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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.
but, so help me God, if Comcast blocks bittorrent traffic, I'm going to call for heads to roll!
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Maybe he should be more angry at the business owners for using cheap routers and/or not implementing traffic shaping, etc. With a proper traffic shaping implementation, you can absolutely SLAM a connection with Bittorrent usage, even torrents with thousands of seeds and peers, and casual web-browsing remains essentially unaffected. I've download torrents that are several hundred gigabytes, pegging my connection the whole time. Thanks to my PFsense traffic shaper, it doesn't even so much as impact my pings when I play videogames.
Vigilante beats up on people in order to get public wifi access that he believes is rightfully his
That's what it amounts to. He can't get the access he wants, so he just pushes his way in and takes it.
If access is so important to your work, why aren't you/they paying for it?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
You're using a free public network and selectively booting the users who don't fit into your specified profile.
Why not just buy your own connection and stop being such a fucking Nazi?
Other people are using a *public* wifi connection you're connected to, using some of the bandwidth you feel you're entitled to, so you attack them with a cache poisoning exploit?
Hopefully you do this to someone who can hit back. Or just get arrested.
You can ask this person to stop doing it, because he's not anonymous.
That does not fix the problem that what he's doing is possible in the first place.
I don't like your announcing on WWE programming, and I don't like Bittorrent BanHammer. Please leave Slashdot.
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.
Huh? They lie right to your face about it? Wait a minute. Who the hell are you anyway and what do you have to say about it? If it bothers you, buy yourself a mobile hotspot and STFU. At least maybe they are actually buying food/coffee/whatever and aren't just using the cafe as their personal office. What's the next complaint? That their conversations are too loud and you can't hear your conference calls?
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
The issue is that cheap access points/firewalls run out of resources trying to manage (and possibly do connection-tracking) on all the different connections. If a bittorrent user suddenly opens up a few thousand additional connections (regardless of actual bandwidth) then that ends up knocking everyone else off that firewall.
The bittorrent users could prevent the problem by limiting how many connections are allowed per torrent, but it sounds like they're not doing that.
Rather than forcing bittorrent users off the network entirely, it would be better if the access point itself limited the number of connections per MAC address to something reasonable. This would prevent the symptom from occurring.
I'd be upset if his solution was to poison the food so the people that took it all started vomiting.
This is not your Internet. If a public hotspot is being overloaded by any client, not just someone's porn torrent, then that's between the user and the network admin. It's not your job or your right to be The Internet Police. Running a BT client on a public net is a dickish thing to do, but I can imagine scenarios when I might need to do it myself: "oh crap, my root drive is horked and I desperately need to download a Debian USB image. Good thing there's a Starbucks around the block!"
A sane policy would be for the net admins to limit the number of open connections or UDP sessions from a single machine. An insane policy is to think that "my technodick is bigger than yours and I'm going to knock you offline" is less than sociopathic.
Guess what, OP: I don't like your SSH sessions interfering with my Skype. Check out my new SSHWACK Banhammer that frees open networks from latency-hogging assholes like you. Are you sure you want to start this game?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You write a utility that scans network traffic (strike 1) so you can find traffic *you* don't agree with (strike 2). Then, you engage in a DOS attack to stop it? (Strike 3). You are out; at least you should be.
What on earth entitles you to do such nonsense on a network you don't own? The business owner can do what he wants and allow what he wants. If you want to offer to run your little hack, after explaining what it does and getting their permission have fun, but you have ZERO right to just march in and start making a mess of somebody's ARP cache because you don't like what's going on. Morally, You need permission to do this kind of thing on a network you don't own or legally control, so until you have permission BUTT OUT!
You probably yell at your neighborhood kids for riding their bikes in the street or not crossing at the corners after the full "Stop, Look, and Listen" routine too.... If it's not your network, keep your packet sniffing and ARP poisoning attacks to yourself. You don't know if the BitTorrent traffic isn't the owner's laptop downloading CentOS in the back room or some guy working for the MPAA who hacked in from 2 miles away, and it's NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
> 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.
From that phrasing, it almost sounds like you're supposing that more speed is more efficient. Faster means less efficient more often than not. For something easy to visualize, a moped going 20 MPH requires several few ounces of fuel per hour. To go several thousand miles per hour, an X-37 must burn around 15,000 pounds of fuel per MINUTE.
Downloading from many sources means taking up many resources. Downloading from one source (the closest one) would be significantly more efficient, and almost as fast.