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View Full Version : Why is Bittorrent such a revolutionary program?


View Full Version : Why is Bittorrent such a revolutionary program?


nip
May 26th, 2005, 12:26 AM
I recently started using Bittorrent with the Azureus-client and fail to see the hype about it.

Let's say you know what movie or music file you want. The first thing to do is to search for a tracker site using a search-engine. Since scam-sites know about BT, it's hard to find a site that is really about BT and not a fake one. If you're lucky, you can ask some people on a message board and they tell you one (probably their favourite one they're on).

Since lots of public BT-sites have been closed, most of them now require registration or even invites. As you have more friends in real-life than on the internet, nobody trusts you, so invite-sites aren't an option. You go through the hassle of registering for a site.

You click the link on the confirmation-email and finally search through the torrents, only to see that the file you're looking for isn't here. Requests from a newbie aren't tolerated, so you just close the page and go on another journey hunting down a site that might have the file you're looking for.

Isn't this annoying?

Furthermore, if you want to share files, it's quite a hassle. No matter if your BT-client supports the creation of Torrents or you need a special program, it's a time-consuming procedure.

Point to the file, let the program create a torrent file, visit the tracker site, upload and type in the stuff, redownload the torrent-file just to make it clear for the program that - duh - you already have the file and want to share it.

It's also quite difficult to find less known or old files, because by then, the tracker might have been closed or the seeder deleted the torrent file. Then it's up to you to ask for a reshare but no, the file is older than two weeks and thus considered lame to have. Reminds me of the "elite" 0-day warez traders from the 80s.

With any (or most) other filesharing programs, you point to a folder with the files you want to share and use the built-in search function to find what you want. That's it.

Your thoughts?

tomars
May 26th, 2005, 04:18 AM
When typing in 'torrent files' in google, the second site on the list is isohunt. This seems quite reasonable to find torrents. The trackers which are invite only are good because they stay up longer than open trackers and are based on ratios so if you don't share you're gone. They also have standards for the files they share, like OiNK - minimum 192 mp3. If I look on limewire, thats probably the highest bitrate I would find. If people want to download free stuff then the least they can do is research where to find torrents. It's really not that difficult. Fake torrent files get removed from trackers very early so it doesnt get flooded with fake movies. And about sharing files, it takes what 2/3 mins max? I don't mean to pick apart what you're saying but 'easy' networks like Kazaa are shit basically. I'd rather spend 2 minutes finding a good torrent file with decent speeds, than spend 30 seconds and find a long list of fakes just to wait in a line and download at 0.3kb/s.