Other things you should know...

Ocasionally, more frequently with old torrents, you may see that the torrent you have started to download is no longer downloading anything. This often occurs because there is no user offering data to you and the only solution to this is to be patient and wait for someone to help you out. If time goes by and no help appears you could ask around (in the site forums for example) for someone to help you out, usually people are nice and glad to help you.

On other occasions, you may notice that you upload a lot but you are almost not downloading anything. This sometimes happens because there is no room in the upload channel to send to other users, confirming that you have received the previous chunk of the torrent and asking him to send you another chunk. If this happens, the only solution is to limit the maximum upload speed to a few kilobytes under the maximum upload speed you have.

Legal issues

The BitTorrent protocol was designed from the start to help people download very large files in short time and with no thought about each user's security. The protocol did not need to be burdened with encryption and protection for users, yet it is flexible enough to work even if several seeders or leechers send bad data in the network.

The point is you should know that you are not completely safe on the Internet, if you are downloading something illegal or copyrighted in your country, people can find your IP address and possibly even threat your ISP to find information about you.

While the BitTorrent protocol is legal in every way possible (no files are stored on the tracker, the torrent file is only a text file with information about the files), it is your responsibility, you have to judge what is legal and what is not and take the appropriate actions.

Conclusion

In this guide, I have only guided through the steps of installing and configuring a BitTorrent client and I have explained the protocol a bit, you have to decide for yourself if you use it to download an open source operating system , video trailers , freeware applications or pirated material.

If you like this guide or have questions or suggestions please leave comments in the forum, I'm sure this guide in the current form is only the first version of several, much improved versions.

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