[Novalug] How safe is bittorrent?

[Beartooth]

 	I finally found a way to use that I could handle, thanks 
to a discovery on a list, plus invaluable help from my local ISP. 
I'm very impressed.

 	But I'm also somewhat dubious for two reasons. The first 
way I tried (unsuccessfully, despite the ISP) was with Opera 9.10 
-- and I noticed that it asked "Do you really want to do this?" 
That's not exactly reassuring. And sure enough, what my ISP did 
for me was to spell out exactly how to make holes in my hardware 
firewall (the one on the router, which comes from them).

 	Btw, I also tried "gtorrentviewer %f" as well as azureus 
and bittorrent. What worked was aria2. With FC6, you simply 
command "yum install aria2" (as root of course) and then, again 
as root, command "aria2c <URL>" (note the c!), where the URL is 
that of the page on which you would click to start a bittorrent 
download. It found the open ports, even though its own name 
wasn't on any, and did it all; all I had to do was burn media.

 	SO, to get back to my question, worry, or whatever : am 
I, as an eternal and inherent subtechnoid, taking a lot of risk 
this way?

 	Should I maybe tell the router to allow only my most 
expendable machine to use bittorrent? Restrict it to certain 
hours? Open those gaps only for a little longer than I'm using it 
myself??

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, Neo-Redneck Double Retiree,
Not Quite Clueless Linux Power User 
I have precious (very precious) little idea where up is.