2 new experimental torrent clients

[mattstick]

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/01/bittorrent_bull.html

BitTorrent Bullies: BitTyrant and BitThief
Topic: P2P

Bittyrant Impatience doesn't get you anywhere. It causes stress and frustration and it usually gives everyone around you the impression that you're a total jerk. And as these two new P2P clients demonstrate, impatience also has the potential to ruin BitTorrent.

Yesterday, TorrentFreak alerted us to a new BitTorrent client with a "selfish" anti-social streak. BitTyrant, a project of the University of Washington's computer science department, is based on the code for Azureus 2.5. So, it's a cross-platform Java application -- that's good. What makes BitTyrant bad is that prioritizes your upload connections, favoring the peers that provide the best download speeds. You end up sharing more of the torrent with only the peers that give you the biggest chunks. The slower peers that aren't giving you as much data are choked and relegated to the bottom of the list.

This velvet rope approach improves the client's download performance, and it probably doesn't do a lot to harm the distribution of a fileset within a massive swarm. But BitTyrant still rotten bananas, especially if people start to use it in large numbers.

Now there's BitThief, which is straight-up nefarious and wrong -- the client downloads torrents without uploading. TorrentFreak tells us how it works:

    [BitThief] constantly pretends to be a newly arrived peer that doesn't have anything to offer itself. Additionally, the client re-announces itself many times during the start of the download, and it ignores the 30 minute announce interval.

According to TorrentFreak's Ernesto, who tells me he has tested the client first-hand, BitThief (a Swiss project, go figure) does what it promises by clocking higher download speeds on large swarms. On regular swarms, it performs about the same as any other client. But it also opens 500 simultaneous connections (compared to the Mainline client's default 80) so it hoses your router almost instantly.

These clients go against the fundamental purpose of BitTorrent: efficiently distributing files to a large number of peers at once.

But BitThief is total jerkware. Downloading without uploading? Seriously, what's the point? So you have to wait 20 minutes to download a file instead of 15 -- big deal. What's the rush? Is the world going to end if you don't get that Lost episode before everyone else?

I'm with Ernesto -- I hope these clients get banned on every tracker in the universe.
Posted by Michael Calore 12:03 PM | Post Comment | View Comments (33) | Permalink

[disco]

thanks for the heads up, hopefully etree will give em the 

[DoW]

don't people get it?
the longer a seeder has to stay on to distribute, the fewer shows that person will seed for a couple of reasons.
one the extra time restricts their bandwidth usage in other areas that will have to be made up somewhere.
second, it gets frustrating staying on to seed while people who complete jump off immediately.
luckily, BT is everywhere and this approach doesn't hit the communities I participate in.

[jedifunk]

i can almost guarentee that oink will ban the use of those clients.... the whole premise there is community sharing..

same with etree, but they don't have nearly the control that oink does because its not invite only

[OlfactoryHue]

whats oink, never heard of that one, good place?

[tet]

doesn't matter, i'm sure etree can ban any client they want. 

the problem becomes more severe when BT client authors start putting in spoofing mechanisms in their clients' IDs, like web browsers can do.  i can tell Safari to look like Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, IE 6, Netscape...  if a BT client ever got that capability, that would cause a significant problem.  i think the engine needs its own hash code to prevent that.

[DoW]

oink is good abourt policing clients.
I am generally against ratio based membership (it works in some places, but places like etree operate fine without one), but if this became a problem, there is always that option.

personally, I don't think it will be a problem on music related sites.  uploading a gig is not really that burdensome.  it will be more of a problem downloading DVD's at sites that do not enforce ratios.

[jedifunk]

good points bvaz

[mattstick]

Personally I think it's cool...  Sometimes I DO need LOST 20 minutes before everybody else.