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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."
Slashdotted already...
wha'? where am i?
.. 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- 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.
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.
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
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
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...
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!
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.