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Deluge Anonymizing Browser Now Includes Bittorrent
markybob writes "An open-source bittorrent client, Deluge, now provides an internal, anonymizing browser to protect its users from overzealous ISPs. The client runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. From the site: "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent. If an ISP is throttling or blocking bittorrent traffic, you can pretty much bet that they're tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users." Their forum has more info"
"Deluge BitTorrent Client Now Includes Anonymizing Browser"
And to be exact, this is Deluge 0.5.8RC1
Small correction: The Mac OS X version uses X11, not Cocoa.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
In related news, semantically reversed article headlines now include slashdot!
Also, the summary is highly misleading. This is not a bittorrent-based replacement for TOR as one might conclude from the summary. The browser is merely designed to conceal the IPs of people surfing websites hosting torrents by going through a proxy. You also see ads while using the service. I wonder how long it will take ISPs with an anti-bittorrent agenda to block their proxies... Quoting TFA's FAQ:
Yeah, sorry, I tend not to tolerate ads in my browsing experience, why should I put up with them for torrent downloads? Also, I thought ad-supported p2p programs went away with KaZaa?
and...
I think this falls under the categories of "Why should we trust your servers?" and "Whitelists suck."
I say this every time the subject of p2p apps comes up: solutions such as these simply add to the arms race between ISP and file-sharers. In the end this will solve nothing. Instead of attempting to out-tech Big Content there should be a focus on improving consumer rights.
Then again this could be an attempt to to show that ads and donations may be a way to support the distribution of content via BT.
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
BitTorrent works just fine behind a typical "firewall." It is not necessary to accept incoming connections, especially with a well seeded legitimate torrent. If you can't download with BitTorrent at all then you have a problem with your firewalls policy not the firewall per se.
It's not a horrible method of distribution. Its an excellent method of distribution, especially for free software. Thats why it is being used for such distribution.
Why the hell are comments like this marked insightful?
*waaa* I can't download via p2p, all the free stuff I want, at work
Either go home and do it, or work with your IT. If you have a business need to download linux distros, it's up to your ork IT to provide that to you. If you don't, well, go suck at Microsoft's teat.
I used to run a firewall, and I allow out what is business appropriate. If that includes bit-torrent, so be it.
Let's put it another way: there are some firewall administrators who aren't BitTorrent friendly. If you work in a company that has such a firewall and you have a problem with BitTorrent, you should take it to the IT administration. Oh, wait, perhaps your problem is that the IT people in your company aren't Linux-friendly? Then download at home and bring a CD or DVD to work.
The one big advantage BitTorrent has is that it avoids slashdotting the server. Traffic doesn't concentrate, it has a much gentler effect both on the servers themselves and on the internet backbone as a whole, because you end downloading more from those peers that have more bandwidth.
Yup, you're correct. WoW does use it for patches and updates. Given that the patches are at least 100megs in size and there are 9.5million subscribers I'd say it's one of the better examples of a problem for which BitTorrent is the ideal solution.
Picture if you will a pasty-white geek who has written some software. "The service my software provides puts people who use it at risk," he muses, "How might I protect those who may not know how to protect themselves?"
Suddenly, a light goes off. Or on. I think it goes on. Anyway, he thinks, "I could integrate a browser that accesses a limited number of related services in such a way as to provide a safety net for the non-nerds whom I appreciate so well!"
Time passes. "Oh, fuck. This is going to cost me money," the nerd thinks, "How can I provide this service when it costs me money, and I need to buy Ramen?"
Another lightbulb does its thing. "Advertisement!"
There you have it. If you don't like it, cut pasty-dude a check.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The best solution, ofcourse, is to switch to a less zealous ISP. But that is not always possible: I, for example, find myself subletting an
apartment that comes with horrible, horrible Comcast DSL (who actively reset with your TCP connections).
In these cases say Aye, matey and hook up to the swedish Pirate Party's Relakks VPN service (as seen on Slashdot)
to get past your pesky ISPs rules. It's also be very useful if you use coffeeshop wireless a lot and your email provider still requires plain-text passwords.
Arrr, we be lootin' again!
Sir, Chuck norris calls you bullshit. 10 Megabit cable connection (pretty standard here) gives ruffly 990kb/sec transfer depending on the sender's connection and protocol used. (For example, 990kb/sec is the top speed i can get from ftp.funet.fi which is few hops away)
Personally i never used background downloading in wow and at the time of the patch going live, there where so many seeds already available that having only 1 official seed from Blizzard didnt really matter. Comparing the "patch" downloading to x amount of Sony mmorpgs, ultima, Anarchy online and few others that i've played, i do consider WOW's to be done best and sir, you can call bullshit on that too.
yush
I call bullshit, Tony Hoyle has no idea what he is talking about or he is just trolling.
Do you think FTP can saturate your 10 mbit link when its downloading from my FTP server sitting on a 384 kbit up DSL line?
The headline was obviously written in Soviet Russia.
After all, I am strangely colored.
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
We don't single out users, we monitor nodes, which many customers are attached to. If a node is exceeding healthy levels (different nodes have different max levels, there's no one set "healthy" level) then that node is shaped until the traffic goes down.
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
To give you those "free roads" you drive on, the government charges you taxes. To give out free services, charities accept contributions.
I doubt many of the gimme,gimme, free software takers actually develop anything substantial or contribute anything, apart from annoyance.
Perhaps with time people will mature in their outlook and freely contribute better than they do now: "Hey I like service x or software y. Here's $20 to say thanks!". This is not yet happening but perhaps it will one day.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
According to a quick search (so may not be accurate) current "semi-official" block size is 16KB which easily fits into a single datagram packet (allowing for IP Fragmentation). Or if you are determined to keep your datagrams under the Ethernet MTU then you could employ some form of erasure coding to the data (at the expense of CPU cycles) and then if a few packets get lost then not to worry or you could advertise a 1k block transfer size at the expense of great application level overhead. Any system would rely on the client knowing the available bandwidth and only scheduling to receive a volume of packets it could.
There was once talk of using the Vivaldi round trip estimation which has been in Azureus for no particular reason to select peers closer to the client, and some research was done into using it for estimating the bandwidth of a pipe to allow for UDP data connections not needing feedback.
In BitTorrent the sending side never needs to know that a block arrived at the client so in some circumstance UDP could be better due to less connection overhead. Also most home NATs have better support for UDP hole punching than for TCP allowing for greater possibility that two incorrectly set up peers could talk to each other.
Most important, copyright and "intellectual property" is no longer necessary for those who are doing the making. I have first-hand experience with the transformation from the creative equivalent of an indentured servant into an artist that has control over my own product and income. Step one was examining just how corrupt and useless the current system has become. Step two was learning about Creative Commons, direct to public domain and other innovative approaches to distributing work and getting paid for it. Step three, at least in my case, was "profit!!" (of course).
The experience has also radicalized me in terms of how I see not only the way artists support themselves, but also how I view the entirety of economic life in these United States (and beyond). Reading Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and comparing their words with the actuality of 21st century life, has convinced me that the entire system of "free markets" "supply and demand" and "the unseen hand" are all so much baloney. It's all been a dodge to keep those of us who work for a living from noticing that we're getting less for working more while our bosses are gaining wealth and producing less.
Notice how the the bosses (executive vice-presidents) at Circuit City have been forced to accept mere 1 million dollar bonuses (called "retention awards") this year because their company has performed so poorly. If any of us were to perform so poorly, we'd get pink slips instead of six-figure Christmas presents. To complete the picture, notice how Circuit City has unceremoniously fired their most experience sales staff, who were earning as much as $14.00 per hour, and then offered them their jobs back a $9 per hour and no benefits! The French Revolution was not so long ago that these "executive vice-presidents" can't learn a few lessons regarding what happens to people who oppress a working class. Hell, some of them must have seen V for Vendetta.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The best client out there for Linux users with Gnome (KDE users can look to kTorrent). Been using it for some time.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The problem is you're defining 'efficiency' in a very limited and incorrect way. True, FTP is good at transferring a large chunk of data from exactly one host to exactly one more. But that is a trivial problem these days; Any network programmer could easily write a protocol/application that sends data from a server to a client as fast as the bottlenecks will allow. And yeah, that's "efficient," in a way because it maximizes your resources. But efficient peer-to-peer downloading is much harder. I suppose a 100% efficient p2p download ecosystem would be one where each and every downloading peer is saturating his download speed. FTP has *no chance* of ever achieving this for popular files, and could never near the level of data transferred on popular trackers without absolutely massive investment in geographically disparate clusters and bandwidth (e.g. akamai). BT accomplishes for free what could otherwise cost thousands of dollars for a content distributor. It sounds to me like you don't understand how BT works, or you're upset that it's the wrong tool for what you use it for. Anyways, if both your bittorrent clients are configured correctly, and the downloading one is the only one receiving from the other, you should achieve very similar speeds compared with FTP, as it just uses HTTP for sending data. Given your clear ignorance on firewall issues ( A good firewall doesn't allow any incoming connections. Really? How does such a host serve requests or recieve replies to sent packets? ), the disparity you report is probably best explained by PEBKAC issues.