Gadgetory

BitTorrent is an Internet Protocol which supports peer-to-peer file sharing to distribute large amounts of data around the world it was developed by Bram Cohen a computer science graduate student at the University of Buffalo essentially BitTorrent takes the stress of transferring large data files from one massive server to every user over an extremely robust network connection and splits it up to multiple normal pcs and multiple smaller network connections cool hey I mean it's not magic though the first time a file is shared there is a single seed or user who is uploading the file to the first downloader so a torrent will always be relatively slow when it's just been created however once that original upload slash download process completes the user or users who downloaded the file also known as peers from the original seed also turn into seeds and then the more popular file is the more seeds are created and the faster the speed will be for newcomers that is the beauty of peer-to-peer file sharing it allows the cost and burden of uploading data to be easily distributed amongst hundreds or even thousands of individuals a great example of torrent technology use in the real world is game patch file distribution for World of Tanks are free to play online game when users opt to use a torrent for the update wargaming.net and their players are happy because they save money on bandwidth so they can spend more on improving the game and adding new content and ISPs are happy because the load caused by uploading a patch to thousands of users all at once is split across many regions reducing the chance of network congestion okay Linus so then why haven't direct downloads been made obsolete by p2p actually there are some good reasons for that first is that they're slower for small files and less convenient for inexperienced users a torrent download takes a while to ramp up to full speed and requires a third-party manager software like micro torrent in order to function second is that with entirely community-driven p2p the file creator doesn't have direct control over the network download speeds depend on the number of other peers who are already downloading the number of seeds uploading and the aggregated upload speed of all the seeds and while you can make an educated guess about the health of a torrent based on how many seeds and peers are present at a given moment if every seed for a file is running on dial-up or you want an obscure file that doesn't have any seeds at all you could wait weeks or even months if it ever completes third up is leechers however healthy a torte might appear to be you have to watch out for leechers in theory every peer can begin sharing partial files with other peers as soon as their download begins so even folks who don't have the full file yet are strengthening the network but leechers the scumbags of p2p sharing will intentionally throttle their upload speeds then stick around as a peer just long enough to fully download the file and then close off their torrent so they don't have to use their upload cap to help out other peers now if a creator is willing to pay for dedicated seeds these issues go away but in that case they might as well offer their users the convenience of a one-click direct download anyway ok so it's not perfect but it is still really cool so then why does the word torrent carry such negativity well just like big data our video about what you can watch here torrents get their bad name from companies and users who use them unethically in this case usually by sharing copyrighted material like music and movies so that's it there's nothing inherently bad about BitTorrent and other p2p file-sharing services it's a great technology that continues to mature and develop C BitTorrent sync a cool replacement for cloud-based backups like Dropbox for example and it's only got a bad name because of some folks who have misused it for personal gain speaking of personal gain you can gain a lot of 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