What is Torrent — Explained
There is a widespread myth that torrent is illegal and downloading using torrent is a punishable offense. But is it really true? If it is illegal why some of the important sites still have an option to download their files using torrent. e.g., Ubuntu and some other sites allow their files to be downloaded using torrent. This post is all about breaking the myth that has been around torrent for a while now.
Torrent — Short History
Torrent is a peer to peer (p2p) file sharing technology which was initially authored by Bram Cohen. It tool the main concepts of file sharing and packed them all into one easy to use platform. Early versions of torrent required centralized trackers to operate but currently tracker-less torrent are gaining popularity.
What is a p2p and how it differs from traditional server based file sharing?
To understand the difference between p2p and server based file sharing, lets look at both of the techniques in detail.
Server based file sharing
In server based file sharing the file is hosted in one centralized server and all the users who need to download the file will need to connect to the host and then download the file. This type of file sharing will have some bottlenecks.
For example, The server will have some allocated bandwidth and will transmit the file with the available bandwidth when the file is requested by the client. When the number of clients which request the file at the same time, then the server gets overloaded and the speed at which the speed at which the file is sent to the client gets affected and sometimes the server goes down.
To overcome this issue, the data from the central server is copied to other locations called as mirrors a.k.a mirror sites, so that even if the original site gets much traffic the file can still be downloaded from mirror sites.
Peer to Peer file sharing
In peer to peer file sharing, the clients are interconnected to each other and act as seeds and peers.
Seeds — A client that has entire or part of the file which is shared in the network
Peers — A client that downloads the file.
In this file sharing model, a client can simultaneously download parts of a file and can share the piece of the file it already has to others who may need it. Simply said, the file is broken into small pieces and the pieces are shared with each other. The client will request the piece it doesn’t have and will send the piece it already has to others.
The entire network of this seeds and peers is called as Swarm.
Now comes the question, So what’s the big difference between these two file sharing models and why p2p file sharing is good?
In peer to peer sharing model, the users can get pieces of the file from multiple sources instead of a single server. Therefore there is no bandwidth constraint and also the distributed computing power helps in getting the file even if the original source gets out of network (given that all the pieces are still available in swarm).
p2p file sharing is good when all the clients are ready to seed the files. Another important term in torrent world is leech. These are the clients that download the file but are not ready to act as seed for the pieces they have. Simply put, these clients will download the file but not upload the pieces they have. P2P file sharing is awesome only when the clients are ready to act as seeds which is the main reason to leave your torrent client open even after downloading the file which helps in faster download for other clients in the swarm.
Why is torrent considered illegal?
Actually torrent is not illegal (depends on the regional law.) as long as you don’t share copyrighted material that you don’t own and which are unsanctioned for sharing.
The bottom line is torrent does not equate to piracy. It just provides a convenient way to do it. But on the whole torrent is a great file sharing platform to share large data without the need for a giant computing power.
Fun Fact: Your ISP(Internet service provider) can still be able to know if you are using torrent. So using VPN is suggested when you download using torrent.
In my next post, I’ll cover how to use torrent and how torrent works internally with a deep dive in trackers, magnet links, etc.
