It’s interesting really. There is no download method as effective (or fair) as a torrent - both for the servers and the clients (it’s fast). Well, it is not actually a download in the classical sense, after all it’s Peer-to-Peer, but still, it functions effectively like a download.

Yet, there seems to be no end to people who hate Bittorrent. Which people? Network administrators, ISPs, even governments in some places. And that’s just the gritty list.

I love torrents. All my best software, movies, and my favourite Linux ISOs come from users around the globe willing to share their upload bandwidth. It a win-win situation: the servers originally serving the content are unstressed, and the speeds can be astronomical for popular files (higher than the regular old HTTP or FTP downloads).

Of course, that is exactly why admins and ISPs hate it. It accounts for 35% of the worlds internet bandwidth (courtesy: Wikipedia). High usage of bandwidth is perhaps, a major issue. The freedom to download, perhaps another. Of course, they do not like the transparency either: they like to be able to see the data passing through their pipelines: torrent data, particularly encrypted, is not so granular.

And so, they stifle torrents completely by closing ports, sometimes even entire protocols (SOCKS, which Bittorrent uses).

I hate the admins who block torrents. If you don’t understand why, you don’t know how useful torrents are. Brush up!

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