Basics of Peer to Peer

Many are using P2P application to download both legal & Illegal content from the Internet ( Ya, I know you don't do it...:P ).Vuze formerly known as Azureus is popular since it supports torrents in addition it allows the user to search for content using keywords which is not yet supported by any other Bittorrent client. Furthermore it even has a graphical view of the files pieces being downloaded, the distance between the various clients with whom you are connected and other stuff which provide easy to understand info to the naive user.

well some basic terminology first

1) Peer : Any computer on the Internet that runs a Bittorrent protool supported application.
2) Seed : Peer's who have completed the download of a specific file and are online, just to upload to other peers interested in the same file.
3) Leech: Peer's who are actively downloading the content.
4) Swarm: Peer's connected to each other actively swapping file blocks form a swarm. In Basics terms, each file will form its own swarm for distribution.
5) Freeriders: Peers,who download content but never upload content to other peers when requested.
6) Tit-for-Tat: This is a transfer mechanism implemented in Bittorrent protocol to avoid freeriders.For each forward block transfer, they should be a transfer in the reverse direction, else the connection is discontinued.
7) Tracker: Responsible for hosting the torrent file that contains info regarding the file size, HASH for validation and also the coordinator for various peers.
8) # of connection: 5 active connections & 30 passive connection.

well this is the stuff that I know, update this list ASAP with new info.

-Alphy