Essentially the title. I was trying to download a file and my colleagues told me that I should use uTorrent. I did some research and figured that this was very popular a while ago, but since then has decreased in popularity. How does it work and why did it decrease in popularity?
In: Technology
Imagine there is a book, it’s 200 pages and others also want to read it. Because you are still reading and don’t want to give away your whole book, you allow 10 pages to be copied at a time.So 1 person starts making a copy of the book, they copied 10 pages and another person goes hey I want that too, so they get 5 from the first person and 5 from the second person. 4th person comes along and gets the other 5 from the first person and 5 from the 2nd and so forth. So now all these people are all sharing parts of the book with everyone who asks for the pages they are missing.
A more simplified way, the 2nd person gets the first 10 pages, then when they’re done, they copy the next 10 and let’s the 3rd person copy the first 10. Then as they get further in the book, they get the next set of 10 pages, then allow the 3rd person to get the 2nd set of 10, and the 3rd person let’s a 4th person copy the 1st 10 pages. It’s almost like it’s cascading down this way until everyone has made copies
Torrents do this. Instead of a single source where everyone downloads from, it will split the file up into hundreds if not thousands of smaller parts and grabs the parts from whomever has it and is free to give it out.
So this allows people who have parts of the file to share what they have instead of waiting until they get it all. This also means that with many people sharing smaller files, downloads are much faster.
10 years ago, typical highest tier internet speeds were like 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up. So, theoretically, one person sharing a file meant it will be downloaded at 20mbps instead of 100. Now, with 5 people sharing it, it can be downloaded at 100mbps. With hundreds of people sharing one file, they can then upload at 1mbps each while you download at 100mbps
Now, what this all means is that there are now multiple sources to download the file without you having to search for them all. It provided a ton of redundancy and reliability to downloading with minimal work. Torrents would keep track of all the people sharing the same file using a tracker, so get the tracker, and you’ll get access to all these sources.
Prior to this, piracy was single peer to peer at best. You would have to find repositories on your own usually via FTP, IRC or other system like DC++ but it’s one person sharing a bunch of files to a bunch of people which made it very very slow. Files, however, were often broken down into rar’d chunks, which made downloading from multiple people possible but was still very manual. There were also newsgroups that you often had to pay for but worked very differently.
Next came stuff like Napster, Kazaa, limewire, etc, that simplified the process by having people choose what they want to share, and the app would index it. So you search what you want, and it will show you all the results without you having to find the people sharing it yourself. But it’s still more or less 1 person your download from at a time. Torrents then allowed centralized places to find the information to download a file, offered more redundancy, and faster speeds.
These apps and torrents are also much easier to install and use, which means more people knew how to protect themselves and went from being neich to being mainstream. And since it’s all peer to peer, your IP is showing and thus made it possible for companies to track you.
Streaming media, like Netflix, disney+, and the dozens of similar services have made it easy to find most things with little effort and cost (which is debatable but more on that later). Steam and other online game marketplaces, along with many free to play games, made it much easier to find, buy, and play games. With software, lots are moving to cloud based or applications as a service, which also makes it hard to pirate. Going back to movies and TV shows, with these streaming services, I can sit back, find something to watch , and watch it, which is very easy vs having to find a source, download it, hope it finishes quickly, then find a way to show it on my TV. So it’s much much easier for the general public, so they stopped relying so much on torrents. That and some high profiles cases of people getting sued and charged for sharing files.
Tldr: sharing files pre torrents, was difficult to find sources, very slow and tedious as you had to manage the sources and multiple files yourself. Torrents automated most of the process by splitting the file manually and allowing people to share and download these parts as they were available. With the ease of use of streaming services for media, online stores for games and applications moving to the cloud has stopped more of the general public from using torrents
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