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Elude Your ISP's BitTorrent Blockade

Posted by samzenpus on from the impossible-task dept.

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."

32 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. Glasnost by Tobenisstinky · · Score: 5, Funny

    Slashdotted already...

    --
    wha'? where am i?
    1. Re:Glasnost by timelorde · · Score: 5, Funny

      Unless, of course, your ISP is blocking that, too...

    2. Re:Glasnost by xXDarkNinjaXx · · Score: 5, Funny

      +5: Creepy...

  2. Australia is lucky by mrbluze · · Score: 5, Interesting

    .. kind of lucky, anyway.

    We have a website 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.

    --
    Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
    1. Re:Australia is lucky by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There is nothing lucky about competition in the Australian broadband market. We forced the monopolist to open their network and we enforced the laws to keep the competition healthy. The fact that the USA is incapable of doing this is proof that they have lost control of their political system and they're the first to admit it.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    2. Re:Australia is lucky by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again?

      pot, meet kettle.

    3. Re:Australia is lucky by iminplaya · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They didn't lose control. They gave it up willingly, for the sake of convenience. If they actually cared, they wouldn't keep on voting for the one who can flash the most cash. They would seek out and vote for candidates who aren't so allied with big business. But... it's more convenient to just vote for the guy that mass media presents to them. Then bitch about it till the next cycle, repeat. If they would admit it, they would be on the first step towards a cure. As it is, the 45 year decline will continue for at least four more. There is no end in sight. Australia doesn't really look any better

      --
      What?
    4. Re:Australia is lucky by QuantumG · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's the American form of arguing.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
    5. Re:Australia is lucky by kylehase · · Score: 5, Funny

      up to 14 years in jail. 20 years if it's mounted on a shark. Probably more if it's on a great white.

      --
      You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
    6. Re:Australia is lucky by fractoid · · Score: 5, Informative

      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'.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
  3. The basic problem here is ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that the cable companies don't consider (or don't want to have to consider) the consumer of their broadband offerings as their customer. They'd much rather have us be parasites on their network, parasites who happen to be targets of profitable marketing campaigns. The ad injection nonsense that a number of ISPs have launched is indicative of this attitude: we're just eyeballs attached to brains that view commercials.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
    1. Re:The basic problem here is ... by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Isn't that what all monopolies want us to do? All MS wants us to do is keep paying for needless Windows licences while they don't improve it much, pay for Office because MS can't be bothered to include a decent word processor, pay for Windows OneCare because they can't fix their swiss-cheese OS, pay for DRM-ed music because they belive that all anyone does with DRM-free music is share it (and of course we all know that transfering media from your computer to a CD-ROM/MP3 player/another computer is morally wrong!11!11!) All the oil companies want us to do is pay for the $4/gallon of gas while beliving all the "oil is scarce" nonsense. All the government wants us to do is keep being patriotic so they can go on witch hunts for "terrorists" on American citizens. To keep us in paranoia about how obviously they need to wiretap more American phones because they might be a terrorist. To keep help "keep crime down" by restricting our second amendment right to bear arms. All the record companies want us to do is keep buying a copy of a song for every device we own. To believe in all this "piracy" nonsense and how if you transfer your legally bought CD to a computer/MP3 player/another CD/Home server is now illegal. To believe that fair use is illegal. To make us believe that all "pirates" bring down the economy/cause global warming/are responsible for drownings/deface Internet sites or other outrageous things.

      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.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:The basic problem here is ... by jamstar7 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's mostly because we're not their customers, we're their product. Their advertisers are their customers.

      --
      Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
  4. Protest by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Protest by paying the bill in pennies or any other kind of creative check-writing various tax departments have been the victim of...

    1. Re:Protest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  5. I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" by JohnnyComeLately · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" by FooAtWFU · · 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.

      --
      The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
    2. Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No" by BLKMGK · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
  6. Re:not me by UncleTogie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
  7. Re:I feel very sorry... by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, what are you implying? That those who pay for a high-speed connection to the Internet shouldn't have rights to the high-speed part of it? So you are saying because I pay $XX per month to get unlimited access to the Internet at a speed of say ~1.5 MB/Second I have no right to demand use of that unlimited connection? I don't get what you are implying here, it seems like you are saying that what you pay for you have no right to use.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  8. Verizon seems alright by dave562 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:not me by rabbit994 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's not car manufacturers, it's more like taxing someone who spends more time on roads then someone else, which is something we do already with Fuel Taxes and Road taxes against Semis.

    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.

  10. Don't elude...get a different ISP by ucblockhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't have this problem because I am willing to pay more for service from an ISP like Speakeasy that does not do this. If you want these companies to change, you need to be willing to hurt their bottom line even if it costs you more.

    --
    The cake is a pie
  11. ISP by codepunk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A friend of mine runs a ISP, he has a very simple policy that works out
    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.

    --


    Got Code?
    1. Re:ISP by Mr2001 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bit Torrent is a bandwidth hog and attempts to evade filtering rather well. 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.

      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.
      --
      Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
  12. Article Summary by complete+loony · · Score: 5, Informative
    Detecting throttling;
    • Download something popular
    • Call your ISP
    • Read their terms of service
    • Glasnost
    • pcapdiff
    • 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.
    --
    09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
    1. Re:Article Summary by pwizard2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
      --
      "It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
    2. Re:Article Summary by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  13. In lieu of uploading.... by awarrenfells · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  14. Switch ISP by Joce640k · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    No sig today...
  15. They already do by patio11 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Every major ISP sells completely unthrottled, you bought-it-enjoy-it bandwidth to businesses. Get yourself a T1 line, never worry about being throttled again! Prices are quite reasonable starting at about $600 to $1200 per month.

    Its an obvious consumer winner!

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    Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
  16. Canada too by phorm · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For example, look at the recent shenannigans with Bell and those subletting their monopolized line-system. The regulating bodies basically just said that Bell is doing nothing wrong by throttling or otherwise screwing with the traffic of the 3rd-party ISP's customers, because there's no proof it will cause lost business.

    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.