Whats A BitTorrent

[Jake]

I was just wondering what a bittorrent is and where if i should can i get one?
If so Post the Specific Bit torrent you yourself use.

 

[Arden]

I'm not really sure if I get the question right.. either way.. a torrent is a little file which you load in a program that handles torrent (i.e. Bittornado, etc.), this let's you download a specific file.
Let's say.. you want to download err.. Warcraft 3.. you search for the WC3 torrent, load it in the program, and there ya have it

I use bittornado xP

 

[Stealth]

A Bittorrent is a peer-to-peer filesharing protocol which has advantages over normal P2P like Gnutell, eDonkey and (formerly) WinMX. A server (tracker) keeps a list of all torrents organized over it, and once you download a small .torrent file it'll communicate with the tracker it was hosted on to make sure you get the file from as many people as possible at a time.
As for the clients, I'd suggest BitComet or BitSpirit. They're both user-friendly. Once you're more comfortable with torrents, you might switch to uTorrent (microTorrent).

 

[Jake]

So Are these Programs any good or do they cause more problems than they can fix?

 

[Stealth]

They don't cause problems by themselves, only what you download, because it might be illegal and/or have a virus contained in itself.

 

[Duality]

Yeah, you have to be careful. Some files are made so that if you download it and it's illegal, it will track down your IP and in turn, the RIAA will catch you.

 

[Michael S.]

You also have to watch the type of site that you download torrents from as they could have nasty spyware or adware, and sites like this often (not always, but often) put nice little desktop icons on your computer that can be a pain to remove if you don't have the right type of protection.

 

[Duality]

I actually trust torrents then some of the direct download websites. Some of them have viruses and you don't even need to download the files to get them.

 

[Bryce W]

Torrents are much less likely to contain any viruses because Torrents rely on others downloading and leaving the torrent on their PC in order for you to leech off them. If they were detected as viruses they would be deleted real quick and would stop the spread as there would be very few seeds for you to download from.

Kazza and other P2P programs on the other hand.. thats a whole different story.