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."

Australia is lucky

[mrbluze]

.. kind of lucky, anyway.

We have a website [whirlpool.net.au] which provides pretty detailed information on what the ISP's are up to. Because there are so many members, I think the ISP's are sitting up and paying attention to a degree, because it's really not that expensive to change providers now.

So here it's just a matter of choose your carrier and tell the other telco's to piss off.

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

[JohnnyComeLately]

My PC can run for months/weeks/hours of being on and have no problems with the connection. The moment I run LimeWire, the problems begin. 9 times out of 10 I end up having to reboot my cable modem to get back on-line....despite the fact my cable modem shows normal activity.

Re:not me

[UncleTogie]

now if i started running a bittorrent client all the time i would imagine my ISP would throttle my connection back severely and i could understand why...

So if your car manufacturer kept track of how many miles you'd driven, then limited either the speed or distance you can travel, would THAT be OK?

I'm sick of the "now you can download movies and music" commercials that say you can do these things, but don't mention limits other than POSSIBLY in fine print... at the bottom of the screen... in a 2-second flash... in the middle of a paragraph.

Either sell the service and back it, or don't bother. Sticking it to the customers 'cause you oversold your bandwidth is about as obnoxious as it gets without bein' illegal.

Anti-trust?

[hyades1]

It will be interesting to see if a major ISP steps forward with an offer to provide completely unthrottled service, perhaps at a premium price.

Would an across-the-board failure to offer such an obvious consumer winner provide grounds for charges of collusion or racketeering?

Verizon seems alright

[dave562]

I've had pretty good luck with Verizon DSL. For a moment I was considering switching to cable but with all of the horror stories I've seen around here regarding bitTorrent clients I've stayed away from cable. The only time I ever had a problem is when I was seeding some popular, copyrighted music that I pulled down off of a site that I found via a Google Search. It was kind of creepy. As long as I was seeding the file, my transfer rate went down to near zero. Once I stopped, it went back up to my full speed. I tried it out a few times over a couple of days just to make sure that I wasn't imagining things and sure enough, every time I seeded that one file my connection slowed to a crawl.

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a long time since you could do that. There have been court cases establishing the right of a company to refuse small change.

However, what you can do is to pay each charge on the bill with a separate cheque, on separate days. One day pay the basic cable, the next day the box rental, the next day, the remote control rental, then the FCC charges, et cetera. And if they ever screw it up and re-charge you for something you've already have paid (which guaranteed won't take long, since their system isn't set up to handle itemized payments), put the money from then on into an escrow account and only send them slips showing the money has been deposited, pending them fixing their error. If they close you down, sue them -- there's no way you're going to lose if you can document that you made all the payments until they started sending erroneous bills, and continued to place money in escrow until they could present a correct bill.

Or, just abandon the service, since "service" doesn't include service.

In lieu of uploading....

[awarrenfells]

While it does defeat the purpose of file sharing to a degree, but I have found that ISP's can only really detect file sharing through your upload to download ratio. I work for an $ISP, and we red flag accounts with an upload equal to or greater than their download, which sucks for some customers who upload large amounts of information to other servers or sites. I don't agree with it, but I have to pay the bills :P

Re:Australia is lucky

[bsDaemon]

You act like we ever had control in the first place. The Democrat Party has a history as far back as the 1840s (at least) of dragooning Irish immigrants and mobsters into their party, offering them city jobs if they'd vote right and beat up anyone who didn't. Once they had the Irish hooked, they moved on to Blacks and now Hispanics... Northern Dems, anyway. Southern Dems are the party of slavery and the KKK, lest we forget.

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.

It wasn't until the 1960s when the Southern Democrats switched to the Republican (Carpetbagger) Party, for some reason which still makes absolutely no sense that the illusion formed that anyone was actually a Republican.

American politics has always been about whose gang is bigger -- just like Roman politics. Don't like it? Tough. I highly doubt that it's that much different in the rest of the world. You Europeans just have smaller parties and more of them -- but probably no more parties than your country has football teams, because your political lynch gangs are just called "football hooligans."

Rome's new mayor is of the National Alliance Party, which either is or is allied with MSI and Alessandra Mussolini, Playboy Bunny and Fascist MEP. Boys Roma, one of the local hooligan squads, backs that party.

Glasgow has battle lines drawn between Rangers (UDA) and Celts (IRA) and has in the past been a spill-over for that whole mess.

Of course, Latin American political mobs just kill each other outright with bombs and machine guns and deal drugs.
----

My point is, perhaps the only thing we've lost in America is the illusion that "we" ever had a say. But frankly, no one else is any better off either, really.

Except the Swiss.

Re:Protest

[griffeymac]

Great, and then I burn through books of checks at four times the usual rate. Exactly how does paying the cable company in installments inflict harm on them? They get the check for part of the bill, and they reduce that amount from the total amount owed. They get another check, and reduce the amount from the total amount owed. As long as all the checks get there before the due date, they don't care how many checks they get--they have a whole department of people that do nothing but process the checks received in the mail every day.

Switch ISP

[Joce640k]

My ISP started messing around with this, I called them to ask about it and they flat-out denied it.

When I looked on the message boards and everybody else was in the same boat, I called again. This time they said they were throttling, but only at peak hours (not true - but that was the official line).

Next day I called their competitor. As soon as the line was installed (2 days) I called and told them I was switching, and to who.

Re:Protest

[uniquegeek]

The merchant rules (in that respect) are the same in Canada, except that businesses blatantly say it costs extra to use plastic. The policy doesn't seem to be enforced by the credit companies. Something you'll also find is being polite but firm in a support call will often yield positive results. You're racking up their call time (a major metric that phone support is graded on), but they have no way of getting rid of you because you haven't given them a reason to. If they dropped you, they would be reprimanded. i.e. Don't let them off the phone. I've gotten a higher-insterest savings account this way, and reduced my Mastercard rate by 11% (the Mastercard call took 90 minutes, but it was worth it). A good way of dealing with this with your ISP is to arm yourself with techinical information, and ask technical questions. Ask questions about the CONTRACT YOU SIGNED, not necessarily the contract they assumed you have accepted (new versions forced upon you without consent). Remain polite and clam, and ask for definite answers. I wonder what would happen if you got hard numbers for a max cap and asked for a pro-rated refund for months you didn't all your data transfer. Oh boy, you could come up with some really fun questions...

Re:They already do

[bogjobber]

That's bullshit too. I can get a badass hosted server with a dedicated, super-high quality 100mbps very, very close to guaranteed bandwidth for prices like that. For the price most people pay for cable subscription I can get a dedicated shitty server with 10mbps shared connection, still very high quality. Obviously residential areas have a built-in disadvantage, but shouldn't it be in the same ballpark? With the UTOPIA [utopianet.org] project here in Utah, I can get a 50/50mbps connection for $60/month that doesn't censor or throttle. Other than the will to organize and a significant tech-savvy population (hardly unique), what does suburban Utah have that most of the country doesn't?

It's not technically infeasible in America. Maybe in BFE but not in anything resembling a large city, let alone high-density cities. We're the kind of people with the knowledge to change this. Let's get off our collective asses and stop accepting this kind of service!

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

Good for you, trusting person that you are.

I have no problem at all with pointers being illegal to point at an aircraft. When a cop has the power to arrest you for having one on your person, there's something seriously wrong. Even if you wish to trust your police to understand what you're doing with it, he's got one more thing to nail you with if he's corrupt. It's his word against yours. Yes, if he's corrupt he can claim you were pointing it at aircraft, but having that extra onus to prove it is exactly what you need to have a society that doesn't encourage corruption. I've also met some cops who are really pieces of work and wouldn't be able to tell a dobsonian telescope from a bong.

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

[jimthehorsegod]

I've experienced something very similar myself. I was using a T-Mobile 3G Datacard (PCMCIA jobbie). I'd agreed to look at someone's PC on my way back from a business trip. I realised halfway through the drive that I didn't have any CDs with me, so I pulled over, fired up my laptop, found a torrent for Knoppix and set it downloading whilst I drive the rest of the way (which, by the way, I felt was cool.)

It hadn't finished by the time I got there, so I let iust carry on while firing up a browser to look in the Internets for clues to cause of the problem. Only thing was, I couldn't connect to a single webpage - everything timed out. I killed azureus, and immediately everything was fine again. Let Azureus run with a 10k/sec cap, then tried a 5k/sec cap and it bust the internets once more.

That's far more annoying that a bandwidth cap or usage limits - actually breaking *all* connections while you're using p2p is downright rude.

Re:Printable version

[rajkiran_g]

People need to stop linking to printable versions... you're screwing the host by consuming their bw without giving them the courtesy of receiving a banner impression from your visit. I'm looking at you AdBlock folks too... You shouldn't penalize the sites that try to use unobtrusive advertising. That PC World site doesn't have roadblocks or expanding ads, they're fairly normal.

Yeah, right. A fairly normal site, with the actual content needlessly split into two pages and compressed into a 260px narrow column.