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Torrent File
In the BitTorrent file distribution system, a torrent file or meta-info file is a computer file that contains metadata about files and folders to be distributed, and usually also a list of the network locations of trackers, which are computers that help participants in the system find each other and form efficient distribution groups called ''swarms''. A torrent file does not contain the content to be distributed; it only contains information about those files, such as their names, folder structure, sizes, and cryptographic hash values for verifying file integrity. The term ''torrent'' may refer either to the metadata file or to the files downloaded, depending on the context. A torrent file acts like a table of contents (index) that allows computers to find information through the use of a BitTorrent client. With the help of a torrent file, one can download small parts of the original file from computers that have already downloaded it. These "peers" allow for downloading of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnet URI Scheme
Magnet is a Uniform Resource Identifier, URI scheme that defines the format of magnet links, a de facto standard for identifying files (Uniform Resource Name, URN) by their content, via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hash value rather than by their location. Although magnet links can be used in a number of contexts, they are particularly useful in peer-to-peer file sharing networks because they allow resources to be referred to without the need for a continuously available host, and can be generated by anyone who already has the file, without the need for a central authority to issue them. This makes them popular for use as "guaranteed" search terms within the file sharing community where anyone can distribute a magnet link to ensure that the resource retrieved by that link is the one intended, regardless of how it is retrieved. History The standard for Magnet Uniform Resource Identifier, URIs was developed by Bitzi in 2002, partly as a "vendor- and project-neutral ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnet Links
Magnet is a URI scheme that defines the format of magnet links, a de facto standard for identifying files (URN) by their content, via cryptographic hash value rather than by their location. Although magnet links can be used in a number of contexts, they are particularly useful in peer-to-peer file sharing networks because they allow resources to be referred to without the need for a continuously available host, and can be generated by anyone who already has the file, without the need for a central authority to issue them. This makes them popular for use as "guaranteed" search terms within the file sharing community where anyone can distribute a magnet link to ensure that the resource retrieved by that link is the one intended, regardless of how it is retrieved. History The standard for Magnet URIs was developed by Bitzi in 2002, partly as a "vendor- and project-neutral generalization" of the ed2k: and freenet: URI schemes used by eDonkey2000 and Freenet, respectively, and att ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid character code points in Unicode using one to four one-byte (8-bit) code units. Code points with lower numerical values, which tend to occur more frequently, are encoded using fewer bytes. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII: the first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single byte with the same binary value as ASCII, so that valid ASCII text is valid UTF-8-encoded Unicode as well. UTF-8 was designed as a superior alternative to UTF-1, a proposed variable-length encoding with partial ASCII compatibility which lacked some features including self-synchronizing code, self-synchronization and fully ASCII-compatible handling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SHA-1
In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a cryptographically broken but still widely used hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United States National Security Agency, and is a U.S. Federal Information Processing Standard. Since 2005, SHA-1 has not been considered secure against well-funded opponents; as of 2010 many organizations have recommended its replacement. NIST formally deprecated use of SHA-1 in 2011 and disallowed its use for digital signatures in 2013, and declared that it should be phased out by 2030. , chosen-prefix attacks against SHA-1 are practical. As such, it is recommended to remove SHA-1 from products as soon as possible and instead use SHA-2 or SHA-3. Replacing SHA-1 is urgent where it is used for digital signatures. All major web browser vendors ceased acceptance of SHA-1 SSL certificates in 2017. In February ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hash List
In computer science, a hash list is typically a list of hashes of the data blocks in a file or set of files. Lists of hashes are used for many different purposes, such as fast table lookup (hash tables) and distributed databases (distributed hash tables). A hash list is an extension of the concept of hashing an item (for instance, a file). A hash list is a subtree of a Merkle tree. Root hash Often, an additional hash of the hash list itself (a ''top hash'', also called ''root hash'' or ''master hash'') is used. Before downloading a file on a p2p network, in most cases the top hash is acquired from a trusted source, for instance a friend or a web site that is known to have good recommendations of files to download. When the top hash is available, the hash list can be received from any non-trusted source, like any peer in the p2p network. Then the received hash list is checked against the trusted top hash, and if the hash list is damaged or fake, another hash list from another ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexicographical Order
In mathematics, the lexicographic or lexicographical order (also known as lexical order, or dictionary order) is a generalization of the alphabetical order of the dictionaries to sequences of ordered symbols or, more generally, of elements of a totally ordered set. There are several variants and generalizations of the lexicographical ordering. One variant applies to sequences of different lengths by comparing the lengths of the sequences before considering their elements. Another variant, widely used in combinatorics, orders subsets of a given finite set by assigning a total order to the finite set, and converting subsets into increasing sequences, to which the lexicographical order is applied. A generalization defines an order on a Cartesian product of partially ordered sets; this order is a total order if and only if all factors of the Cartesian product are totally ordered. Motivation and definition The words in a lexicon (the set of words used in some language) have a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Associative Array
In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an abstract data type that stores a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection. In mathematical terms an associative array is a function with ''finite'' domain. It supports 'lookup', 'remove', and 'insert' operations. The dictionary problem is the classic problem of designing efficient data structures that implement associative arrays. The two major solutions to the dictionary problem are hash tables and search trees..Dietzfelbinger, M., Karlin, A., Mehlhorn, K., Meyer auf der Heide, F., Rohnert, H., and Tarjan, R. E. 1994"Dynamic Perfect Hashing: Upper and Lower Bounds". SIAM J. Comput. 23, 4 (Aug. 1994), 738-761. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=182370 In some cases it is also possible to solve the problem using directly addressed arrays, binary search trees, or other more specialized structures. Many programming languages include ass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bencode
Bencode (pronounced like ''Bee-encode'') is the encoding used by the peer-to-peer file sharing system BitTorrent for storing and transmitting loosely structured data. It supports four different types of values: * byte strings, * integers, * lists, and * dictionaries (associative arrays). Bencoding is most commonly used in torrent files, and as such is part of the BitTorrent specification. These metadata files are simply bencoded dictionaries. Bencoding is simple and (because numbers are encoded as text in decimal notation) is unaffected by endianness, which is important for a cross-platform application like BitTorrent. It is also fairly flexible, as long as applications ignore unexpected dictionary keys, so that new ones can be added without creating incompatibilities. Encoding algorithm Bencode uses ASCII characters as delimiters and digits. * An integer is encoded as i''''e. Leading zeros are not allowed (although the number zero is still represented as "0"). Negative value ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Distributed Hash Table
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. ''Keys'' are unique identifiers which map to particular ''values'', which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures. DHTs form an infrastructure that can be used to build more complex services, such as anycast, cooperative web caching, distributed file systems, domain name services, instant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chunk (information)
A chunk is a fragment of information which is used in many multimedia file formats, such as PNG, IFF, MP3 and AVI. Each chunk contains a header which indicates some parameters (e.g. the type of chunk, comments, size etc.). Following the header is a variable area containing data, which is decoded by the program from the parameters in the header. Chunks may also be fragments of information which are downloaded or managed by P2P programs. In distributed computing, a chunk is a set of data which is sent to a processor or one of the parts of a computer for processing. References See also * Chunking (computing) In computer programming, chunking has multiple meanings. In memory management Typical modern software systems allocate memory dynamically from structures known as heaps. Calls are made to heap-management routines to allocate and free memory. Hea ... {{software-eng-stub Data unit ar:كتلة (معلومات) ca:Chunk es:Chunk eo:Chunk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer File
A computer file is a computer resource for recording data in a computer storage device, primarily identified by its file name. Just as words can be written to paper, so can data be written to a computer file. Files can be shared with and transferred between computers and mobile devices via removable media, networks, or the Internet. Different types of computer files are designed for different purposes. A file may be designed to store an Image, a written message, a video, a computer program, or any wide variety of other kinds of data. Certain files can store multiple data types at once. By using computer programs, a person can open, read, change, save, and close a computer file. Computer files may be reopened, modified, and copied an arbitrary number of times. Files are typically organized in a file system, which tracks file locations on the disk and enables user access. Etymology The word "file" derives from the Latin ''filum'' ("a thread"). "File" was used in the conte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
