The anti-Slashdot effect
BitTorrent should be elected president. It’s the only application that makes files faster when they get Slashdotted. I downloaded a 100+ MB DivX that was being downloaded by thousands of fellow geeks at 225K/s sustained. It’s a beautiful thing.
I let my connection stay active for a while (still on in fact)… Already uploaded more than I downloaded. I’m a good netizen. And yes. I still buy CD’s/DVD’s/Software. P2P isn’t the antichrist quite yet.
Just a word of caution. Be careful when using BitTorrent. One of the sites that I uploaded from had their records seized and my IP was stored in their “tracker” or something. I was “caught” sharing 2Fast2Furious because of this. Nothing has happened to me yet. I think it was more of a warning. I don’t use P2P anymore for fear of being caught again. Good Luck!
I was downloading legitimate material :). It’s a very cost effective way to distribute “oceans of bits” as Steve Jobs would say.
From my point of view (someone who pays for bandwidth), this is a mind blowing concept: a service that actually improves when scaled.
But you are right–unless you’re behind an anonymous IP address, don’t do P2P for less-than-legal material. A good way to snag that anonymous IP is through Anonymizer.