Elude Your ISP's BitTorrent Blockade 308
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."
Glasnost (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Glasnost (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Glasnost (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Printable version (Score:4, Funny)
Australia is lucky (Score:5, Interesting)
.. 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.
Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
pot, meet kettle.
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Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Informative)
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'.
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Well, it IS easier to ban a gadget than "outlaw stupid". Look at the US which tried the "outlaw stupidity" method with regrds to gun control. Isn't working very effectively, IMHO. Most other contries just outlawed the gadget rather trying to make people smarter, laudable though that is in abstract.
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However, what has that to do with this discussion?
Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Funny)
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(or, in my case, assuming above normal intelligence
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speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again?
I shall have to assume you're an American, because trying to score points off such a triviality as that while your own political system is rogering you every which way would be exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from one. We might not have laser pointers (note: that whole debacle was in one state, and it was only for laser pointers up to a certain level of dangerousness, and noone here even gives a shit about it anyway because we don't see the need to own laser pointers), but I'm glad we're not in the s
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GO BO + KO.
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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 wh
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Note, that (iirc) it's only class 3 and 4 lasers that are banned, not all laser pointers.
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Unfortunately green class IIIs are exactly what you need to point out astronomical objects...
Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Australia is lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Australia is lucky (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to start with the party and take control at a much earlier stage.
In america by the time the voting for a candidate in either major party takes place, you've already lost to the corporations.
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The Republican Party has always been the party of big money, cigar-munching indust
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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 b
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They weren't rebelling
Fine point for arguing, I know.
Canada is basically monopolized too (Score:4, Insightful)
Canada too (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello! The ISP's cannot provide the indicated level of services due to the interference of a third party. Screw loss of business, that's a pretty major way of screwing the customers, who now have absolutely zero choice for ISP's who aren't handing it to them up the tailpipe (Rogers, the non-DSL ISP, also throttles). So is it fair that customers aren't "leaving" because they're getting equally screwed elsewhere?
When I last spent time in Aus, I was amazed by how closely they kept tabs on their politicians and policies. North America in general could learn a lot from them in that regard.
Switch ISP (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That's nice. You paid $5 for a, what?....15 year old movie? Some people would rather not pay $30 for a movie that just came out, though.
ISPs are obligated to deliver on their promises. If
The basic problem here is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The basic problem here is ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The basic problem here is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, monopolies are much like oppressive governments, they try to make the public not think. But to just exist and "consume" whatever crap they throw at us.
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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...
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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:The basic problem here is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Protest (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Protest (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Protest (Score:4, Informative)
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:Protest (Score:4, Insightful)
The VISA Merchant Rules [64.233.167.104] (Google cache - I'm having problems with the real link) on Page 15 says that they can't charge extra for a credit card transaction, but CAN charge a "convenience fee" (wink wink), but there are a bunch of rules on when they're allowed to do this. They're probably in compliance with all of them, but there's a small chance they've messed up on this one: "The customer must be given a opportunity to cancel prior to completion of the transaction."
Re:Protest (Score:4, Funny)
Did you miss out some crucial bit of information in your post?
I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 si
Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" (Score:5, Informative)
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- Find out what your upstream bandwidth is and limit your uploads to half of that. Better yet start off with 4kb upstream and increase it if you don't have problems after half an hour. You may find you're saturating your upstream connection which makes it hard for requests and control data to go upstream.
- Try a different bittorrent client. For instance you might find uTorrent works well, but Azureus brings your net connection to its knees.
Anti-trust? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
They already do (Score:5, Funny)
Its an obvious consumer winner!
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Much of this wouldn't be an issue if the FCC had the balls to demand that media companies actually observe a meaningful level of service and have enough bandwidth to reasonably cover their promises. That doesn't mean 100%, that would be terribly wasteful, but enough to ensure that when everybody's likely to be on that things are still quick.
If
Verizon seems alright (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Verizon seems alright (Score:4, Informative)
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:Verizon seems alright (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Don't elude...get a different ISP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
ISP (Score:5, Insightful)
rather well. He does not go out of his way to regulate what people do
on the network until it causes a issue. Bit Torrent is a bandwidth hog
and attempts to evade filtering rather well. If he encounters issues
caused by a Bit Torrent user he just hands them their money back
for the month and drops them as a customer. This keeps the rest of the
network clean and the other customers happy. The profit margin on each
connection is so very thin that it just does not pay to mess with this
extremely small portion of the customer base.
Re:ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, you can set a low rate limit in your torrent client, and/or set it to stop seeding once it reaches a certain share ratio, and you'll only use a moderate amount of bandwidth.
There's absolutely no need to treat BitTorrent differently from any other application. You don't need to use "filtering"; just limit bandwidth. If a customer is using too much bandwidth, charge him for the overage or lower his cap. It doesn't matter whether he's running BitTorrent, LimeWire, or just sending a lot of emails: all that matters is his total usage.
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BitTorrent only "hogs" as much bandwidth as the human user causes it to. It's no different in that sense from any other application: other P2P systems, YouTube, email, whatever. If you want to spend all day uploading email attachments at full speed, you can do that, and you'll use just as much bandwidth as if you were seeding torrents at full speed.
You know, you might be theoretically right here, but I honestly don't think you could (and certainly not in any remotely realistic workload) max out any DSL/Cable/+ connection doing email. BitTorrent does manage to EASILY complete max out your upload and download speeds. Don't forget that many bittorrent clients automatically (by default!) adjust their upload and download rates to maximize their rates, and maximize their bandwidth usage.
On the other hand, you can set a low rate limit in your torrent client, and/or set it to stop seeding once it reaches a certain share ratio, and you'll only use a moderate amount of bandwidth.
There's absolutely no need to treat BitTorrent differently from any other application. You don't need to use "filtering"; just limit bandwidth. If a customer is using too much bandwidth, charge him for the overage or lower his cap. It doesn't matter whether he's running BitTorrent, LimeWire, or just sending a lot of emails: all that matters is his total usage.
The difference is that it's exceedingly rare--virtually impossible ev
Re:ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
It's stupid for a few reasons. One reason is that it puts the cart before the horse: the network is there to serve users, not the other way around. The public works department needs to adapt to the fact that drivers want to go to the beach, and ISPs need to adapt to the fact that their customers want to share files.
Another reason is that it's just not a very effective solution. Filtering one specific application is more difficult and costly than imposing an overall bandwidth cap, and it sets off an arms race as new versions of the application evade the filters, and new versions of the filters detect the application again. And if the filter ever becomes 100% effective against one application, people will just switch to another one, starting the whole cycle over.
If people are using too much bandwidth, then restrict their bandwidth usage or charge them for it. It's just that simple. The only reason ISPs are wasting their time with these filters is so they can keep advertising an impossibly high level of service, knowing that none of their customers will actually be able to use it.
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In a "realistic workload", probably not. But you could certainly put your email client in offline mode, queue up a few thousand emails with big attachments, and then send them all at once. Presto: you're now using up as much bandwidth as you possibly can, at least until the queue is emptied.
Actually I really doubt that IMAP/POP would manage to saturate any connection. You might be able to fill a slow upload speed, but my guess is server latencies would significantly limit what you can do. Not to mention in your scenario, your download amount is not going to be that substantial.
In a "realistic workload", probably not. But you could certainly put your email client in offline mode, queue up a few thousand emails with big attachments, and then send them all at once. Presto: you're now using up as much bandwidth as you possibly can, at least until the queue is emptied.
More like clearing the 18 wheeler trucks off the main road to relieve traffic congestion. This is something that happens in the real world.
It's stupid for a few reasons. One reason is that it puts the cart before the horse: the network is there to serve users, not the other way around. The public works department needs to adapt to the fact that drivers want to go to the beach, and ISPs need to adapt to the fact that their customers want to share files.
I don't disagree with you. Getting limited is annoying. Actually that happened
Re:ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
Or am I misunderstanding what we're talking about
Article Summary (Score:5, Informative)
- 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:Article Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Article Summary (Score:5, Informative)
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Copyright Free Content? (Score:2)
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I think they meant things like Linux -- which is, of course, copy-written. The whole Free Software movement hinges on Copyright (Left?). So, presumably, they just meant crap like music and movies that someone is going to bitch about you copying as being copy-written.
It was a stupid remark on their part, I agree - but I think their intent was obvious.
Obvious or not it is still important to point out such errors because the RIAA/MPAA/BSA all want to create the illusion that it is illegal to share anything tha
In lieu of uploading.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Best sign of victory... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:not me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:not me (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with throttling, I just wish they would be upfront about it. If they have bandwidth limit, then state it. If they block certain protocols, say so.
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Re:not me (Score:4, Informative)
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For those who want to keep track of bandwidth from other programs as well (or maybe just aren't in
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They basically do that with their x-ty thousand miles warranties.
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Oops... getting too serious...
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Maybe he's trying to start a new AC meme. Imagine a world where all the posts about chowing down on a jock's stool are followed up by a post apologising for contributing nothing. What an improvement that would be!
Re:I feel very sorry... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I feel very sorry... (Score:4, Funny)
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Unless you are one of them. Then it gets very significant, very fast.
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Surely the
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