Wat’s wrong in using http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce?
There is a Nobel Prize for Computing. It is called the Turing Award, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_award.
Suroot: correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t port forwarding only open access to the bittorrent client application which listens on that port? Which would mean that yes, if your bittorrent client has a bug, you’re vulnerable there.
But OTOH if you don’t use port forwarding but still connect to other bittorrent clients for downloading, your client is again exposed to attackers - some malicious hacker just needs to share a file you want to download, and bam! you connect to his evil bittorrent client which can then merrily exploit bugs in your client. I don’t quite see how port forwarding can make this any worse 
“There is a Nobel Prize for Computing. It is called the Turing Award”
But that’s not the Nobel Prize, it’s the Turing Award. It may be a computing equivalent to the Nobel, but it’s not the Nobel.
“Wat’s wrong in using <a href=“http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce?””>http://tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce?"
Actually that is a fair point, one of The Pirate Bay’s defenses was that they host legitimate legal content (as well as the other stuff).
-Perros-
If you use Pando (pando.com), you don’t even need to supply a tracker. Download their app, drag files into it, specify a recipient and off they go. You don’t have to do any network-y configuration or have any idea how P2P works. Pando sends an email to the recipient and seeds your file for a limited time. Instead of a .torrent file you distribute a .pando file. The only catch is that the recipient needs the Pando app as well.
Full disclosure: I used to work for Pando.
Why would you share an archive, when you can share the files/directory directly? Unless the compression is good, it’s annoying to have to keep both the archive so others can download it, and the extracted files so you can use/see/listen them.
I’ve never had any difficulty sharing files over BitTorrent, and I’ve been using µTorrent since its original beta version. Must be a Vista thing! I only had to forward the port on my wireless router, add an exception to my firewall, and find a reliable tracker. I use Demonoid’s private tracker now. And with µTorrent, I can easily schedule appropriate upload times and throttle the bandwidth accordingly. Easy as pie!
I find this old article http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2005/08/25/bittorrent.html?page=1 from O’Reilly useful for people using Linux, although I think that in can be applied on Windows, too.
[sorry for double posting]
I’m amazed at all the people recommend he use a heavier client on the server. So there’s less config? So what! That’s kind of the point of a server: set it up once to be as efficient as possible.
Thanks! I’ve been sharing (I think) a few files for some time now. Now I can go back and ensure that they’re really being shared (if they’re legal [not sure], I’ll use LegalTorrents.
One thing has always bugged me… Podcasts always seemed like a perfect use for Torrents. I think quite a few people suggested it to Adam Curry when he was at the forefront of podcasting, but I’m pretty sure he resisted because he couldn’t figure out a way to make money off that.
It really kind of bugs me that the initial podcasting clients (podcatchers) didn’t use p2p, it would have really legitimized the whole p2p thing, saved all the podcasters from having to pay to distribute something they were giving away for free, and stopped Apple from monopolizing the entire podcast distribution system–using it to pull more people into the “Apple Store”.
As a second choice, at least it was Apple and not someone who felt it necessary to find some other way to monetize it, but I still wish things had gone the other way.
By the way–cool new capta system, but I’ll miss “Orange”
@Suroot: what kind of idiot are you? Opening a single port to the outside doesn’t “open your computer to the outside world” completely, and definitely isn’t a wide-open door for hacking. It only lets people connect to the bittorrent client.
If having an open port = being hackable, go hack google.com’s port 80 and prove it.
Seriously. S3. It looks like you wasted a lot of your time.
- Upload to S3 using any number of easy tools or browser extensions
- Share the S3 URL with ‘?torrent’ at the end of it
- Step 3 not necessary.
Good grief - it surely can’t be that hard?
Use http://checkip.dyndns.org/ as a super-lightweight way of checking your IP address. No ads, and can be easily parsed by scripts. It’s hard wired into many dyndns clients, so that URL isn’t going away soon.
I guess all of these options still throttled using DPI. BitTorrent? Must be illegal. Thanks Bell Canada!
I use Ares (http://aresgalaxy.sourceforge.net/)
It also downloads files from multiple computers and easy to use, you don’t mind about port forwarding and tracking.
Although people may decry it, I find that uTorrent works quite nicely with UPnP on my router - automatically forwarding whatever random port it wants when it starts up, so I don’t have to worry about it.
I like it because it just sort of works - and isn’t that how it’s supposed to be??
I’d like to note that it is possible to serve trackerless torrent using distributed hash table (DHT) method. This unfortunately is not implemented in all clients…