Slashdot Mirror
BitHammer, the BitTorrent Banhammer
michaelcole writes: Its name is BitHammer. It searches out and bans BitTorrent users on your local sub-net.
I'm a digital nomad. That means I travel and work, often using shared Wi-Fi. Over the last year, I've been plagued by rogue BitTorrent users who've crept onto these public hostpots either with a stolen/cracked password, or who lie right to my face (and the Wi-Fi owners) about it.
These users clog up the residential routers' connection tables, and make it impossible to use tools like SSH, or sometimes even web browsing. Stuck for a day, bullied from the Wi-Fi, I wrote BitHammer as a research project. It worked rather well. It's my first Python program. I hope you find it useful.
I'm a digital nomad. That means I travel and work, often using shared Wi-Fi. Over the last year, I've been plagued by rogue BitTorrent users who've crept onto these public hostpots either with a stolen/cracked password, or who lie right to my face (and the Wi-Fi owners) about it.
These users clog up the residential routers' connection tables, and make it impossible to use tools like SSH, or sometimes even web browsing. Stuck for a day, bullied from the Wi-Fi, I wrote BitHammer as a research project. It worked rather well. It's my first Python program. I hope you find it useful.
It's hard being an editor, sure, but put some effort in lads. What the heck is going on here?
Right, so someone comes in, gets an IP address via DHCP, turns on BitTorrent and gets banned 'as long as the program [BitHammer] is running'. Rinse, lather, repeat: now you have no traffic on your network, because all IP addresses in your subnet are on the banlist. Niiiiice.
This doesn't have to do with bandwidth. It has to do with the size of the connection table... a table used to keep track of which internal/external addresses have established connections. With these cheap residential routers, they have very little memory, so when you have a hundreds of connections, it fills the table and things go to shit.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
As opposed to the bittorrent user(s) who are pushing everyone else out of the way and preventing their access?
Its one thing to do so with permission from the network owners .. its another thing to wade in and beat up on people just so you can get what you want.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
This is not in the summary, but in his readme on github the submitter states "After talking with the frustrated non-technical people who owned/managed them, I wrote this program to help network users and owners."
The implication is that this tool is written for use by whomever manages the network. Most networks would have a "no bittorrent" rule, if the network owner was savvy enough to know this. The tool is an interesting enforcement mechanism.
Don't get me wrong, I think BitTorrent is very cool technological achievement. But transferring data between semi-random hosts around the globe and opening hundreds of TCP connections per computer while doing it, is like the ultimate way to clog the pipes.
BitTorrent uses UDP when done correctly, and pretty much becomes the absolute best way to get data to many computers very quickly.
A torrent with few seeders isn't very efficient, but one with many hundreds of well-configured peers is hard to beat on overall transfer speed.
^Agreed! There are so many legit reasons to utilize torrents, ugh! Being an admin of over a dozen public wifi locations, the largest having nearly 1000 clients a day, with 30 WAPs. I never block bitTorrent only traffic shape to extreme cases (eg some one DL at 100Mbps for over 15mins will be bumped to a 10Mbps speed), and each client is in a /30 subnet to protect users from self righteous people like this.
Because when you sell something, you have an obligation to provide the product sold.
Sell Internet access? Provide Internet access.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
One wrong is greater than another? In this instance, no. Neither own the network, both are abusing it in their own ways. I like hat you did there, with the ripped movies/porn reference. Cause those are the only things people do with bittorrent, right? That's why their wrong is greater, cause they must be stealing from both ends, bandwidth AND content, right?
There are already tools available for network owners to manage their networks with a minimum of fuss, QoS, port blocking and other tools right in the router their IT guy already set up for them. This is a greifer tool, pure and simple. If it can knock a bittorrent user off the network, it can knock anyone off the network.
This uses ARP spoofing as a way to deny service to another legitimate user of the network. The same thing can be used to defend or even fix this issue. This tool will work for maybe a few weeks before torrent clients upgrade to defend against it. Probably by doing the same thing but redirecting ALL local traffic to the bittorrent user instead. Let's face it, a few extra connections form people trying to watch Youtube vids and browse websites and email really aren;t gonna affect the leech much if he's busy downloading gobs of files.
This guy is an idiot anyways, as the people clogging up his local wifi spots are not torrent users, but everyone else around him. The kid watching youtube, the girl watching netflix, the guy downloading sports highlight clips from ESPN's website....video is here and business connections are actually pretty shitty on a small scale like your local coffeehouse or a hotel. Gigabit would help but it ain't here for 99% of America.
This guy has made a hacking tool for small networks. A little tweaking and you own the network instead and can use ALL the bandwidth. Just read his github page, the guy basically admits that its a hacking tool, it won't work at least half the time to "fix" the problem it claims to fix, and the bittorrent use may not even be the problem in the first place.
This shouldn't be on Slashdot in its current context, its an advertisement for a scriptkiddie tool.
Hey everybody, thanks for the comments. Most of you probably won't ever see this comment, but I appreciate your interest and feedback about the program. Believe it or not, I thought about alot each of the ethical issues yall brought up. And well, frankly there isn't a good way for strangers to work together anonymously. That's probably a good definition of a stranger. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them here. Anyways thanks again and best wishes! Mike
Bittorrent tries to transfer data between clients that are close together when possible. That means that often the data can stay within the ISP's internal network, never going out over the clogged pipes connecting to the wider internet. Those pipes are where things get backed up, which is why streaming video providers like Netflix and YouTube offer to give ISPs cache servers to place inside their networks.
BitTorrent can actually help ISPs, and be more efficient than centralized distribution from that point of view.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC