[Windows] Bit Torrent Question

[orangepoptart]

I am fairly new to bit torrent so naturaly I have a few questions to ask. I hope you will forgive my ignorance on some of these subjects. I am running bit torrent on a windows 2000 machine. I was wondering if when zone alarm pops up and I tell it not to let a server be created will that accidentaly prevent people from downloading from me? Second I was wanting to know if there was a way of tracking people that are downloading stuff like the riaa is doing? (note: im not downloading mp3's or anything like that) I appreciate you takeing your time to respond to my questions. Thankyou :D

[JayMan8081]

It is fairly easy to track people who are downloading from you at least. Most of the incoming connections to your machine when running a torrent are shown by IP address and port. Under Windows if you do a netstat -a while downloading a torrent you can see all the open incoming and outgoing connections. The ones associated with bit-torrent will be easy to spot because they will use the same ports or port range. In this way it could be easy to tell who was getting that given file from you. Of course you would probably have to talk to the ISP to get personal info such as name, address, etc.

[orangepoptart]

I just thought of another quick question I had which is ... how does bit torrent know what to share on your hard drive? And does zone alarm stop it from shareing because (mine auto dosn't let servers).

[JayMan8081]

Under BitTorrent you have to explicitly tell it what files you want to be able to upload to other users. In order to do this you need a tracker to tell other peers the location of the file. Most likely ZoneAlarm will block any attempts to make a connection to your PC. You might want to look for a BitTorrent FAQ somewhere. It doesn't sound like you really understand how the program works.

[sploo22]

The official one:

http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/introduction.html