News: BitTorrent Sites Are Slowly Taking Over the Internet ?

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BitTorrent Sites Are Slowly Taking Over the Internet
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-site ... -internet/

The popularity of BitTorrent is growing every day. BitTorrent sites are on the rise, and now four of them hold positions in the top 500 most popular websites on the Internet. Even more are expected to join the club in the near future.

BitTorrent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent

BitTorrent is the name of a peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution protocol, and is the name of a free software implementation of that protocol.
BitTorrent is designed to distribute large amounts of data widely without incurring the corresponding consumption in costly server and bandwidth resources. CacheLogic suggests that BitTorrent traffic accounts for ~35% of all traffic on the Internet,[1] while other sources are skeptical.[2]

The original BitTorrent client was written in Python. There are numerous compatible clients, written in a variety of programming languages, and running on a variety of computing platforms.

Using a web browser, users navigate to the site listing the torrent, download it, and open it in a BitTorrent client. After opening the torrent, the BitTorrent client connects to the tracker, which provides it with a list of clients currently downloading the file or files. A group of peers on a BitTorrent or P2P connected with each other to share a particular torrent is generally referred to as a swarm.

The effectiveness of the peer-to-peer data exchange depends largely on the policies used by clients to determine whom to send data to. Clients will prefer to send data to peers that send data back to them, which encourages fair sharing.

Many major open source and free software projects encourage BitTorrent as well as conventional downloads of their products to increase availability and reduce load on their own servers.

BitTorrent, like any other file transfer protocol, can be used to distribute files without the permission of the copyright holder, the same as photocopiers can be used to duplicate books. BitTorrent has received some criticism for this ability. BitTorrent trackers have been frequent targets of raids and shutdowns due to claims of copyright infringement.


BitTorrent
http://www.bittorrent.com/

Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide
http://www.dessent.net/btfaq/