BitTorrent

About a month ago, I found myself getting curious about a term I'd seen on Slashdot fairly often: BitTorrent. I think I may have known that it was peer-to-peer, but that it was different from, say, Gnutella or Kazaa. Anyway, I went to the BitTorrent Home Page, and poked around a bit.

It's actually pretty neat stuff. More than just peer-to-peer, it's set up to work best when you have lots of people trying to get something at once (hence Slashdot's interest in it). It also provides no search capabilities, making it somewhat less useful for illegal file swapping, since you need to post a link to a central server (called a tracker) somewhere else (like a web page). Of course, that hasn't stopped folks from using it to share movies, warez, etc., but it should be easier (says the site) to stop such things.

More on this in the days ahead; I've started taking this one deep...