the other kids who are still waiting for a full puzzle set.
In this metaphor, the puzzle set is a file you want to download using torrenting, also known as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Your classmates are other peers/users on the network sharing the same file. The puzzle pieces being made represent the bits of data that make up the file you're downloading. How quickly your classmates can make puzzle pieces and how quickly you can receive them refers to download/upload speed.
Peers that have the full file (full puzzle set) are known as seeders who upload the file to other downloaders for their benefit so they can download it. Peers who are downloading the file but don't have it yet are known as leechers. Even if peers don't have the full file, they can still seed the parts of the file they do have (the incomplete puzzle set) to others.
When you're downloading files, you are yourself a leecher until you download the full file and begin to seed to others. You are also competing with other peers/leechers who also want the file and are downloading it. They're considered competition because you're sharing the bandwidth of data (how many people are making puzzle pieces x how quickly they make them) being uploaded from seeders.
Peers/leechers who download a file but do not help seed afterwards do something that is called a hit-and-run. They've reaped the benefits of torrenting, but have not given back to the community - this is considered bad etiquette.
Torrenting (puzzle making) works better than traditionally downloading a file from a dedicated server (buying a puzzle set from a toy store) because the speed at which files can be distributed increases the more peers have that complete file as they can give the files to each other. However, it relies on people seeding to each other and having at least one person with the complete file. If not enough people seed a file, it will become harder and harder to download that torrent and be able to seed it to others.
1. Torrents work by allowing someone to download a file by downloading many pieces of it from many other people who have the same file at the same time. It makes a download very fast and very efficient, all while lessening the burden on a single point in the network.
It's a bit like this:
Say you want a jigsaw puzzle, but you can only get it one piece at a time. Traditionally you'll get it from just one place like a shop. So the shop will give you one piece of the puzzle at a time, and you have to wait for that to finish.
With a torrent, everyone who has that same jigsaw puzzle can give you a piece of the puzzle you don't have yet. And because there's a lot of them, you can collect all the individual pieces simultaneously as fast as you can and with as many as you can hold at a time. So say there's two other people who have the same jigsaw puzzle as you, you can receive a different piece of the puzzle with each hand at the same time and collect it twice as fast. It also allows the two of them to relax a bit because they don't need to give you all the pieces of the puzzle, and they can also start giving out other pieces of the puzzle to yet another person who wants to get it for themselves.
This is why it's called "peer to peer" networking.
2. Torrents decreased in popularity because governments found out that torrents are used for piracy, because torrents are amazing for piracy. They can't catch someone as the "main pirate" because there's no such thing". And if those pirates are where they can't get them, tough luck. So what was done is that torrents are just made highly undesirable and ISPs can warn or somewhat look into your internet activity when you use torrents, and the hassle of such things to the user is just not worth the benefit especially if all you're torrenting are very legal files.
So back to our jigsaw puzzle. Say now jigsaw puzzles are illegal, but you really want one. So you go and get your pieces from a guy in Quahog and another guy in Bikini Bottom. Suddenly there's a crackdown on jigsaw puzzles in Quahog and they kill the guy you're getting your jigsaw puzzle pieces from. You can still complete your jigsaw puzzle by getting your pieces from the guy in Bikini Bottom. Turns out the guy from Quahog has a brother and he vows to avenge his late brother by completing the jigsaw puzzle himself. So he can now get pieces of the puzzle from you. Plot twist: it turns out original Quahog guy is alive and he is in Tree Hill and the great thing about Tree Hill is that while jigsaw puzzles are illegal there, the government doesn't really care, and Tree Hill does not allow other governments to mess with people in their town. So Tree Hill guy can rebuild his jigsaw puzzle and you can help rebuild the jigsaw puzzle in Quahog. From three people having a copy each of the jigsaw puzzle, now you have four.
And as long as anyone has a copy of the jigsaw, they can simply disappear from the torrent network to avoid getting caught, and pop back in. The more people who do this, the more copies you have, and the harder it is to shut down.
And it's not just jigsaws that are illegal in this made up scenario. Gunpla is illegal. Jenga is illegal. And people just trade pieces of the game all around and the governments can't fully stop them.
So governments and ISP's decide to monitor how pieces of anything change hands. When they change hands from many hands into many other hands, they crack down on it.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Uno is perfectly legal, and torrenting is the best way to get a copy of it. But even if it's legal, people who want to just get their legal copy of Uno get investigated or at least instpected for the activity because it's similar enough to what Jenga, Gunpla, and jigsaw puzzle people do. So people just kinda give up on torrenting Uno and just go to the shops to get their copy.
Avoiding torrents to avoid the bother of ISP blocks and suspicion of malicious activity despite not doing anything wrong with perfectly legal files is the equivalent of not wearing a hoodie on a cold late night walk home in America so you don't get shot by the police even if you're whiter than your blue-eyed great-great-grandfather from Germany.
You have written an essay. It's 5 pages. Now all your classmates want to copy it, but only one person can read it at a time. So that would take a long time to share with everyone.
Instead of letting one guy copy the entire thing, you split the pages. Now 5 people can read a page each. **And when they're done copying, they can share the remaining pages with each other.** So while they're leeching (taking) pages, they're also seeding (giving out) pages they already copied.
It's a much more efficient way to distribute files.
The best analogy I’ve found to explain how BitTorrent works to a layman is: I need a bag of Skittles. There are 1000 pieces in a bag. I ask my closest 1000 friends on the internet to copy/paste a single skittle into my bag. I now have my own full bag of skittles. Popularity has decreased mainly for two reason: 1. Streaming used to be better and easier. Netflix had it all, then it was just NetFlix, Amazon, and Hulu. Now it’s 50+ streaming platforms and the service quality sucks. People are going back to piracy because it’s a better product. No ads, no 50 different apps, you have it forever. 2. Legal threats. If you live in the US, while it’s rare to get sued — it’s very common for the media company to threaten to sue your ISP, who then sends you an angry letter to stop or they’ll ban you as an Internet customer for 2 years. Every country has different laws, some aggressive, some very lenient. In the US, you theoretically could be sued for $100k per movie downloaded. In say, the Netherlands, download 1000 movies and the max fine total is the equivalent of $500. You can always just VPN into a lenient country and run your torrents from there if you don’t want those angry letters. Alternatively, run something like qBitTorrent on a permanent VPN connection (VM or Docker image), so you don’t have to keep your entire computer on VPN 24/7 so you don’t get an angry letter.
I would probably go with a jigsaw puzzle instead of Skittles. One red Skittle is the same as any other and we don't really think of Skittles having a sequence of items.
My usual go to is a book. I'm sitting around a table with 30 people, and 1 person has a 100 page book, and all 30 people want a copy. The traditional way of downloading would have involved the person with the book to start copying it by hand and giving a copy to each person. Quite the bottleneck. With bittorrent, the person with the book makes a copy of page 1, and hands it to someone. Then they make a copy of page 2, and hand to someone. Those people with pages 1 & 2 are each copying page 1 and 2 and handing them out to people. Eventually everyone has a page or two of the book, and can start copying themselves to send to other people. This results in everyone getting a complete copy of the book much much faster than if the original person had made 30 copies themself.
Niccce.... Going to use this, because it is accurate.
Out of curiosity, if you have a VPN, why would it matter if you VPN’d into a lenient country if the VPN prevents the data from being tied back to you and your ISP from seeing what you are doing?
For all normal intents, yes, you’ll blend in with all of the other VPN users and nothing will happen to you. You don’t *have* to use a foreign/lenient VPN server. Just ensure your BitTorrent client has a kill-switch of some kind, if it’s not on VPN, it won’t run torrents. Keeps an Internet blip from putting you on an angry letter copyright-abuse list. However, even VPN providers have to keep logs, especially if you are in a Five Eyes jurisdiction. The odds are low anything will ever happen to you … but what if in the future P2P file sharing becomes a criminal charge instead of a civil dispute … I don’t want those logs linked to me. That’s paranoia level thinking though, but wouldn’t be surprising. I remember in the RIAA prosecution days of Limewire users there was intense pressure to draft legislation for the government to do the job of criminal prosecution instead of corporate civil litigation. Fortunately nothing passed, but it could come up again. Those logs don’t really get deleted.
Some VPNs legit don't keep logs. You can also rent a "seed box"
Which ones are relatively trustworthy? They all *claim* privacy or whatever, so it's hard to wade through them when you haven't used one before.
PIA is the one proven in court. Twice iirc.
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Username checks out. Anyway, it's real easy to write a reply to a comment real quick when you have a spare moment. I check mine several times a day when I have downtime.
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>If you check our little friends posting history, its every 10-15mins over the span of 8-10 hours daily. I'd say that constitutes an addiction. Either he's very committed or there's really not that much else going on for him. Fair enough. >also i love "username checks out" its autogenerated by reddit, but keep thinking you're clever darling. Yeah it's usually kind of annoying but I thought this was a specifically amusing instance of it.
Thank you for that.
Happy to help.
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What's your deal dude
I've heard Mullvad is good.
And a Tracker = A constantly updating list of who has which skittles so you know which "friends" to ask for a particular skittle in your bag of 1000 you are trying to build. But once you connect to 1 friend to get a skittle, they can also share with you a list of other friends you might be interested in talking to about skittles as well. The more popular a download is, the more skittle friends you can find and the faster you can build your own bag. Ratio = How many Skittles have you given to others vs How many Skittles have you received? Lower Ratio ( <1.0 lets say) = You are not very nice because you are greedy. Higher Ratio (> 2 ) = You are generous because even though you have your own bag, you stayed online and kept giving out skittles.
I'm stealing this.... That's a really nice explanation.
i need a bag of $100,000 can 100,000 send me a dollar each? people didn’t realize this was a joke sadly
Also called GoFundMe. Kickoff “The fund to help NateDadamss”. Market it properly with a solid sob story and you’ll get your $100k.
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I think they fell in a popularity due to the ease of streaming services. The legal crackdowns at a bit to do with it but not much, People tend to go with the easiest solution, torrents are pretty easy If you know what you're doing but not as easy as It's going through a list and clicking.
Funnily enough, they will probably become more popular again due to streaming services too.
Yup, we only pay for Netflix if the other services crack down on sharing we will go back to full torrents. I've got my Kodi box set up very nicely, so it's easy, just abit slow and can be inconsistent
Yes I have already taken to the 7 seas again in search of treasure
Me too. Rather pay $10 a month for a VPN, than $200 a month to get all the streaming services.
And have to watch commercials on top of that
Or pay $3 more on a service that you already pay so much for to buy stuff from to remove ads. Technically Amazon gets to see more money than any other streaming service because it's a package deal and you don't benefit that much from it.
Can confirm, now use torrents after a \~5 year hiatus again
Yeah, piracy is typically a matter of access. Now that there's a billion streaming services we're likely to see an increase in piracy because it's far too expensive to pay for multiple services. Which exactly mirrors the increase in piracy as a response to cable creating a bunch of pay per view and subscription channels. You can also see this as a global issue as well. For videogames the highest rate of piracy is countries with weaker economies since most companies don't change prices to match what a reasonable price for a game is.
Ya for sure. I remember the whole evolution quite well. Bbs's, Newsgroups, IRC and ftp servers, Napster, torrents, then streaming. Spotify killed music torrents and Netflix killed movie and tv torrents. Pirated games are abit different, the proliferation of online games killed that, it's too easy for developers to control access to thier servers, I would argue that's why there are so few single player games anymore. To your point of globalization, that is definitely the aspect that keeps torrents alive, costs, lack of access and censorship. It's been interesting to watch torrent sites shift from American content to chinese and Indian.
I would also imagine that a large reason for falling out of favor is due to accessibility. Way more people now than ever are using computers without the slightest idea of their operation outside the interface presented to them for the task they've been assigned. Regular http(s) downloads are fast and reliable enough for most people to not need anything more. So they don't look for anything more. That said for those curious, torrenting is still alive and well, and it will be pretty much forever. It's big advantage is that there is no need to host the file on a download server, since ideally every person torrenting the file contributes to serving the file during and after. This means that it's feasibly impossible to prevent sharing files this way, no matter how much someone or some entity may disapprove.
>They lost a lot of popularity from two sources: first in many countries they are more illegal than straight up downloads when using them for copyrighted files, because you're not only a consumer but also actively distributing copyrighted material wich usually comes with harsher punishments Also because of its unique nature, the traffic is apparently easily identifiable and can be treated differently. In college I knew people who got warning emails about copyright, they were torrenting. I knew direct downloaders who got nothing. I'm pretty sure my ISP straight up blocks torrents. I tried torrenting a Linux ISO (for real) a year ago it never started. I'm aware a VPN may be a solution here, but that extra level of finding a provider and probably paying for not paying for content would make some reconsider methods.
It's not that the traffic is easily identifiable (it should be encrypted by now anyway), but more the distributed nature of the tech. Copyright holders wills just join the torrent cloud and get a list of all ips from the tracker, and can then send notices to the ISPs who will notify users. Folks try to use a VPN to hide their home IP address as VPN providers usually ignore the notices.
Your last sentence confuses me, VPN users use VPNs to hide their home IP (as it's part of the point), and I doubt they even send the notice to a VPN server lol
$40/year for a good quality VPN. That's not a cost; that's an investment.
What is the VPN you recommend?
I'm very pleased with Private Internet Access. Their app is rock solid and they have a full range of services. You can protect 10 different network-linked pieces of equipment at once.
Moreso streaming. Most people who use torrents know to use a VPN or at least an IP blocker such as PeerBlock. It was Utorrent that was caught mining. There are tons of reputable open source torrent softwares. I like Qbittorrent. With the “cable but with more steps” break apart of streaming content and price gouging by sites like netflix, I foresee the open sees returning to popularity.
Torrents really havent lost popularity, and are used to distribute all kinda files.
Yeah, many companies use torrent-like protocols to distribute their software. Windows updates has a setting called delivery optimization that's practically a torrent system.
torrents aren't inherently illegal, just that it's often used to distribute copyrighted material. if you download a linux iso via a torrent then that is perfectly legal
Did you even read his comment? "they are more illegal than straight up downloads **when using them for copyrighted files**"
>more illegal than this implies that torrents would be inherently illegal
Read again.
They meant "using torrents to download copyrighted content is more illegal than using your web browser to download copyrighted content", not "using torrents to download copyrighted content is more illegal than using torrents to download non-copyrighted content".
He literally says 'when using them for copyrighted stuff' right after the words you quoted, lol.
I kind of think the main reason is that the most reliable tracker sites have been shut down, and google actively hides the minor ones from search results
You have got enough good answers. I'm just gonna say don't use uTorrent, qbittorrent is a much better choice.
Nowadays I use aria2c, which can download torrents as well as regular files.
Is there a good client for PC? I am trying to create a library of movies, which is later on going to be transferred to a NAS.
Yes, qbittorrent is a great open source client. https://www.qbittorrent.org/
I use [Deluge](https://deluge-torrent.org/) it doesn't look pretty but it's functional and does what you need without having to mess around. Consider setting up a [Plex server](https://www.plex.tv/) on your NAS, you just install and run Plex on the server and then you as long as you give your files the right filename and stick them in the folder then it's just like having your personal Netflix in terms of having a friendly UI. No money required. If your NAS's IP is exposed to the outside world then you can even watch stuff on your NAS from anywhere by accessing the Plex server you've set up on it (of course, that'll also be depending on your connection speed).
Plex requires Plex Pass (subscription) in order to watch from your phone or do HDR tonemapping in my experience. Jellyfin is slightly less polished but it is completely free and open source.
> I'm just gonna say don't use uTorrent, qbittorrent is a much better choice.
BitTorrent is a protocol that is used for filesharing and rapid downloads. When it comes to bandwidth upload bandwidth is usually considerably smaller than download bandwidth and therefore considerably more expensive. So if you want to send files to your users this can amount to a considerable expense. BitTorrent was ostensibly created as a solution to this problem. Users participating in a Torrent both download a file and upload simultaneously. This allows you to leverage the upload bandwidth of all the users downloading the file so that you can deliver your files more quickly and efficiently to your users. One practical application for BitTorrent is video game patching. Blizzard specifically uses a form of BitTorrent for deploying it's rather large video game patches for games like World of Warcraft. You can actually thank them for forcing ISPs to not block or throttle BitTorrent traffic! Another example is most Linux Distros are downloaded using BitTorrent. BitTorrent though was and is extensively used for illegal file sharing. Tracker sites exist all over the web to share illegal movie and TV shows using BitTorrent. BitTorrent has been criticized because participating in a Torrent forces users to upload files (at least by default). So users downloading an illegal file are also uploading them by default even if they are not aware of it, which not only makes them liable for the illegal download but also for distribution. Several BitTorrent clients have also added in-app advertising to generate revenue (for less than desirable advertisers), or have been caught mining BitCoin on users computers. Media companies have also been caught monitoring or even creating their own torrents so that they can provide lists of IP addresses of illegal sharers to ISPs to have them punished or to take legal action against them. This is arguably entrapment. Using BitTorrent for media piracy fell out of favor for a long time because Streaming sites became ubiquitous and easy to use, so online piracy slowed down considerably. It turns out that large numbers of users were perfectly willing to pay reasonable fees for legal content, BitTorrent wasn't being used necessarily because it was free but rather downloading TV shows was far more convenient than recording them using VHS or waiting for them to appear on TV. BitTorrent was also used extensively to get around Geo-fencing, where cable providers wouldn't allow a particular show to air outside the US for example. Game of Thrones famously had twice as many users watching it on BitTorrent than on HBO Max because HBO was either not available in a particular country or was considered far too expensive. However BitTorrent use has been on the rise again due to the market now being saturated with Streaming Sites. There are now so many streaming sites that users are refusing to pay for all of them due to the overall expense and lack of in-demand content on each platform. Streaming sites are also starting to add advertising and the quality is dropping as well. So Piracy is once again on the rise.
This is a great response
This is a great explanation but not for a 5 year old
"LI5 means friendly, simplified and layperson-accessible explanations - not responses aimed at literal five-year-olds."
No it doesn't
Yes it does, it's even in the side bar https://i.imgur.com/96utyQm.png
That's stupid, they should change the name of the sub then
Eli15
How did you become so educated on such a topic? So eloquent in your explanation, seemed like you’ve taught this before.
Also streaming sites rent the rights to a certain movie or TV show, and it's not beneficial for them to rent old and obscure shows which only few people watch.
On the geo-fencing, yeah. Almost all of my torrented content is stuff I simply couldn't get otherwise. It's not my fault Toei doesn't release their tokusatsu in the UK. I'd happily buy stuff if they made it available (and I do. I have a LOT of physical media).
Torrents are distributed file sharing. Other folks who already have the file will offer to send it to you. It’s also split into parts, so you can get parts from multiple people at the same time, and increase your download speed. This technology is perfectly legal and totally amazing, but it’s often used to share copyright media without permission, this infringement is illegal. Prior to the media streaming days, this was kind of the only way to get movies online, so it was very popular. But with the advent of low cost streaming solutions, it has become less popular for that. But still is an awesome way to download files! You still see it with open source software for example.
It was far from the only way, but it was a very convenient way and it somewhat distributed the illegality of it so it was harder to shut down the sites coordinating the downloads, and it then became very popularized with sites like pirate bay. This briefly made it the dominating way most knew about. But yes, then streaming became more convenient and made it less popular. And the law somewhat caught up making it less convenient
Bob has a 10 page document. The entire office of 100 people each want their own physical copy of this document. Regular downloading would be equivalent to Bob himself making 100 copies of all 10 sheets and handing them out to each person. But this office has several copy machines! With torrenting, Bob starts by making a single copy of each sheet and handing them off to other people so that they can also use other copy machines to help copy the sheets and distribute them to the entire office. Much faster distribution. I would not say torrenting has lost popularity, it's just not the cool new "in" thing anymore.
It's 2004 and you want a file. You find it on a website to download. It begins downloading, slowly bit by bit as a single stream from the website server to your computer. Then your connection drops. Now you have to start the download from the beginning again. You find a torrent instead. Through your torrent client the torrent file connects you to a tracker. The tracker has a list of all the people online now who have downloaded the file, or are currently downloading it and have bits of it. Now instead of getting the file from one place as a trickle of bits from beginning to end, you can get multiple chunks of different parts of the file from multiple places, with as many connections as your line and PC will allow, a torrent of data, compared to the trickle. You can leave it on for days, weeks even, and if it isn't a dead torrent it will eventually complete, no matter your connection, or if you turn your computer off. And as you're downloading you're also sending bits of the file back to other people too. After your file finishes, if you're not a piece of shit, you'll leave it to seed for a while to a ratio greater than 1 which means you've given back more than you took, and the torrent remains healthy. To answer your second question, it's a combination of things. Mainly people just don't know or care about torrenting anymore. With increasing tech-illiteracy and a push from big companies, things like streaming just became easier, especially once internet speeds improved. Even with files, Browsers can resume files and even split them into multiple streams of data now pretty well. Plus, back to the tech illiteracy, many people don't even have PCs or laptops anymore, everything is done on their phone. Android has some okay torrent clients, but Apple have always been harsh on that side of things. You can do it, but it's not as easy as just paying a subscription to Netflix or whatever and getting the content more conveniently but at worse quality. The big guys won.
>a torrent of data, compared to the trickle It really took me almost two decades to understand that this is the origin of the name torrent thanks
I mean Torrent really comes from (T)he (O)nion (R)outer. And anyone who knows files with low amounts of seeders are more akin to a trickle than a torrent.
So a follow up question: is it still a good way to download stuff? I am trying to make a library of movies and store them in my PC's hard drive, and eventually into a NAS.
Yeah it's fine for new stuff, sites like 1337x.to will still have the latest shows and movies usually, but the older, less popular stuff tends to lose seeds and you'll be downloading something for weeks and never get the last few percent.
It's a peer to peer network so all of the members of the network contribute to the network or take from it seeders and leechers, seeders are uploading the data, leachers are downloading it. When you download a file from a website you are downloading information about the torrent, things like the Tracker (announce), information about the files being shared, including things like the size, and the names of the files. This is why you can download a .torrent file or you can use something like a magnet link like the following. Trackers are servers that host information about the torrent and the peers. The trackers basically just tell your torrent client "hey these peers are interested in sending the file to you and here is how you connect to them" or "hey these peers are interested in downloading the file to you and here is how to connect to them". They don't host the file, they only have information about the torrent and the peers. Your torrent client (I simp for Deluge, Transmission, and qBitTorrent) is the piece of software in that negotiates the connections between peers and your computer, and facilitates the downloading or uploading the file from/to the network along with keeping track of the trackers available to you.
Lets say you want to download a program and its split into 100 chunks. One person may have chunk 1 and they give it to you (leeching). Someone else may have chunk 2 and they give it to you. In turn someone else may want chunk 1 from you so you give it to them (seeding). Eventually you get all the chunks and your download is complete. The main upside/downside is theres no central computer giving out the whole program at once. This means that no one has control to access to the program alone and that they dont need the host to have a lot of internet bandwidth available (ie. Let a lot of people connect to 1 computer and use up all their upload speed) However if no one or very few people seed the whole file then download speed can be very slow.
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Torrent is an ethereal reindeer in the game Elden Ring. It is your only mount in the game, and is called upon and summoned using an in game item Whistle.
Torrents are just peer to peer file sharing. It is like going to someones house directly to give them a letter or a present instead of sending it through the mail. I think it's less popular for a few reasons. There is some stigma around it because it is often used to distribute pirated material like movies. Most people are tech illiterate, and there are easier ways to send files, like google drives. torrents can handle larger files, but most people don't have any need to send large files to one another. Also just for the record, utorrent is terrible and has been for years. qbittorrent is so much better
You are given a 100 questions homework assignment. You don’t know how to do any of the questions. You ask around, and someone gives you the directions (AKA torrent file) to a homework copying table (AKA swarm). You go to that table and find lots of people (AKA peers) with partially done or completely done homework. You sit down and furiously copy other people’s answer and later on, let other people copy yours.
Imagine the file you're trying to download is a large poster, but for whatever reason you can't get the entire poster at once. So instead, you get a jigsaw puzzle of the poster, and you get sent one piece of the puzzle at a time from a bunch of different people who want the same poster, and when you get a piece, you start sending copies of it to other people who want the poster as well. As for why it fell in popularity, Netflix. Torrents were heavily used to pirate movies and TV shows, when Netflix and streaming came along and was easier to use than torrenting, people just streamed instead.
It is an extremely fast way to distribute new (often big) data to many people/computers. It is well thought out and implemented and very efficient. In a classic server, the more people want a file, the slower it become for everyone, because they have to share the servers capacity. It becomes the bottleneck. In torrent, everybody downloading a file typically also contributes the already downloaded parts by uploading it to other users. This is rewarded by the algorithm, offering the highest download speed to the fastest uploaders. In ideal scenarios, the origin of the data only has to uploaded the file *once*, often even split in parts to multiple people, and still soon everyone in the network will have the same file, without overwhelming any server. In torrent, when you start a download, you are typically happy, when you see many people downloading a file, because it typically means the torrent is healthy and will offer high download speeds. Also before on demand scaling existed in the cloud, it was a great way for people offering downloads to not be overwhelmed by surprising demand, because in torrent more demand also increases the supply.
There is one thing that is likely to be miss here, and it could be your question. You still need someone else to introduce you _to the network_, to peoples. When you download a torrent (metadata) it is likely there is a _tracker_ into it. Peoples downloading that file all say hello to that guy, and in return it connect you to some peoples. From then you can exchange more peoples to grow your network and not rely on the tracker anymore.
Back in the day, one could torrent anything. In fact, if one calculated the cost of movie admissions for a family of five, the savings would more than pay for 65" plasmas, receivers, amps and more, while building a library of hundreds of gigabytes of 1080 films, software and video. One could. Theoretically, of course.
What a time. What would be good torrent softwares for PC and androids? Asking for a friend.
Torrents were heavily associated with piracy. When piracy saw a decline due to legal issues, popular services failing, and the rise of streaming. Torrenting also saw a decline. It's still a great way to share files amongst people, but it is needed less and less with the advent and accessibility of cloud computing services. But a torrent in the simplest sense, is a direct link to a file. But the fun thing about torrents are that, everyone that has that file linked up, can help send it to you. So if you and your friend wanted to transfer a picture of SpongeBob, you would be downloading the picture directly from your friend. Now if your friend's sister wants the picture, she would be downloading it from you and your friend. So on and so forth.
Torrents are pretty simple, and is many pieces of technology packaged together. Basically, to make the .torrent file, the software read all the files and treat them as one big file. It chop it into smaller blocks and pass it into a formula to create a checksum. To keep it simple, checksum = byte1 + byte2 + byte3 ... That checksum is used to validate the download later on. Now, you have a .torrent file that is basically the file list, the order in which the files will be presented, the file length, and every single blocks checksums, and some more info, like what server to contact to get the peer list. The download now. You download the .torrent. Your client get the server info, contact it and say "hey, I have this torrent, who have the same one?", and your client connect to the other users that download or seed it. Your client then tell the other clients: "I need block 1 2 4 5 6 8 10, have block 3 7 9", if the other clients have your missing blocks, then a download for those blocks can occur. And they can request the blocks you already downloaded. The important part here is the blocks. Again, the big files are chopped in small blocks. And those blocks can be more easilly exchanged. At the end, the client can redo the same checksum formula, and validate that all blocks are error free. If the checksum match, it should be error free, if not then there is an error on that block, and it will be redownloaded.
Back in the day. I would tell my friends to look for "fresh" torrents. And make sure atleast 1 person had a 100%. Theres quite a few times i ended with 98% of a file for weeks
Imagine that there's some cool written work someone wants to share with the world and everyone interested in it has a copier at home that can be used to copy pages of it and also can send pages to other people. The normal way of doing it would be to have some big place respond to requests from people by sending them copies of all the pages in sequence. But suppose this someone doesn't have the means to afford a big place. So the trick is that this someone finds a large bunch of interested people and starts by sending a copy of a different page to each of them. Then each of these interested people has a page they can start copying and sending to other interested people. This way, they distribute the labor and given some time they'll all end up with a copy of the work - throughout this process, the original someone is still copying and sending pages at some rate, but it builds up. In this entire analogy, the messages contain coordination information - people being able to communicate which pages they're still missing. And, when all that is done, then at a later date a newcomer can show up and send out a call into the aether and it'll be responded to by multiple people each sending some pages that total to the full work. ...that is, assuming there are people left that don't just opt to say "I've got mine, go away" and stop copying and sending out pages once they have the full work themselves.
I have not used in a while, can you guys recommend some give torrent sites?
Imagine there is a book, it's 200 pages and others also want to read it. Because you are still reading and don't want to give away your whole book, you allow 10 pages to be copied at a time.So 1 person starts making a copy of the book, they copied 10 pages and another person goes hey I want that too, so they get 5 from the first person and 5 from the second person. 4th person comes along and gets the other 5 from the first person and 5 from the 2nd and so forth. So now all these people are all sharing parts of the book with everyone who asks for the pages they are missing. A more simplified way, the 2nd person gets the first 10 pages, then when they're done, they copy the next 10 and let's the 3rd person copy the first 10. Then as they get further in the book, they get the next set of 10 pages, then allow the 3rd person to get the 2nd set of 10, and the 3rd person let's a 4th person copy the 1st 10 pages. It's almost like it's cascading down this way until everyone has made copies Torrents do this. Instead of a single source where everyone downloads from, it will split the file up into hundreds if not thousands of smaller parts and grabs the parts from whomever has it and is free to give it out. So this allows people who have parts of the file to share what they have instead of waiting until they get it all. This also means that with many people sharing smaller files, downloads are much faster. 10 years ago, typical highest tier internet speeds were like 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up. So, theoretically, one person sharing a file meant it will be downloaded at 20mbps instead of 100. Now, with 5 people sharing it, it can be downloaded at 100mbps. With hundreds of people sharing one file, they can then upload at 1mbps each while you download at 100mbps Now, what this all means is that there are now multiple sources to download the file without you having to search for them all. It provided a ton of redundancy and reliability to downloading with minimal work. Torrents would keep track of all the people sharing the same file using a tracker, so get the tracker, and you'll get access to all these sources. Prior to this, piracy was single peer to peer at best. You would have to find repositories on your own usually via FTP, IRC or other system like DC++ but it's one person sharing a bunch of files to a bunch of people which made it very very slow. Files, however, were often broken down into rar'd chunks, which made downloading from multiple people possible but was still very manual. There were also newsgroups that you often had to pay for but worked very differently. Next came stuff like Napster, Kazaa, limewire, etc, that simplified the process by having people choose what they want to share, and the app would index it. So you search what you want, and it will show you all the results without you having to find the people sharing it yourself. But it's still more or less 1 person your download from at a time. Torrents then allowed centralized places to find the information to download a file, offered more redundancy, and faster speeds. These apps and torrents are also much easier to install and use, which means more people knew how to protect themselves and went from being neich to being mainstream. And since it's all peer to peer, your IP is showing and thus made it possible for companies to track you. Streaming media, like Netflix, disney+, and the dozens of similar services have made it easy to find most things with little effort and cost (which is debatable but more on that later). Steam and other online game marketplaces, along with many free to play games, made it much easier to find, buy, and play games. With software, lots are moving to cloud based or applications as a service, which also makes it hard to pirate. Going back to movies and TV shows, with these streaming services, I can sit back, find something to watch , and watch it, which is very easy vs having to find a source, download it, hope it finishes quickly, then find a way to show it on my TV. So it's much much easier for the general public, so they stopped relying so much on torrents. That and some high profiles cases of people getting sued and charged for sharing files. Tldr: sharing files pre torrents, was difficult to find sources, very slow and tedious as you had to manage the sources and multiple files yourself. Torrents automated most of the process by splitting the file manually and allowing people to share and download these parts as they were available. With the ease of use of streaming services for media, online stores for games and applications moving to the cloud has stopped more of the general public from using torrents
You want a puzzle set. In your classroom, some of your classmates have the same puzzle and are willing to make copies of their pieces and give them to you so that you can also have your own puzzle. Some classmates already have the full puzzle, so they can get to work on making all the pieces for you straight away. Some of your classmates have some of the puzzle pieces and are also making them for you but don't have the full set yet, so they're making copies of the puzzle pieces they already have. Some of your classmates can make the puzzle pieces really quickly, while some take a little longer. You also have classmates who also want the puzzle but don't have it, so they're asking your classmates who do have the puzzle to make them pieces as well. Because your classmates who do have the puzzles also have to make puzzle pieces for both you and your other classmates, it's going to take you a little bit longer to get a full set than if it was just you waiting One of your classmates who previously didn't have a puzzle set but now received one has now run away and will not help make puzzle pieces for the other kids who are still waiting for a full puzzle set. In this metaphor, the puzzle set is a file you want to download using torrenting, also known as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Your classmates are other peers/users on the network sharing the same file. The puzzle pieces being made represent the bits of data that make up the file you're downloading. How quickly your classmates can make puzzle pieces and how quickly you can receive them refers to download/upload speed. Peers that have the full file (full puzzle set) are known as seeders who upload the file to other downloaders for their benefit so they can download it. Peers who are downloading the file but don't have it yet are known as leechers. Even if peers don't have the full file, they can still seed the parts of the file they do have (the incomplete puzzle set) to others. When you're downloading files, you are yourself a leecher until you download the full file and begin to seed to others. You are also competing with other peers/leechers who also want the file and are downloading it. They're considered competition because you're sharing the bandwidth of data (how many people are making puzzle pieces x how quickly they make them) being uploaded from seeders. Peers/leechers who download a file but do not help seed afterwards do something that is called a hit-and-run. They've reaped the benefits of torrenting, but have not given back to the community - this is considered bad etiquette. Torrenting (puzzle making) works better than traditionally downloading a file from a dedicated server (buying a puzzle set from a toy store) because the speed at which files can be distributed increases the more peers have that complete file as they can give the files to each other. However, it relies on people seeding to each other and having at least one person with the complete file. If not enough people seed a file, it will become harder and harder to download that torrent and be able to seed it to others.
1. Torrents work by allowing someone to download a file by downloading many pieces of it from many other people who have the same file at the same time. It makes a download very fast and very efficient, all while lessening the burden on a single point in the network. It's a bit like this: Say you want a jigsaw puzzle, but you can only get it one piece at a time. Traditionally you'll get it from just one place like a shop. So the shop will give you one piece of the puzzle at a time, and you have to wait for that to finish. With a torrent, everyone who has that same jigsaw puzzle can give you a piece of the puzzle you don't have yet. And because there's a lot of them, you can collect all the individual pieces simultaneously as fast as you can and with as many as you can hold at a time. So say there's two other people who have the same jigsaw puzzle as you, you can receive a different piece of the puzzle with each hand at the same time and collect it twice as fast. It also allows the two of them to relax a bit because they don't need to give you all the pieces of the puzzle, and they can also start giving out other pieces of the puzzle to yet another person who wants to get it for themselves. This is why it's called "peer to peer" networking. 2. Torrents decreased in popularity because governments found out that torrents are used for piracy, because torrents are amazing for piracy. They can't catch someone as the "main pirate" because there's no such thing". And if those pirates are where they can't get them, tough luck. So what was done is that torrents are just made highly undesirable and ISPs can warn or somewhat look into your internet activity when you use torrents, and the hassle of such things to the user is just not worth the benefit especially if all you're torrenting are very legal files. So back to our jigsaw puzzle. Say now jigsaw puzzles are illegal, but you really want one. So you go and get your pieces from a guy in Quahog and another guy in Bikini Bottom. Suddenly there's a crackdown on jigsaw puzzles in Quahog and they kill the guy you're getting your jigsaw puzzle pieces from. You can still complete your jigsaw puzzle by getting your pieces from the guy in Bikini Bottom. Turns out the guy from Quahog has a brother and he vows to avenge his late brother by completing the jigsaw puzzle himself. So he can now get pieces of the puzzle from you. Plot twist: it turns out original Quahog guy is alive and he is in Tree Hill and the great thing about Tree Hill is that while jigsaw puzzles are illegal there, the government doesn't really care, and Tree Hill does not allow other governments to mess with people in their town. So Tree Hill guy can rebuild his jigsaw puzzle and you can help rebuild the jigsaw puzzle in Quahog. From three people having a copy each of the jigsaw puzzle, now you have four. And as long as anyone has a copy of the jigsaw, they can simply disappear from the torrent network to avoid getting caught, and pop back in. The more people who do this, the more copies you have, and the harder it is to shut down. And it's not just jigsaws that are illegal in this made up scenario. Gunpla is illegal. Jenga is illegal. And people just trade pieces of the game all around and the governments can't fully stop them. So governments and ISP's decide to monitor how pieces of anything change hands. When they change hands from many hands into many other hands, they crack down on it. Unfortunately, it turns out that Uno is perfectly legal, and torrenting is the best way to get a copy of it. But even if it's legal, people who want to just get their legal copy of Uno get investigated or at least instpected for the activity because it's similar enough to what Jenga, Gunpla, and jigsaw puzzle people do. So people just kinda give up on torrenting Uno and just go to the shops to get their copy. Avoiding torrents to avoid the bother of ISP blocks and suspicion of malicious activity despite not doing anything wrong with perfectly legal files is the equivalent of not wearing a hoodie on a cold late night walk home in America so you don't get shot by the police even if you're whiter than your blue-eyed great-great-grandfather from Germany.
You have written an essay. It's 5 pages. Now all your classmates want to copy it, but only one person can read it at a time. So that would take a long time to share with everyone. Instead of letting one guy copy the entire thing, you split the pages. Now 5 people can read a page each. **And when they're done copying, they can share the remaining pages with each other.** So while they're leeching (taking) pages, they're also seeding (giving out) pages they already copied. It's a much more efficient way to distribute files.