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What makes torrents work

What makes torrents work

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A lot of work goes into a simple torrent download. What looks like a single stream of data is actually hundreds of streams at once, assembled through a complex ballet of code. Cryptographic hashes prevent anyone from slipping bad data into that stream, and makes sure good data doesn't get corrupted along the way. Data comes in from lots of different sources, but it all ends up in exactly the right place in exactly the right configuration. In this video, we take a look at how it all happens, and why that setup turns out to be perfect for downloading things you didn't pay for.