[mingus725]

Regarding integrity of bitorrent downloads . . .

I'm a bit concerned whether we have the necessary clarity on verifying the download integrity. I have little technical expertise in this area; I'm too ignorant to contest any of the above comments. But looking at the Ktorrent settings and forums on this topic, it seems that (a) chunks are verified as downloaded but (b) there is an option to check the download once complete. Why would there need to be the latter if the former is adequate? How is the latter different from the former (because it has now been written to disk, whereas the chunks are verified on-the-fly)? I also seem to remember reading somewhere that not all clients do validations, or do so only as an option? If so, should certain (likely Windows) clients be recommended by name? Or are there other reasons to recommend particular clients?

With 11.0 we got hammered here pretty hard with questions/complaints that were due to bad downloads/burns, taking away valuable time better spent on other issues. My point is that there needs to be a comprehensive while still understandable explanation on how to get the user to valid media - and we need it to be precisely correct.

By the way, indirectly related, today I did a LiveCD media check that reported OK on a CD that failed the K3B verification test a few minutes earlier. I've suggested the K3B test in the past as a compliment to the media's own self-test, but this has me nervous now.