Earlier this year he fell from a second storey window and although he recovered from a deep coma he ultimately was to succumb to his injuries.

“In January anum fell out of a window and caught pneumonia, there was nothing we could do, his lungs died and there was no lung transplant for him,” H33T co-founder Lacadaemon (a blood relative of anum) writes.

Anum designed all the artwork for the popular BitTorrent site and kept on doing so until his last day.

“Anum spent his final day with me designing artwork for a new project. He was quietly brave concerning his end of life decision. His last words were typed on his laptop ‘I am not afraid to die. I am afraid of being alone’” Lacadaemon writes.

The previously unpublished logo below currently prides the H33T site, and was typical of anum’s creativity.

Our thoughts and deepest condolences are to all who were close to him.

Lacadaemon shared the following with TorrentFreak in remembrance of anum.

“We are growing up, building history in our sharing culture, lives are being lived, and while we so often celebrate the successes and failures, today we mourn one of our fallen, a front line activist whose work has been seen by tens if not hundreds of millions without any one of them knowing his name. That is how it has to be in this world where it is bankers who do God’s work on earth, greed is good, and sharing a piece of corporate mass-media can get you longer jail time than for violence.”

“We reject the current hegemony, choosing instead alternatives about shared values, freedom and autonomy, creating our own culture based on sharing, co-operation and mutual support. We are united from every land on this planet in a new diaspora by the common belief that knowledge should be free, or taken to its ultimate conclusion: education is the great equalizer. BitTorrent is our engine, file sharing is our work, for our sins we live incognito, today we remember anum, founding member of H33T, our companion and friend, who on 15 May 2013 died aged 25 ….”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

BitTorrent throttling has been going on for a few years now, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. The traffic shaping methods used vary from ISP to ISP. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day, or throttle in specific regions. Others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding, or even downloading .torrent files.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. If it really is that big of a problem, be open about it, and let your customers know what they can and cannot do.

Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections – a company that happens to manufacture traffic shaping devices, lists some of the possible solutions ISPs can implement in order to cope with the “BitTorrent problem”, which he wanted to share here.

1.) Ask for voluntary cooperation.

One recourse would be to ask customers to scale back on torrents, or to use them at night or another time when network usage is low. There is plenty of precedent in the Green movement to recycle and to reduce carbon footprints. So why not a campaign to scale back BitTorrent usage ?

The downside: Can you imagine a service provider sending a letter to its customer base outlining the technical limitations of allowing unlimited BitTorrent applications, and then asking for some voluntary cooperation? Me neither. Perhaps someday, but for now providers are viewed as a profit-driven adversary by most customers.

The upside: Seems to have a warm, fuzzy, feel-good ring to it.

2.) Keep connections within the providers network.

This is the method currently practiced with help from a popular product provided by Sandvine. The basic idea is that on a large provider network there are enough BitTorrent hosts that a client need not leave the provider’s network to retrieve content.

The downside: Consumers are suspicious of providers looking at their data to make determinations on what type of traffic it is. The consumer may also not get good results if the bulk of the content were located outside their providers network; for example, if a user were to download a file that was popular in Europe, the number of servers hosting it on the Comcast network might be limited.

The upside: Consumers are still freely able to find most BitTorrent content. Providers greatly reduce connections and exchange costs with other providers.

3.) Usage based quotas.

With this method a service provider will charge much higher rates when a preset amount of data usage is exceeded over a calendar month.

The upside: This method is unobtrusive in that the provider need not look at a customer’s data, only their total usage. Experience with university residential networks has shown that once quotas are announced users voluntarily reduce their peer-to-peer or BitTorrent usage.

The downside: More complex billing detail and customer service to resolve disputes. Large providers will still compete by marketing their service as unlimited. Despite the rants about BitTorrent being a resource issue, it is still only a small percentage of total customers that use it.

4.) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.

The upside: It’s simple and fair to implement. Providers already set rate caps on Internet speeds, so this is just a rate cap on connections, very similar and easy to swallow for the consumer.

The downside: When users reach their allotted connection limit, all traffic on their link slows down.

5.) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.

The upside: It works.

The downside: It’s most likely not economically sustainable. Without some other form of mitigation, the public’s appetite for content appears insatiable.

6.) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.

The upside: It moves an unprofitable customer off your network and onto a competitor.

The downside: Customers begin to despise you.

Here at TorrentFreak we have discussed some of these alternatives before, and in the long run there is really only one solution that is acceptable. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

Art Reisman told TorrentFreak that that there are two solutions that make sense to him: “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates, if it can be kept simple! Second is to limit customer connections as a resource.” Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prices are reasonable. The second option of limiting the number of connections only looks like a temporary fix though.

What do you think?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

NetEqualizer’s ability to keep BitTorrent traffic in check will not be affected by encryption techniques neither today nor into the future.

But I doubt if these claims are true, perhaps it’s just an attempt to make it to slashdot or digg, and get some new customers.

Why?

1. If you take a look at their website you will notice that the word “BitTorrent” is not even mentioned, not in the product description, and not in their f.a.q.

2. NetEqualizer works like this:

a) Look at all the connections on the network
b) How long has each connection been active
c) How much bandwidth has this connection used since it first started
d) How much bandwidth has this connections used in the last 8 seconds

Then it decides, based on these rules if the traffic should be throttled or not. They claim to throttle connections that use a lot of bandwidth, for a relatively long time. If they detect a connection that meets these criteria, they close it.

Funny thing is that BitTorrent has a lot of open and half-open connections, if one is closed, another one is opened within a few seconds. This connection will then not be throttled until it generated a significant amount of bandwidth, for a relatively long time. This means BitTorrent traffic will be relatively unaffected.

I’m not a network expert, so perhaps I’m wrong, but my reasoning sounds plausible. Overall I think this device is actually not as evil as it sounds. If the network is not busy then take no action is taken, and users have all the bandwidth they need. It only throttles the heavy consumers, if the network reaches its maximum capacity.

And to me, it even seems to be BitTorrent friendly…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.