BitTornado Bans All BitComet Users

Written by Ernesto on January 07, 2007 

BitTornado developer John Hoffman, better known as Shad0w, decided to ban BitComet users from accessing his client. Shad0w says that BitComet is gaming the system and stealing precious bandwidth, which results in slower speeds for all non-Bitcomet users.

banned bitcometBitComet is known to be a BitTorrent bully, similar to the recently introduced BitThief and BitTyrant. What makes this problem serious is the fact that BitComet is far more popular than the other two clients, so its effect on other peers is more serious.

Recently, BitComet started to exploit the super-seeding procedure, an invention by Shad0w that is also implemented in other popular clients like uTorrent. A super-seed detects peers that efficiently distribute data to other peers, and rewards them by sending them more data. This technique speeds up the overall speed of the swarm, and all other users benefit from it. However, not if it was up to the BitComet developers.

Shad0w explains, “When BitComet games super-seed, it induces the seed into thinking that the BitComet peer is very efficient at spreading data. As a result, the peer downloads faster than the rest of the peers, and typically doesn’t share that data as efficiently, costing the rest of the peers a lot of download time.”

The continuous efforts of the BitComet developers to cheat the system made Shad0w decide to ban all BitComet users. “Since BitComet has proven itself to be a harmful codebase, and since they have forced me to take steps I’d rather not have, I will also be banning connections from that client to my own client and tracker codebases. Should the BitComet developers decide to remove the exploitation code from their client, I will reconsider this decision.”

People may question whether it is a good decision to ban all BitComet users, but I think it is a wise one. In general, BitComet users are not the sharing type, so my prediction would be that it is more likely to speed up downloads, than to slow them down.

I’m with Shad0w on this, and I seriously hope that BitComet stops cheating, and will become more BitTorrent friendly in the future. I’ve used Shadow’s BitTorrent client for quite a while myself, and Shad0w is one of the most dedicated BitTorrent client developers around.

Previously: 24 Season 6 Leaked on BitTorrent

Next: Mininova Reaches 1 Billion Downloads

113 Responses

1 Jan 07, 2007 at 20:37 by John Hoffman (TheSHAD0W)

Not only is BitComet slowing everyone else down, but they’re also stupidly shooting themselves in the foot. http://forums.degreez.net/viewtopic.php?t=7079

2 Jan 07, 2007 at 20:51 by meLon

This is not the first time BitComet has annoyed the rest of the torrent community:
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1021

3 Jan 07, 2007 at 21:13 by ZeroCool

Man that shadow needs to wise up man there has been no compliants about this so what is his problem just because his client is old and outdate he ahould keep with the times. GRADE A WANKER GOES TO SHADOW

4 Jan 07, 2007 at 21:20 by Hack the Gibson

Cry more N00b

5 Jan 07, 2007 at 21:33 by NamelessGerbil

ZeroN00B, cry me a cheat river will ya?

6 Jan 07, 2007 at 22:33 by jonston

bitcomet does indeed suck but there are 2 problems with this:
1. how can bitcomet game superseeding? as i’ve always seen it explained, a superseed judges a client’s upload by seeing how fast its pieces appear in the swarm. how can bitcomet make other clients lie about what they’ve recieved?
2. don’t lump bittyrant in with bitthief and bitcomet. it basically does the same thing as superseeding by prioritizing upload to other clients that upload fast.

7 Jan 07, 2007 at 22:36 by StichFace

Frank Castle you really know how to hit rock bottom don’t you…

I still prefer BitComet and even with the ban will continue to use it.

8 Jan 07, 2007 at 23:11 by Chris

Does anyone even use that client? Bitcomet was fixed a long time ago, and I can’t think of anyone in the world who would agree with you. You suck

9 Jan 07, 2007 at 23:34 by shad0wh@t3r

lol poor baby shad0w, BitComet users wont let him leech their bandwidth to support his shitty user base. By dividing the bittorrent community into private fiefdoms he damages EVERYONE including his own users! He can go fuck himself! While he lives in lalaland the rest of us will continue to use and support BitComet and all the other clients that don’t condescendingly decide who its users can and can not trade packets with or how. What he forgets is that the bandwidth is ours, the files are ours, and he has just one of many clients (and not nearly the best).

To shad0wsuck3rs:
From the perspective of a Bittornado user, this is bad news. a large number of people on any given torrent will now not be accessible to the client, and totally ignored. This will lead to less speed rather than more. Shad0w assumes every person on BitComet is obviously a thief, spoofing his super-special “super-seeding” and cheating the system to steal from him saying, they “typically doesn’t share that data as efficiently” . So he bans them. The Nazi’s were efficient too - at banning Jews! The real “democratic nature” of bittorrent is its ability to allow the people to decide both their commitment (upstream) and reward (downstream) on an individual and communal level. The more people that participate in any one torrent the faster the speeds. That doesn’t mean every person must saturate their connection with upstream packets at all times. If a feature is going to be added to an individual client, it shouldn’t require a ban of other users of the same basic system to work.

10 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:21 by a

This is like trying to require a certain user agent to view a web site. BitComet will just add a setting to report that it is some other client.

11 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:21 by Ibslice

Well done. We have had it banned on our tracker for a long time now because of this exact factor and because it not reporting stats correctly. I know many other private sites have done similar. Its great that another developer also see’s this and has also taken a stand. Congratulations and WELL DONE :)

12 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:26 by Seriously

You are going to dictate to me what peers I can connect too? I don’t think so. Goodbye BitTornado.

13 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:37 by Required

Its about time. The public tracker idiots will whine and complain, but everyone knows all the good stuff is on private trackers, and Bit Comet screws everyone else in the swarm, hurting the community, and reducing the numbers of people who want to upload new content. Shad0w is brave enough to take a stance against a shitty cheat client, unlike uTorrent’s whimpy developer (who recently sold out to hollywood). I’ve used the original ‘epxerimental client’ from shadow for years before switching to uTorrent a year or so ago. I needed a client that can schedule bandwidth and show all torrents in a single window. I might switch back, though, and start using Bit Tornado when the new version is released with the BC ban implemented.

I have played around with Azureus and the stuffit plugin, but Az is too much to deal with, it eats up way too much of my resources. Bit Tornado would be perfect if it had an updated GUI.

14 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:42 by Mike Cane

I have to wonder… is the MPAA/RIIAA employing boiler rooms of temps to sabotage P2P?

15 Jan 08, 2007 at 00:53 by paperslug

[quote comment="37005"]lol poor baby shad0w, BitComet users wont let him leech their bandwidth to support his shitty user base. By dividing the bittorrent community into private fiefdoms he damages EVERYONE including his own users! He can go fuck himself! While he lives in lalaland the rest of us will continue to use and support BitComet and all the other clients that don’t condescendingly decide who its users can and can not trade packets with or how. What he forgets is that the bandwidth is ours, the files are ours, and he has just one of many clients (and not nearly the best).

To shad0wsuck3rs:
From the perspective of a Bittornado user, this is bad news. a large number of people on any given torrent will now not be accessible to the client, and totally ignored. This will lead to less speed rather than more. Shad0w assumes every person on BitComet is obviously a thief, spoofing his super-special “super-seeding” and cheating the system to steal from him saying, they “typically doesn’t share that data as efficiently” . So he bans them. The Nazi’s were efficient too - at banning Jews! The real “democratic nature” of bittorrent is its ability to allow the people to decide both their commitment (upstream) and reward (downstream) on an individual and communal level. The more people that participate in any one torrent the faster the speeds. That doesn’t mean every person must saturate their connection with upstream packets at all times. If a feature is going to be added to an individual client, it shouldn’t require a ban of other users of the same basic system to work.[/quote]

BUWHAHAHAHA Dude you seriously made me laugh. More than Half of the Bit Torrent community HATES BitComet. I think what he did is good and this could result in others doing this and maybe ending the crappy hunk of Programing call”BitComet”.

16 Jan 08, 2007 at 01:03 by Bobo

Too bad bitcomet has such a stellar user interface, and is actually easy to use…

17 Jan 08, 2007 at 01:06 by marcel

how do I ban people with the client bitcomet on utorrent?

18 Jan 08, 2007 at 01:51 by mr loves holy spirit

[quote comment="37025"]how do I ban people with the client bitcomet on utorrent?[/quote]
You cant, µTorrent always plays nice, even with bitcomets.

19 Jan 08, 2007 at 01:58 by paperslug

[quote comment="37033"][quote comment="37025"]how do I ban people with the client bitcomet on utorrent?[/quote]
You cant, µTorrent always plays nice, even with bitcomets.[/quote]
You could just bann thier IP

20 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:19 by groovie

@shad0wh@t3r
Hey dumbass. Seriously, dont take this ban on bitcomet personally.
We all saw this one coming, just change client.
And if you haven’t noticed: many, I mean many, seedboxes are running bittornado.

Im with Shad0w at this one.

21 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:24 by Pax3

I’m using bitcomet because I don’t have any other alternative!!

My pc is a bit outdated and Azureus is too heavy to run on it. uTorrent is an excellent program but lacks the NAT Traversal feature, and since I’m behind a router I can’t get good speeds with it neither connect to many peers (I’ve tried the guide available on their to port forwarding but with no results).

The thing is, I seed a lot, I often let my computer on all day just to seed! And now someone decided to ban me from whatever just because I’m using bitcomet!
I’d change my torrent client, but to which one? I need something with NAT Traversal, and the only one left that occurs to me is BitSpirit, but I really don’t like that client….

22 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:34 by paperslug

[quote comment="37038"]I’m using bitcomet because I don’t have any other alternative!!

My pc is a bit outdated and Azureus is too heavy to run on it. uTorrent is an excellent program but lacks the NAT Traversal feature, and since I’m behind a router I can’t get good speeds with it neither connect to many peers (I’ve tried the guide available on their to port forwarding but with no results).

The thing is, I seed a lot, I often let my computer on all day just to seed! And now someone decided to ban me from whatever just because I’m using bitcomet!
I’d change my torrent client, but to which one? I need something with NAT Traversal, and the only one left that occurs to me is BitSpirit, but I really don’t like that client….[/quote]
OK. What to do is forward the Port in your router to use utorrent. Also the reasons why you may get super Speeds With BitVomit is because it abuses Trackers and suchs.

23 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:35 by paperslug

[quote comment="37040"][quote comment="37038"]I’m using bitcomet because I don’t have any other alternative!!

My pc is a bit outdated and Azureus is too heavy to run on it. uTorrent is an excellent program but lacks the NAT Traversal feature, and since I’m behind a router I can’t get good speeds with it neither connect to many peers (I’ve tried the guide available on their to port forwarding but with no results).

The thing is, I seed a lot, I often let my computer on all day just to seed! And now someone decided to ban me from whatever just because I’m using bitcomet!
I’d change my torrent client, but to which one? I need something with NAT Traversal, and the only one left that occurs to me is BitSpirit, but I really don’t like that client….[/quote]
OK. What to do is forward the Port in your router to use utorrent. Also the reasons why you may get super Speeds With BitVomit is because it abuses Trackers and suchs.[/quote]
http://torrentfreak.com/bitcomet-the-bittorrent-bully/
Check there to see. Sorry for Double posting.

24 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:44 by ALASKAMAN

Shad0w is right; Bitcomet games the system and that sucks. Banning Bitcomet is the right thing to do. More sites should do the same!

25 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:48 by supercool

you guys are LaME.
BitComet RULES!

26 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:51 by paperslug

[quote comment="37045"]you guys are LaME.
BitComet RULES![/quote]
XD
Wow another BitVomit Fan. Why is it so much better? Oh yeah the way it over works the hell out of Tracker sis so cool.

27 Jan 08, 2007 at 02:57 by BitComet User

Here’s my dilema…I’m behind a nat which I don’t control (it’s a college campus). I can’t just go up to my IT guy and ask him to forward my port or open up any ports. I use BC because it allows me to download faster…I’d love to seed if I could. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s shitty that leechers like me damage the torrent system. However not all of us have a choice in that matter and regardless as to what anyone says not all leechers wanna be leechers. If it was up to me I’d be seeding several torrents on another machine (gotta keep my main one open for gaming ;-).

IMO it’s Shad0w’s program and he can do with it what he wants…but assuming it’s not already he should’ve just made it an option instead of hardcoding it in. Fairness works both ways.

28 Jan 08, 2007 at 03:57 by Mort

[quote comment="37050"]I use BC because it allows me to download faster…I’d love to seed if I could. Don’t get me wrong I think it’s shitty that leechers like me damage the torrent system. However not all of us have a choice in that matter and regardless as to what anyone says not all leechers wanna be leechers.[/quote]
you made a choice, and it’s to download as fast as possible. you chose your personal speeds over the interests of the bittorrent community.

anyway, as has been stated, most private trackers ban BitComet already, so shad0w’s just taking it one step further. anyone who is really disappointed by it should ask for your money back … oh wait

29 Jan 08, 2007 at 03:57 by Yatti420

Good to see Shadow still kicking… As for BitComet… This has been coming for awhile has it not?

30 Jan 08, 2007 at 04:31 by Belan

Granted, Bitcomet games the system … but not all bitcomet users are “evil leechers who want to destroy the system.” I run WinXP 64bit … bitcomet is the only client I’ve been able to use that won’t blue-screen my machine within 5 minutes. It sucks that it doesn’t play nice, but don’t assume people are trying to cheat everyone out of a few kb/mb/gb of bandwidth just because they’re using that client.

31 Jan 08, 2007 at 05:35 by Genocide IIDX

so basicly BitComet is being banned cuz of some retarded users r abuseing it?

i been useing Bitcomey for year and i have no prob with it i seed my torrents

unlike the other clients i used i get better DL speeds from Bitcomet

bittorrent: i didit like download speeds sucked even if i dl from a torrent with over 2000 seeders i shouldnt get anything under 100
azures:

32 Jan 08, 2007 at 09:56 by Hannes

Nice step!

33 Jan 08, 2007 at 10:49 by ShadowMaster

[quote comment="37069"]so basicly BitComet is being banned cuz of some retarded users r abuseing it?

i been useing Bitcomey for year and i have no prob with it i seed my torrents

unlike the other clients i used i get better DL speeds from Bitcomet

bittorrent: i didit like download speeds sucked even if i dl from a torrent with over 2000 seeders i shouldnt get anything under 100
azures:[/quote]

No, BitComet is not being banned because of retarded users abusing it. It’s being banned because the client itself is written to be abusive out of the box.

Yes, you are getting better speeds with BitComet __because__ BitComet abuses the system, but everyone else is paying the price because BitComet the client is being selfish.

34 Jan 08, 2007 at 11:58 by ZeroCool

O well i called a noob o well dont matter because I aint but really come on bitcomet is a class client but shadows client has gone and doesnt have basic torrent features now like DHT if he updated his client nice GUI and more now basic cleint feature i could possibleably understand but he has gone for ages and first thing he doesn o yeah lets ban bitcomet

35 Jan 08, 2007 at 17:30 by OPS

all the words is crap. Everybody make their own decetion. You can ban it. They lose nothing. Maybe you will get better maybe not. If you want to have a finnal way to getoff all the XXX, please ban Chinese IP. After do that, your world is clearing, but too clearing.

36 Jan 08, 2007 at 18:37 by CryCryCry

So if you get faster downloads with Bitcomet, why don’t we all use it? I thought that was the whole f***** point with this protocol. I have been following this case for a while and the only ones that cries about it is the “private tracker” people. Weeeell, guess what, you’re no good for the torrent community anyway are you? Because you want to invite all the good seeders with your registration and invite bullcrap, away from the public trackers. So when Bitcomet doesnt help you in dividing the community, you use all you creativity to come up with the very clever “bitvomet”, and spam the good piece of software that Bitcomet is? Mommy ruined you little boysclub? We all agree that bitcomet downloads faster, so all logic tells use to use it! And this discussion has nothing to do with the seeder issue.

Thats another thing. It’s ok to stop seeding if there is 200 other seeders, it’s a bigger problem that people dont keep torrents alive. The popular torrent are gonna survive anyway…..

37 Jan 08, 2007 at 20:22 by John Hoffman (TheSHAD0W)

The BitTorrent protocol is designed to inherently limit damage from peers which don’t contribute, so up until now I didn’t bother with trying to police the protocol. The problem is that BitComet’s new theft methods don’t just take bandwidth from a point where it’s bottlenecked, and they aren’t just slowing everyone else down, they’re actually slowing THEMSELVES down too. It’s a truly asinine thing to do.

ZeroCool: Of course I’ve had complaints, otherwise I wouldn’t've known about the problem.

jonston: I’ll write more about it later.

38 Jan 08, 2007 at 20:33 by kdsde

CryCryCry wrote: “We all agree that bitcomet downloads faster, so all logic tells use to use it! And this discussion has nothing to do with the seeder issue”

oviously you have absolutely no idea about logic!
there isn’t one magic fast 10GE seeder somewhere that feeds us all with stuff. Its the whole of a swarm that makes the speed.
And BitComet downloads faster because it gives a shit about the health of the overall swarm. 1 seeder has UL capacity X. This X is devided among his leeching peers. so you can only download fast if there are more people in the swarm that GIVE to it in a decent speed. Of everyone would use BC then the speed with which the content is sucked from the swarm would run the cloud of available pieces dry.

Picture a water tank where you with your BitComet take the water from faster then the RainGod can fill it up. (But i’m afraid your logical abilities aren’t developed enough to even imagine such a simple comparison between how a BTswarm works and some real life example!)

39 Jan 08, 2007 at 20:51 by kdsde

P.S.
CryCryCry also wrote:
“I thought that was the whole f***** point with this protocol.”

maybe you should not try to think! either you are unable to do that, or you haven’t understand what BT is all about. It was not intended to get something the fastest possible way, it was invented and its intention was to take the stress off of a server when huge amounts of clients asking him for the same content to serve to them!
Fastest possible speed to get content was never a design goal if I understand the specifications of BT correctly.
maybe you should read them too!

40 Jan 08, 2007 at 22:15 by Gaz

well i’m a bitcomer user. and not for the non sharing reasons suggested in the article. for the simple reason i tried loads and liked the way it workd and the interface. i’ve bbeen using it for many versions. though this information surpriused me. can anyone recommend a client thats like it, but isnt trying the cheat the swarm?

41 Jan 09, 2007 at 01:19 by Dark Shroud

What gaming mode are you talking about?

Now where’s the proof to warrant this ban? BitComet has had a lot of versions, more so than any other client. So what versions of the client are doing this as well? And I’d like some real responses not crap like “everyone knows BitComet cheats” or “BitComet cheats deal with it.”

And since TheSHADOW seem to actually be reading this how about you help those of use who never got the confimation emails from your forums. You have a lot of members listed who never posted once because they did/could not finish regsitering.

42 Jan 09, 2007 at 01:30 by kdsde

Dark Shroud you want an example?

I just at this very moment hit the “log peer traffic” button, and one of the first things that almost instantly came up was:

[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:114688->16384

43 Jan 09, 2007 at 01:52 by donb

Bit comet is not cheating the swarm.

I will keep an open mind till I see something more then wild accusations ranted in a blog, but every other “rumor” regarding Bit Comet has proved to be half truths, or complete fabrications.

Now, consider this, two BT clients. Bit comet that is being accused of acting hostile to other clients, but with NO proof of any kind, and Bit tornado, which IS hostile to other clients, and bans them without any proof.

I have always recommended Bit Tornado as one of the four best, along with Utorrent, Bit Comet, and Azureus, but now we have one that is Hostile (Bit Tornado), one that “could be”, but probably isn’t.

Bit comet has never banned any other clients. In fact, the only thing you can say bad about bit comet is regarding a very old version, and how some hackers were able to force it to enable DHT. However the record of FACTS is clear regarding this, as its developers mediately correct the issue.

In fact, DHT didn’t even have any set rules at the time, since it wasn’t even part of BT protocol, so there were no rules to break, but this didn’t stop people from spreading the rumors.

I am looking forward to hearing Bit Comets official response to this latest attack on it, but since no real facts are included with this accusation, it is impossible to defend. This attack reminds me of a little kid crying that another doesn’t play nice. So, do we ask Bit Comet to prove that is does “play nice”, or ask Shadow to prove it doesn’t???

The former could never be proven by any client, and I sure hope for shadows sake, that he can prove this, cause if he cannot, then his client has become what he accuses bit comet of becoming.

D

44 Jan 09, 2007 at 02:36 by Alex

On the other hand, if a torrent is spreading slowly, this may be quite useful, as it will be available for a longer time.

45 Jan 09, 2007 at 02:41 by Dark Shroud

[quote comment="37259"]Dark Shroud you want an example?

I just at this very moment hit the “log peer traffic” button, and one of the first things that almost instantly came up was:[/quote]

How about a little more information. Like what client you were using, were you using Super-seed mode? Instead of 16 listed items in one second that are not the same client. Why you ask? Because BitComet only uses one port. For all of that to be the same person he’d have to be hitting the randomize button and then manuel connect all within the span of a second. And that’s not acounting firewall adjustment.

Here are 2 full seconds of peer traffic from a Naruto torrent in µTorrent:
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Got Piece: 185:131072->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 185:212992->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 185:229376->16384
[19:31:41] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1097728->16384
[19:31:41] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1114112->16384
[19:31:41] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Sending Piece 441:1081344->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Got Piece: 185:147456->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 185:245760->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:0->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:16384->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:32768->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:49152->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:65536->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:81920->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:98304->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:114688->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:131072->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:147456->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:163840->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:180224->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:196608->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:212992->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:229376->16384
[19:31:41] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Requesting 662:245760->16384
[19:31:42] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Got Piece: 185:163840->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Sending Piece 441:1097728->16384
[19:31:42] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Got Piece: 185:180224->16384
[19:31:42] 195.39.129.88 : Disconnect: Peer error: offline (timed out)
[19:31:42] 218.212.223.23 : Connecting: port 22808
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1130496->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1146880->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1163264->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1179648->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1196032->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1212416->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1228800->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1245184->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1261568->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1277952->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1294336->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1310720->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1327104->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1343488->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1359872->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1376256->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1392640->16384
[19:31:42] 84.204.194.100 : [µTorrent/1600 ]: Got Request: 441:1409024->16384
[19:31:42] 67.10.254.129 : [Mainline 5.0.4 ]: Got Piece: 185:196608->16384
[19:31:42] 24.86.115.21 : Disconnect: Connection closed

Now out of the 49 (1085) seeds & 20 (311) leeches I’m connected to only 15 are BitComet; 8 of the 15 are seeders.

But guess what, I can do like all newbs/noobs do and pound away on the Mannuel Announce button hammering peers, the tracker & DHT in both BitComet and BitTornado. Since they both have that same option.

46 Jan 09, 2007 at 02:47 by donb

Round One, to Dark Shrould

47 Jan 09, 2007 at 03:21 by cars

bitcomet is a cheat end of ,its not for me to prove its for you to prove it doesn’t.
i just hope clients like Azureus do the same thing and ban.it
this is not aimed at bitcomet users.
but at the end of the day non bitcomet users suffer and have done for some time now.
something needs to be done. and ive got to say this is a great start.
im looking forward to the new bit tornado release.im all for it ,saves me having to ban it myself.

good on ya shadow top man

48 Jan 09, 2007 at 03:25 by Heliologue

Originally posted by a twit
Shad0w assumes every person on BitComet is obviously a thief, spoofing his super-special “super-seeding” and cheating the system to steal from him saying, they “typically doesn’t share that data as efficiently” . So he bans them. The Nazi’s were efficient too - at banning Jews!

Wow, Godwin’s Law fulfilled before ten comments. That might be a new record.

49 Jan 09, 2007 at 03:57 by kdsde

dark shroud what are you talking about? And why do you post a logexcerpt that shows totally normal peer behaviour?

to answer your questions:
me using µt latest beta ,no, i’m not super seeding here, i’m just a leeching peer on that torrent like he was, and what I posted is one single BC client (I just Xed the last segment of this IP).
And what you can see in this tiny cutout is BC’s behaviour when he gets choked after getting his turn from one of my uploadslots; Instead of waiting till it is his turn in the choke/unchoke cycle again, he drops all his pending requests just to ask for the dropped pieces right away again. (and no, this here is not endgame mode related since he was only in the 70% range with hundrets of outstanding pieces till completion!) He was so smart to kill himself due to BC’s behaviour to drop connections just to try to reconnect with more then one connection after that. Thanks to BC’s agressive behaviour, µT’s swarmfriendly ipfilter.dat that does not terminate established connections right away can then archive its purpose by blocking such rough peers like BitComets. :-)

@donb
If you have no clue about interpreting posted data, why don’t you just try to educate yourself before posting?!

50 Jan 09, 2007 at 11:50 by donb

Don’t you love people who just insult people, instead of stating their case?

Did you see me insult you Kdsde?

I was only showing my support for dark shroud, but you had to turn this personal.

The facts are that people making unfounded statements regarding bit comet are nothing new, and even when they are found to be completely unfounded, the rumors just continue to spread.

Unlike you, and some others here, I am keeping my mind open, and for you to assume I know nothing about BT, well those here that I have helped resolve issues in the furums I run will differ with you.

Now, consider this, If it was bit comet that announced it was going to ban another client, using only language like “Bit Tornado users are not the sharing type”, Then that would make Bit Comet the hostile client that shadow claims it is. I personally take offense that he can categorize Bit Comet users as “not the sharing type”.

Unless There is more then these vague claims offered, then Bit Tornado should and will be reclassified as a hostile client.

History has shown us that Bit Comet’s developers have been quick to fix any exploits in its client, so demonstrate one, and see what they say, its that simple.

Until I see some evidence to support these claims, I’m giving B/C the benefit of the doubt.

D

51 Jan 09, 2007 at 14:36 by kdsde

donb, I did not insult you. I told you to read because your statement makes no sense.

How come you claim something is “unfounded” if people will offer you hundrets of logs that show how hostile BC behave?

Why are you still claiming there is no prove?
Oh, I think I know why; you might want to accuse those that are willing to present you detailed logs that show BC swarmhostile behaviour that they are BitTornado fan boys that doctor logs!

52 Jan 09, 2007 at 16:22 by donb

To come to the conclusion that “Bit Comet users aren’t the sharing type” is unfounded.

To claim that the client is hostile and harms the “swarm” would require a lot of evidence, not a lot of rumor.

I can tell you that alot of the big uploaders I see on my torrents are Bit Comet users. I don’t think Bit Comet is hostile to other peers, and most of what I have read regarding this is not true. Regarding your log, this alone is meaningless. Without testing in a controlled environment, no conclusions can be drawn.

Another factor that I don’t see addressed is motive. Why would Bit Comet design its client to be hostile, and to what end?

I think it is far more likely that this is more of the same, people read something about bit comet and continue to repeat it, without any evidence.

Until I see some unbiased, and (in detail) testing comparing BT clients, I will put these claims in the same category as all the other rumors regarding B/C.

If there is infact problems with Bitcomet, then I’m sure they will fix the problems, like the dht exploit was corrected.

Peers that ban Bit Comet (or use a client that does) are going to be disconnecting from some of the biggest shares (in my opinion). I do my part to help Bit comet users to learn the importance of sharing, and I see, few to none, who are trying to download without sharing.

D

53 Jan 09, 2007 at 18:41 by revro

ok donb, lets rephrase “Bit Comet users aren’t the sharing type” to “Bit Comet users clients aren’t the sharing type”, everybody happy now ;)

noone insults the users, its their client that is a problem, so you dont have to take it personelly ;)

“Why would Bit Comet design its client to be hostile, and to what end?”
well to make it more popular cause it downloades faster, maybe? :)

54 Jan 09, 2007 at 22:24 by paperslug

That is true over half the BitCOmets I get dont seed. I am not saying all dont share but most dont and it is a very abusive client to the trackers.

55 Jan 10, 2007 at 02:01 by Bomb Bloke

Saying “Bit Comet users don’t seed so we should ban them” is idiotic. Even if you do manage to squash the client, the users will pick up a new one. What will you do then? Ban that one as well? What happens when they all start using Bit Tornado?

Not that this change has anything to do with whether or not Bit Comet shares data (it shares as much as the user tells it to), it’s to do with Bit Comet’s alleged approach to super seeding.

As Jonston put it,

“how can bitcomet game superseeding? as i’ve always seen it explained, a superseed judges a client’s upload by seeing how fast its pieces appear in the swarm. how can bitcomet make other clients lie about what they’ve recieved?”

As someone who has no idea about super seeding, would anyone care to explain why this is or is not relevant?

56 Jan 10, 2007 at 05:44 by meverick

WHAT A LOAD OF B****CKS SOME PEOPLE COME OUT WITH

57 Jan 10, 2007 at 11:14 by donb

revro,

Shadow didn’t say “Bit Comet users clients aren’t the sharing type”.

also…

“Why would Bit Comet design its client to be hostile, and to what end?”
well to make it more popular cause it downloades faster, maybe?

If this was a commercial product, this theory might be sound, but its not, and this theory is not.

D

58 Jan 11, 2007 at 11:47 by mandog

what little cry babies you tossers are its ok to cheat from others but nobody must
cheat from you think you are little gods defending your apllication what ever it may be
all you do is harm to others Bittornado in 2 years of downloading i’ve only seem it on the stats 9-10 times 2 torrent currently being downloaded at pressent 50% of seeds are bitcmet and i don’t use it so what does that say tossers

59 Jan 11, 2007 at 19:14 by Dark Shroud

This quote sums it up nicely:

“The way super-seed works is it discovers which peers are sharing data the most efficiently”

That’s a fascinating remark. How could it possibly discover that? How could one client know what all the other clients are doing, who they’re connecting to, and how they’re distributing data?

It can’t. There’s no mechanism for demanding status reports from other clients, and if there were, I’d want it disabled STAT, not least because it’s wasting my bandwidth. And who would bother to write all the code to do that, for no benefit?

That might be what super-seed wishes it could do, but that’s not what it actually does. The reality falls far short.

A super-seed sends you one piece, then it waits and won’t send you a second piece until somebody ELSE offers it that first piece it sent to you. This establishes that you did share the piece, since somebody else now has it and is offering it.

That’s all it does, because that’s all that it CAN do, and all the rest is wishful thinking. “Most efficient data-sharer?” In a perfect, homogenous network, MAYBE that’s equivalent. I don’t know. Nobody’s every seen a perfect, homogenous network on the Internet.

But the basic idea is still, “I’ll give you another piece when I see that you shared the last one.” Now, if you’ve done that, and done it correctly, then it’s not possible to “game” it or “cheat”. Not unless whoever actually implemented it screwed up badly. Let’s look. He says,

“When BitComet games super-seed, it induces the seed into thinking that the BitComet peer is very efficient at spreading data.”

How? How can any client induce another into thinking that? The SS either was offered piece X by another peer, or was not. There’s no middle ground, no third state, here.

We have three clients. Sigma is the super-seeder, while alpha and beta are peers.

Sigma gives a piece to alpha, and won’t give alpha another piece until alpha has shared the first one. So alpha sends the piece to beta. Beta offers that piece to sigma, who now knows that alpha has shared it, so allows alpha another piece.

How can alpha somehow “induce” sigma into thinking that piece X has been shared when it has not? The system simply does not contain any way to do that, unless the ss algorithm or its implementation is horribly flawed. Sigma is not relying on alpha to say “I’ve shared piece X” — BT has no mechanism for doing that, and we don’t ever want it to have a mechanism for doing that — sigma is waiting for somebody else, in this case beta, to say “I’ve got piece X, do you want it?” — part of a normal BT peer negotiation– as evidence that alpha has shared piece X. If beta doesn’t say that, then sigma thinks alpha has not shared, and won’t give alpha another piece.

This isn’t difficult or technical. If someone can’t explain, simply and clearly, how this gaming is being accomplished, you know they’re blowing smoke in your eyes.

I said that the network was not homogenous. There are “clumps” of peers who are connected to each other, but only one or two of them are connected to any of the peers in that other clump over there. The members of one clump share pretty efficiently among themselves, but diffusion between one clump and the other clump is much less efficient.

(This is the very issue that plagues PEX, the alternative to DHT.)

It means that alpha might be sharing its little heart out among members of its own clump, but none of them happen to connect to sigma. So even though alpha is sharing all that anyone could wish for, sigma does not, can not, become aware of any of that traffic. This is where the nice theory meets the ugly reality. This is where “knowing who is sharing data most efficiently” becomes an impossibility.

The persistent notion that BitComet doesn’t share, is just plain stupid. All BT clients choose their connections and their trading based on whoever gives them the most pieces, the fastest and most reliably. It’s a mutual agreement, continuously renegotiated. If your client doesn’t share with mine, you go to the bottom of my list, and mine won’t share with yours. If you don’t give, you don’t get. So if BC really behaved like that, downloads would be far faster with any other client, and nobody would use BC. It would have died out long ago.

60 Jan 15, 2007 at 22:26 by Blitzar

At last someone smart here! Hooray for BC!

61 Jan 16, 2007 at 07:28 by cars

lol Dark Shroud thinks he/she smart.
stop talking bollocks
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen.
why you ask ,ill tell you
because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.
meaning that superseeder has to work even harder now because person A wants more data but now theres a problem because person B want data also data that it didn’t get off person A .
do you see a pattern here
even in normal seed mode this can happen bittcomet loves to disconnect from the swarm every time it recieves a piece of data.
erm any non bitcomet user ever wounded about why the connections are bouncing blaim bitcomet.
on off on off on off it never flaiming sits still for a minuate lol

so there you go maybe im not smart but hay, im honnest and it does happen simple as

62 Jan 16, 2007 at 14:14 by kdsde

to sum it up;

in 59 Dark Shroud explaines quite good how Initial (aka. super) Seeding works.
so it is NOT utter bollocks what he explaines.
BUT 59 does not consider BitComets specific behaviour which is as good explained in 61 by cars.

For “Person A” read “Bitcomet A”! There is no need to call people names because they just lack the knowledge/intellect to understand how bad their choosen client behaves (but if someone willfully uses BitComet even after neutral technical experts educate them about their client…)

63 Jan 16, 2007 at 14:52 by Superseed

ok, but still there was no answer about the users who cannot forward ports. so if BitComet is, by the rumour, so bad, why nobody can propose a different client to do the Nat Traversal well?

i’m just wondering if there is a possibility to ban BitComet client but only used by people who do not need Nat Traversal? in that case users behind Nat would not be banned while using BitComet. what do you say?

64 Jan 16, 2007 at 23:11 by Legion

hmmm…this shit looks like revenge of nerdz

65 Jan 17, 2007 at 04:19 by Flux

Who cares about bittornado it sucks. Look at torrents the majority of the users that are connceted to trackers are bitcommet, Azureus, utorrent, and offical. By banning bitcommet your killing bittornado even more since 1/3 of the seeders will be gone. Bitcommet really isnt a leacherware test it for yourself your download rate still is affected by your uploadrate. Most people claiming bitcommet is a leacherware have probally never use it before and thye are just trying to pin the answer to why they get such low download rates. Part of the reason is the recent rise in bittorrent users and all these double, triple torrents of the same file so the seeders are spread all over the place.

66 Jan 17, 2007 at 08:37 by Superseed

Yesterday I’ve check’ed some torrent clients (BitSpirit,uTorrent,BitLord,Azerus and BitTornado) giving them the same torrents to download for same period of time and what I found is that even though effects of banning Bitcomet can be already seen (similar number of available but lower number of connected peers and seeds)it still beats other programs as far as speed is concerned. In fact, banning this client did no harm to it so far…..

67 Jan 17, 2007 at 11:06 by insectivore

Cars explains:
================================
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen…because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.
=================================

This begs the question of how BitComet can “pose as a new peer”? There isn’t any such concept as “new peer” in the protocol, or in the super=seeding extension. All peers are basically equal. There’s no status code that means, “I’m a new peer”.

Interoperability requires that all clients adhere to rigidly defined protocol specifications, which cannot be unilaterally changed. If anyone tries, the remainder of the clients out there will not know how to respond to it. Therefore the list of messages that one client can send to another is exclusively specified in the protocol. Any others are not allowed and will be rejected as invalid arguments.

None of them include anything like the concept of “I’m a new peer”.

Since BitComet can’t send any such message and expect to be understood, BitComet cannot “pose” as anything. The protocol does not allow it.

Back to Cars:
============================
(…)meaning that superseeder has to work even harder now because person A wants more data but now theres a problem because person B want data also data that it didn’t get off person A .
============================

Let’s clean this up a bit, with Sigma as the superseeding client, and alpha and beta as peers.

Sigma sends alpha a piece X. Now according to Cars, Alpha did something unspecified that induces Sigma to give it another piece, and Sigma gives Alpha piece Y.

But, says Cars, here is Beta, and it is requesting piece X from Sigma because it didn’t get it from Alpha. Um, wait a second… how can this be? On any level?

Sigma is a super-seeder. It “doesn’t have” any pieces except the ones it decides to “reveal”. Alpha and Beta don’t drive this process, Sigma does. Alpha doesn’t ask, Sigma tells. Beta doesn’t ask for piece Z, Sigma says it’s got piece Z now and does Beta want it?

The rest of the time, Sigma claim it is just another peer, and doesn’t have any pieces Alpha and Beta don’t have.

But Sigma is a super-seeder. It already sent out piece X, and isn’t going to send it again until it has sent all the rest of the torrent. (That’s its brief: send out each piece only once.) So Beta can’t effectively ask, and Sigma won’t itself offer Beta piece X.

In the meantime, the (unproven, unestablished, unjustified and falsifiable) assumption is made that alpha isn’t sharing any of the pieces it gets. But Sigma is sending out pieces one at a time, each one only once, according to its own schedule, whether alpha is sharing, not sharing, or even present.

How then, is Sigma “working harder” if it’s doing the same thing it would be doing, according to the same schedule in any case?

But perhaps Sigma isn’t? That would mean that Sigma is sitting idle for long periods, sending nothing. And then it’s a claim that Sigma is being deceived into taking action and sending a piece, that it otherwise would not send.

Oops! If Sigma is sitting idle, that pretty much finishes the notion that super-seeding is faster, or more efficient at distributing torrents than regular seeding. If it could be sending but isn’t, then that’s just wasted time it could be using to send out the rarest piece of the moment. It’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to use this. It would be far slower than regular seeding.

————————————-

BitComet has no way to say, “I’m new to the swarm”. Neither does any other client. There’s no protocol for that.

It might be, though, that a superseeder stops tracking BitComet for whatever reason. But since BitComet predates super-seeding by years, and behaves the same way it always has, this would be the super-seeder’s failure to cope with the existing ecology. If the SS is misinterpreting BC’s actions, then it’s up to the SS to stop doing that instead of blaming everyone else.

If the superseeder is making assumptions about the existence of behaviors that are not required by the protocol, then it was very badly designed. That’s its fault, nobody else’s. It needs to fix its own shortcomings, not start banning anything that doesn’t conform to its whimsical decrees.

————————————–

In sum, Cars has explained absolutely nothing. There is still no clear idea of how BC is or can game the system, while there is some suggestion here that the system failed to account for pre-existing behavior due to faulty design.

do you see a pattern here
even in normal seed mode this can happen bittcomet loves to disconnect from the swarm every time it recieves a piece of data.

Among the other messages like “new peer” that there aren’t, one of them that there isn’t is “disconnect”. Since there’s no such message, no other client would understand it or honor it. So how does BitComet do this disconnecting?

All of the TCP connections are one-on-one. Alpha to beta, alpha to gamma, alpha to delta. There is no “swarm”, in this sense, there are only the individual connections. There is no way to “disconnect from the swarm”, since the swarm is nothing more than the aggregate of all individual connections interested in a particular torrent. It’s an abstraction that has no real existence.

A swarm is not a packet network, or really any kind of a network — no client accepts and forwards messages to another client. For contrast, DHT *is* a network and does forward data up and down the “line”, for the benefit of other nodes.

You cannot “disconnect from the swarm”. Neither can you connect to it. It doesn’t exist in a sense where this would be possible.

So what does this mean? Is it a claim that BitComet drops its connection with any peer that it just received a piece of data from? If so, then anyone can observe that this is false simply by running BitComet and observing its behavior.

When is a client supposed to connect; remain connected; permissibly disconnect from another peer? The protocol is silent on the subject. There is no specification, and no standard. If someone wishes to establish a standard by inference, then they do need to include the normal behavior of one of the most popular bittorent clients out there: BitComet.

If there is no standard, then no one can violate it. There are merely differences in opinion, in approach, in execution. New systems that cannot cope with existing and permissible behavior, are broken.

——————-

There is still an unanswered question: WHY would BitComet or any other client do this? What does it gain from whatever it supposedly does? Will it download the torrent faster? No. The torrent will finish according to the timetable that the super-seeder sets, and nothing external can affect that.

Pragmatically, all this would mean that if you use BitComet on a super-seeded swarm, and all this is supposed to get you an “unfair” advantage, then you should finish the download sooner than all the other clients.

Good, this is a testable result, a doable experiment. So try it yourself. Fire up BitComet, find a swarm that’s being super-seeded, and have at it. You can see how fast it’s going for all the other peers, since you’re all reporting the percentage completed to each other.

Hmm. You will proceed at the same pace, at the same time, with all of the other clients in this swarm, all of the Azurei, and the µtorrents, and the mainlines. You all finish at the same time, as close as makes no difference. There’s no net advantage to BitComet at all.

Which is utterly predictable.

We are not a noticeably altruistic bunch, we bittorrenters. Considering that most of the material we deal with is infringing someone’s copyright, it’s not exactly a shock. Staunch moralists, forthright do-gooders, we ain’t.

So if one client actually had hit on a method to download faster or grab an “unfair share”, then we would all enlighten our self-interest, jump on that client and use it. Yes, even if it’s “wrong”. Just about everything we do is pretty dubious from a strict ethical standpoint, and that’s never stopped any of us.

The bad or exceptional behaviour would quickly become the norm. If there were any edge to be had in doing things that way, all clients would soon do them that way. Then everything would stabilize at the new norm. Everything would be right back where it was/is. The system ecology’s feedback, positive and negative, self-stabilizes it.

Where are we?

- Still no explanation of how the SS system can be gamed in any way. This attempt isn’t plausible.

- Still no explanation of whatever it is that BC is supposedly doing that it shouldn’t do, or how it does that, or why that matters.

- No apparent advantage to BC in doing whatever-that-is. Since it’s not faster, there’s no evident reason to do it. If BC is gaming the system, it sure ain’t doing that too well.

We got sound and we got fury. Answers, we don’t got.

Cars explains:
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen…because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.

This begs the question of how BitComet can “pose as a new peer”? There isn’t any such concept as “new peer” in the protocol, or in the super=seeding extension. All peers are basically equal. There’s no status code that means, “I’m a new peer”.

Interoperability requires that all clients adhere to rigidly defined protocol specifications, which cannot be unilaterally changed. If anyone tries, the remainder of the clients out there will not know how to respond to it. Therefore the list of messages that one client can send to another is clearly specified in the protocol. Any others are not allowed and will be rejected as invalid arguments.

None of them include anything like the concept of “I’m a new peer”.

Since BitComet can’t send any such message and expect to be understood, BitComet cannot “pose” as anything. The protocol does not allow it.

Back to Cars:
meaning that superseeder has to work even harder now because person A wants more data but now theres a problem because person B want data also data that it didn’t get off person A .

Let’s clean this up a bit, with Sigma as the superseeding client, and alpha and beta as peers.

Sigma sends alpha a piece X. Now according to Cars, Alpha did something unspecified that induces Sigma to give it another piece, and Sigma gives Alpha piece Y.

But, says Cars, here is Beta, and it is requesting piece X from Sigma because it didn’t get it from Alpha. Um, wait a second… how can this be? On any level?

Sigma is a super-seeder. It “doesn’t have” any pieces except the ones it decides to “reveal”. Alpha and Beta don’t drive this process, Sigma does. Alpha doesn’t ask, Sigma tells. Beta doesn’t ask for piece Z, Sigma says it’s got piece Z now and does Beta want it?

The rest of the time, Sigma says it is a peer that doesn’t have any pieces Alpha and Beta don’t have.

But Sigma is a super-seeder. It already sent out piece X, and isn’t going to send it again until it has sent all the rest of the torrent. (That’s its brief: send out each piece only once.)

In the meantime, the (unproven, unestablished, unjustified and falsifiable) assumption is made that alpha isn’t sharing any of the pieces it gets. But Sigma is sending out pieces one at a time, each one only once, according to its own schedule, whether alpha is sharing, not sharing, or even present.

How then, is Sigma “working harder” if it’s doing the same thing it would be doing, according to the same schedule in any case?

But perhaps Sigma isn’t? That would mean that Sigma is sitting idle for long periods, sending nothing. And then it’s a claim that Sigma is being deceived into taking action and sending a piece, that it otherwise would not send.

Oops! If Sigma is sitting idle, that pretty much finishes the notion that super-seeding is faster, or more efficient at distributing torrents than regular seeding. If it could be sending but isn’t, then that’s just wasted time it could be using to send out the rarest piece of the moment. It’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to use this. It would have to be slower than regular seeding.

————————————-

BitComet has no way to say, “I’m new to the swarm”. Neither does any other client. There’s no protocol for that.

It might be, though, that a superseeder stops tracking BitComet for whatever reason. But since BitComet predates super-seeding by years, and behaves the same way it always has, this would be the super-seeder’s failure to cope with the existing ecology. If the SS is misinterpreting BC’s actions, then it’s up to the SS to stop doing that instead of blaming everyone else.

If the superseeder is making assumptions about the existence of behaviors that are not required by the protocol, then it was very badly designed. That’s its fault, nobody else’s. It needs to fix its own shortcomings, not start banning anything that doesn’t conform to its whimsical decrees.

————————————–

In sum, Cars has explained absolutely nothing. There is still no clear idea of how BC is or can game the system, while there is some suggeston here that the system failed to account for pre-existing behavior due to faulty design.

do you see a pattern here
even in normal seed mode this can happen bittcomet loves to disconnect from the swarm every time it recieves a piece of data.

Among the other messages like “new peer” that there aren’t, one of them that there isn’t is “disconnect”. Since there’s no such message, no other client would understand it or honor it. So how does BitComet do this disconnecting?

All of the TCP connections are one-on-one. Alpha to beta, alpha to gamma, alpha to delta. There is no “swarm”, in this sense, there are only the individual connections. There is no way to “disconnect from the swarm”, since the swarm is nothing more than the aggregate of all individual connections interested in a particular torrent. It’s an abstraction that has no real existence.

A swarm is not a packet network, or really any kind of a network — no client accepts and forwards messages to another client. For contrast, DHT *is* a network and does forward data up and down the “line”, for the benefit of other nodes.

You cannot “disconnect from the swarm”. Neither can you connect to it. It doesn’t exist in a sense where this would be possible.

So what does this mean? Is it claiming that BitComet drops its connection with any peer that it just received a piece of data from? If so, then anyone can observe that this is false simply by running the BitComet and observing its behavior.

When is a client supposed to connect; remain connected; permissably disconnect? The protcol is silent on the subject. There is no specification, and no standard. If someone wishes to establish a standard by inference, then they do need to include the normal behavior of one of the most popular bittorent clients out there: BitComet.

If there is no standard, then no one can violate it. There are merely differences in opinion, in approach, in execution. New systems that cannott cope with existing and permissible behavior, are broken.

——————-

There is still an unanswered question: WHY would BitComet or any other client do this? What does it gain from whatever it supposedly does? Will it download the torrent faster? No. THe torrent will finish according to the timetable that the super-seeder sets, and nothing external can affect that.

Pragmatically, all this would mean that if you use BitComet on a super-seeded swarm, and all this is supposed to get you an “unfair” advantage, then you should finish the download sooner than all the other clients.

Good, this is a testable result, a doable experiment. So try it yourself. Fire up BitComet, find a swarm that’s being super-seeded, and have at it. You can see how fast it’s going for all the other peers, since you’re all reporting the percentage completed to each other.

Hmm. You will proceed at the same pace, at the same time, with all of the other clients in this swarm, all of the Azurei, and the µtorrents, and the mainlines. You all finish at the same time, as close as makes no difference. There’s no net advantage to BitComet at all.

Anyone of intelligence could have predicted that sight unseen.

We are not a noticeably altruistic bunch, we bittorrenters. Considering that most of the material we deal with is infringing someone’s copyright, it’s not exactly a shock. Staunch moralists, forthright do-gooders, we ain’t.

So if one client actually had hit on a method to download faster or grab an “unfair share”, then we would all enlighten our self-interest, jump on that client and use it. Yes, even if it’s “wrong”. Just about everthing we do is pretty dubious from a strict ethical standpoint, and that’s never stopped any of us.

The bad or exceptional behaviour would quickly become the norm. If there were any edge to be had in doing things that way, all clients would soon do them that way. Then everything would stabilize at the new norm. Everything would be right back where it was/is. Its feedback, positive and negative, self-stabilizes it.

Where are we?

- Still no explanation of how the SS system can be gamed in any way. This attempt isn’t plausible.

- Still no explanation of whatever it is that BC is supposedly doing that it shouldn’t do, or how it does that, or why that matters.

- No apparent advantage to BC in doing whatever-that-is. Since it’s not faster, there’s no reason to do it. If BC is gaming the system, it sure ain’t doing that too well.

We got sound and fury. But we got nothing more.

68 Jan 18, 2007 at 00:58 by MDD

To be “new to the swarm” means to drop (disconnect) the TCP connection to the seeder. Then reestablish. That simple.

69 Jan 18, 2007 at 10:31 by Dark Shroud

Except that will not work. Even if Alpha drops his connection from Beta, Alpha is still in Beta’s IP list. And the swarms IP list as well and still reporting statics to the tracker.

70 Jan 18, 2007 at 13:27 by MDD

The tracker has nothing to do with superseeding. Beta may or may not keep the ip in it’s list, that is an assumption. Some clients do and some clients don’t. Also, depending on the implementation, some data may be kept but not all. (uTorrent is an example of a client that will save stats for a while (minutes) but not for too long .) Since I don’t have access to BitTornados code I can’t say one way or another. A way to avoid the described superseed abuse would be to keep dropped peer data for a short while.
That being said, if it is true that BitComet drops, then reconnects, as a design feature, then that is bad behavior and shouldn’t have to be programmed around. One would hope that Bitcomet would be fixed.

71 Jan 18, 2007 at 13:55 by MDD

[quote comment="37259"]Dark Shroud you want an example?

I just at this very moment hit the “log peer traffic” button, and one of the first things that almost instantly came up was:

[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Request while choked: 451:114688->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:49152->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:65536->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:81920->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:98304->16384
[01:25:01] 85.166.206.x : [BitComet/0070 ]: Got Cancel Unrequested: 451:114688->16384[/quote]

I know that this is a bit late, but I have been checking out my torrent behavior and wanted to point out that the Request While Choked message is normal behavior. The process to send data, i.e. unchoke, get request, send data, get, send, get, send,…., choke. Will often result in a final get causing this message. It is normal. Still investigating.

72 Jan 18, 2007 at 14:42 by hellow

Hey guys,

I use bitcomet just for the features and GUI. I have switched over to utorrent. But I dont feel comfortable with it.

What if I get fast downloads, but seed till the ratio is 2.0 (which I normally do). Am I still cheating? I mean, bitcomet might not be so efficient there, but ultimately, sooner or later, I am sending out what I should be sending out.

BTW, utorrent seems to be a bit slow. I am downloading Opensuse 10.2

73 Jan 19, 2007 at 13:23 by insectivore

“To be “new to the swarm” means to drop (disconnect) the TCP connection to the seeder. Then reestablish. That simple.”

This becomes interesting. Has super-seeding created the very problem it’s blaming others for? It appears so. Consider:

On one torrent I saw not long ago, the tracker returned a list of something like 128 seeds and 1,500 peers. A largish swarm, but not really unusual. (Obviously not being super-seeded, but that’s not relevant at the moment.)

It is, I hope, evident to all that no single client is going to connect to all hundred–plus seeds and all thousand-plus peers. They don’t all have spare connections and a client can’t maintain that many connections at once. The point being, you connect to SOME, not ALL, of the swarm members. Just as some, but not all of them connect to you.

Since you are choosing only some, how is the choice made? What’s the basis for selection? It’s simple greed. This is our so-called “greedy algorithm”. Each client tries for the best connections it can find, bearing in mind that connection is a mutual agreement.(The reason you have all those half-open connections is because you or the other party haven’t mutually agreed yet. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.)

In order for this finding process to go forward, a client must rotate its connections — it must drop some and try new ones, to fulfill its mandate of finding the best it can get. This IS mandated behavior, not least in order to prevent peers from locking each other in and to allow new peers a way to get into the swarm, though the details like timing are not specified.

Those peers that respond, that offer pieces it does not have, and that send those pieces timely, are good connections and should be kept. Those that don’t respond, have no pieces of interest or don’t send them timely, are bad connections and should be dropped. We’re not talking about BitComet here, we’re talking about all clients.

This is the normal case. Let’s apply it to super-seeding.

Suppose we have a super-seed, working normally. You connect to it. It claims to be just another peer, but from time to time it says that it has a new piece. What about all the other times? The rest of the time, it says it doesn’t have anything new.

Does that make it a good connection? Or does reporting that most of the time, it doesn’t have any new pieces it’s willing to offer, make it one of the poorer connections in your list, and a good candidate for replacement with another, hopefully better connection? Keeping in mind that you don’t know it’s a seeder, it says it’s just another peer?

Which do you think?

So, having invited, if not caused this by its own behavior, it now claims that anyone who opts to look for a better connection is suddenly doing something wrong.

This is all clients, not just BitComet. But if the BC algorithm is so much sharper and more efficient at spotting and pruning the poorly-performing connections, well, you can understand why other clients would be envious of that.
——————
Does the protocol mandate, or even address when connections are to be maintained, started, stopped? It does not. Any assumptions you make about that are erroneous.
——————–
BitComet’s behavior has not changed. It has always acted the way it acts now. When super-seeding was introduced, it was added to a pool that already included this behavior. In other words, Shadow KNEW or should have known, at the time he did it, that some bittorrent clients did not maintain connections with poorly performing peers for very long. It was up to him to allow for that, to write his code to compensate for and deal with it. If he did not, then he dropped the ball. It was and is his own error, nobody else’s. He compounded the error by failing to note that his change would make his client appear to be an undesirable connection to others, liable to be dropped by them, and to allow for that.

It is his job to maintain state information for as long as it turns out to be necessary. He’s the one introducing this, after all. If he doesn’t persist his own data or maintain it for long enough to deal with the known behavior of existing clients, that’s also his mistake. If he just assumed that every client would have the same pattern and timing as his own, in the complete absence of standards, then he fumbled badly.

If he drops the state information prematurely, he’s gaming his own client, then looking for somebody else to blame. Somebody hand the guy a mirror.

74 Jan 19, 2007 at 23:26 by DonPuia

[quote comment="41057"]Cars explains:
================================
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen…because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.
=================================
[/quote]
So what ? finally a good client you moron.

75 Jan 22, 2007 at 05:59 by Razorback Server

No one even uses BitTornado anyways. I doubt it would make ANY difference.
I used to use Bitcomet and I would seed good with it too, but then I decided to use utorrent because it seemed like the nice thing to do, it didn’t slow down that much and I still seed with it. Blocking a good client with an inferior one will not do anything.

I’m pretty sure if you recconect to a new swarm you are considered ‘new’. So does BC connect to a new swarm each time?

76 Feb 02, 2007 at 16:03 by me

oh god does it have to be this big fight about which stupid thing to use i use bitcomet i leave it on all day and all night to seed but for some reason it stoped working now i know why crappy people that just want to harm others decided they want to fight over software its a free client people what do u expect now days u cant get anything for free theres always fighting and some type of price to pay thats life get used to it

77 Feb 05, 2007 at 21:11 by utorrent

I’ll stick with utorrent. Tried others, but I’ll stick with what works best for me.

78 Feb 07, 2007 at 06:15 by mike

wow bitcomet is grimey. so stop using it u fricken noobs. also bitcomet guy and bittornado guy should join forces. they could probably make some kick ass stuff.

79 Feb 07, 2007 at 16:12 by blablah

demonoid

80 Feb 08, 2007 at 23:06 by MaruLink

Bit Comet is slow and crappy. uTorrent dl’d what Bit Comet struggled to get in 3-4days in less than 24hrs and the entire file in 48. Why people use a constricting client like Bit Comet is just beyond all signs of intelligence. It is slow to dl, it is on most GOOD trackers ban list and it has retarded little file type extensions that make it so you can’t resume a download with another client which is absolutly retarded.

Bit Comet is the worst Torrent client I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been torrenting since the first one was released by Cohen.

As well, Shad0w, just suck it up. Your client sucks just like your RO server sucked back in the day. Cry more n00b (And if you’re not the Shad0w that ran the Shad0wRO, well then, someone took credit for your client when it was first released, either way, the client sucked then and it sucks now)

81 Feb 09, 2007 at 21:22 by 啊啊啊

坚持用bitcomet。

82 Feb 12, 2007 at 11:04 by dragorn

[quote comment="41057"]Cars explains:
================================
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen…because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.
=================================

This begs the question of how BitComet can “pose as a new peer”? There isn’t any such concept as “new peer” in the protocol, or in the super=seeding extension. All peers are basically equal. There’s no status code that means, “I’m a new peer”.

Interoperability requires that all clients adhere to rigidly defined protocol specifications, which cannot be unilaterally changed. If anyone tries, the remainder of the clients out there will not know how to respond to it. Therefore the list of messages that one client can send to another is exclusively specified in the protocol. Any others are not allowed and will be rejected as invalid arguments.

None of them include anything like the concept of “I’m a new peer”.

Since BitComet can’t send any such message and expect to be understood, BitComet cannot “pose” as anything. The protocol does not allow it.

Back to Cars:
============================
(…)meaning that superseeder has to work even harder now because person A wants more data but now theres a problem because person B want data also data that it didn’t get off person A .
============================

Let’s clean this up a bit, with Sigma as the superseeding client, and alpha and beta as peers.

Sigma sends alpha a piece X. Now according to Cars, Alpha did something unspecified that induces Sigma to give it another piece, and Sigma gives Alpha piece Y.

But, says Cars, here is Beta, and it is requesting piece X from Sigma because it didn’t get it from Alpha. Um, wait a second… how can this be? On any level?

Sigma is a super-seeder. It “doesn’t have” any pieces except the ones it decides to “reveal”. Alpha and Beta don’t drive this process, Sigma does. Alpha doesn’t ask, Sigma tells. Beta doesn’t ask for piece Z, Sigma says it’s got piece Z now and does Beta want it?

The rest of the time, Sigma claim it is just another peer, and doesn’t have any pieces Alpha and Beta don’t have.

But Sigma is a super-seeder. It already sent out piece X, and isn’t going to send it again until it has sent all the rest of the torrent. (That’s its brief: send out each piece only once.) So Beta can’t effectively ask, and Sigma won’t itself offer Beta piece X.

In the meantime, the (unproven, unestablished, unjustified and falsifiable) assumption is made that alpha isn’t sharing any of the pieces it gets. But Sigma is sending out pieces one at a time, each one only once, according to its own schedule, whether alpha is sharing, not sharing, or even present.

How then, is Sigma “working harder” if it’s doing the same thing it would be doing, according to the same schedule in any case?

But perhaps Sigma isn’t? That would mean that Sigma is sitting idle for long periods, sending nothing. And then it’s a claim that Sigma is being deceived into taking action and sending a piece, that it otherwise would not send.

Oops! If Sigma is sitting idle, that pretty much finishes the notion that super-seeding is faster, or more efficient at distributing torrents than regular seeding. If it could be sending but isn’t, then that’s just wasted time it could be using to send out the rarest piece of the moment. It’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to use this. It would be far slower than regular seeding.

————————————-

BitComet has no way to say, “I’m new to the swarm”. Neither does any other client. There’s no protocol for that.

It might be, though, that a superseeder stops tracking BitComet for whatever reason. But since BitComet predates super-seeding by years, and behaves the same way it always has, this would be the super-seeder’s failure to cope with the existing ecology. If the SS is misinterpreting BC’s actions, then it’s up to the SS to stop doing that instead of blaming everyone else.

If the superseeder is making assumptions about the existence of behaviors that are not required by the protocol, then it was very badly designed. That’s its fault, nobody else’s. It needs to fix its own shortcomings, not start banning anything that doesn’t conform to its whimsical decrees.

————————————–

In sum, Cars has explained absolutely nothing. There is still no clear idea of how BC is or can game the system, while there is some suggestion here that the system failed to account for pre-existing behavior due to faulty design.

do you see a pattern here
even in normal seed mode this can happen bittcomet loves to disconnect from the swarm every time it recieves a piece of data.

Among the other messages like “new peer” that there aren’t, one of them that there isn’t is “disconnect”. Since there’s no such message, no other client would understand it or honor it. So how does BitComet do this disconnecting?

All of the TCP connections are one-on-one. Alpha to beta, alpha to gamma, alpha to delta. There is no “swarm”, in this sense, there are only the individual connections. There is no way to “disconnect from the swarm”, since the swarm is nothing more than the aggregate of all individual connections interested in a particular torrent. It’s an abstraction that has no real existence.

A swarm is not a packet network, or really any kind of a network — no client accepts and forwards messages to another client. For contrast, DHT *is* a network and does forward data up and down the “line”, for the benefit of other nodes.

You cannot “disconnect from the swarm”. Neither can you connect to it. It doesn’t exist in a sense where this would be possible.

So what does this mean? Is it a claim that BitComet drops its connection with any peer that it just received a piece of data from? If so, then anyone can observe that this is false simply by running BitComet and observing its behavior.

When is a client supposed to connect; remain connected; permissibly disconnect from another peer? The protocol is silent on the subject. There is no specification, and no standard. If someone wishes to establish a standard by inference, then they do need to include the normal behavior of one of the most popular bittorent clients out there: BitComet.

If there is no standard, then no one can violate it. There are merely differences in opinion, in approach, in execution. New systems that cannot cope with existing and permissible behavior, are broken.

——————-

There is still an unanswered question: WHY would BitComet or any other client do this? What does it gain from whatever it supposedly does? Will it download the torrent faster? No. The torrent will finish according to the timetable that the super-seeder sets, and nothing external can affect that.

Pragmatically, all this would mean that if you use BitComet on a super-seeded swarm, and all this is supposed to get you an “unfair” advantage, then you should finish the download sooner than all the other clients.

Good, this is a testable result, a doable experiment. So try it yourself. Fire up BitComet, find a swarm that’s being super-seeded, and have at it. You can see how fast it’s going for all the other peers, since you’re all reporting the percentage completed to each other.

Hmm. You will proceed at the same pace, at the same time, with all of the other clients in this swarm, all of the Azurei, and the µtorrents, and the mainlines. You all finish at the same time, as close as makes no difference. There’s no net advantage to BitComet at all.

Which is utterly predictable.

We are not a noticeably altruistic bunch, we bittorrenters. Considering that most of the material we deal with is infringing someone’s copyright, it’s not exactly a shock. Staunch moralists, forthright do-gooders, we ain’t.

So if one client actually had hit on a method to download faster or grab an “unfair share”, then we would all enlighten our self-interest, jump on that client and use it. Yes, even if it’s “wrong”. Just about everything we do is pretty dubious from a strict ethical standpoint, and that’s never stopped any of us.

The bad or exceptional behaviour would quickly become the norm. If there were any edge to be had in doing things that way, all clients would soon do them that way. Then everything would stabilize at the new norm. Everything would be right back where it was/is. The system ecology’s feedback, positive and negative, self-stabilizes it.

Where are we?

- Still no explanation of how the SS system can be gamed in any way. This attempt isn’t plausible.

- Still no explanation of whatever it is that BC is supposedly doing that it shouldn’t do, or how it does that, or why that matters.

- No apparent advantage to BC in doing whatever-that-is. Since it’s not faster, there’s no evident reason to do it. If BC is gaming the system, it sure ain’t doing that too well.

We got sound and we got fury. Answers, we don’t got.

Cars explains:
bitcomet is very smart because if a superseed send person A data then we would expect for person A to pass on to person B but that doesn’t happen…because as soon as a superseed sends person A data person A drops out of the swarm then reconnects posing as a new peer then it wants more data and gets it.

This begs the question of how BitComet can “pose as a new peer”? There isn’t any such concept as “new peer” in the protocol, or in the super=seeding extension. All peers are basically equal. There’s no status code that means, “I’m a new peer”.

Interoperability requires that all clients adhere to rigidly defined protocol specifications, which cannot be unilaterally changed. If anyone tries, the remainder of the clients out there will not know how to respond to it. Therefore the list of messages that one client can send to another is clearly specified in the protocol. Any others are not allowed and will be rejected as invalid arguments.

None of them include anything like the concept of “I’m a new peer”.

Since BitComet can’t send any such message and expect to be understood, BitComet cannot “pose” as anything. The protocol does not allow it.

Back to Cars:
meaning that superseeder has to work even harder now because person A wants more data but now theres a problem because person B want data also data that it didn’t get off person A .

Let’s clean this up a bit, with Sigma as the superseeding client, and alpha and beta as peers.

Sigma sends alpha a piece X. Now according to Cars, Alpha did something unspecified that induces Sigma to give it another piece, and Sigma gives Alpha piece Y.

But, says Cars, here is Beta, and it is requesting piece X from Sigma because it didn’t get it from Alpha. Um, wait a second… how can this be? On any level?

Sigma is a super-seeder. It “doesn’t have” any pieces except the ones it decides to “reveal”. Alpha and Beta don’t drive this process, Sigma does. Alpha doesn’t ask, Sigma tells. Beta doesn’t ask for piece Z, Sigma says it’s got piece Z now and does Beta want it?

The rest of the time, Sigma says it is a peer that doesn’t have any pieces Alpha and Beta don’t have.

But Sigma is a super-seeder. It already sent out piece X, and isn’t going to send it again until it has sent all the rest of the torrent. (That’s its brief: send out each piece only once.)

In the meantime, the (unproven, unestablished, unjustified and falsifiable) assumption is made that alpha isn’t sharing any of the pieces it gets. But Sigma is sending out pieces one at a time, each one only once, according to its own schedule, whether alpha is sharing, not sharing, or even present.

How then, is Sigma “working harder” if it’s doing the same thing it would be doing, according to the same schedule in any case?

But perhaps Sigma isn’t? That would mean that Sigma is sitting idle for long periods, sending nothing. And then it’s a claim that Sigma is being deceived into taking action and sending a piece, that it otherwise would not send.

Oops! If Sigma is sitting idle, that pretty much finishes the notion that super-seeding is faster, or more efficient at distributing torrents than regular seeding. If it could be sending but isn’t, then that’s just wasted time it could be using to send out the rarest piece of the moment. It’s hard to see why anyone would ever want to use this. It would have to be slower than regular seeding.

————————————-

BitComet has no way to say, “I’m new to the swarm”. Neither does any other client. There’s no protocol for that.

It might be, though, that a superseeder stops tracking BitComet for whatever reason. But since BitComet predates super-seeding by years, and behaves the same way it always has, this would be the super-seeder’s failure to cope with the existing ecology. If the SS is misinterpreting BC’s actions, then it’s up to the SS to stop doing that instead of blaming everyone else.

If the superseeder is making assumptions about the existence of behaviors that are not required by the protocol, then it was very badly designed. That’s its fault, nobody else’s. It needs to fix its own shortcomings, not start banning anything that doesn’t conform to its whimsical decrees.

————————————–

In sum, Cars has explained absolutely nothing. There is still no clear idea of how BC is or can game the system, while there is some suggeston here that the system failed to account for pre-existing behavior due to faulty design.

do you see a pattern here
even in normal seed mode this can happen bittcomet loves to disconnect from the swarm every time it recieves a piece of data.

Among the other messages like “new peer” that there aren’t, one of them that there isn’t is “disconnect”. Since there’s no such message, no other client would understand it or honor it. So how does BitComet do this disconnecting?

All of the TCP connections are one-on-one. Alpha to beta, alpha to gamma, alpha to delta. There is no “swarm”, in this sense, there are only the individual connections. There is no way to “disconnect from the swarm”, since the swarm is nothing more than the aggregate of all individual connections interested in a particular torrent. It’s an abstraction that has no real existence.

A swarm is not a packet network, or really any kind of a network — no client accepts and forwards messages to another client. For contrast, DHT *is* a network and does forward data up and down the “line”, for the benefit of other nodes.

You cannot “disconnect from the swarm”. Neither can you connect to it. It doesn’t exist in a sense where this would be possible.

So what does this mean? Is it claiming that BitComet drops its connection with any peer that it just received a piece of data from? If so, then anyone can observe that this is false simply by running the BitComet and observing its behavior.

When is a client supposed to connect; remain connected; permissably disconnect? The protcol is silent on the subject. There is no specification, and no standard. If someone wishes to establish a standard by inference, then they do need to include the normal behavior of one of the most popular bittorent clients out there: BitComet.

If there is no standard, then no one can violate it. There are merely differences in opinion, in approach, in execution. New systems that cannott cope with existing and permissible behavior, are broken.

——————-

There is still an unanswered question: WHY would BitComet or any other client do this? What does it gain from whatever it supposedly does? Will it download the torrent faster? No. THe torrent will finish according to the timetable that the super-seeder sets, and nothing external can affect that.

Pragmatically, all this would mean that if you use BitComet on a super-seeded swarm, and all this is supposed to get you an “unfair” advantage, then you should finish the download sooner than all the other clients.

Good, this is a testable result, a doable experiment. So try it yourself. Fire up BitComet, find a swarm that’s being super-seeded, and have at it. You can see how fast it’s going for all the other peers,