pdagal

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dean_shan

Yeah BitTorrent is really nice. It takes a lot of strain off servers. While you are downloading from someone you are uploading to another. Give and take. You always give more then you take. That's the beauty of it, no leachers.

Darius Wey

If you're after a decent BT client, try Azureus.

It provides you with a host of options to tweak to your heart's content, and it has a nice interface too.

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Jonathan1

I second Azureus. Its a very good BT client. However you do have to have Java installed prior to installing the client.

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jeffmd

stlbud

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Bill B

Zune Tag - therealstlbud

dean_shan

It's called sharing. That's what the Internet is all about. Bandwith costs are expensive when you start dealing with huge files such as movies. By using BitTorrent you can take some of the load off their servers and save them money.

stlbud

Maybe that's what a lot of people would like to see of the Internet but I see people hijacking my son's computer so that all he sees is kiddie porn or a friends computer that is spewing out spam because they clicked on the wrong link somewhere along the way. In both instances there was no saving the system. Virus scanners and spyware scanners couldn't fix the problem. Both had to have their hard drives formatted losing family pictures and personal work.

The internet is a very dangerous place and to say that it's ok for someone to take over even a small part of your computer is asking for trouble.

Besides, it's my bandwidth , I paid for it and they can pay for their own. If they can offer it for free, I'd rather pay a $1.00 and keep my computer safe, thank you very much.

Bill B.

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Bill B

Zune Tag - therealstlbud

Wiggster

Actually, the people you're downloading from get to use you as a server for the other parts of the file that they don't have.

You get the file. That's a pretty big bonus. Even though to keep the file, you DO have to give up your disk space, and you DO have to use bandwidth to get the file. And having open ports has nothing to do with this program.

All right, good chatting with you, now that you're done.

Wait.

Well, that was... quite off topic. Nothing to do with BitTorrent, nothing to do with movies, etc.

I am taking over your screen space with my text here. You would not see it if it weren't for me!
Seriously, BitTorrent just uploads the file you're downloading back to other people. It doesn't have spyware or maliciousware or grant others access to your innermost hard-drive-laden secrets.

Paying $20 a month so one person can surf is vastly different than paying $900 a month so thousands can hit your site every second. If you're a free, not-for-profit collection of guys, how are you going to pay for that insanely high bandwidth bill?

Oh, and to get technical, no, you're not paying for your bandwidth. You're (most likely) paying for internet access, that has a so-called "unlimited" amount of bandwidth available. However, if you start using more than a healthy person should, you'd get a letter from your ISP stating that they switched you over to dedicated hosting, as you're not using normal user bandwidth. Using the internet and having a server on the internet are different things, so they pay accordingly. Guess which costs over 10 times what the other costs? You guessed it, dedicated servers.

Let's look at an example. Say there's a 200 MB movie on your site, and you get 25,000 MB of bandwidth a month on a 1.5 MB/sec line. All together, if you offer no other services or anything of the sort, 125 people can download your file for free before your hosting company charges you even more money than you're getting now. Now, if 300 people want that file, you've just gone over 50 GB what you were alloted. At $1 per GB, that's $35 extra you'd have to pay for giving people things for free. If you get slashdotted and 5,000 people want your one file, that's $950 extra you'd have to pay (okay, at that point I doubt your host would charge you $1/GB, but follow me). Suppose you have ten files instead of that one file, bandwidth keeps adding up. You're doing this in your spare time, for fun, to help people, and it's costing you more than your rent to keep doing it? Would YOU like your hobby to put you out of your home just because people download what you made?

Now let's suppose you use BitTorrent and 125 people want your single 200 MB file. You host it on your server and you seed it out to ten people-- 2 GB of bandwidth spent, and twenty people have it within the first 60 minutes. Then each person uploads a fourth of the file every four hours-- in four hours, 25 people would have it and you'd have no bandwidth used. four hours later, 31 people would have it. Then 40. Then 50. In 24 hours, over 285 people would have it, and that's with everyone uploading less than 3.5 K a second. Continue that for just ten days and 13,050,608 could have the 200 MB file-- and it only cost you 2 GB of bandwidth in the first day. That's over 2.5 terabytes because people could give up because people could share 3.5 KB a second. If you're someone like me who has 250 K a second, that number could increase drastically. And if you're on broadband, would you notice 3.5 KB/sec gone?

Why should someone have to pay money to give you something for free?

Your security concerns with BitTorrent are somewhat ill-informed. The internet isn't the safest place ever invented, no, but there are plenty of places where no one is trying to get you (like here for instance)

Steven Cedrone

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