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A friend asked me to explain using BitTorrent, and like a lemming, here I go. ...

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol which allows computer files to be shared anonymously between computers connected to the Internet. Its anonymous nature, and ability to handle really large files, has made it synonymous with file piracy. True, but all digital distribution channels have been, in their turn, exploited for file sharing/piracy, going back to before Bulletin Board Systems. I say it's the nature of the files which encourage sharing and piracy; digital files make nonsense of "ownership" because they can be given away, and kept at the same time.

A detailed explanation of how it works is here.

Notable features

• Platform-independent; the operating system doesn't matter.


• There are a variety of Desktop clients for every major platform.


• Any file or collection of files which can be stored on a computer can be shared.


• Computer users have no contact or access with each other's computers.


• Files can be small or very large.


• File sharing can be stopped or interrupted and resumed arbitrarily.


• Ideally suited for really large downloads, particularly over slow Internet connections.

Legit uses of BitTorrent

• The Internet Archive, a staggeringly large repository of text, audio, music, film, etc, now includes BitTorrent in its file download options for way, way over 1.3 million files, and is the fastest means of downloading media from the Archive.


• I download ISO files of Linux distributions, often now running to 4 GB -- I always look for a BitTorrent option for any legit software I want to download.


• Lots of Governments (UK), government broadcasters (CBC), and educational institutions, use BitTorrent to distribute large data sets, amongst themselves and to the public.


• The Amazon S3 “Simple Storage Service” is a scalable Internet-based storage service with a simple web service interface, equipped with built-in BitTorrent support.


• Facebook and Twitter utilize BitTorrent to update their servers.

How do you access BitTorent

Just as you need to install a Web browser program to access the World Wide Web, You need to download, and install a type of program called a BitTorrent client so you can access BitTorrent. There are many of them. There are two I would personally recommend to choose from, for starters:

uTorrent -- Probably the one to try. Has all the important features, Good user interface, and it is very light on system resources.

qBittorent -- Based on uTorrent. What I use -- it's available for Linux distros, Windows, and OS X -- it has a sequential download feature, so I can choose to have all of half the files, or half of all the files -- with music files I can start listening to them before the entire download is done, see? What I describe about qBit, generally applies to uTorrent.

There is also Vuze. -- very popular. very full-featured; because it's a Java program, requires install of a Java Runtime Environment, very memory-intensive.

After installation, If nothing else, before you try to get any files, go into the client's Options/Preferences settings and looks for Downloads settings.

In qBit, for example. In the main Menu, under Tools > Options. Click the Downloads button. Under Hard Disk | Save files to location:, choose a specific directory for downloaded files to be saved to. The default will be the standard "Download" directory for your operating system. I recommend you, at least, create a sub-folder called "Torrent downloads"  or whatever you like, and make that the directory your BitTorrent client will download into (I recommend people also create download sub-folders for their mail program, and Web browser). qBit allows you to specify a folder for both incomplete and finished torrents -- this is what I do.

Getting files

Typically the BitTorrent client user first uses a Web browser to go to tracker Websites to find much of the content they want; movies, music, software, etc. As I understand things, BitTorrent tracker Websites coordinate the distribution of files -- they do not have the files on their site. There are lots of tracker sites, the best known being The Pirate Bay (TPB), which has survived the longest against the greatest opposition. I read that DHT (Dynamic Hash Tables) make trackers obsolete -- I'm not understanding that.

[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignnone" width="497"] Clicking a magnet link in TPB. Your browser should just "know" which program magnet links belong to, if not, the problem is generallly the BitTorrent client. -- click for larger image[/caption]

When you see a "thing" you want, listed on a tracker website, and click to download, you are downloading a link to that thing. TPB exclusively uses magnet links, most tracker use torrent links and magnet links. In either case your Web browser downloads the link and passes it to the BitTorrent client, which will launch.

[caption id="attachment_449" align="alignnone" width="497"] qBit has launched and has begun to download the torrent. -- click for larger image[/caption]

Above you can see the three-pane interface which uTorrent and qBittorent share.

1. Your torrents categorized by their state of activity. Clicking a category shows those torrents in pane #2.


2. Displays useful info for each torrent: percentage downloaded, speed; Seeds and Peers, and estimated time of arrival.


3. Clicking on a torrent in #2 allows you to see its details in #3; here it's showing the individual files in the torrent.

When a torrent is complete, highlighting the torrent in pane #2 will allow you to see the files in pane #3. you can then double click them to launch them -- play the movie files -- listen to the music files.

You can quit your BitTorrent client any time. When you open your BitTorrent client, downloads will resume where they left off when you quit.

Give and take

Any P2P file sharing system requires users the give in some proportion to what they get. BitTorrent enforces sharing -- the system rewards and punishes on-the-fly, in the form of transfer speed.

New users have nothing to share and will get slow transfer speeds at first. Things will pick up the more they download. By default, every thing in your torrent downloads folder is available for sharing, even the portion of the file you are downloading can be shared. You can control how much you share in the option/preferences by setting the upload speed.

According to BitTorrent there are three types of users:

1. Leeches -- They want but have nothing to share. We all start out as leeches.


2. Peers -- They want and they are sharing.


3. Seeds -- They have complete files and are sharing them.

When you are browsing a tracker site, looking through available files, pay attention to the number of seeds listed for each -- the more seeds a file has (or the more seeds which have that file), the faster it should download.

Soon you will have a healthy amount of finished torrents in your download folder to help your sharing ratio. These finished files are available for seeding, the longer they stay there the better. But, maybe sooner than you want, you'll need to free up room on your hard drive by weeding your torrents download folder.

I pick files which have been done for the longest time, and which have no peers listed (they want the file). Along the top of both the qBit and uTorrent window are five buttons, including delete. Select the appropriate file in pane #2 from the Completed list, and click Delete. Unless you click the check-box, "Also delete the files on the hard disk," This will just delete it from qBit's memory. You can then go to your actual torrent downloads folder and move the file off your hard drive.