Bittorrent secure?

[Chuck Swiger]

Hanspeter Roth wrote:
> how secure is Bittorrent?

It's not secure.

> How can one know how trustworthy the stuff
> downloaded from other Bittorrent fellows is?

You need to have an external source of information which specifies a checksum 
or MD5 hash to confirm that the file has not been tampered with.  If you trust 
the Torrent tracker file, then BitTorrent has this part built-in.  Otherwise, 
you would use something like the distinfo files in /usr/ports to help confirm 
the validity of files.

On the other hand, Torrent doesn't do any worse than FTP or HTTP.

-- 
-Chuck