[Speakers] torrents

[Bruce Smith]

This is about all I know on the subject (too little for a presentation).

> Is there anybody that can give a small presentation on the background and sage 
> of bittorrent?  

Don't know the background.  It's a program that automatically sets up
peer to peer downloads.  You upload to others (or others are downloading
from you) at the same time you are downloading your software.

There is a small (config?) file that you download or specify to when you
start bittorrent that tells it what software you are downloading.  No
idea how to create one of them.

You may have to open/forward some ports on your torrent machine to allow
uploading to work correctly.  If you don't allow uploading, you are only
allowed the slowest of download rates (slower than dialup).

> I have just started looking into using it and find it quite 
> cool, but what kinds of downloads are there or should I say how does one find 
> the "legal" (and yes I mean the legal, this illegal is far too easy to find) 
> stuff?  How does it actually work? Is there any kind of listing for open 
> source projects that are available through this form of P2P?

I've ONLY used to for Linux distributions (ISO images).  Many distros
(at least the ones I've downloaded), specify the torrent (config?) file
on the download page of their web site.

 - BS