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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.
This basically boils down to: "My use is more important than your use, under a flimsy excuse that your use could potentially interfere with my use, I will deliberately abuse the network in order to wilfully interfere with your use."
The computer abuse act and FCC guidelines about wilful interference comes to mind....
I'm shocked by some of the replies so far. Some of you are furious because this guy is trying to limit the people who abuse the system?
Imagine you are at a buffet. It's all-you-can-eat but with no instructions or limits on the way to do it. Now imagine there's a few people at the front of the line and they're putting all the food available into buckets, leaving nothing but scraps for everyone else. Would you be pissed at those people or at the one who would stand up and yell "Hey, leave some for the others"?
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The BitHammer relies on Local Peer Disocovery which gives priority to peers that are close to the bit torrent client. This is good for ISPs because it tries to keep the bit torrent traffic inside their own network instead of hammering peering connections. This also makes connections faster for the bit torrent client.
If you want to get around BitHammer you just need to turn off Local Peer Discovery, if BitHammer can't find you it can't block you. But now the ISPs are going to get screwed because Local Peer Discovery is turned off. This will also make the torrents slower for the client.
Sounds like a loose/loose situation to me.
They may not be, but if they want to provide working WiFi, they should hire someone who is.
The fun part is when you spoof the MAC of the ARP cache poisoner.
While the program can be used with the network owner's permission, the fact that it can more easily be used without permission makes it rather dubious.
I think he's/we're going about this the wrong way. If this is really a widespread problem afflicting non-technical people trying to run a public wi-fi hotspot, what needs to happen is for router configs to limit the number of connections from a single MAC address by default. If you're a gamer or running bittorrent on your own network, it's easy enough to change those configs. But on a public hotspot, they're the ones who'll be forced to contact the network owners, not the people trying to get legit access.
I'm also a bit skeptical that the submitter really talked with the owner. If you've got access to the router via the owner, the most obvious thing to try first is QoS. Assign torrent traffic to low priority, default everything else to medium (to catch encrypted bittorrent), and give ports 80 and 443 (http and https) high priority to keep web browsing customers happy. You need to be careful about giving ssh high priority because it's possible to run a tunnel over ssh and do your torrenting that way.
Tragedy of the commons.
I see this during the weeks that there are festivals in Austin. People camping tables at local cafes, not ordering anything, but using the wireless network for Netflix, with an occasional uTorrent downloading a movie to watch later on.
One coffee shop here in Austin chucked their Wi-Fi because the tables kept occupied with people who didn't even at least buy a drink. As soon as they stopped doing that, their business went up, since they had paying clients again.
Another place turned off their APs from 11 to 1, and again, their business is booming.
If I had a shop, I'd have a Wi-Fi system that would use one time passwords (doesn't have to be extremely secure... something like AOL's old system with two words and a hyphen between them is good enough) which grant the user time, as well as a block of bandwidth. These would be free of charge with a purchase. This way, if someone wants to download a 22 gig BD-R rip, they can... but they will be making a lot of purchases. Elaborating on this, there could always be two tiers, one paid for with the one use password, and free... so people who made purchases would have higher precedence than the person who is at work, but whose laptop is in their car in the parking lot with a terabyte torrent chugging away.
It gets worse when you go RV-ing, to the point where a device with tethering or a personal Mi-Fi-like device is an absolute requirement. There are just too many people who will clog up a RV park's Wi-Fi, making it unusable for everyone else. Plus, for decent Wi-fi, it is expensive... and RV parks don't make that much money per square meter of space relative to a hotel or coffee shop.