It is impossible to imagine a modern computer from which you can’t access the Internet. Where providers have not yet managed to extend their communication lines, computer owners use a wireless connection: specific 3G or implemented by GSM telephone service providers. It can be argued that the availability of an Internet connection has become, if not mandatory, then very desirable. In the light of the above, every self-respecting user should at least have an idea of what a torrent is.
The torrent system actually created the global network as it is at present. Before answering the question: “What is a torrent?”, We will consider a situation familiar to many with watching a movie.
The city cinema with bright posters invites you to visit the viewing hall, and friends do not cease to praise another masterpiece of cinema art. Advertising a movie on the pages of sites only strengthens the desire to watch a movie, to make up your own opinion about it. The solution involves one of four ways: go to the cinema, purchase a movie CD, watch it online or download from the network. At high access speeds, they most often choose to watch online and only then (if necessary) go to the cinema. Downloading from the network is less popular, since it is difficult to find a site with the necessary movie, and file sharing (rapidshade) limit the speed.
The disadvantages of online browsing are obvious:
- when paying for Internet traffic, not everyone decides to watch a movie again, as this means additional costs;
- wanting to replenish the home collection, you have to buy a CD. Although it’s possible to extract a movie from the browser’s cache, its quality will not be sufficient for the collection, because very rarely online movies are broadcast in high resolution with multi-channel audio.
At the same time, a user who knows what a torrent is and downloads movies through trackers does not even recall such shortcomings, since there are simply no torrents in the torrent system.
In a simplified form, the system consists of three components: a specialized site called a torrent tracker, and at least two torrent clients (distributing and downloading). The torrent client is represented by the BitTorrent, Vuze, utorrent programs, etc. There are also quite a lot of torrent trackers on the network, for example, nnm-club.ru, rutracker.org, etc. A person who wants to make a file publicly available (in our example, a movie) creates a distribution on the tracker with a description and screenshots, and also places a link to a special torrent file. A tracker visitor who knows what a torrent is, after reading the description, clicks on the link. It starts the torrent client installed on the computer and starts downloading. The next visitor to the site clicks the link, and the download is already taking place both from the original source (the files being distributed on the trackers are not stored), and from the first one that started the download. The more distributors, the higher the speed, and the download is called “fast torrent”.
Some trackers require users to register. Usually it is necessary for the rating system: the more megabytes distributed, the higher the rating and more opportunities. However, more and more trackers are abandoning the rating, hoping for the consciousness of the users themselves (after downloading, you do not need to immediately erase the file or close the torrent client).
All such sites have the ability to search for torrents by name. In addition to films, you can usually download various programs, music, books, games - almost everything. It is enough to install the client program, select a tracker and download the desired file.
To summarize, we can say that the torrent system is exactly what many users who are looking through the search engines for the necessary files for download are so lacking.