Who says there aren't legitimate torrents?

As most every Linux distro is available from a torrent feed someplace, and most FreeBSD/BSD forks, and most anything else these days including Solaris and some other items.

The issue with the word "torrent" is it's become a nasty thing just like the word "hacker" has. "Hacker" originally meant to mean hobbyist, and those of us that are old enough to know that still use it to mean that. There are legitimate uses for torrents, too bad the overwhelming majority of them are anything but legit.

Only takes a few to ruin it for everyone was never more true...
 
I prefer direct download anyway; I get great rates from OSU's OSL, especially on campus.
 
Heh, I just installed RHEL 5.2 at work after spending many hours remastering the install disc with a custom kickstart.

Definitely prefer Ubuntu for personal desktop or home-server usage though.
 
Joe Average said:
Only takes a few to ruin it for everyone was never more true...
Click to expand...

Although in this case "a few" is vastly understating.


Aside from FOSS, another prominent user of bittorrent is Blizzard for distributing patches.
 
The bittorrent.com website is one big portal to legally (purchased) downloadable content.
 
Even MajorGeeks posts torrent downloads. Sometimes it is the fastest way to download.
 
The regular straight up download works great for me when I download *nix distros. I prefer to get them from a good trusted source, (such as the original distro site) instead of from "unknowns...with possible other baggage in the package I don't want".
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
The regular straight up download works great for me when I download *nix distros. I prefer to get them from a good trusted source, (such as the original distro site) instead of from "unknowns...with possible other baggage in the package I don't want".
Click to expand...

These are usually posted with an MD5 checksum, so it does not concern me. As long as you can be bothered to verify it, no problem. ;)
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
The regular straight up download works great for me when I download *nix distros. I prefer to get them from a good trusted source, (such as the original distro site) instead of from "unknowns...with possible other baggage in the package I don't want".
Click to expand...

If you get the .torrent file from the distro site (which is usually the case), it is a trusted download as all the torrent pieces have a checksum attached.
 
Torrent technology is marvelous and there's nothing wrong with it or talking about it. There is a lot of great open source and plain free software available. A lot of people just use it for distributing things they shouldn't be.
 
It is also wonderous for saving on bandwidth as a central server does not have to send copy after copy of the original file. Am I making things up or was there an article on Digg about a university using an internal torrent system to distribute patches to their machines?
 
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