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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"
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.
Maybe he should be more angry at the business owners for using cheap routers and/or not implementing traffic shaping, etc.
Or he could do the correct thing and pay for a portable hotspot of his very own. Once you are paying the bills, you get to dictate the terms.
If someone else is monopolizing the business owner's bandwidth, that's not your business. You can inform the business owner of the situation, but if they choose to do nothing, that is their choice to make, not yours.
I'd be upset if his solution was to poison the food so the people that took it all started vomiting.
He is supposed to HIRE someone that is. Just like you hire someone to install a water heater, or electrical lines. If you are deploying COMMERCIALLY, you should hire someone who knows what the fuck they are doing, or dont bother.
Good-bye
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
Assholes are assholes, because they don't give a shit about anyone but themselves. These are borderline sociopaths, who love to skirt around the edges and fuck everyone else up, simply because they can. Giving them "geek street cred" for breaking things for the rest of us is not noble cause.
Case in point, your suggestion, just because someone can leach 100% of the bandwidth from a mom n pop WiFi setup, will simply mean that nobody will be able to use it, because the choice of having a BitTorrent client running at the coffee shop screwing everyone, or paying someone to configure and maintain it will mean no wifi at the coffee shop. Which means BitTorrent guy will lose out as well, he is just too stupid to care.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is complete BS. Sure, if you want to take a $19 Tiger Direct OEM surplus belkin right out of the box, plug it in and walk away, yes, it will suck. (pretty much for any use) But 5 minutes with the setup wizard -- after all, someone has to setup the wifi -- and all that is fixable. Anyone even hinting at needing "industrial" hardware (aka. "enterprise", aka. damned expensive) to host a public hotspot doesn't know jack about running a hotspot -- or is a Cisco/Juniper/etc. vendor. There are hundreds of thousands of shops all over the planet using netgear, linksys, belkin, buffaloe, etc. consumer "crap" for their guest wifi networks; and they work perfectly fine... until a torrenting asshole hops on the network, which is what this guy is trying to fix.