Funny Bit Torrent Cartoon
I came across this cartoon (The First Bit Torrent User?) this morning and thought it was pretty funny. Some of you are going “What the heck is bit torrent anyway?” Bit torrent is a way of distributing large files over the internet quickly and without the original distributor incurring all the costs of hosting the file. Let me clarify a bit. It used to be that if I downloaded a file from the internet, say a piece of software from Download.com, that I would connect to Download.com’s computers and download the file from them. Download.com would have to bite the bullet on the cost of hosting the file for all the folks that went to their site to download the file. If you have many files and many downloaders, the costs can get astronomical.
Enter bit torrent, software developed by Bram Cohen in 2001. What bit torrent does (at least as I understand it) is create a downloading “pyramid scheme.” I’ll clarify that as well. I’ll use the same illustration of my downloading a file from Download.com. If they used bit torrent technology (which I don’t think they do) what would happen is that I would download the file from them, and then subsequent downloaders would download the file from Download.com and me, and so on and so on with all downloaders sharing the burden of hosting the file, and downloaders downloading bits and pieces of the file from one another.
Of course, there are legal and illegal uses for bit torrent. Because of its ability to distribute large files quickly, it has become the distribution method of choice amongst software and video pirates. I first started using bit torrent to download linux distributions. And before you ask what linux is, here’s a link to the wikipedia entry!
There are several different clients you can use to download bit torrent files. Amongst the most popular for Windows is uTorrent, which was recently bought by Bram Cohen’s company. It’s the client I currently use, though I’ve used Bit Comet and Azureus in the past as well.
You should probably check out Lifehacker.com’s “Beginner’s Guide to Bit Torrent since they probably do a much better job of explaining it all.
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