Elude Your ISP's BitTorrent Blockade

StonyandCher writes "More and more ISPs are blocking or throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, even if you are downloading copyright free content. Have you been targeted? How can you get around the restrictions? This PC World report shows you a number of tips and tools can help you determine whether you're facing a BitTorrent blockade and, if so, help you get around it."

Re:Australia is lucky

[mrbluze]

We forced the monopolist to open their network and we enforced the laws to keep the competition healthy.

That's true, and activism still works in Australia - except in Tasmania, of course (the place where you see bumper stickers reading "Tasmania, Smell the Corruption").

Article Summary

[complete loony]

Detecting throttling;

• Download something popular
• Call your ISP
• Read their terms of service
• Glasnost [mpi-sws.mpg.de]
• pcapdiff [eff.org]
• Vuze plugin.

Avoiding throttling;

• Enable protocol encryption.
• Change the port number to something other than 6881.
• Tunnel through TOR or some other commercial VPN.

To which I would add, if you know your ISP is injecting fake RST's filter them out with a firewall rule. A little more complex a task than the expected audience of TFA though.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[FooAtWFU]

For what it's worth, the network load induced by BitTorrent can be sufficient to cause (low-quality) cable modems, broadband routers, and similar devices to become flaky, while they are capable of handling the relatively quiescent and straightforward data streams associated with "normal" use.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[BLKMGK]

That may be the hardware and not the ISP. Some modems puke when they get too many connection attempts - Limewire and Bitorrent can cause this behavior. You might want to try a different cable modem.

Re:Article Summary

[pwizard2]

Tunnel through TOR

Part of the reason why Tor is so slow is because people are tunneling downloads through it, which kind of ruins it for everyone else.

Re:Australia is lucky

[hedwards]

The Republican Party has always been the party of big money, cigar-munching industrialists who hire the mobsters that the Democrats didn't get to beat up Democrat-backing union-members and break strikes. It was always free market, industrialist and all that jazz. Lincoln was the first Neo-Con, too -- suspending habaeus corpus in Maryland and locking the state legislature up, invading the Confederacy, etc.

Actually, Lincoln had the constitutional right to revoke the writ of habeas corpus under the US constitution.

W doing so OTOH is completely and in all other ways illegal. There was no rebellion, and as bad as 9/11 was there was no effort by al Quaeda or anybody else to occupy our country.
 

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

This passage comes out of Article I of the US constitution. I don't think anybody other than the biggest partisan can argue that the confederacy wasn't engaged in an act of rebellion. And it is more than a little bit tenuous to suggest that there wasn't a legitimate claim at the time that it was in the interest of public safety to ensure that possible and known southern sympathizers could be kept from returning to the south.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Matt_R]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pointer#Australia [wikipedia.org]

Re:Protest

[uniquegeek]

Not sure about cheques, but credit/debit payments cost the company for each use, plus the manpower and associated costs to process it. There's the reason why stores tag on $0.50 for interac purchase, especially if they're under $10.00.

Re:Article Summary

[FishWithAHammer]

Tunneling through Tor is a really shitty thing to do; it's not made to facilitate your downloading, and you put undue stress on people who are running Tor nodes for you.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Gideon Fubar]

We have jerks here, just like everywhere else. Some of them take to pointing lasers at incoming planes and hovering helicopters. I don't endorse banning the lasers, but then i'm not the kind of guy who thinks it's fun to try to hit the cockpit of a landing 747.

Note, that (iirc) it's only class 3 and 4 lasers that are banned, not all laser pointers.

Re:not me

[complete loony]

For those ISP's with periodic bandwidth caps, there's already a firefox extension called Net Usage [iau5.com].

Re:Protest

[witherstaff]

In the US it's against the merchant policies to tack on extra fees for credit/debit. Visa/MasterCard/Discover/Am Ex/etc all are equal to cash.

But you can give a cash discount. It's wacky and lame and almost no one does that.

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

Note, that (iirc) it's only class 3 and 4 lasers that are banned, not all laser pointers.

Unfortunately green class IIIs are exactly what you need to point out astronomical objects...

Re:Verizon seems alright

[totally bogus dude]

You should be able to set the maximum rate your bittorrent client will upload at. If you set it to 80-90% of your maximum upload speed you should be able to surf and download without problems while it uploads. Experiment and see the performance you get.

You can also do more general traffic shaping, which will maintain a queue at your router and insert 'interactive' traffic before bulk uploads. A bit more complicated to set up but more robust. If you're the only one using your connection though and BT is the only thing you have uploading, using the client's throttle setting is good enough.

The reason it slows down your connection is that as you're downloading anything (e.g. a web page) you need to send acknowledgement packets to the sender before it'll send the next packets containing the content. Since you're uploading at full pelt, those acknowledgement packets have to wait behind the larger file upload packets before they get sent. Traffic shaping / prioritization lets them skip to the head of the queue.

Re:Australia is lucky

[QuantumG]

The law was against having them with no legitimate use.. if you have a legitimate use then there's no law against having them. You'd know this if you had read anything about the law in question and you would have read something about it if you cared, so clearly you don't.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in my case (Comcast-New England), it's definitely not the modem. Because it used to work fine. Then all the Comcast throttling stories came out and I laughed at the people it happened to. Then it came to my area and it wasn't funny anymore. Same modem, blatant throttling.

It makes webpages take 10 seconds to load while using bittorrent. Not the usual extra latency from using your upstream. Slower than dial-up type latency. Though I did get around the actual bittorrent seeding part of the throttling, by sending the tracker communications (not the actual data) through Tor, and turning on encryption for the rest. But still can't reasonably browse at the same time.

Re:not me

[number11]

For those ISP's with periodic bandwidth caps, there's already a firefox extension called Net Usage.

For those who want to keep track of bandwidth from other programs as well (or maybe just aren't in .au, whose ISPs Net Usage customizes for), there's NetMeter [metal-machine.de], which tracks all traffic through your network interface.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[whydna]

Agreed. I'd specifically recommend the "Wonder Shaper" http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ [lartc.org] from the kind, albiet insane, folks at the Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site.

Careful though; spending too much time there might cause mental grief (for example, go read Section 12.1.3 of the LARTC HOWTO [lartc.org]), but I digress.

On the other hand, if you're fluent in this and/or like working in the kernel networking stack, shoot me an email/message, cause I've got a fun job for you.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Billly Gates]

I use AT&T dsl and my router was fine with bittorrents until a few months ago.

As a test I downloaded just one torrent with only a few k per second. My wifes latency in wow jumpes well into the the thousands. I tried about 10 torrents all pumping hundreds of k a second and it makes no difference.

The second I turn off bit torrent my connection mysteriously becomes better.

As a result my wife wont let me use bit torrents anymore and it pisses me off. It seems the whole connection is throttled with just a single torrent and this happens even if only a few k per second is downloaded. We paid for the highest speed possible for our internet service. I think I am no longer going to use it. Whats the point if I have to use only low bandwith applications?

Re:Australia is lucky

[fractoid]

Some tools ordered high-power (up to a Watt or two, I think) lasers off some website and then pointed them at planes because planes are big and far away and going "yay I can make a dot on a plane" is fun. The pilots, however, thought variations of either "oh shit the world just went bright green and now I can't see" or "we have incoming at two o'clock, prepare evasive maneuvers".

And in its usual hysterical-nanny way, the government decided to ban ALL laser pointers because apparently it's easier to do that than to try and outlaw 'stupid'.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Kjella]

All the oil companies want us to do is pay for the $4/gallon of gas while beliving all the "oil is scarce" nonsense.

Producing oil, as in actually creating oil is a slow process over millions of years and we're pumping it out of the ground like there's no tomorrow. I have a little problem saying "scarce" about something we pump out 35,000,000 barrels/day of, but do you really think this is something we can just ramp up production of as we please? The cheap kind is running out, and you can hope we have some expensive oil but...

Re:not me

[Constantine XVI]

The latest releases of DD-WRT, and a few other custom router firmwares, have a built-in bandwith log for your entire network.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[mrbcs]

I have a little problem saying "scarce" about something we pump out 35,000,000 barrels/day of, but do you really think this is something we can just ramp up production of as we please?

Last I checked it was 86 mbpd. http://www.worldoil.com/INFOCENTER/STATISTICS_DETAIL.ASP?STATFILE=_WORLDOILPRODUCTION [worldoil.com]

Not scarce, just not as much as we're demanding.

Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP

[codepunk]

Actually having worked for a ISP the heavy users are way less than 5 percent probably closer to
1% or less. Much easier to just get rid of those couple of customers than to filter and or take
calls about slowness on the network caused by a couple of these users.

Re:In lieu of uploading....

[awarrenfells]

There have been false positives, yes. People uploading files to ftp for backup, or people uploading and/or sending images for business and work purposes are other causes I have encountered that have gotten people's accounts red flagged.