With the phrase "Bit Torrent" popping up everywhere recently, we thought it was a good time to do some digging on the subject.

Bit Torrent is basically just a simple distributed P2P program that you can use for obtaining perfectly legal files (like RedHat 9) or files of questionable legality (like a DVD rip of Road To Perdition, or CD rips like Coldplay's A Rush Of Blood To The Head). Two great features of Bit Torrent are:

1. The many-to-many P2P model much like Overnet and Edonkey, etc use, in which one person hosts (or "seeds") a file (or "torrent") and every subsequent download of that file becomes another temporary host.

2. The web-based capabilities, which allow me to post links like the ones above which (when you have the program installed) can simply be clicked on to initiate the download. Also, the Bit Torrent client itself is extremely simple... basically it acts almost like a browser plugin or extension.

Getting started with Bit Torrent is as simple as downloading and installing the client (there's also an Experimental client which allows you to throttle bandwidth usage... it works well for us on Windows). Note that installing the client doesn't add anything to the Windows Start Menu or desktop... it simply installs the program itself in the Program Files folder.

After that you're all set to start browsing sites like torrentse.cx and supernova.org... simply clicking on torrent links when you find something you're interested in downloading. This should launch the client and prompt you for a location on your computer to download the file to.

One last note: be sure to leave the client open as long as you can after your downloads complete, to help spread the files well to other users.