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Click above to see how the network works
Torrents, the first thing that comes to our mind from this word is File sharing. File sharing is nothing but sharing and taking files viz., digital, documents, images anything that could be shared. File sharing using the peer-to-peer (P2P) network model, personal pc of users store and share their files. People involved in file sharing engage in both providing (upload) and receiving of files mutually.
How does it work?
Peer-to-peer network has evolved magnificently over the last years and today the biggest turn-over is the torrential network. In this new environment Bran Cohen’s designed BitTorrent protocol is used to distribute data over the network. The first person who intends to share the file or collection acts as the first seed.
Each peer who downloads/leeches the data also starts uploading/seeding them to other peers. On the network, a huge file is broken into pieces and the peer who is seeding seeds all the pieces, the leech starts downloading the file in pieces, and as each piece is downloaded the peer starts to seed them again. Thus as the leech increase the seed also increases.
Seed: This is one or more people/pc/client who intends to share the file. So the general rule, the more the seed, the more the guarantee the file is completely downloaded.
Leech: This is one or more people/pc/client who intends to download the file.
A BitTorrent download differs from a classic full-file HTTP request in several fundamental ways:
- BitTorrent makes many small data requests over different TCP sockets, while web-browsers typically make a single HTTP GET request over a single TCP socket.
- BitTorrent downloads in a random or in a “rarest-first”[2] approach that ensures high availability, while HTTP downloads in a sequential manner.
In this animation, the coloured bars beneath all of the clients represent individual pieces of the file. After the initial pieces transfer from the seed, the pieces are individually transferred from client to client. The original seeder only needs to send out one copy of the file for all the clients to receive a copy.
As per Wikipedia
Bran Cohen designed this protocol in April 2001 and the first implementation was released in July the same year. It is now maintained by Cohen’s company BitTorrent, Inc. While BitTorrent was the first client to be using this protocol, today there are numerous clients available for a variety of computing platforms.
My all time favorite is µTorrent and Azureus for Ubuntu
How do I use it?
This is the easiest part, download any BitTorrent client, like µTorrent and follow the installation steps given on the website. Once this is done, you can choose to look for the torrent files (this is the file a seeder creates to seed the movie on to the torrential network) for the movie or file or content which you are interested in. Some of the sites are listed below
Once the torrent file is downloaded open it with the program you have installed and then chose the location on your hard drive to download the content. Now, please sit back and relax based on your internet connection.
Cost/Advantage/Cons:
BitTorrent achieves much lower cost, much higher redundancy, and much greater resistance to abuse or to “flash crowds” than a regular HTTP server.
The above protection does come at a cost: downloads do take time to rise to full speed as they take time to create the swarm of enough peer connections, and the it takes time for the node to be an effective uploader
In short a typical BitTorrent download will rise to higher speeds (based on your Internet Connection and bandwidth), and maintain the speed, but probably towards the end fall down to slower speeds (while I have not faced in on my 256k connection)
Hope you enjoyed reading the article and that you will start being into the torrential networks, remember there is a lot to be leeched and seeded 
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August 26th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Q1: Can I just download from others/seeders, and not become a seeder myself – i.e. not allow others to leech/download from my system?
Q2: How secure are these seeding and leeching? Are there any threats behind the scene?
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August 28th, 2008 at 8:13 am
@ Raman
A1: Yes you can do that, but remember that until the download is complete at your end, you cannnot stop being a leecher. However, Torrential programs like utorrent and the others, enable you to restrict your upload speed, while there is a restriction that if you decrease it to 7 or below, your download speed will also be decreased.
A2: Nothing is secure in this unsecure world, always remember to download the torrent files from known sites like mininova or isohunt. But most important is when you are opening a while which has been download. You will be able to expect .exe files when you are actually downloading a movie. Use VLC to run any movies, and if there is a movie which tells you, that you need to download a particular player, remember you are inviting spyware/malware to your PC. Avoid getting softwares from torrent, more important read at the comments of other users who have downloaded it already, that should be at the top of your mind, you get a first hand information about the content and the quality of the stuff you are downloading and gives you a relief before downloading itself.
Thanks Raman for responding to the blog…
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August 30th, 2008 at 12:09 am
cool..thanks!
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