Azureus is a very very interesting project just now.

for those in the know, BitTorrent is the best way to get high traffic files served from places that may not neccesarily have the central bandwidth to do so.

BitTorrent is occasionally accused of just being for pirates. It's true that BitTorrent is a bigger player in piracy than Napster ever was, but besides that, it has many legit uses. VCRs have probably been used to 'pirate' more tv shows than every computer program put together, but have enough other uses to keep the corps from their door. I have similar hopes that BitTorrent will simply be too useful to ban.

Azureus is a java client for BitTorrent, a multi torrent manager. It has many good point from a management perspective, and is a good example of good use of Java.

Azureus has just upgraded to 2.3.0.0, and a bounty it is. Besides the plugins, the protocol upgrade, and other niceties, it introduces a feature strangely familiar to those following the demise of SuprNova.org.

(For those not following such minutia, SuprNova.org was a torrent tracker site, which served many many people. It was a nest of piracy and old game files, videos, and a lot more. After it was shut down by mysterious persons, a bold new initiative was announced, a way to use BitTorrent with NO trackers. Which would make such a network impossible to prosecute, save by going after each and every user. Exeem was announced with some fanfare, which dulled to dislike once it became clear it was stuffed with adware)

Azureus now supports decentralised torrents. And also continuing once hosted torrents, when they lose their tracker.

I have no idea how that will work, but I only hope they will work with other torrent clients and possibly update the original torrent spec to ensure standards and interopability. I wouldn't want it dependent on even so good an open-source client as azureus.

Of course, azureus continues to work with plain old torrents off of trackers, which I continue to use it for almost exclusively. I just got the latest version of Knoppix via torrent very quickly, considering it's near 700 mb size. Very spicy indeed.