May 28 2006

Dear torrent content creators

Segmenting content across rar files made sense back in the modem transfer days, when if your connection bombed during download, the most you'd lose would be a single chunk instead of the whole thing. It also was nice to individually checksum each piece, so you were sure you weren't downloading a humongous image that just ended up being unusable. I know, I know - it even felt leet to validate checksums and rejoin rar.

It's not leet anymore. It's not even worthwhile. If you're the original seed of a rar segmented torrent, you don't understand the concept. Torrents automatically checksum each chunk of a transfer, and segmenting is done at the protocol level. Stop rar'ing for purposes other than compression. It's stupid and annoying.

Thank you.