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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....
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.
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.