When I was younger I would only download these via bittorent because our connection was extremely unreliable and bittorent was always restartable.

Even now I do the same. In india direct downloads are slightly slower. I guess it's to do with the mirror location or something else. Torrent makes it much faster

Probably because tcp or http or both are throttled somewhere. Bit torrent uses any port and lots of connections so throttling is much less effective.

Same in China. The Chinese firewall throttles TCP connections making direct downloads very slow. Not uncommon to have an unbearable slow connection while browsing web pages and then when starting a torrent download, you immediately get 2 Megabytes per second download speeds here.

A tip is to use a tool like axel (https://github.com/eribertomota/axel) to do direct downloads. This will usually speed it up.

>My name is Eriberto and I am not a C developer. I imported Axel from its old repository[1] to GitHub (the original homepage and developers are inactive)

Uh oh. Thanks to the repo owner for updating the README, but that's not a good situation.

I'd also like to suggest aria2c for this purpose: https://aria2.github.io/

Oh, I know that programmers and hackers and whatnot knew torrents were cool; I'm talking about non-technical people.

For example, until fairly recently, if I mentioned a "torrent" to my non-technical mom, she would assume I meant ThePirateBay or something like that. Nowadays, she knows it as just another means to download files.

Not sure Academic Torrents is the best example of a use of torrents for "non-technical people".

That's a fair point; I guess what I was trying to get at is that when I worked for NYU, I think it would have been an incredibly tough sell to use torrents in any capacity, because of the stigma of piracy. However, I think if I were to pitch it now, there would be serious consideration.

Actually, World of Warcraft was released in 2004 and I think it used BitTorrent for patch distribution from the beginning.

So very legitimate uses date quite some time back (as you would expect).

I think the grandparent was talking about the general perception of torrenting

I remember a game called "GunZ" (the 2005 one, i think) internally using torrents to propagate updates. But it was a long time ago.

A huge number of games used torrents for patching since around that time, notably in the MMO scene. WoW and every Nexon game come to mind. AFAIK the Battle.net launcher still downloads updates via torrent.

The Blizzard updater is actually a very cool download utility, worth hacking/poking at.

AFAIK it pioneered the concept of "web seeds", using HTTP GETs with a Range: header to download specific chunks from a CDN that were not healthy/available in the swarm.

I saw a game do that recently. It makes a lot of sense to use torrents and reduce bandwidth on their servers.

I completely forgot about GunZ doing that. I guess I was wrong; torrents have been taken seriously for awhile :D

None of that changed the popular stereotype. And Linux distros, etc. have never been more than a fraction of the volume of warez torrents.