Bittorrent Torrents – What are they, and what are they good for?

Okay, not that kind of torrents. This kind:

Torrents, from the word Bittorrent (the original client-server program used to use torrents for downloading), are small text files. inside those files, there’s some text and data, that helps your client program (which you must have installed to open those *.torrent files) figure out what files they are looking for and how to locate them.

For that purpose, they use trackers. Trackers are servers running a torrent tracking program, and what they actually do is direct traffic. Just like traffic police.

They have the list of IP addresses, showing where copies of the tracked files are located at, and direct chunks of those files to the Bittorrent client. This way, you might be connected to a 100, 200 or more computers at the same time, downloading different parts of the files you are looking for, till you have the full package.

This is what makes Bittorrent so effective and efficient. Even if some of the computers that hold copies of your files gets shut down, you still have plenty to go, and so you’ll get your files, and get them fast.

Bittorrent embodies the spirit of the original Internet. The network that DARPA created and was at first called ARPANET, was designed to survive an atomic attack, by relying on many different computers located all over the United States. In the same way, Bittorrent relies on many separate clients spread around the world. Even if you cut off a chunk of those links, there are still many that can take their place.

Okay, so we learned what torrents are (small files, used to help track and download programs, music, movies, or any kind of digital data), and how they work.

Why were they invented? Bittorrent is the file sharing protocol through which torrents work. It was invented by Bram Cohen in 2001 for the purpose of efficient data distribution. He created it to allow easy and fast download of large files such as Linux distributions, but in the process, a monster was created.

“At any given instant, BitTorrent has, on average, more active users than YouTube and Facebook combined” and also “As of January 2012, BitTorrent is utilized by 150 million active users (according to BitTorrent, Inc.)”

These are very big numbers, they are only estimates, and and they are already obsolete.

Today, torrents are used for their original purpose, but also for any other kind of file, such as the latest movies, ebooks, games, and applications as the biggest peer-to-peer file sharing network ever created, and it doesn’t seem to be possible to stop.

How to find torrents? torrents can be found on linux distribution sites, software sites, and any company that prefers it as a medium of distribution which is virtually free and very fast and efficient. However, to search for specific content, there are search engines that go through multiple sources to find the exact file one is looking for.

One of the most famous ones is “The Pirate Bay” which is under constant attack by the FBI, MPAA, and a long list of companies that try to shut it down due to alleged copyright infringement. They do that because it’s the largest source for torrents in the world.

But, as a result of that, or maybe as an evolutionary step, Magnet links came to be. They were actually invented back in 2002 and were used for previous file sharing protocols such as Edonkey and Emule, but were adopted by the bittorrent community very fast.

The reason for that is, they eliminate the need for storing torrent files. They are simply links, that are coded to tell the Bittorrent client where to find the data it needs. As such, it makes websites such as TPB (The Pirate Bay) almost impervious to law suits as they do not even keep torrent files on their servers anymore. Only links.

I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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