My high school computer teacher told me playing games was harmful. Its funny that I have held onto that philosophy upto date and games aren’t really my thing. Its interesting how people find it weird that a techy doesn’t play any computer games. Tell you what its not just about not playing games but simply choosing sides when presented with options. This has been the same view when it comes to torrents until a colleague of mine introduced me.
So in this post I will talk about all things torrents and especially playing it safe when it comes to the company policies. Lets start here, it order to download a file from a torrent site one has to download a torrent. A torrent is really just a small file which is opened by a torrent client and then the download for the intended file can begin.
Hold that thought.
With the advent of the cloud and virtualization companies are heavily investing in ensuring that they have 24/7 internet connection. They are going as far as having multiple service providers just to make sure that their business don’t grind to a halt. In Order to make sure that this resource is not misused by employees its always likely to find a clause about internet fair usage policy in the employee code of conduct or company policies. Some even go ahead and specifically indicate that torrents are not allowed. But just like most internet users, we dont dont read the terms of use and hence using torrents instantly makes the user guilty before being charged.
However using torrents in the office cannot be a real issue unless the user has a certain trend of high internet utilization, no one ever asks anyway.
Lets go back to Torrents.
There are two important terms to take note of; Leeches and seeds.
Seeds are people who have already downloaded the complete file and remain connected so that others can download from them.
Leeches are people who are still downloading the file. With bit torrents, you can also download from a leecher, but only the parts of the file they have already downloaded themselves. This is what makes bittorrent so fast.
Going back to internet resource utilization. After downloading a file using bittorrent instantly renders the downloader a seed. This basically means that at that point the computer has just become a mini server. Whether working from home or the office, this will have a high impact of the amount of data being utilized.
So what is the solution to this? Although not in the best interest of how torrents work, its best to delete or move the file to a different location than where it was placed by the torrent client so as to ensure the downloaded file will not be used to serve other clients.