Help Azureus to Fight BitTorrent Throttling ISPs
Written by Ernesto on March 25, 2008ISPs 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.”
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79 Responses
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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???
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