Torrents

COMP1260 > Using the Internet

Introduction These days torrents are everywhere. Anyone and everyone can have access to free music, software, games, and movies by downloading them via torrents. I will be explaining what a torrent is, and how they work. "It's actually a pretty cool technology that really just boils down to another way to download files." It may be a pretty cool technology, but there are some legal ramifications that go along with it. Downloading pirated software, music, movies, and games is illegal in most cases and should you should be careful if you choose to download torrents. You should also be aware that many torrents can include viruses. Before you go start downloading torrents you should see "Borrowing" Software for effects of what downloading torrents as well as other pirated software has on the world. In the following sections I will be talking about what a torrent is and some of the legal issues and about the viruses you can get from downloading torrents.

...by students If you don't want those pesky emails from your ISP telling you to delete that movie or other file, you should use Peer Guardian or the NEW Peer Block. Peer Guardian and Peer Block are programs you run in the background while downloading torrents. What it does is blocks incoming and outgoing connections based on IP blacklists. In other words, you can download torrents relatively worry free. The only problem with Peer Guardian is that it is very buggy when running in Windows Vista 64 bit or Windows 7 64 bit. There is a work-around involving disabling driver signing, but this is pretty complicated and requires more advanced computer skill. Peer Block is the newest peer blocking software, and I strongly advise getting it instead of Peer Guardian. Figure 1: PeerGuardian The user interface of the IP Blacklist blocker; PeerGuardian. Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pg2rc1vista.png

Torrents

Figure 2: μTorrent
The user interface of the popular bit-torrent client: μTorrent.
Image courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UTorrent.png

A torrent is a small file that you can download from various popular torrent sites Once you have the desired torrent downloaded, you must open the torrent file in a bit-torrent client. A simple bit-torrent client that I would suggest would be μTorrent. The user interface of μTorrent is shown in Figure 2 to the right. Once you have opened the .torrent file in your bit-torrent client, it will begin downloading. The files will be uploaded from multiple computers around the world who have also downloaded the same file. The people who have completed downloading the file that are uploading it are called a 'seeder'. A file is split in many small pieces and downloaded a piece (or multiple pieces) at a time. You can think of it as a letter that is cut into hundreds of pieces that is being sent to you from many people. Once you have all the pieces of the file, the download is complete and you can use the file. The complete process is called a peer-to-peer file distribution network.

Types of Torrents

Since torrents can be used to download any type of file, it is important to realize that certain downloads are not legal. There is nothing illegal about torrents in general, but if the content is illegal the torrent is illegal.

Legal

There are several legal torrent sites that are available.
Mininova (a popular torrent site) has recently shut down all illegal torrent activity. They have gone legal and provided their users with strict Content Distribution guidelines. Mininova users must comply with the following:

- You are (or your company is) the copyright owner or publisher of quality content.
- You would like to distribute your content for free.
- You agree that you will not upload DRM-protected content or spam.

Having these strict guidelines, and constant monitoring of these legal torrent sites keeps the content free from illegal torrent sources.

Illegal

There are even more illegal torrent sites. They will distribute illegal torrent content. Some of these sites may contain sexually explicit ads, or questionable content and you should be wary about entering these sites. Enter at your own risk. (Some of the sites are not work safe)
Some of the most popular torrent sites of 2009 are:

• The Pirate Bay
• Iso Hunt
• Torrentz
• Now Torrents
• BTjunkie

Some of these sites are just torrent meta-search pages. This means that they search other torrent sites and display the results from all those torrent sites.

Legal Issues

File sharing in Canada falls into a legal gray area. File sharing by downloading pirated content via torrents is still illegal in Canada. There is a loop hole currently for downloading music via peer-to-peer file transferring though. That is because there is a levy on all blank audio recording media, including MP3 players. You may not upload any music to the internet, but if you download music from the internet, you can make a private copy for yourself.
Downloading any other files including movies, software, etc is currently illegal.
As many of these laws are currently in the works, it is hard to get a straight answer for this question. Bill 61 is in the works, which may restrict our rights even further. For more information, visit: Fair Copy Right for Canada and join their Facebook group.

Viruses?

Yes. Yes there are. You have to be careful when looking in torrent sites for torrents. Always have a anti-virus program installed. Your best bet is to get one with internet security. See Viruses and Virus Checkers for details on getting a good virus scanner.

What to look for when searching for torrents

The thing about torrents is that you cannot verify if a file has a virus until you have finished downloading the file via your bit-torrent client. Many torrent sites include a comment section. Your best way to weed out bad torrents is to look through the comments to find out what everyone else says about the file. It is best to find a torrent that many people have made good comments about the torrent. If the comments say something like: "This is a VIRUS! DO NOT DOWNLOAD!", then someone may have downloaded it and has had their virus scanner catch it. If a few of the comments say something like: "Great download. Thanks", you are relatively safe in downloading that torrent. Don't download a file if there is no comments, as these torrents have a good chance of having a virus. A rule of thumb when looking for torrents is that if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. For example: if you find a movie that just was released in theaters and there is a DvdRip of it on a torrent site, it likely either contains a virus, or a password protected file, or a different movie. If you are looking for a movie, people will often comment on the audio and video quality. A common comment will be: "A/V?" which means "how is the audio/video quality?" and a good response will be something like: "10/10" which means it is good quality and by extension, there are probably no viruses either.

.rar

Occasionally a file will be split into many pieces (called a .rar file). Usually these are the files that contain viruses, but this is not always true. Many good torrents are split into .rar files because it is convenient to download a small piece. About a decade ago, the network connection was not reliable and a part of data was often broken. It is painful to download a large file again when it is broken. For this issue, uploaders have started to split a large file into .rar files. A .rar file is similar to a .zip file, but it needs to be opened with Winrar. To find out if the file you are downloading is split with a .rar extension, you can often click on a details page on the web site, or find a "file" section where it list what files are all included on the torrent. If your file is split with a .rar extension, read the comments on the torrent web site to find out what others have to say about it.

Conclusion

Downloading torrents that have pirated movies, software and games is still illegal. You should be watching closely to what happens with bill 61 in the near future as it may effect those who still download torrents. If you are downloading torrents you should always be safe. Read the comments section of a torrent before downloading it and make sure everyone else says its good.

Further Reading

http://ask-leo.com/whats_a_torrent.html What is a torrent?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_vocabulary Bit-torrent vocabulary
http://www.faircopyrightforcanada.ca/ Fair Copy Right For Canada
http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml Canadian copyright levy on blank audio recording media

References

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