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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.
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.
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)
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