Greg's FAQs
File sharing with torrents

What are Torrents all about?

A torrent is a way to share files. For example, someone copies a movie onto their computer and puts it out as a torrent. That allows other people to copy that from their computer. Torrents are one kind of method commonly known as peer-to-peer file sharing.

Isn't it illegal to share copyrighted material?

Yes. If you give me a copy of a movie you bought, we would be breaking the law. However the torrent server does not distribute copyrighted material itself. There are on-going legal attempts by the big publishing companies to shut down these services. Napster was the first and it was shut down and reborn as a retail service. For now, torrents are still going.

What kinds of stuff can you download?

There is lots of pirated software, movies, music albums and porno.

Isn't there a risk of viruses, trojans, spy-ware and other bad stuff?

Yes. Make sure you have good updated anti-virus and anti-spy-ware running. If you can, it would be nice to use a seperate computer that you can just reformat if it got too infected.

How do you do it?

1. Go to a torrent search engine and find the thing you want to download
2. Click the download link and save the torrent file on your computer.
3. Open the torrent file using your torrent client program and download your booty

How does it work?

You don't need a torrent client to download a torrent file. Torrent files are very small and simply identify the content makes up that particular album, movie or wahtever. You can use your favorite web browser to download the torrent file from a torrent search engine. Torrent clients also do this but their main purpose is to manage the downloading of your booty.

How fast does stuff download?

The files being shared are broken up into small blocks. The torrent server has a part called a tracker that follows who got which block. Rather than each person getting the whole thing from the same source, each person gets a block and passes it on to someone else who is trying to copy the file. People having blocks to share are called seeds and people just getting blocks are called leeches. The more people (especally seeds) sharing the file, the faster it will download.

Links to common torrent clients

Links to common torrent search engines

Other torrent links