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BitTorrent - Safe or not?

Darat

Lackey
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Darat
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Just thought I'd download the latest Mandrake (v10) ISOs to play about with but they want people to use BitTorrent.

I normally keep well away from any type of internet file sharing so anyone got any horror stories or reasons why I'll be a complete idiot to use it?
 
Is it safe?...

I've been using bittorrent for some time now and never had any problems. Haven't seen any advisories on it (of course if you are running linux and doing anything on the 'net as root, you are asking for trouble). It is very nice....downloads are rock-solid.

M
 
It's pretty safe. It doesn't "share" anything but pieces of the file you are currently downloading. So, when you download that 700MB file, you get random pieces from lots of people, and lots of people get random pieces from you. The pieces that nobody has come from the site that's hosting the download. That means NO MATTER WHAT, you will definitely get the whole file eventually. Something many file sharing solutions don't guarantee.

It's almost always a *LOT* faster than a straight download, and it's resumable. Unlike Mozilla's download and IE's download, it doesn't download it to a TEMP file somewhere and then copy it to the destination when it's done.

If you are *NICE*, you'll leave it up after you finish the download to speed up a few other people's downloads. Otherwise, when you quit, it's really gone, nothing is running, and it never offers to "share" that file from your computer again... unless you run it again and start it "downloading" the same file again for whatever reason.

It is open source. If you like, you can download the source code and 'cripple' your version NOT to share. It really only hurts you, as part of the sharing hand-shaking logic is actually finding out about more parts on other machines. At the very least review it for yourself and build it for yourself, if you don't trust it.
 
I love Bit Torent! Fast, fast, fast! I use Shadow's Experimental Client.
 
BitTorrent is nice. The Linux community is pretty strong on security and I haven't heard anyone shouting about BT so if there are problems, the good guys don't know about them yet.

There are a few gotchas with BitTorrent if you have a firewall, DSL router or your ISP has a caching proxy (I have all of these and it's a real pain). However, there are generally workarounds for all these problems. Certainly I downloaded the Mandrake 10 Community CDs last week OK : 18 hours for the initial 2GB download seemed reasonable.
 
Bittorrent is great.

But..... if you browse some site like suprnova and find a cool leaked workprint of a movie, you IP will be readily available to the movie studio who may try to get your ISP to cut off your service.
 
Thank you kind posters.

I've installed it ( I'm using Shadow's Experimental Client), had a few problems as per Iain's post but sorted that out.

Iain - have you installed the Mandrake 10 yet?

(Edited for an email to a post.)
 
corplinx said:
Bittorrent is great.

But..... if you browse some site like suprnova and find a cool leaked workprint of a movie, you IP will be readily available to the movie studio who may try to get your ISP to cut off your service.
Click to expand...

But that would be theft of somebody's work! Are you telling me there are people who would do that and find it acceptable?
 
I installed Mandrake 10 rc1 on my laptop last weekend. It is a 500 celeron with 96 megs of ram and a 5 gig drive so it is no powerhouse. I can tell you that the 2.6.x kernel and KDE 3.2 absolutely rock. It is noticeably more responsive than Mandrake 9.2 was on that machine. (Which ran perfectly fine BTW.)

Imagine an OS that keeps getting faster! I wonder how well XP would run on that machine. (Who cares?)

I have the community ISO's downloaded as well. I know what I'll be playing with this weekend. :)
 
Darat said:
Iain - have you installed the Mandrake 10 yet?
Click to expand...
Yes. I'm running Mandrake 10 Community on my laptop. I had a few problems, and I still can't get the 2.6.3 kernel working properly (doesn't see my wireless ethernet adapter and hangs during shutdown). However, the 2.4.25 kernel is working just fine for me and doesn't feel any slower. It definitely feels faster than 9.2 (and a world faster than my NT PC at work - though that is a much lower spec).
 
evildave said:
It really only hurts you, as part of the sharing hand-shaking logic is actually finding out about more parts on other machines.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. Is that why BT downloads tend to always start off slow and then steadily gain speed as they progress? The more of the file you have, the more you can give to other people and the more their clients give you in return?

Or am I misreading you?
 
It takes a while to get connected to and have parts served from other computers. You get put on a waiting list to receive your parts on other computers. They will "get around to" serving you, but they won't violate upload faster than their bandwidth limitations allow, and they are generally already serving piecs to other people on their local queues.

Initially, your client is seeded with a list of other users. These other users all started before you did. Your client won't automatically find out about MORE users, as users "disappear", so you end up getting more and more of your pieces from the main server, which you have to share with LOTS of people, and your client will try to connect to "dead" (completed, closed out) connections more often, because its own list of "other" clients is stale.
 
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