There are of course some bad clients out there, but there are also some clients that can be trusted for torrenting, those usually are open source and make it onto linux distribution repositories. Can one get hurt by torrenting though? yes, if one downloads something bad, or download a bad client, or don't update the client when security issues happen, or get into trouble with isp/law for something, and so forth.
It is also great that the wayback machine/internet archive has asstr.org.
Though I rather we all have a copy of most of asstr.org so we don't put all eggs in one basket