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Geek Culture / Torrents?

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5867Dude
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Posted: 28th Mar 2008 23:24
How come people say they are quicker?
Are they actually like compressed?
Thanks for any replies


Was Cool Kid
Blobby 101
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:03 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 00:04
well, the only dealings i've ever had with torrents was that they weren't that quick. well, it took seconds to download but then i had to install bitcomet which proceeded to take 4 Hours to do whatever it had to do to make the file usable.


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Ed222
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:11
and after that bit torrent forces you to seed I reformated my computer because of that.

BiggAdd
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:21
You guys are all going to get a slappin' if you doin't shut up.

bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:22
LOL. Bitcomet? Seriously?

Use azureus or utorrent, both great clients and very easy to use. No torrent client would take 4 hours to make a file usable. In fact, the way it works, as it's downloaded the file is pieced together to wherever you set files to reside.

Once the client downloads a bit of data, it's put into the file. Once it's completed downloading, there's no "piecing it together", it's just there and ready for use. With the above clients, you can stop sharing immediately at that point, or let it run in the background.

It's much faster because you can have possibly hundreds of people uploading the file to you at the same time. Instead of say, 1 server sending you a large file where your subject to that server's bandwidth, you've got hundreds of servers your obtaining it from.

Also, the transfer protocol is more efficient than ftp and http, so it's faster in that respect as well.

I'd recommend azureus over utorrent as azureus has a neat video service tied into the client. You can bypass that if you don't like it by going to an advanced view, where you'll see a standard torrent interface.


Hurray for teh logd!
Samoz83
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:24 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 00:26
Quote: "You guys are all going to get a slappin' if you doin't shut up."


but the AUP doesn't say anything about discussing Torrents in a legal form which is what they are doing here surly.
"3.4 Links to illegal software, illegal software sites, or illega Bit Torrents/p2p sites" this is the only part i could quickly see mentioning torrents (i did only scan it quickly tho so i might be wrong)

www.firelightstudio.co.uk
Ed222
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:25
Quote: "You guys are all going to get a slappin' if you doin't shut up"


you were just joking right?

MSon
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:25 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 00:27
.Torrents are suppose to be quicker, but there useful as programmes like limewire are compatable with them meening you dont need to install download acceleraters, you can pause torrent downloads, also torrent are easy to list in databases, like with the pirate bay website so you dont have to navigate through loads of websites

or so i remember from a past life

Everyone Be Cool, You, Be Cool.
Ed222
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:27 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 00:27
@Samoz83

nope we can't get slapped for talking about this it's not breaking any aups I just checked

bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:27
Quote: ".Torrents are suppose to be quicker, but there useful as programmes like limewire are compatable with them meening you dont need to install download acceleraters, also torrent are easy to list in databases, like with the pirate bay website so you dont have to navigate through loads of websites"


Thanks for bringing this topic down to piracy :/

Seriously, torrents are useful for other, "legaller" things too Any demos I download nowadays are all done through torrents when available. Also, as I stated above, azureus offers hi-def previews and shorts for free


Hurray for teh logd!
H4ck1d
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:35
Quote: "Seriously, torrents are useful for other, "legaller" things too"


I heartily agree. For example, most linux builds are available as torrents, I know several are even only exclusively offered as a torrent download.

BiggAdd
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:35 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 00:35
Quote: "But the AUP doesn't say anything about discussing Torrents"

It sure does!

Quote: "The following software related topics, and discussion of them, are banned from all of our forums:

3.2 Advertising websites that are not on-topic
3.3 Spam / Pyramid schemes
3.4 Links to illegal software, illegal software sites, or illega Bit Torrents/p2p sites"


IanM
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:35
As long as we keep the discussion away from illegal uses of torrents, you can carry on.

The speed thing, IMO, is a little overblown - I'd much rather download something say the size of the MSDN CD's using FTP or HTTP than torrent it.

BiggAdd
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 00:37
Fair enough.

The mod... has spoken.

bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 01:17
Quote: "I'd much rather download something say the size of the MSDN CD's using FTP or HTTP than torrent it."


Ye, if it's not limited to 200kb/s or less like most linux distro's from any mirror server I've come across.

I like it when my download finishes in 60 seconds rather than 20 minutes


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Agent Dink
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 01:51
Quote: "Ye, if it's not limited to 200kb/s "


I just wish I could download that fast in general, stop your whining!

bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 01:58
Quote: "I just wish I could download that fast in general, stop your whining!"


I pay good money for the privilege, I'll whine all I want


Hurray for teh logd!
FredP
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 02:10
You want to get even with the pirates?Get yourself a client like Limewire or whatever and put anything you want to distribute in the folder to share with your new friends.
In other words...sometimes it's easier to sell something than to give it away...meaning instead of thinking you are trying to give them something the pirates will think they are stealing something so they get their thrill...
But what they are doing is helping you distribute your stuff.
I am not joking about this.I lived in a town where they would steal your trash...it would be funny if it weren't true.
Since the same trash guy had to pick up all the trash no matter where he found it he probably didn't enjoy playing "Let's see who stole the most trash this week..."

RIP Floating Skull unknown-2007 we will miss you in FPSC x10
CattleRustler
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 02:37
I wish someone would steal my trash, and my cat box - that would be great. Ill even give em a key to the garage.

[href]mod2software[/href]
Aaron Miller
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 02:44
Out of curiosity, is it illegal to download a publically available TV show (The Late Late Show) episodes if no DVDs are provided to purchase? I'm kinda tired of "ripping" youtube videos. :/ If it is illegal simply say "Yes, it's illegal", if it isn't could someone explain where I might find some of these episodes?

Cheers,

-naota

My email actually IS "nocannedmeat@gmail.com". Why? I don't know.
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bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 02:48 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 02:48
It's probably very thin ice. But as far as I'm aware, anything broadcast over the air is fair game, as long as it was first broadcast over the air.

That would include direct to tv movies, but not movie channels that show movies that were first shown in theaters.

However, I'm no lawyer and the above could be completely false, as such, I'm not helping you find sites to download shows.

This of course is in the US, other countries may have other laws.


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Samoz83
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 02:48
Yes, it's illegal

www.firelightstudio.co.uk
Osiris
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 03:03
Well, ABC streams stuff in HD, and many other channels will probably soon do that as well. However I doubt it is illegal, especially if you cant buy it anyways (unless you just cant buy it because its not out yet). Besides, if it was illegal, then all VCR's are technically illegally used every second of every day.

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You will be dearly missed.
ionstream
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 03:13
I find it hilarious how torrent people don't give a crap about file piracy, but the second someone's share ratio is less than 1 its "STOP STEALING BANDWIDTH YOU SELFISH LEECH!"

Zappo
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 03:16
It is illegal to download TV episodes unless the owner has made them downloadable for free - whether or not they are available to buy.
The BBC have got into trouble recently with their download and viewing service called BBC iPlayer. They were allowed to provide certain programmes for download by their owners because they had DRM on them (Digital Rights Management) but they left a security hole which meant people worked out how to get the videos without DRM! They have covered themselves by saying that the service is still in Beta, but I'll bet the companies who made the programmes are a little upset about it.


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Xenocythe
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 03:41
Quote: "unless the owner has made them downloadable for free"


Stupid writers strike pushed all my shows back for weeks

3.11 We do not tolerate posts made for the purpose of putting down another forum member, group of members, religion, our company, our staff or any of our moderators, past or present.
Megaton Cat
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 08:12
I heard cattle downloads legal videos of an adult nature.

Formerly known as Megaton Cat
Jeku
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 09:05
Quote: "The speed thing, IMO, is a little overblown - I'd much rather download something say the size of the MSDN CD's using FTP or HTTP than torrent it."


Are you serious? In my experience I can download things up around 500-700 with my bit torrent client. Honestly, if you setup your router with proper port forwarding, you can get blazingly faster speeds than regular HTTP or FTP. At least, that's what I always do.


FredP
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 09:30
Downloading using a torrent is definitely faster...even with insanely high connection speeds.

RIP Floating Skull unknown-2007 we will miss you in FPSC x10
Digital Awakening
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 09:52
Torrents can be extremely fast if there are many others with high speed connections to download from. When I download through Firefox I get in the region of 50-200 kB/s, if I use a download accelerator and the host of the file allows multiple connections then I've seen speeds up to 600 kB/s for a payed for service.

With torrent I've once downloaded 4 files with the total speed above 4000 kB/s (that's 4 Mega Bytes per second!), for a single file I've had speeds up to 2000 kB/s. Of course, some torrents barely makes it over 1 kB/s.

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5867Dude
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 10:47
Ah, I see. But aren't then torrents the same as Limewire where multiple people share the same thing?


Was Cool Kid
IanM
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 14:11
Quote: "Are you serious?"

Yup. I hardly ever get torrents of the kind of speed you are talking about. I have an effective 7.5 mbs download speed and have port forwarding configured on my router. The best I ever got was a 400 kps for SLES 9, but I usually get between 100 kps and 200 kps, but that does very much rely on the number of seeders and leechers.

When I used a download manager (flashget IIRC) for the Linux download instead and gave it a list of mirror sites, the download averaged about 800kps and peaked at 1000 kps.

Torrent does not automatically mean fast.
FTP/HTTP does not automatically mean slow.

I guess it's one of those things that have spread, kinda like the 'quicksort is always faster' thing.

lagmaster
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 15:39
people forget that torrent is based mostly upon people's sharing bandwidth, compared to http/ftp which is what a server can output as.

so for example a server could have 100mbits of bandwidth, only way to tell if it's busy is when _your_ downloading from it is slower than your max connection, there's other factors which may include distance, what company it pumps the data through. have you tried downloading from the asus.com.tw site? 5kb/s at peak times!

but this is where torrents _could_ be faster, lets say the latest WoW patch has come out which is for example 150mb. the laugh is that torrent may have a few hundred of thousand people on it. so you can have anyone sharing it from 1kb/s to 50,000kb/s. so overall the bandwidth available to people downloading it is more but depending on how many people want it, you may get it slower.

i think torrents are the way forward for sharing fairly large files. i remember the days when *cough* fedora linux was beginning to be rolled out to servers and the servers never let you have the iso faster than 25kb/s. at least now most linux distros offer torrents so you can grab them for ease of use.

the future i feel is you getting the file you want from multiple people like how p2p works, but developed in a way where it's more useful for other "legal" means.

BatVink
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 15:57
Quote: "But as far as I'm aware, anything broadcast over the air is fair game, as long as it was first broadcast over the air."


Absolutley not! Have you ever read a copyright notice on anything you've watched? When you receive a broadcast it is for your private use. Nobody hands you the right to take their stuff and distribute it yourself.
Digital Awakening
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 16:17
What you see on TV is always payed for by someone, the rights to air it is not free. It could be you (PPW or a payed for channel), various companies (through commercials) or the government (public service).

[center]
bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 16:33
Quote: "Nobody hands you the right to take their stuff and distribute it yourself."


It may not be legal to distribute, but I'm pretty sure it's legal to download.


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MSon
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 16:35 Edited at: 29th Mar 2008 16:45
no, because someone has copywrited it, and your downloading a Copied version, which is illegal

1 person has a legal copy, in the UK they may copy it for personal use, (Backups), but if shared then thats illegal, a download is still a shared file so no.

personally i dissagree with this, i remember reading a story in the paper that about 90% of software in the UK was copied, but when the outprice the average person, its bound to happen, a £300 programme to me is 2/3 weeks wages, i dont have QuarkXPress or Photoshop, but i am trained in them through college, if i wanted this software, i have no idea how much it would cost, but at leaset £1000.

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bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Mar 2008 16:46
Like I said, I could be wrong.

Here's some information, like everywhere on the internet on the subject, it's largely ambiguous.

http://www.wisegeek.com/is-it-legal-to-download-television-shows.htm


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David R
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 18:25
Quote: "Absolutley not! Have you ever read a copyright notice on anything you've watched? When you receive a broadcast it is for your private use. Nobody hands you the right to take their stuff and distribute it yourself."


That's not necessarily true - when you reach TV etc. the conflict of Fair use vs. Copyright becomes dubious (otherwise, all timeshifting TV tools/PVRs etc. are violating copyright. Sure, they're still personal use, but they still break the limits of recording/storing the data to begin with)


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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 18:32
The fastest I've ever downloaded a torrent is at 3kb/s. And it kept cutting out. It was useless, but so is the network around these parts.


I fail at life. No, really.
Benjamin
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 18:39
Quote: "The fastest I've ever downloaded a torrent is at 3kb/s."

It downloads at about that speed for me when my router is incorrectly configured for it.

Manic
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 20:21
The other reason that people suffer slow download speeds with torrents is that they don't throttle their upload properly. Essentially, if you leave it un-throttled or above your maximum upload speed for your line, bit torrent will eat all of it up, leaving you with nothing left to request new parts from other users, so slowing everything down, including your downloads. Always set it at least 5k slower than your max upload.

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Antidote
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 21:37
The whole point of a torrent isn't necessarily the speed (although a torrent with a lot of seeders can go much faster than a direct download), the point is that it distributes uploading to many different machines instead of just one server. For example in a standard direct download (http, ftp, etc...) the user connects to a server where the file is located in full and downloads the entire file from that server. The server has to be able to handle the strains of multiple downloaders and all kinds of other costs to the person hosting the material come up. With a torrent, all the user downloads from a site hosting a torrent file (say downloading a linux distro through bittorrent, we're keeping this thread legal) is a file containing locations of uploaders and hash information. The user then uses a torrent client (bitcomet, azureus, utorrent, etc...) to download pieces of the file from multiple sources. As the user downloads these pieces the torrent client begins broadcasting them to other downloaders who may not have those pieces of the file yet. This is a huge benefit to the content providers, who now only have to host a file that's a megabyte or two in size instead of a multiple GB .iso file. The problems with the bittorrent protocol (and it is a protocol, not a file type or program), is that download speeds can be sparadic (often starting slow, as the user connects to multiple sources and then speeding up later), or very slow (when there are little or no seeders). Torrent rely on the community to keep them up so there's no guarantee that they'll always be available, but as stated before they can go blazingly fast. Also Comcast is evil and they throttle bittorrent traffic so that it's impossible to seed properly. Seeing as bittorrent is used for perfectly legal reasons this is not just protecting against piracy, but also invading the rights of others in how they use the internet. Comcast should be sent into oblivion, but I'm afraid that won't happen because of the push from organizations like the MPAA and RIAA to stop bittorrent piracy.

bitJericho
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 22:32
Quote: "Seeing as bittorrent is used for perfectly legal reasons this is not just protecting against piracy, but also invading the rights of others in how they use the internet. Comcast should be sent into oblivion, but I'm afraid that won't happen because of the push from organizations like the MPAA and RIAA to stop bittorrent piracy."


You haven't been keeping up with the news:

http://www.chattershmatter.com/2008/03/30/comcast-adjusting-its-way-of-handling-web-traffic-for-bittorrent-users/

Better than nothing I guess


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Antidote
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 22:36
Regardless of their changes in policy they should still be held accountable for the months that they were acting completely illegally.

bitJericho
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 22:46
I doubt what they were doing was illegal in any sense of the word. It just wasn't the right thing to do to their customers. I can't believe their customers put up with it, I'd have moved on.


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Antidote
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Posted: 30th Mar 2008 22:55
Per FCC regulations regarding net neutrality, what they did was illegal.

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