BitTyrant and BitThief

[Krell]

, 4 January 2007

BitTorrent Bullies: BitTyrant and BitThief

Topic: P2P

Impatience doesn't get you anywhere. It causes stress and frustration and it usually gives everyone around you the impression that you're a total jerk. And as these two new P2P clients demonstrate, impatience also has the potential to ruin BitTorrent.

Yesterday, TorrentFreak alerted us to a new BitTorrent client with a "selfish" anti-social streak. BitTyrant, a project of the University of Washington's computer science department, is based on the code for Azureus 2.5. So, it's a cross-platform Java application -- that's good. What makes BitTyrant bad is that prioritizes your upload connections, favoring the peers that provide the best download speeds. You end up sharing more of the torrent with only the peers that give you the biggest chunks. The slower peers that aren't giving you as much data are choked and relegated to the bottom of the list.

This velvet rope approach improves the client's download performance, and it probably doesn't do a lot to harm the distribution of a fileset within a massive swarm. But BitTyrant still rotten bananas, especially if people start to use it in large numbers.


Now there's BitThief, which is straight-up nefarious and wrong -- the client downloads torrents without uploading. TorrentFreak tells us how it works:

[BitThief] constantly pretends to be a newly arrived peer that doesn't have anything to offer itself. Additionally, the client re-announces itself many times during the start of the download, and it ignores the 30 minute announce interval.

According to TorrentFreak's Ernesto, who tells me he has tested the client first-hand, BitThief (a Swiss project, go figure) does what it promises by clocking higher download speeds on large swarms. On regular swarms, it performs about the same as any other client. But it also opens 500 simultaneous connections (compared to the Mainline client's default 80) so it hoses your router almost instantly.

These clients go against the fundamental purpose of BitTorrent: efficiently distributing files to a large number of peers at once.

But BitThief is total jerkware. Downloading without uploading? Seriously, what's the point? So you have to wait 20 minutes to download a file instead of 15 -- big deal. What's the rush? Is the world going to end if you don't get that Lost episode before everyone else?

I'm with Ernesto -- I hope these clients get banned on every tracker in the universe.




http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/20...rent_bull.html








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[soulxtc]

ALSO READ:

BitTyrant - the new "selfish" BitTorrent client server
(7 comments)
It's like Azureus on steroids, claiming to increase download speeds by a startling 70% but, at what costs? .

FYI: works famtastico on public tracker sites like TorrenstSpy, managed to get speeds of 300 kB/s in a few cases! But, the premise of it sucks in that it makes you stingy with your UL data, denying it to people with shittier connections than yourself, and in effect risking the very health of file-SHARING.

[RACKnRAIL]

These will probably cause many private trackers to ban them ,as they did with BitComet a while back. I can see some people jumping on the chance to leech for real again.

[sonusahu]

bitthief doesn't seem to be much of a problem cuz i think most trackers wud ban it if it reannounces many times and ignores the 30 min annouce interval

[soulxtc]

Originally Posted by RACKnRAIL

These will probably cause many private trackers to ban them ,as they did with BitComet a while back. I can see some people jumping on the chance to leech for real again.

Oh BitThief for sure, and hopefully so....as for BitTyrant its supposedly already been banned on OINK but, I cant find any listing of it in their "banned clients section."

[RACKnRAIL]

Originally Posted by soulxtc

Oh BitThief for sure, and hopefully so....as for BitTyrant its supposedly already been banned on OINK but, I cant find any listing of it in their "banned clients section."

It won't take long. Nobody likes a fraud.

[lysine]

Originally Posted by soulxtc

I cant find any listing of it in their "banned clients section."

it's in the thread:

BitTyrant (We forbid user-modified clients. This client falls into that category).

[Winston84Smith]

BitTyrant does NOT "cheat" , what it does is reward peers with a good upload .
This means that people with a 10/Mbit down 128/Kbit upload won't be able to leech all
your bandwidth without giving the same back , as they can now .
Upload costs money , do you think its fair that people with cheap 10Mbit/128Kbit
connections can complete the torrent before a peer with ,for example, a expensive 2/2Mbit
who continuously upload 2Mbit ?
There IS a real problem here for those of us with good connections , quite frankly I'm starting to get tired of having uploaded what equals to 5X before I even complete the torrent myself .
I don't mind sharing at all , if I did I wouldn't use torrents , but there has to be just a bit of
fairness in it for me to ...

[RACKnRAIL]

Originally Posted by Winston84Smith

BitTyrant does NOT "cheat" , what it does is reward peers with a good upload .
This means that people with a 10/Mbit down 128/Kbit upload won't be able to leech all
your bandwidth without giving the same back , as they can now .
Upload costs money , do you think its fair that people with cheap 10Mbit/128Kbit
connections can complete the torrent before a peer with ,for example, a expensive 2/2Mbit
who continuously upload 2Mbit ?
There IS a real problem here for those of us with good connections , quite frankly I'm starting to get tired of having uploaded what equals to 5X before I even complete the torrent myself .
I don't mind sharing at all , if I did I wouldn't use torrents , but there has to be just a bit of
fairness in it for me to ...

Give me a break. There's still people on dial up for fucks sake. so unless my ISP is warning me about excessive upload bandwidth, I will do what I can to support the communities in which I belong, even if it means sharing 5x more than I d/l. If your that worried about sharing more than you get you should join a newsgroup where you can just grab what you want without sharing.

[soulxtc]

Originally Posted by RACKnRAIL

Give me a break. There's still people on dial up for fucks sake. so unless my ISP is warning me about excessive upload bandwidth, I will do what I can to support the communities in which I belong, even if it means sharing 5x more than I d/l. If your that worried about sharing more than you get you should join a newsgroup where you can just grab what you want without sharing.

Exactly. thats the whole point of my argument.

Sure, it makes certain that one gets their "fair share" but, it messes up the whole system of file-SHARING. If we start saying by proxy through our client servers that "you're not good enough to trade with" and Im gonna trade with somebody better than you, well it throws the whole system out of whack.

If everybody starts using it then the guys with anything less than broadband would be screwed.

An extra 10 minutes is small price to pay for equality.....

[meyou123]

Originally Posted by Winston84Smith

BitTyrant does NOT "cheat" , what it does is reward peers with a good upload .
This means that people with a 10/Mbit down 128/Kbit upload won't be able to leech all
your bandwidth without giving the same back , as they can now .
Upload costs money , do you think its fair that people with cheap 10Mbit/128Kbit
connections can complete the torrent before a peer with ,for example, a expensive 2/2Mbit
who continuously upload 2Mbit ?
There IS a real problem here for those of us with good connections , quite frankly I'm starting to get tired of having uploaded what equals to 5X before I even complete the torrent myself .
I don't mind sharing at all , if I did I wouldn't use torrents , but there has to be just a bit of
fairness in it for me to ...

If you don't want to share, as has been stated, use newsgroups. But don't say that this app is NOT cheating the torrent networks when it certianly IS!

Not everyone has broadband. Just because you and I do, is no reason to say that other people on slower connections like dial up and DSL should not be able to have access to the files we are sharing.

Remember also that someone could come along with a faster connection like a T3 and YOU and I would be out in the cold! It is better for you if you don't like the way your broadband is being used, that you find some other way to get your files.

The bit torrent network was set up so that people would also GIVE and not just take...it was also set up so that ALL people on different connections could take part in it. NOT just those with broadband.

And even though you would be giving to other people on broadband, how FAIR would it be for an app to decide that someones connection was not "fast enough" so therefore they could not download the file you were sharing... SIMPLY because they did not have broadband in their area or could not afford it?

[Winston84Smith]

where did you guys get the idea that dial-up users wont be able to download torrents anymore ?
That is mostly a question of how many connections you allow your client to make ...assuming you have
enough bandwidth to serve more than a few peers before it's all used ..
NOWHERE in the documentation for BitTyrant does it state that lowbandwidth-peers wont be able to connect and download ..
But it WILL put an end to people with 10Mbit down 128Kbit up raping MY bandwidth . They can use IT ALL
without giving ANYTHING back to the swarm .. guess how much room that leaves for me to also upload to the low-bandwidth peers ? ..
And NO I wont use usenet or anything else , I have Terrabytes of upload to show that I DONT MIND SHARING ... that's just not always what is going on with the current way bit-torrent works ?
And how many of you guys are using TRULY selfish cheating clients like all the Bit-crap versions ??
anyway , what do people with dial-up know about this ??

An extra 10 minutes is small price to pay for equality.....

So , you think 10 minutes is all I pay for a decent connection ?

and I didn't say that I have a problem with uploading 5x the file-size ,
I just think it sucks that I have done so before I even complete it myself ..
that should show you all that there IS something unfair in the current implementation
of the BT protocol ..
Maybe the guys with bad uploads should go to usenet ??

[hehthatscool]

Originally Posted by Winston84Smith

Maybe the guys with bad uploads should go to usenet ??

I would say i agree, but whe need them for having a good ratio. Not everyone can have a 1.05 ratio if you calculate it out.

[Winston84Smith]

Originally Posted by hehthatscool

I would say i agree, but whe need them for having a good ratio. Not everyone can have a 1.05 ratio if you calculate it out.

:) true , but that applies no matter what client people are using ...
what your ratio on a torrent ends up being is mostly a matter of attitude
as long as you are not the last person to join .
I have 6 months old torrents that I still seed sometimes , because I think they are good and
should be available to others . I really don't care if I end up having upped them 50x or something..
but I would like to complete them before I reach that share-ratio , and that's the point of BitTyrant .
People with slow uploads will still be able to use torrents even if everybody else switched to BitTyrant ..

[Uranium118]

I have a bad upload speed, I still manage to get a 1.5 - 2.0 ratio.