[edit] About Bittorrent

Bittorrent is a way to quickly and efficiently distribute large amounts of information.

You need a bittorrent application to download the data available here. We provide a list below.

[edit] Open Source (and free) Bittorrent clients:

[edit] Azureus

• Vuze (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Instructions

[edit] Libtorrent

• LibTorrent (Linux, BSD)

[edit] Transmission

• Transmission (Linux, Mac, BSD) Very popular amongst Mac users and easy to use.

[edit] KTorrent

• KTorrent (Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD)

[edit] uTorrent

• µTorrent (Windows, Mac) Not open source but free to use. Quick, light weight and easy to use with good support in their forums.

[edit] Structure of the Torrents

Upon browsing the torrent you'll find that the directory/file structure will look like:

911datasets.org/[datasetname]/[actualdata]
or 
911datasets.org/[Name of Release Group]/[Release Number]/[actualdata]

For example a file from Release 31 has the complete path:
   /911datasets.org/International_Center_for_911_Studies_NIST_FOIA/Release_31/Release 31/42A0355 - G31D1/1686_large.jpg

Where everything after Release_31 is the exact structure received from (in this case) NIST.

[edit] Links to more information about Bittorrent

• A Beginners Guide to Bittorrent
• BitTorrent basics
• The protocol explained (for the geekier crowd)
• For those of you who are visual learners: a great graphic visualization for how BitTorrent works.

[edit] Issues

[edit] The torrent is ginormous and I lack the space on my hard drive to host it!

This is a common misconception, said in another way: If the torrent is X GB then you need X GB free on your hard drive to download it.

This is only partly true. Many of the torrents here are tens or hundreds of GB. If you want to download all X GB then you do need X GB free space on your hard drive, but if you just want a single smaller file that is contained in the torrent you can instruct your bittorrent client to only download that individual file. For example, if there's a 900GB torrent, and inside it is 5MB file that you want, you only need to download the 5MB file. How to do this varies between bittorrent clients. Inside your bittorrent client, there will be a spot that allows you to browse the file structure of the torrent and see the name and size of each file. You can pick a file to focus on and the bittorrent client will download that file.

[edit] Slow Download

Normally, bittorrent is very fast (assuming more than one or two people are seeding the torrent). If you find that it takes a long time for your .torrent to start downloading, or if it's slow but you are on a broadband connection, you most likely need to "open your bittorrent ports". How to do this depends on the specifics of your computer and network, but in general, if you for example use a wireless router, you need to configure your router to forward the tcp ports used by your bittorrent client to your computer's local IP address from your router.

Instructions on how to forward ports on many popular routers.

DHT and PEX

To find peers in a swarm when trackers are down just enable DHT and PEX in your Bittorrent client.

DHT and PEX explained

[edit] I want to pick and choose specific files within a torrent instead of downloading the whole thing

For BitTorrent or uTorrent, you can select which files to download when you initially open the .torrent file.

If you wish to change which files to download after that, you can select items from the "Files" tab and right-click to change priority (options are: high, normal, low, or don't download)

Other BitTorrent clients should also have similar functionality.

[edit] My Bittorrent client is reporting that one of the 911dataset torrents is Corrupt!

We've been getting feedback that some users of Miro have reported the larger torrents below as corrupt. They are not corrupt. Please try utorrent or vuze instead. If you receive an error message saying

"'Error: The requested operation cannot be perfomed on a file with a user-mapped section open

Just resume the torrent and it should continue downloading fine.

[edit] Windows error when trying to open files

Some file names in this release are rather long, and Windows may have an error when trying to open them; this problem can be minimized/eliminated by making sure your Bittorrent Client is using a folder near the root folder of your computer to download the data to. For example, you may need to make the folder c:\bittorrent_downloads and configure your bittorrent client to use that path for saving torrents.

[edit] My internet connection is slow since I started to seed the torrent

If you are using a relatively recent bittorrent client, this should not be a issue, but if it is, it's easy to fix. What is happening most likely is that you are using all of your allowed "upstream" bandwidth... and thus there is none left to make the upstream requests required surf the web (making DNS queries ect). To resolve this, open your bittorrent client which is currently seeding (thank you) and note how much upload bandwidth it is using... most likely a number between 100k/s and 2MB/s.... then configure your bittorrent client to limit the upload rate to 75% of that number. Since your maximum download rate is much higher than your upload rate, other web operations should remain unhindered.

[edit] Send us data

There are many ways to obtain useful and previously unavailable information. Most of the material here was obtained using the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) process.

It's easier than you think.

Please read http://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/Rummaging_2010.pdf to get started.

[edit] Donate

Money is a constant and critical limiting factor. Our _immediate_ needs include roughly $10k $5k in hardware and another $10k in software development. Please consider making a donation.

Donations also accepted @ http://911blogger.com (scroll down a bit to find the donate buttons)

You can also send bitcoins to 1LU5YksUf4MEdeMEDmdv6hWAeEVSc1jrFv

[edit] Help Seed the Torrents

Can't stress this enough. We are talking about large quantities of information. Help us host and distribute it. Check out 911datasets.org HOWTO and BitTorrent_HOWTO.

[edit] People to post the torrents on the major indexes

No need to ask first. Feel free to do this anytime.

[edit] Mediawiki syntax/layout helpers/expert

Folks who are interested cleaning up the site, making it look better, making it run better. Here is the list of currently installed extensions

[edit] Mediawiki and BitTorrent

We represent the file structure of each torrent in the wiki. Clicking on a file will (eventually) bring the user to a form where they can add structured metadata via SMW forms.

For example, structured metadata that could be added to a video file would be organized into events. Each event would have optional and required properties:

1. Start/Stop timecodes of event in file
2. News Network
3. Reporter/Cameraman
4. Date/Time
5. Location (with different levels of granularity)
6. Related events (events would have unique (and descriptive) id's and be selectable via some interface)
7. Tags
8. More fields could be added at any time.
9. Related Events

UPDATE: Major progress on this front. -jkeogh

[edit] CSS/Graphical designer

Someone who has a knack for design and can help make this look less like a vanilla mediawiki site.