Torrents, you use them, you love them, but do you know how they work? Or how, even though it is blatantly illegal, it hasn't gone the way of Napster? Do you care? If not, sorry. However, if you want to know what kind of legal and technological ninjitsu go into getting you the entire season of "24" in less than an hour, stick around.
First, the how. Torrents are a type of P2P, peer to peer, sharing. P2P sharing depends on a community of sharers swapping files. Most twenty-somethings were introduced to P2P back in the nineties with programs like Kazza and Limewire. These P2P programs depended on people uploading files then others downloading these files directly from the up-loaders computer. This approach has several serious flaws, the most important of which are; the download speed depends only on the up-loaders and down-loaders connection, so if one of you has a slow connection you're screwed, there is almost no community support and no one to report on the quality or even content of the files you are downloading, and finally it is ridiculously easy to trace this type of sharing, meaning the RIAA will be at your door any second.
Torrent files fix all of these problems and more. Basically, when you download that .torrent file it points your torrent program to a tracker, the tracker has a list of all of the people who are sharing that same file and instead of downloading one complete file from one person, you download parts of the file from many people, thereby speeding up your download considerably. Also, because the torrent sites are only supplying the locations of the files and not the files themselves, the illegality of said sites is murky at best. Finally, all good torrent sites consist of good communities which leave comment informing you whether or not the torrent is worth downloading. Because of these advantages the majority of people still using direct P2P programs like Kazza or Bearshare are those who simply don't know any better. Sadly, these people may never know the greatness of torrents, because the RIAA and MPAA are completely and totally done fucking around. They are already going after torrent sites, and though they are losing their cases, they will not be discouraged. Why are they losing? What will be their next tactic, and how can you get on the piracy bandwagon before it is set ablaze and we all burn to death? Why would you want to get onto a bandwagon that will soon be engulfed in fire? For those answers you'll have to wait for Piracy 102, cliffhanger.
