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I know very little about torrents, aside from having tried a client once or twice. Is there any aspect of the way the torrent-ing process deals with files that
by ericb 18y ago
I know very little about torrents, aside from having tried a client once or twice. Is there any aspect of the way the torrent-ing process deals with files that reduces the chance of also getting a virus with the download? It seems like "official" torrents of say intrepid ibex are probably fine, but is other random content just as risky as it was on kazaa, etc?
- eggnet 18y agoFirst, you download a small .torrent file. That small file contains the hash of the contents as well as a hash of each segment of the contents of the final data. If you trust the source of the .torrent file then it doesn't matter who you connect to to get any portion of the actual torrent. Each segment of the file you receive is checked against a hash and the entire final data is also checked against a hash.
- litewulf 18y agoBut to answer the original question: yes it is just as risky. But because people are all uploading and downloading the same file (if they used the same torrent), bad files are negatively reinforced and good files positively.
- halo 18y agoNope. BitTorrent is just a protocol for transferring files. Much like other similar protocols like http, ftp etc it makes no attempt to limit the type of files relayed through it and is a little out of its scope.