Idolator

Have you ever borrowed a hard-to-find CD from your roommate, burned it, and then wondered what it would be like if the process took 52 hours? Do you enjoy pornographic pop-up ads? Do you enjoy lots of pornographic pop-up ads? If so, then you're ready for BitTorrent, the most simultaneously enthralling and frustrating music-geek discovery since Robert Pollard.

Name: BitTorrent
Where To Find It: http://www.bittorrent.com/index.html
High-falutin' description: Peer-to-Peer Data Distributor
Actual Purpose: Scamming albums, concert bootlegs, and other large chunks of digital media

BitTorrent's technology allows large files to be shared in pieces via a give-and-take platform: When you're torrenting a file, the information is being downloaded and uploaded at the same time. It's like communism! Sort of. And because it swaps lots of data while using only a little bandwidth, BitTorrent is ideal for grabbing large files.

How To Use It

To start, you'll need a BitTorrent client; you'll then be able to download torrents, which essentially work by piecing together bits of a file from users all around the Internet. The clearinghouses for those bits are known as trackers, and the Web is full of them: Torrentspy has plenty of legit releases, and for bootleg concert recordings, check out Dime A Dozen, although snagging an account there can be tricky. (Also, its mascot looks like the Hamburglar.)

After you search for the file...

...look for a torrent that has a lot of "seeders" — people who have the torrent you want in its entirety — and download it:

You'll then want to open the torrent file in your BitTorrent application.

When you're done, don't close your torrenting application right away; this way, you can seed the file, and help out those seekers who come after you. (Some tracker sites actually require your ratio between uploaded material and downloaded material to remain at a certain threshhold—and if you don't share and share alike, you're banned.)

Now for the drawbacks. Since a torrent's download speed relies on how many other users have those files, obscurities' download time can be very, very long (will somebody please seed that Prince-Miles Davis 1987 live show for us?). Also, the MPAA and the RIAA are both monitoring BitTorrent hubs, so be warned: If you get too crazy, you may wake up and find Lars Ulrich staring over your bed. (Especially if you're blond and Danish.) And we're not kidding about the porn: Many publically open tracker sites seem to make their money by selling as many XXX ads as possible, so make sure you don't download your Christy Canyon clip collection in front of the kids!