Im certainly not a noob but im a noob when it comes to torrents?! I don’t really understand how they work but I was wondering, when I download openSUSE for example is it possible in any way to recieve malware, viruses or whatever. I trust openSUSE but is it possible for hackers to put viruses into the download or something? This is almost more of a question about torrents and less about linux but i would only use torrents when downloading distros.
Thanks,
-Joseph
Download torrents from trusted / known sources
Software.openSUSE.org
O great! So there’s no chance of viruses if it’s a trustd source!
The chance of Virus’ in Linux in virtually 0 anyway. And even if you download a virus it’s probably for windows, it will not work in Linux. There a lots of threads on this in the forum.
Well I was actually talking about viruses on the torrent but ok, thanks!
You can do a md5sum check afterward to be sure that your ISO file is not corrupted or moddified by a third party.
You can find these md5sums on the download page
On Linux for example simply type in a terminal
md5sum /path/to/download/openSUSE-11.1-DVD-i586.iso
On windows you will need to install a 3rd party tool to count that sum and the syntax may be different.
greetings
I’m pretty sure the .torrent files contain irreversible hashes of the files or parts of the files, and that the sharing applications all dump anything that doesn’t match. This means that as long as you trust the creator of the .torrent file and the torrent sharing application you are using, you should be okay because you don’t have to worry about one of the peers poisoning the data.