Why would anyone want to keep conecction wide open?

[1Chris]

I kept hearing about bittorrent at school. I'm not into file shareing, but after a quarter of hearing about it, I decided to give it a try. I only use legit software, downloaded 3 songs years a go (never since).

I'm not into file sharing but my reason is to get a little experience in ways people are using computers today.

I have been reading up on it. I am shocked to see in order to make things work like torrents are supposed to, you need to open or disable your router, turn off your firewall.

Not only that, but you need to leave your computer on. What kind of **** is this? Why would anyone want to keep a high speed connection wide open, without a firewall or a router?

Am I missing something? Why do people do this?
Thank you,
Chris.

[BipolarBill]

in order to make things work like torrents are supposed to, you need to open or disable your router, turn off your firewall.

Not true. You must open certain *ports* in both the firewall and the router. Thats not new or unusual. If you take the time to check your "Windows Firewall" exceptions in Control Panel, you'll find many "leaks" already in place.

[WBWatson]

It's called port forwarding.

In home networking, port forwarding, also called port mapping or punch-through, enables you to create a permanent translation entry that maps a protocol port on your gateway machine to an IP address and protocol port on your private LAN.

It's a transparent process, meaning network clients cannot see that port forwarding is being done. This process enables you to run a public Internet service on a machine that is otherwise hidden from the Internet by your gateway.

Port forwarding may also be used to aggregate traffic from an application that uses several ports for transactions and consolidate it into one port for reporting the total traffic identified with that application.

Edit to add:

With most bit torrents sites like the one I use once you've uploaded to the site or "seed" the file you want to share others will download your file and seed that file as well. Over time you'll have a bunch of people seeding the file. I have only left my bit torrent client open for a few hours until the file gets seeded. Then I close it down. I don't leave my machine on for days.