On Thu, July 28, 2011 12:04, Emily L. Ferguson wrote: > At 11:42 AM -0500 7/28/11, Lea Murphy wrote: >>This Bit Torrent deal is very interesting, never heard of it. > > Big porn purveyor and full of malware. > > Beware BitTorrent. Bit Torrent is a protocol, like HTTP (which is what the browser uses to get web pages from the server), ftp, ssh, whatever. As such, it is not in any way associated with porn or malware. (And in fact those two accusations are ones I've never heard before; normally detractors associate it with piracy.) It's designed to make it possible to distribute big things to a big audience without spending big money -- by having the people who download it keep their copy available to others, and keeping the work of the central contact point minimal (distributing block checksums and pointing people at servers). This makes it perfect for distributing software installation ISOs for free software -- like the CENTOS Linux distribution for example, for which Bit Torrent is the primary distribution mechanism. Of course, those characteristics also make it perfect for distributing pirated movies. I think this is where people get the association between the protocol and piracy or other bad stuff; though the protocol is designed to check the validity of all blocks independently of who is serving them, so it should prevent any insertion of malware. Given that that association is widespread in people's heads, I do take a certain pleasure in running it at work (where we're using CENTOS for our Linux boxes). -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
