Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.

Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.

Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.

Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.

“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.

Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.

After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.

“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.

The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.

Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.

TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.

“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.

“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.

Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.

He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.

Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.

P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.

One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.

Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.

PeerBlock can be downloaded here.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Private BitTorrent trackers are supposed to be private and for registered members only. A non-member that downloads a torrent from a private tracker will usually get a tracker connection failure in their BitTorrent client. They will not be able to download or upload any data from that torrent, rendering the torrent useless to them. This is the basis that most private trackers work upon, but not Moviex.

Lately, several people have noticed a sudden rise in torrent files being uploaded to public indexing sites like Newtorrents, Mininova, and The Pirate Bay. These uploaded torrent files contain two announce URLs, one from The Pirate Bay and a moviex.info URL that always has the same passkey present, presumably the passkey for an anonymous user.

http://www.moviex.info:2710/...3c73mdqxj31q/announce
http://vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

To see a pirate bay tracker URL present in a torrent file is nothing out of the ordinary. So what’s special about the moviex.info URL being present in public torrents? Well, the message you get when trying to connect to the moviex.info tracker if you are not a member might give you a hint.

“Failure: access denied, leeching forbidden, you’re only allowed to seed”

Normally you would get something like: “Failure: unregistered torrent pass.” However, moviex.info allows non-members to seed files, while they are not allowed to download. This is a huge bonus for MovieX and its members. Currently, newtorrents.info provides 1000’s of downloads per day to torrent users and reportedly 50% of the available torrents on that site have the moviex.info tracker URL present, the actual percentage may even be be higher.

It is not unusual for private trackers to upload files to public sites. Most of the time this is done to advertise the tracker, so their community grows. However, we don’t see torrents like this very often, I’m not sure if they do this on purpose, but they are definitely leeching bandwidth from people who only use the public tracker. It’s a pretty nice system if you want your private tracker to gain external seeds along with faster download speeds for your members, It’s however also a very damaging method for any user who is not a member of MovieX.info as they will continually upload pieces of the torrent to users who will give very little if anything at all back.

To see exactly what this tracker configuration does and how it works watch the video below. The video shows two clear examples, one of a non seeded file and one of a seeded file using these rogue torrents, obviously for legal reasons we have renamed the torrents that I used for this demonstration (HQ download).

There is a way to prevent the leeching. If you download a torrent file from a public tracker check the tracker URL’s and remove the moviex.info announce URL if it is present. This will stop you seeding the file on that tracker and in turn not allow members of moviex.info to leech data from you. You could also try blocking their IP Address (206.53.62.206) in your IP filter if you are not a member of the MovieX community.

MovieX have taken the time to code this feature into their tracker and at the moment as far as we can tell they are the only private site exploiting this type of dirty hack to leech from external BitTorrent users. What moviex.info should do is configure their tracker not to allow external users without a passkey to connect to their tracker in any way, instead it would seem they have deliberately setup to leech as much data from the public BitTorrent community as possible and boost their own private community speeds. MovieX deny this is the case and claim these torrents to be no more than simple advertising for the site in an attempt to attract new members?

Update: MovieX is now blocked by PeerGuardian, a simple solution is to download and install the application.

Thanks Stuart!

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

On the Media Defender website we read:

“Decoying and Spoofing are the most commonly known techniques that we employ. We send blank files and data noise that look exactly like a real response to an initiated search requests for a particular title.”

According to ubisuck over at the mininova forums, Media Defender is doing just this with ZipTorrent. Apparently the fake client is a mod of the popular BitTorrent client Azureus which can be configured to send fake data.

Here’s a full screenshot of the ZipTorrent configuration screen. As you will see, there are some dubious settings like “fake upload ratio mode”, “no upload” and “safe fake download”.

It is not hard to check whether you are connected to these fake clients. In the peers list of your BitTorrent client they will show up as “ZipTorrent” and most of the time you will be connected to a bunch of them all originating from similar IP addresses with either 0% or 100% of the file completed.

However, there are blocklists to stop these malicious clients from connecting to your BitTorrent client. Pasted below is a list of the known IP-ranges ZipTorrent is on. The ranges were identified by The Pirate Bay team and are posted in several forums. You might want to add these to the blocklist of your BitTorrent client or PeerGuardian.

There’s one problem though, Media Defender will probably move to new IPs if they read this, a never ending story.

Update: The legitimacy of the screenshot and “ZipTorrent” is doubtful but the IP ranges are correct. Spoofing is not limited to a client like ZipTorrent and I’m told that clients like uTorrent and Azureus are also used to do this job.

ziptorrent:64.62.145.130-64.62.145.165
ziptorrent:65.19.131.0-65.19.131.85
ziptorrent:66.160.133.0-66.160.133.199
ziptorrent:87.117.250.0-87.117.250.150
ziptorrent:216.218.0.100-216.218.184.199
ziptorrent:216.218.190.0-216.218.199.255
ziptorrent:38.99.252.0-38.99.252.255
ziptorrent:38.99.253.1-38.99.253.200
ziptorrent:38.100.24.0-38.100.24.255
ziptorrent:38.100.25.0-38.100.25.255
ziptorrent:38.100.26.0-38.100.26.255
ziptorrent:38.100.134.0-38.100.135.255
ziptorrent:63.216.0.0-63.223.255.255
ziptorrent:64.62.145.0-64.62.145.255
ziptorrent:64.62.214.0-64.62.214.255
ziptorrent:64.93.64.0-64.93.64.255
ziptorrent:65.19.131.0-65.19.131.85
ziptorrent:65.19.143.0-65.19.143.255
ziptorrent:65.120.42.0-65.120.42.255
ziptorrent:66.117.5.0-66.117.5.255
ziptorrent:66.160.133.0-66.160.133.199
ziptorrent:66.160.158.0-66.160.158.255
ziptorrent:66.180.192.0-66.180.207.255
ziptorrent:66.186.192.0-66.186.223.255
ziptorrent:66.198.35.0-66.198.35.255
ziptorrent:81.230.187.01-81.230.187.99
ziptorrent:87.117.250.0-87.117.250.255
ziptorrent:100.0.0.0-115.255.255.255
ziptorrent:129.47.9.0-129.47.9.255
ziptorrent:154.37.0.0-154.37.255.255
ziptorrent:206.80.0.01-206.80.99.99
ziptorrent:207.45.196.0-207.45.196.255
ziptorrent:208.10.23.0-208.10.23.255
ziptorrent:208.10.29.0-208.10.29.255
ziptorrent:209.66.117.0-209.66.117.255
ziptorrent:209.133.121.0-209.151.247.255
ziptorrent:209.133.122.0-209.133.122.255
ziptorrent:209.151.247.0-209.151.247.255
ziptorrent:216.218.0.100-216.218.184.199
ziptorrent:216.218.190.0-216.218.199.255


Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Today p2pnet’s Alex H did an exclusive Q&A with with uTorrent’s Ludvig Strigeus:

Alex H: Last time we spoke you guys had just released uTorrent 1.1.4. Now you’ve just released uTorrent 1.5. How far has uTorrent come with the 1.5 release? What’s new?

Ludde: uTorrent 1.5 is a significant release that’s a big milesone for us. The new major changes in 1.5 are support for Protocol Encryption (i.e. Message stream encryption) and Peer Exchange (a feature that lets peers interchange peers with each other, and reduces the need for a working tracker, it makes BitTorrent more distributed). A lot of work has also been spent on optimizing the downloading speeds, uTorrent should now download much more efficiently than before.

In combination with this, a new algorithm for optimized disk accesses has been implemented. Previous versions would hit the disk much more often, while the new automatic disk cache tries to minimize this.

The time between releases, a whopping 2 months, is the longest time ever in uTorrent’s history. This shows that 1.5 is really a big change compared to 1.4 (The number of changes is well over a hundred), and we’ve worked to perfecting it down to the smallest detail.

Other notable things that have been added since 1.1.4 (when you last interviewed us) include:

* RSS Reader: Allows uTorrent to automatically fetch releases (such as TV-shows) as soon as they are released. This helps uTorrent to become a better content-on-demand platform, since it will automatically help users download the content they need. A nice RSS tutorial can be found on the webpage for the users that are unsure about how RSS works.

* Unicode support: The same executable can be used both in Unicode mode (windows 2000 or later) or in ANSI compability mode (windows ME or earlier). This is a quite unique feature for native Win32 programs. Unicode is a relatively new universal way of representing characters inside the computer, which means that uTorrent is compatible with foreign torrents (such as those with chinese filenames), while still being able to run properly on old platforms. Support for old platforms like Windows 95 is an important goal for us, not because the user base is there, but it shows that we care about how the application performs for all users.

* Mainline-DHT: This was added in uTorrent 1.2. It means Distributed Hash Table, and is a nice technology that really minimizes the dependency on the tracker. DHT allows uTorrent to receive peers through a distributed network of peers, so the tracker is not needed.

We’ve come a long way since 1.1.4, now uTorrent is really one of the serious contenders in the BitTorrent scene. We concentrate on adding mainstream features that are easy to use, and benefit the majority of the user base, and thus uTorrent is geared towards both normal users and “expert” users that know the inns and outs of their computer.

Alex H: Who makes up the uTorrent team now?

Ludde: The uTorrent team consists of:

* Ludvig Strigeus (ludde) – Sole uTorrent Developer
* And some of the most notable members of the uTorrent community:
* Giancarlo Martínez (Firon) – Support technician and my right hand.
* Timothy Su (Ignorantcow) – Website designer
* Maciej Trebacz (mav) – In charge of translations
* Carsten Niebuhr (Directrix) – Working on the upcoming webinterface
* Ludovic Arnaud (Ashe) – Working with website efficiency/admin frontend

Then there are a bunch of other people hanging around in the IRC channels/Forums helping people and helping me.

Alex H: uTorrent worked with Azureus to develop the Message Stream Encryption specs. What does it do and how does it do it?

Ludde: It is basically an encrypted wrapper around the BitTorrent traffic. This makes it a lot harder for Internet Service Providers to block or throttle the BitTorrent traffic, as they can’t determine as easily if the traffic really is BitTorrent. Blocking is obviously of interest to them, since it has been estimated that at least 30% of all Internet traffic is BitTorrent.

All data packets are encrypted with a key generated at run time, so there is no way for a 3rd party to observe what kind of files that are being transmitted by just analysing the packet stream. However, characteristics of the BitTorrent protocol, such as packet sizes, or the fact that a client connects to a large number of peers, can still be used to infer that BitTorrent activity is going on, so the encryption is not a universal solution.

Alex H: Can the PHE specifications work with other protocols, or is it a BitTorrent-only thing?

Ludde: It was designed to be as general as possible, and to not be dependent on BitTorrent, so it can (in theory) be used to encrypt other protocols. Just like SSL can be used to encrypt other things than HTTP.

Alex H: What was it like collaborating with rival developers? Was it just “Team uTorrent” and “Team Azureus”, or were there other individuals involved too?

Ludde: We are not really “rival developers” even though we work on “competing” clients. I have a healthy relationship with the Azureus team and we’re cooperating openly. My goal is not to destroy Azureus. I want to provide a lightweight alternative to Azureus for the people that believe that Azureus’s requirements in terms of CPU/Memory are too high.

Alex H: Last week Slyck.com published a story that revealed a deal between a company called PeerFactor and Ludvig Strigeus, uTorrent’s developer. How does uTorrent fit into this? Is Ludde working for the “dark side”? Have you sold out as some people are claiming?

Ludde: I can’t believe how much this deal has been blown up. The whole hysteria started with the Slyck.com article saying that uTorrent is cooperating with RetSpan and working with Anti-P2P organizations. Later the article was updated because that statement was factually incorrect. Yet I believe a large number of users still have doubts about uTorrent’s legitimacy.

The deal as such is not even about uTorrent. I will provide the company (PeerFactor, a startup company started in late 2005), with a small DLL-file that can be used for one thing only – Downloading files from BitTorrent network. The deal is not between uTorrent and PeerFactor, and it does not affect uTorrent. I’m just using some of my expertise to help them develop an application that webmasters can use to publish big content on their websites. I don’t even give out any source code.

I can’t show you our agreement, but uTorrent is not even mentioned in our deal. There are no mentions of any Anti-P2P ideas, and PeerFactor owns NO rights to the BitTorrent code. The deal is just between me (Ludvig Strigeus) as a developer and PeerFactor. It’s not related to uTorrent at all. The license has no malicious intent towards P2P users, and it does not affect uTorrent in any way. The contract explicitly states that they can only use it for the designated purpose, and not for anything else such as monitoring P2P users.

Alex H: Who was at the meeting with PeerFactor?

Ludde: I have not even met anyone in person, I havn’t even talked to them on the phone! All our communication has been on e-mails and IRC. This is not a big contract. It’s just a small side project to try to get some payment for the effort involved in writing a BitTorrent protocol stack.

Alex H: What does this .dll file do exactly?

Ludde: The DLL file component that I have exports a few basic functionalities such as

* Start downloading a torrent
* Stop it
* Pause
* Remove it
* Determine how many % was downloaded.

It contains no functionality whatsoever for retreiving IP-addresses of peers.

The DLL file wasn’t written specifically for PeerFactor. It’s a generic download DLL with a small size/footprint that I have developed as a separate project. I just made some minor adjustments so it would meet PeerFactor’s requirements.

Alex H: Do you know, or can you speculate on what PeerFactor plans to do with the .dll?

Ludde: The goal is to use unused bandwidth of Internet users to distribute big files, like trial games, free trial music and trailers. It is not related to fake files.

Alex H: How is the deal structured? Is it a straight sale or a lease? Is there some kind of royalty payment to Ludde?

Ludde: It’s a 6-month lease. PeerFactor will evaluate if the DLL fits with their requirements. No source is involved, and all ownership to the code belongs to me. I have not been paid anything, but if the service turns out to work, I will get some form of payment. I don’t have an employment contract with PeerFactor. I do not work for them, and they do not have control over any decisions I make related to uTorrent.

Alex H: PeerFactor has ties to French anti-P2P company RetSpan. Is there still a relationship there?

Ludde: No, the person I’ve been in contact with has assured me that there is no relationship at all between PeerFactor and RetSpan. I trust him, and if it turns out that there is a connection, I will not work with them.

Alex H: The uTorrent website was put on a block list a few days ago. How did it happen? Is there anything on the uTorrent website that is a security risk for users?

Ludde: These blocklists are created by a bunch of over-paranoid people (Bluetack). The software PeerGuardian has temporarily handed over list creation to Bluetack, and Bluetack prefers to be better safe than sorry. Their decision was based on incorrect facts, and it will take some time before the block gets removed.

Alex H: There is a certain level of mistrust directed at closed source applications like uTorrent. Why is the uTorrent source code not available? Will uTorrent ever be open source?

Ludde: There are no plans to make uTorrent open source. If uTorrent becomes open source, it will result in hacked clients, or companies modifying the code and creating malware clients. If uTorrent is closed source, I can make sure that the quality of uTorrent stays high and that it doesn’t become a bloated client. Further, it makes sure that the source code is not used by dubious companies or for dubious purposes.

Alex H: Is there anything in the uTorrent source code that would be considered a security risk to users, such as a “phone home” component or something that builds up a profile of the user?

Ludde: Not at all, uTorrent has an optional feature (enabled by default) that sends a unique random ID number when checking for new updates. This is used solely for the purpose of computing how many users that are actively using uTorrent. Azureus does the same thing, so it’s nothing special really. A lot of internet-enabled programs do this without even telling the user. With uTorrent you have the option to turn it off if it’s of concern to you.

Alex H: uTorrent is free, but donations are accepted. What other kinds of work have you done to make ends meet? Is there anyone you would refuse to work for?

Ludde: Working with an Anti-P2P company is certainly not a good idea, considering my interests in making the best BitTorrent client. I would not do that. Apart from that, I don’t know. I will have to evaluate any possible offers and see if they match with what I think is fair and makes sense.

Alex H: I asked a similar question to this in our previous interview: How do you see BitTorrent developing over say, the next three years?

Ludde: This is a very hard question to answer. I definitely believe P2P is here to stay. I think ISPs will get a bigger role and start developing solutions to help P2P instead of working against it, for example cache mechanisms. I like the new law in France that legalizes P2P, and I hope that more countries will follow.

I think we’ll start seeing BitTorrent more in embedded devices, such as set-top boxes. More services will be developed around BitTorrent to distribute legal content, and subscription based services such as high quality movies-on-demand instead of renting DVDs in the rental store.

Alex H: Thanks for your time, and good luck for the future.

Ludde: Thanks.

P2Pnet

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.