Eventually, you will hear the term bittorrent and you will wonder what they heck people are talking about. You may have heard about it in the discussion about file sharing or you may have heard someone mention it in passing. Your IT department may have been talking about it during their lunch break and you overheard them. So what exactly is bittorrent?

Basically, it is a P2P (Peer To Peer) networking technology that allows people to share files quickly and efficiently. Whether the files are legal or not isn’t part of this article. What you choose to download using bittorrent is up to you.

Getting Started

One thing you will need is a BitTorrent client. There are quite a few out there for whatever OS you run. On Windows, I used the BitTorrent feature of Shareaza but now that I have switched to Mac, I use Transmission. Whatever client you use, they all work pretty much the same. You download the torrent file and open it. The torrent file tells your client software what you want to download and who has it.

The reason I said BitTorrent is quick is because you make multiple connections and download the file faster than with one single connection. BitTorrent is more efficient because those multiple connections are to different people. Because you aren’t downloading from one person, the network load is spread out. More efficient and less likely to cause problems.

Why Use BitTorrent

So why do people use BitTorrent? More often than not, the people using BitTorrent are sharing software they have created. For instance, Linux developers are the number one group of users of BitTorrent. They use it to share new features and ideas to each other so the free exchange of the files is paramount. Is this illegal? Of course not. Linux is completely open source (free - as in beer).

Other people do use BitTorrent for more nefarious means. If you go to any of the torrent tracker sites (most well-know of which is The Pirate Bay) you can find everything from music to the latest build of Leopard OS X 10.5. This is of course illegal and is stealing. No matter what you think. It IS stealing.

Good, Bad, and Illegal

No matter what you plan to use BitTorrent for, it is a very convenient technology. You get what you want when you want it. However, be careful because illegal activity can be traced. I would suggest you research BitTorrent completely before you try any P2P technology.

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