Author Archives: slug

how to make a torrent file and share it on the internet

Sometimes we want to share big files on the Internet, pictures or material with other friends. We can easily do this by creating torrent files and allowing our friends to download them through the bittorrent network.

The network

bittorrent networkThe bittorrent network is a network of computers that share files. This files are called torrent files. There are services that offer different files and will point your computer to the computers that are serving this files. When you start downloading a file, these computers will send it to you, and you can also start sending to other users the parts you have. This way the bittorrent network balances itself and can escalate really quickly and dynamically. Each one of these computers are running some torrent client with torrent files, waiting for you to download them. This computers send the info of the torrents they have to the trackers.

The Trackers

That’s why you always have to put at least one tracker URL on your torrent for it to work. This way the torrent client you run will send to the tracker a message saying “hey, I’m here and I have this file”. There are private and public trackers. When you look for torrent files you are actually browsing the trackers information, because they keep track of the files shared by the computers.

You can add more than one tracker to your torrent file, so it appears on more servers. Sometimes you have to create an account in a tracker before being able to use it, sometimes they are open like the open tracker of the pirate bay: http://open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

Seeders and Leechers: karma on the bittorrent network

If we look at the users connected to a torrent file, we can see that they are divided mainly in two groups: Seeders and Leechers. The seeders are the users that already downloaded the whole file, but they still leave it on the hard drive (and on the torrent program) to share with the next users that look for it. It is really important to share back the files you have downloaded, as you will this way contribute to the next downloads to be quicker, and release some pressure from the main sources. When you create a torrent file, you have to seed it on the systems.

If you are downloading a file, then you are a leecher of that file. And if you don’t share enough you are a leecher in general, which is one of the uncoolest things to be in the Internet. A good copyfighter will try to have a general ratio of at least 5, which means that has uploaded and given to other users five times more than downloaded.

Creating the torrent file

Is really easy to make a torrent file.

A torrent file is nothing but a folder. It can have information about the contents, a small picture for an icon, maybe translations or any kind of information that you can add. The more information you add in files like .txt or .nfo, the more indexed your torrent file will be on the torrent searches, and the more downloads is gonna get.

Is really easy to make a torrent file. Specially a bad torrent file. Once you put the torrent online, you have to make a new one to change any little thing, so check it out several times before creating it.

Once you are comfortable with the contents of the folder, rename the folder with as much information as possible, like: Music For Machines – This Month in Minimal Electro Tech (07-08/2009)

Then go to your torrent client (the one you use to download torrents) and click on File/New Torrent or any similar option, select the folder you prepared, add the tracker addresses and the comments you want to add… and create the torrent! If the trackers allows it you will be able to seed this file.

More detailed explanations according to different programs can be found here.

Seeding the torrent file

Ok, you have the torrent but nobody asks for it… this is because you need to upload your .torrent file to a torrent site if you want it to appear on the  sites. Most of the torrent sites have an “upload” box. You can submit your torrent there for the torrent to appear on searches.

If you don’t want to submit your torrent to a public server you can send to your friend the .torrent file and she will be able to download from you, and then also seed.

Now we need to become seeders of our content.

To do so, we will:

  • head to the folder were our torrent folder is located
  • open the torrent file with our torrent client
  • tell it to download it on the same directory were our torrent folder is
  • voila! now your torrent should appear totally full and ready to seed.

Keysigning party under the bridge – Wednesday May 6th

GPG is the free implementacion of the Pretty Good Privacy system. This allows you to sign and encrypt messages to other people, and if we sign each other our keys you can also verify that the person you know is who actually wrote the email.some color keys

Send your public key by mail to anybody from the #slug, and come over next Wednesday to get more people to sign it.

Encryption is not as complicated as it sounds, check out this howto for making your own gpg key in case you don’t have one yet, this video tutorial for using Thunderbird Enigmail plugin, and this other tutorials for GPG.

What you can bring to the party:

  • Little pieces of paper with your gpg key information (specially your fingerprint).
  • Fruits, tea, juice.
  • You don’t need to take your computer
  • You don’t need to take your id (Yes, in all the howtos talks about the ID but we don’t need it)
  • Don’t forget to send your gpg public key to the organizer

What you will have after the party:

  • A list of people you can mail encrypted mail with
  • A list of keys to sign and make a bigger trust ring
  • More information about gpg programs and gpg security

Why we do this:

Is important to increase the amount of encrypted mail to make it more difficult to analize and decrypt. The safety of encryption systems is a balance between the amount of information to decypher and the computing power of the spy… if we have enough encrypted mail they will never reach to decrypt the more importatn ones!

pure data patching circle

Soon we are going to start a Pure Data Patching Circle” and that is the closest I can find to the nights we spent on riereta with dgepeto and the Pure Data Users Syndicate.

We are starting with a Pure data crash course, to honour last serious workshop, and the plan is:

  • three sessions of pure data introduction
  • 2 sessions of support to the students
  • starting pure data weekly patching circle meetings, with lightning talks at the start and then working together and troubleshooting

people interested in joining the workshop, please write back to the #slug: slug [at] lists [dot] riseup [dot] net

people interested on hosting the workshop in some place where we can meet weekly and make a bit of noise and use a beamer, please write too!

internet privacy information

Here a  list of texts about privacy online, for the interested nerds.

news from the underground

The slug keeps working, though we don’t spend time on writing up here cause there are not many announces to do.

We haven’t stopped providing some maintenance services to the squats around, so feel free to get in touch if you need a friendly nerd.

More news soon! Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, why don’t you have a look at this post: Why I Am Deleting My Myspace and Facebook Accounts, and You Should Too, from the techno tranny slut