for all you techies out there...

[Raelum]

i have got yelled at from my ISP a few times for downloading movies because someone called them up and threatened to sue them, and they in turn threatened to cancel my service....

after that i have been downloading 10 gigs or more a week, using utorrent and a anonymous proxy... no problems at all.

a proxy basically hides you ip and ISP information by re-routing through a server. it can slow your downloads down depending on which proxy you use but its effective and safe.

just make sure your download has plenty of seeds and leechers, also check out the utorrent.com forums (even if your using something else) they have tons of tips on boosting your speed, by editing max tcp/ip connections, etc.
forum.utorrent.com / IF YOU HAVE SPEED ISSUES READ HERE FIRST


~Raelum

[PaRanOiD81]

So here it is in a nutshell, before I go out to eat and explore the city of Austin, torrents are as safe as you can be. They take a file, split it up into 1,000,000 pieces, everyone has a piece of the action, you download them, piece at a time from EVERYONE (seeding) and then when its complete, the program combines those pieces to form the final product, which could be all 100 files you download or the single file you download. Peer to Peer download is recommened, however, they have been suing the users who UPLOAD the files, the ones who SHARE the files from the peer to peer. So basiscally, if you DOWNLOAD only and don't UPLOAD, you'll be fine. I hope this helps. Good luck, happy downloading.

[mfqr]

P2P software like Lamewire suck! It's way slower, and riddled with viruses and trojans. Using bittorrent is way safer. Plus, on p2p software like Lamewire, you won't get the speeds you want most of the time. While speed can be an issue with torrents too (not as much), it is in general a better way to download the stuff you want. Rarely do you find whole discographies of your favorite artist on a p2p program, like you would most likely find on a torrent site. Rarely will you be able to download a video game or movie on p2p software at a bearable speed, like you would with a torrent.

It is highly unlikely you'll get caught. Most of the time the torrent websites are shutdown, but nobody bothers the people downloading. And still, a lot of the good ones are still up. Don't worry about it...

Anybody remember Kazaa? Yeah, fuck that. It had 300+ spyware programs in it. Most of them suck. It's so hard to find what you want on those a lot of the time, unless what you want is mainstream, etc. Not to mention that if you use a torrent from a torrent site, you're getting good quality stuff.

[PaRanOiD81]

Yes but the reason you won't get bothered downloading from a torrent is because you are not downloading the entire file, your downloading little bits here and there. its the same reason why they tried to close and sue the piratebay, they lost, because the piratebay only hosted the torrents and not the files. Its really a great idea but you'd have to go on a private network of torrents to get the fastest speeds possible.