Download Torrents

Apparently, social networking traffic has now overtaken pr0n as the single most common type of information being transported across the internet besides email, oh and file sharing activities. But, what you may not realize is that not all file sharing is illegal and that there is a system known as Bit Torrent that spreads the bandwidth load between sharers.

Briefly, the Bit Torrent system allows large files to be distributed in chunks. You choose to download a particular file and as soon as the first packets hit your hard drive, they become available via your internet connection for others to download. Everyone who wants the file must share the burden of the download so that no single user has to provide all the bandwidth. And, unlike other P2P, peer-to-peer, systems there is no simple way to prevent uploads to other users without compromising the speed you can download to the point where it will not be viable.

So, here’s an example of how it works, adapted from the website of UK ISP VirginMedia, which actively encourages the use of Bit Torrents. Imagine that I put a 1Gb video file on Sciencetext and you want to download it. If everyone who visited the site started downloading that file, my bandwidth bill as a webmaster would skyrocket and I’d likely exceed the allowable bandwidth limits on my web hosting account. However, instead of letting you download the complete file, I could create a torrent version on my hard drive and host, not the complete video, but a pointer to the torrent, which would be a few kilobytes rather than 1 Gb.

Now, the first person to start downloading that 1 Gb file will not be using my web host’s bandwidth but the bandwidth to which I personally connect to the internet. However, when the second person connects to the torrent, they will start to download from me and from the first person to connect and so on. A popular file could then become seeded on thousands of computers the world over, with Bit Torrent users grabbing chunks from each other until they all have the complete 1 Gb file.

Of course, for this to work you need a Bit Torrent application, of which there are many, among them uTorrent (the u is a Greek letter mu) and BitLord. You open the torrent file using the Bit Torrent client application and this file tells the program the internet (IP) addresses of other computers on which the file can be found. The group of uploaders and downloaders – the file sharers – is known as a swarm.

This distributed sharing system makes BitTorrent very efficient and means no one person has the burden on their bandwidth. Media agencies and computer companies now commonly use BitTorrent to provide access to their staff to download enormous video and images files, complete system updates and more without causing bottlenecks in their networks. So, not only is it efficient it is faster than conventional downloading where you might right-click a link to a file and save to your hard drive directly.

VirginMedia then points out that, funnily enough, much of the material being downloaded using BitTorrent is illegal. It’s illegal in the sense that it may be copyright material, such as rips of CDs and DVDs, ebooks and audiobooks and other materials. But, because Bit Torrent is such a useful system, the wider internet community, particularly in the open source movement has taken it to heart and commonly uses it to make the latest distro of Linux available quickly and easily, or even demo versions of CD/DVD writing software such as Ahead’s Nero Burning Rom.

There are plenty of legal materials to download via Bit Torrent, including non-copyright and Creative Commons movies, music, books, course materials. The likes of etree.org and the incredibly cleverly named LegalTorrents.com should provide a useful starting place where you might grab freely available live concert recordings of hundreds of bands, among them Grateful Dead and Pearl Jam.

Despite the legal possibilities of the Bit Torrent system, some ISPs practice sandvining or throttling to prevent their customers using up too much of their bandwidth downloading enormous torrents. This, of course, is not good and is in breach of the spirit of the contract between customer and ISP, especially for customers who might be paying $50 per month for just 10 megabits per second downloads.

One quick tip workaround for this is to use a Virtual Private Network, such as Hotspot Shield. This system has several advantages, not least in that it spoofs and IP address in the US and is encrypted. To other Bit Torrent users you will appear to be based in the US regardless of where in the world you actually are, which in ad hoc tests carried out by me from the UK on behalf of Sciencetext readers reveals that torrents can be downloaded quite a lot faster with Hotspot active.

Another side effect of using Hotspot is, of course, that other users, including spies for copyright holders as well as your ISP do not see your actual IP address and so cannot point the finger at you legally speaking for downloading torrents. Of course, the honest crowd that is the Sciencetext readership will only be doing legal downloads anyway, so that isn’t an issue.