Describing Ares to someone without any knowledge of what filesharing is difficult. It is not a task made difficult by any lack of brain capacity, but because it is concept that is so fundamentally different from anything they’ve ever experienced before.

The idea is based around a little file called a torrent which is downloaded from the web (or sent by email or whatever). This torrent file doesn’t contain any of the good stuff like music of movies (or whatever) but it does contain all the information necessary for your version of Ares to get onto the network and find all the good stuff.

What your Ares soft does is to find those computers on the network that have the files or bits of the files that you want. Once it knows where they are it begins to download them all to your computer. Once you have a full set you have a working file. Winner! Once you’ve got a full music file you can play it as you would any other music file. While it is on your computer others can download from your bits of this file that they require. This is a proper give and take situation which may or may not leave you with a warm fuzzy feeling.