I personally think a .torrent is best for downloading very large files (or sets of files). Of course, you do need at least one seeder to be on most of the time... But if the package gets popular enough, you'll always have l enough seeders to fill in the gaps.
Regarding its (i)legal aspects, the protocol is perfectly legal and actually used by several perfectly legit companies (e.g. many if not most Linux distros).
About the content, that's a whole other aspect... And it does depend on the initial seeder mainly - but also on the people downloading, of course. But
if it's legal for archmage101 to put it up on filefront, it's certainly just as legal for him to make it available as a torrent.And that pretty much summons it up.
Regarding the installation of a program, there are plenty out there which are freeware and completely safe (e.g BitTorrent, the original client; µTorrent; Deluge, the one I use; etc). Curiously, I think Vuze has now turned into a bit of a malware-gate... (it wouldn't stop nagging my firewall when I installed it and I remember the uninstall did NOT do a clean job...) Vuze was just fine when it was Azureus, but now I don't trust it anymore.
Then again, if you want the flexibility of downloading a package in small pieces at a time and resume later, you'll most likely need to install some other program too, a download-manager such as Filezilla... (I'm talking Windows here; Linux distros actually usually come with a pre-installed bittorrent client...
).
All of this said, if it's too much of an hassle or I'm the only one interested in having a torrent for GUE, then I'm just fine with downloading it the regular way.
Cheers!
