Help Azureus to Fight BitTorrent Throttling ISPs
ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for years now, but only recently has this turned into a political issue. The BitTorrent client Azureus has now developed a plugin through which you can help distinguishing the good from the bad ISPs, data they will use to strengthen their argument in the ongoing Comcast debate.
Last November Azureus petitioned the FCC, resulting in a FCC hearing which was held a month ago. One of the issues raised there, was that there is little data available on the scope of BitTorrent throttling, a gap Azureus now plans to fill.
“We at Vuze (Azureus) decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate,” says Jay Monahan, General Counsel at Azureus. “We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze (Azureus) application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.”
The main purpose of the plugin is to gather factual data on which ISPs are throttling with BitTorrent, and to what extent. Already there is an ever growing list of bad ISPs available at the Azureus wiki, but the data from the plugin will make their case even stronger.
When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, Azureus was one of the first BitTorrent clients to introduce a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. However, this was only the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.
Unfortunately, BitTorrent encryption doesn’t work against the more aggressive, and ever evolving throttling applications. Even though there is a Comcast proof BitTorrent encryption in the making, it is always easier to use political means to stop ISPs from messing with our traffic in the first place. The plugin is listed at Azureus’ Sourceforge page if you want to help out.
For the paranoid BitTorrent users among us, Monahan guarantees that the data will be sent anonymously. “Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort.”
Previously: Piracy is a Negotiation, not a Fight
Next: Movie Screening Security Guards Take On The Pirates
78 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
Yeah, that’s an excellent plug-in; congrats to Azureus!
But what if all ISPs in the country are throttling your Internet traffic? What are you supposed do to then? Which ISP to choose? :o
>-|
Yeah, that’s an excellent plug-in; congrats to Azureus!
But what if all ISPs in the country are throttling your Internet traffic? What are you supposed to do then? Which ISP to choose? :o
>-|
a good news, many ISP of my country is throttling torrent, unfortunately (or not) the devs form anothers p2p dont care about throttling
Installed the plug-in. Nice job Azureus! :D
Azureus FTW DUDE!
i usually use utorrent for download and Azureus for upload. but now i will use only azureus+ that plugin for some time
I’d like to see more of this across applications.
There is a lack of data, particularly in the UK.
Claiming one speed, delivering another, limiting data transfers - there is a lack of compatibility between isps due to a lack of information disclosure.
I’d like to see more of this across applications.
There is a lack of data, particularly in the UK.
Claiming one speed, delivering another, limiting data transfers - there is a lack of compatibility between isps due to a lack of information disclosure.
How does Azureus tell what is a legitimate rst request and which are spoofed requests? Ive been running this plugin for over a month now and if one were to take the statistics at face value it would make for grim reading, but knowing my ISP doesnt use such methods to throttle bittorrent, surely they cannot be used to claim as much?
Comcast BLOWZ!
I had a 1meg up account with them. I now have a half meg up account with WOW and it streams up three times as fast.
Throttling destroys the net. FTP transfers were just as slow.
Switch if you can.
Is there a point to try this if I live in Canada? Will they need data from other countries than the US?
Does uTorrent have anything like this planned? I’ve always used utorrent, but I’m not opposed to switching… I hear Azureus is just as good.
azureus is a resource hog. I do however appreciate the efforts.
J.
Yes but…. I read:
Status: Plug-in currently only works on windows machines.
make a uTorrent plugin pl0x?
**my work-around that works for me**
Ok i have Comcast and i must say i do get that [re-set:tag] and crazy torrent throttle on my traffic sucks. But heres what i found to work.
while your seeding 1-3 downloaders, yes your ISP is throttling your traffic. But onces! you get 6 or more than it doesnt matter!! F”them!! i seeded to over 300-500 peers today! hahah…..seeded all day Comcast could do nothing about it!!…..[oh ya using uTorrent]
TIP: make sure its a torrent most want, if its not or a Ok, So, So, than forget it…. Good Luck peoples..
I use Azureus and I for one would not want someone snooping in my backyard, I like the stance there taking. However I hope if the plug-in is only for windows or mac we need a Linux Azureus counterpart.
I must be one of the lucky ones that got protocol encryption to work for me through comcast. My seed speeds never dropped. Seeding right now at 180K/s. A little more than my usual. I will still look into Azureus to help out with this plug-in.
great post! I love it
I am so sure telstra throttles p2p…..
I have two identical boxen, except one runs Ubuntu and the other XP.
Azureus runs atop of Java on either OS — but on Ubuntu, it’s terrific.
[quote comment="318607"]azureus is a resource hog. I do however appreciate the efforts.
J.[/quote]
We are in the multi-core age with 2gb ram as the norm, 4gb is becomming the norm and 8gb kits are cheap as chips.
Your argument was valid in the p100 days.
“We are in the multi-core age with 2gb ram as the norm, 4gb is becomming the norm and 8gb kits are cheap as chips.”
This doesn’t mean that we get this HW for free, pal. In case if you don’t know: it still costs money. Which means we’re not gonna eat just any crap SW developers are trying to feed to us.
“Your argument was valid in the p100 days.”
Resources are still valuable. Plus, anything that reqs you to install Java is just asking to be thrown out of the window.
agree with 21
To 21:
We are also in the age of environmental responsibility. With 100’s of millions of old pc’s filling up landfills, why toss an old perfectly working p3, or p4 box that could run 24/7 just running utorrent? Why should I throw a ton of money in a box to run a resource hog when I can use one of my many old pc’s to do a simple task of just downloading???
Set up azureus to have seeds queued.
If you think Azureus is a resource hog.
“Right now the plug-in only works on PCs, not Macs, but we are actively working on future versions.”
As soon as they get me a Mac version, count me in! Maybe I should just run it on my PC for a while for the sake of gathering information anyway.
Anyway, it’s definitely good to see this kind of initiative among filesharing industry leaders.
Ever since uTorrent got picked up by BitTorrent inc, Azureus is the only BT client worth a damn… and it’s a hell of a client at that.
Keep up the good work.
You know I wouldn’t have the problems I do with utorrent if they were opensource like this. Its when shits closed that I have issues I’d also like to see utorrent give a little bit back to the foss community with their new info they have on getting around comcast protection.
Again opensource is the way to go with bit torrent its just too bad people dont realize this when they use utorrent. Which was a good client until it was bought out by corporations who don’t have the users best interest in mind.
Hey, why don’t you guys try Deluge?
I’m using it, and somehow I can get around their throttling shit.
I am from the UK and a uTorrent user, seeing as it is lighter, and I am using a laptop with only 512ram.
But I will use Azereus for a while considering it has this new add on. I am very interested to see.
“Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort.”
Well I’m sorry, that’s not enough for me. If they really want to assure people of that, they better back it up with the code of the plugin, they should comment and lay out the code and say what does what, so the programmer who are using bittorrent can verify this claim.
I for one won’t be using this.
Fuck Azureus that’s a retarded torrent client.
Switch to uTorrent n00bs.
FUCK TORRENTLEECH!
Very nice, i expect this on uTorrent soon!
Limit bandwidth is not a problem for me, my ISP does only that (AFAK).
Why does ever think Azuerus is a resource hog i’m downloading all sorts of stuff on azuerus now. And i’m only using about 3% of my cpu and 108,932K of memory. And this is a 3 year old pc with a crappy old P4 prescot 3.2ghz & 2gb of RAM.
There is nothing better than this!
http://pluking.blogspot.com
@33
Kids and their toys. I have an ancient Celeron at 800Mhz with 512 RAM. Right now utorrent uploads at about 200 KB/s.
Memory usage is at 15.004K and CPU usage at 3%.
Bloatware remains bloatware.
[quote comment="318842"]Fuck Azureus that’s a retarded torrent client.
Switch to uTorrent n00bs.
[/quote]
u are right Azureus is for PROs, so all n00bs go use utorrent
[quote comment="318955"]@33
Kids and their toys. I have an ancient Celeron at 800Mhz with 512 RAM. Right now utorrent uploads at about 200 KB/s.
Memory usage is at 15.004K and CPU usage at 3%.
Bloatware remains bloatware.[/quote]
can u open jpg image with this wreckage?
[quote comment="318671"][quote comment="318607"]azureus is a resource hog. I do however appreciate the efforts.
J.[/quote]
We are in the multi-core age with 2gb ram as the norm, 4gb is becomming the norm and 8gb kits are cheap as chips.
Your argument was valid in the p100 days.[/quote]
As much as the technology has ramped, I have to agree that Azureus clogs my box a bit. And Java is a huge security risk. The ‘xploits for Java are legendary.
http://tinyurl.com/2d2vd2 (Google search for ‘Java exploits’.
This link is nothing someone else couldn’t find on their own, but if you don’t have to run Java, I wouldn’t suggest it. Not to mention the annoying Java Updates, cause the code is so manipulable it has to tended to like an AIDS case, constantly.
I admit the interface is feature-rich, but I prefer to wank to other things.
[quote comment="318683"]agree with 21[/quote]
Too bad you didn’t understand 22…
Azureus might be a resource hog (well I changed some startup options for the Java VM, it now takes more memory but it’s much faster), but it has a lot of useful features I miss on almost every other client (oh, and I use Linux, but I’m also comprising uTorrent+WINE). Currently using it with seeding 1000+ torrents.
I used to run a really old machine with a 1.1 ghz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB HDD, Windows XP, and Azureus and I never had a problem with it being a resource hog at all. I would run it and then go and do other things on that machine and never had a problem.
I used to like Azureus before it went to VUZE. I dislike their new interface that is like a wannabe Joost. I prefer the old, sweet & simple interface of Azureus.
But beyond that Azureus is a kick ass torrent downloader and I have never had a problem with it.
[quote comment="318955"]@33
Kids and their toys. I have an ancient Celeron at 800Mhz with 512 RAM. Right now utorrent uploads at about 200 KB/s.
Memory usage is at 15.004K and CPU usage at 3%.
Bloatware remains bloatware.[/quote]
And that machine would still be capable of running Azures with ease. 3% of 3.2ghz is around 100mhz + 100mb comes well into those specks.
P.s. Dont try and argue with me on this one i used to run Azures on a similar spec machine untill i gave it away to someone so they could browse the net. What is it your using windows 98 SE ?.
Damn, they need to update this for macs. I really want to help out.
Switch to Speakeasy:
http://www.speakeasy.net
[quote comment="318671"][quote comment="318607"]azureus is a resource hog. I do however appreciate the efforts.
J.[/quote]
We are in the multi-core age with 2gb ram as the norm, 4gb is becomming the norm and 8gb kits are cheap as chips.
Your argument was valid in the p100 days.[/quote]
for what is a simple network transfer protocol, with error checking, why should it need a 2Ghz processor? 3 years ago, I was told by an az developerm that its reccomended system was half a gig of ram, and 2ghz processor. Solidworks 2004 didn’t have that high of an requirement, and thats a full-on parametric 3d CAD program.
It’s sloppy programming, and something that shouldn’t be encouraged. Here’s something you might find amusing - I have an old 8-bit computer i used to use for databases, running microsoft DRS, circa 1985. I had a dual p3-550 running win2k, and access, and the load times, and run times for both were similar for similar sets of data. With more ersources, people bog the code down with more crap, and slow things down. You end up with systems doing the stuff with modern software that 20yo computers did with 20yo software just as fast.
Coding standards have plummeted in recent years. Some of the worst, happens to be open source software, and its MO is the cause of it. Right now, Firefox having ahd one tab open for 6 hours, is using the same amount of ram as Opera which has had 30-50 tabs open over hte last 3 days (and which is remembering all the history for all the tabs i’ve closed as well)
Lets encourage better coding, rather than buying ever more hardware to deal with coders inadequacies.
Oh, and the machine I’m on - athlon 1Ghz with 384Mb ram. only thing it stumbles with, is badly coded software.
I agree with 45.
so we need explanation of these measurements! I see them but i dont know they are bad or good!?
Looking forward to the Mac version
Please let me know when it will be able for mac.
thanks
Need a Utorrent version. Azureus hogs my resources.
I’m glad that guys will be able to add to the info on the wiki, but I’m not completely opposed to ISPs throttling torrent downloads. I would just like pressure to be put on them to reveal that they use “traffic-shaping” in their T&Cs and advertising. Consumers have a right to know what sort of speeds and bandwidth allowances they can truthfully expect from their subscriptions.
If some ISPs do not throttle torrents, they are entitled to advertise it and charge higher prices. The ISPs that DO throttle, should be more widely publicised. Free-market competition (yeah, right) should enable a new 2-tier system for subscribers to choose between.
[quote comment="319064"]
I used to like Azureus before it went to VUZE. I dislike their new interface that is like a wannabe Joost. I prefer the old, sweet & simple interface of Azureus.
But beyond that Azureus is a kick ass torrent downloader and I have never had a problem with it.[/quote]
you can disable vuze! start azureus> options> interface> start> Display azureus UI chooser> Show> Classic interface. then restart azureus and viola! vuze interface wont load! :D
[quote comment="318671"][quote comment="318607"]azureus is a resource hog. I do however appreciate the efforts.
J.[/quote]
We are in the multi-core age with 2gb ram as the norm, 4gb is becomming the norm and 8gb kits are cheap as chips.
Your argument was valid in the p100 days.[/quote]
not really? its a torrent client, not crysis ;)
Funny… the day you published this article I noticed considerable changes in my upload bandwidth… coincidence?
azureus is a resource hog. suv’s are a resource hog. lean and mean is possible.
“Kids and their toys. I have an ancient Celeron at 800Mhz with 512 RAM. Right now utorrent uploads at about 200 KB/s.
Memory usage is at 15.004K and CPU usage at 3%.”"
So What. Try launching additional applications while up/dwnloading then check that computer usage.
thts a great champ. changa laga bhi
http://www.freewebs.com/paracha2
Yeah, i have installed it on Linux but i just get a message saying “Plugin currently works only on Windows machines”
amen #24
i dont use azureus buttt
can sum1 from australia with TPG ADSL2+ net, plz test it and upload the info to the azureus wiki.
i would like to c results
I am not lawyer.
But if the Isps are breaking the encryption on the torrent client, in order to get passed it, isnt that a violation of the DMCA?
Hey, I’ve been using your program for years now. ISPs messing with BT isn’t cool. If I find out mine is doing this I will Immediately cancel my service. You guys rule, keep up the good work. Oh and by the way, I’m in the film business and I don’t mind torrenting of my films, not everyone in Hollywood is a royal class douche.
i had Azureus and i had seeding problems so i just switched to utorrent and everythings fine. ps i also have comcast
Perhaps the more obvious approach would be better: insisting that you be able to use what you pay for.. YOUR bandwidth. The FCC already has rules about this. Perhaps even more clarification would be helpful.
Failing to allow you to use what’s yours is a breach of contract.
When I pay for 20 mb/s I expect to be able to use 20 mb/s 24/7. If they don’t want anyone using 20 mb/s they shouldn’t offer it as an option.
I don’t give a rat’s a$$ how my usage of network resources affects anyone else on the network. MY contract is with the ISP, not with network members.
It’s up to the ISP to construct a network capable of servicing all network members, otherwise they’re also guilty of another kind of fraud.
generic retarded objection
“azu is a resource hog”
Sounds like someone didn’t bother READING how to properly configure the application for his system.
Additionally expecting NEW software on OLD hardware to function as well as NEW software on NEW hardware is patently irrational. Upgrade your hardware or continue using OLD software.
azu resouces
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/4719/azufinekj5.png
vs
firefox resources
http://i32.tinypic.com/w18plf.png
Azu, even Vuze, is delightful when properly CONFIGURED. it can even be configured to look oldschool:
http://i26.tinypic.com/2is8v0m.png
Plus I don’t have to tolerate crap clients or barely-sharing peers with azu. microTorrent only has IPA banning.
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