Thread: BitThief Review - Speed tests needed!

[FONT="Book Antiqua"]I am enjoying sharing this information with you very much as I love you all dearly :)

This is one of the most important reviews you have ever read, so make sure you pay attention to every detail in it.

By reading this review you will know how to:

* Download from public trakers at your maximum rate without uploading.
* Discover a new bittorrent platform-independent leeching client and learn how it works.

So let's start by introducing BitThief

"What is BitThief?

BitThief is a free riding BitTorrent client, that is, it downloads from BitTorrent swarms without contributing any resources itself.

BitThief is freely available. We encourage you to download and use it. As it is a scientific project, we require measurements of the performance of our exploits. For that purpose, the client occasionally transmits data to our webserver. The transmitted data merely contains information about the time required to download files of different size."

NB: A blog writer has suggested a midification to make BitThief not transmit this data (although in the newest version I have you can disable sending statistics in the Options menu, but just in case)

"This can be remedied with a few simple steps.

1. JAR stands for “java archive” you can unzip the Bit Thief archive exactly like you would a zip, or rar file and have access to edit all of the files in it.

2. Once unzipped there are 2 files that contain the settings and url’s for transmitting data back to their server.

bitthief.properties and bitthief-debug.properties both have entries that look similar to each other.

You can modify the 2 files mentioned above and the prog will still work. Keep in mind I haven’t the slightest training in Java so I just guessed, and it worked. I changed::

# ET settings
et.enable = true
et.url = http://dcg.ethz.ch/projects/bitthief/et.php

to

# ET settings
et.enable = false
et.url = NULL"

source Bit Thief 0.1.7 - The Swiss are spying on us…

You should definitely take a look at this short scientific paper. They discuss in it the different ways they though of to maximize leeching and fool trackers which is a subject I am sure is a liked discussion topic around here http://www.dcg.ethz.ch/publications/hotnets06.pdf

---

So let me tell you about my experience. I have always had a very bad download speed when getting large popular files from public trackers. My maximum speed is 50KB/s but I was achieving speeds between 2 and 6 KB/s while the peers ate all of my upload speed.

I found out the solution which is to use BitThief, a java super-leeching client.

And I have been AMAZED, and I do not usually use that word, but it is amazing at how fast I had my download speed maxed out while I was uploading nothing!

And it is amazing how well this one connects to the seeders. uTorrent was picking only leechers, but look at this!

Its memory usage is very good too. The programmers assumed that you will get very high speeds, and that the disk write speed could get in your way, so they set it so that the file will be written to the RAM and then flushed periodically to the disk freeing up memory and speeding up the download rate. This is good news especially for high speed SBI members (Do they exist ?!)

I fell in love with this torrent client. I love that it is made by scientists. I love that it has all those scientif graphs that show every little detail about it. I love how it works on Windows/Mac/Linux.

And I love the potential it has!

---

Plea to the beautiful SEXY Male-Model-looking SBI programmers and Moderators

I have never seen anything like this. With just an open port, this client was frequently downloading at rates above my own maximum of 50KB/s where I would sometimes have 70KB/s!
This is a great thing that I am loving, and I hope that the programmers at SBI would hear my plea and help out if they can.

What is good about this client:

*The AMAZING speed and connectability

*That it is Java and based on Azureus so theoretically many programmers here will find its source code familiar

*That it is multi-platform



The shortcomings of this client are twofold:

*First, it announces itself as BitThief which is a bad thing. I hope ghostfucker would include this in his generosity and Perfect Spoof it :)

*Second, although it has an option to upload, I hope that there could be in it an implementation of a random upload speed announce. We could choose a speed range, and BitThief could announce a random number in that range every time.

Thank you all, I love you all and I hope that you will be nice and make nice encouraging comments on this thread

Please read this if you have a fast connection and are willing to test the different clients mentioned here head-to-head:
http://www.sb-innovation.de/showthre...e=4#post103700

You can get BitThief here BitThief - A Free Riding BitTorrent Client

Well, in the scientific article of the people that made this client, they say that they used in on private "higher level" trackers with success.

However, they have been speaking on bittorrent conferences so they probably got to the attention of those trackers and this client would be blocked from them.

That is the reason why you see in my post above that I plea to SBI's programmer to include this client under their wings and show it some love by modding it further. It would be awesome that this client announces itself as uTorrent 1.8.2 or something similar with a nice fake upload.

It is simply an amazing piece of software, and it is java based, so people here know how to mod that kind of clients very well

TF once featured this. It's a heavily modded Azureus version with no upload. It will re-announce itself several times to get as many peers as possible - router users beware, it can open 800 connections in five minutes.

The call-home is known as well. You can also block it in your firewall.

Regarding your upload speed, it could be that you were saturating your line, but in normal public movie torrents with 1000 seeders and 9000 leechers, no upload will greatly slow you down due to BT's built-in tit-for-tat anti leech system. (It only applies in peer-to-peer connections)

Have you tried using the Azureus Hack with no upload turned on? It should greatly outmatch this.

By the way, as far as I know it announces itself as an old Mainline version, with some HTTP header errors that make it detectable.

The thing is in this newest version, 0.3.0, you can actually upload, so no upload is not hardcoded anymore.
And the call-home, now there is an option to deactivate it in the program.
And yes, they have been working on this, and it is actually faster than that Vuze Extreme, especially with no upload.
If you take a look at that scientific article, you will see how they did that.
What happens is that in Bittorrent, there is the tit for tat system which means you will only download if you upload. There is an exception though, which is that when you start downloading a torrent and only have 0%, the other people will help you out by uploading without asking to download back from you.
This client fakes that you have 0% the whole time, so everyone is trying to give you pieces, so you end up with very high speeds without any other client asking you to download back, brilliant!
They are working on making it even better based on science. It is awesome. Now they are planning to implement DHT and to use some way where this client will fake many IPs so that you can connect to the fastest peers more than once.
A lot of improvement since the time TF featured it

Yes, you're right. A lot has changed

These options are specific to a single torrent download:
Upload Data - If unchecked, BitThief will not upload any data to other peers. In other words, it will behave like any other BitTorrent client.
Upload Slots - How many clients BitThief will simultaneously upload data to.
Use Tit-for-tat Protocol - If enabled, BitThief will use the T4T protocol to communicate with other BitThief clients and engage in fair data exchange.
Listening Port - Defines the network port on which BitThief will listen for incoming connections. Open this port in your firewall.
Download Pieces In Order - Instructs BitThief to try and download the file(s) sequentially. This can be used to start using files before the download is complete (e.g. media files).
Initial Announce Interval - Time in seconds between subsequent tracker queries.
Share Ratio - The share ratio that BitThief will announce to the tracker.

However, that's also how the Hack's no upload works. I have tried it connecting to myself - Azureus would always pretend to have 0% of the file just like you said BT does. The last setting sounds good though - like a built-in mini-Ratio Faker...

Hey anon, could you check and sniff what BitThief announces to the tracker, especially that fake ratio thing?

At least then we won't have any surprises if we use it in a low level private tracker

Would anyone else do a speed test on Vuze Extreme vs BitThief?
15 minutes each on the same torrent.

Couldn't check the fake ratio because of these fucking timeouts

But here's a cap from when I have just started a torrent:

Code:

GET /announce?info_hash=*&peer_id=M4-4-0--6849d61bffbc&port=32728&uploaded=0&downloaded=0&left=732766208&event=started&numwant=200&compact=1&key=%d42%16a%09%3d%fbo HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: BitTorrent/4.4.0
Connection: close
Accept: text/html
Host: torrent.ubuntu.com:6969

As you can see, they have changed the peer_id structure and fixed some HTTP headers, but otherwise it hasn't changed its identification too much:

Originally Posted by TF Article

Anyway, about banning this stupid client; it *cannot* be banned like most others, as it identifies itself as Mainline 4.4.0 (which is a nasty trick in and of itself), so a simple peer_id ban will not suffice.

Originally Posted by Azureus Wiki

"?" and "*" clients

Sometimes, Azureus will have a question mark next to a client's name, such as BitSpirit?. This means that Azureus is suggesting that it is what the client could be, but isn't sure. Another example is the BitThief client, which spoofs itself as the mainline client - you may see the text Mainline 4.4.0 (BitThief?) appear in those circumstances - Azureus is telling you that the client is probably "Mainline 4.4.0", but there is a chance it could be the BitThief client.

I'm currently trying to find a copy of BitTorrent 4.4.0 to compare the announces.

---------- Post added at 16:59 ---------- Previous post was at 16:00 ----------

Compare to the real BT 4.4.0's announce:

Code:

GET /announce?info_hash=*&peer_id=M4-4-0--94e91e989787&port=6881&key=482a82c8&uploaded=0&downloaded=0&left=732766208&compact=1&event=started HTTP/1.1
Host: torrent.ubuntu.com:6969
Connection: close
Accept-encoding: gzip
User-agent: BitTorrent/4.4.0

You'll notice that there are still some errors in the announce formatting, key and HTTP headers. I wouldn't recommend using this on sites with good scripts until they fix the faults - I think that fully avoiding detectability should be one of their main concerns, as they can't prove their point if all trackers and clients ban BitThief.

Ooohhh, la la. My greed is gett'in bigger.

Too bad that it's not reccommended to be used on private trackers due to the client's name. That's too bad. :(

Originally Posted by anon

I think that fully avoiding detectability should be one of their main concerns, as they can't prove their point if all trackers and clients ban BitThief.

Well, in their article they mention that IRL there is a lot of variability in swarms second to second.

So they are basing their research on their own tracker. They created their own LAN tracker and they control how many seeders and leechers there are, and the speeds, so that they can actually use their results when they compare their client to the others.

The sweet thing about this is that their point is that you get your files fast when you freeleech. So this client is made with only one purpuse: Download as fast as possible, and get the files in the shortest amount of time.

With them, the means justify the end. They talk about how they coded many ways: they send a lot of queries saying that they just joined the swarm so that the other clients will help them out by uploading to them without downloading, they lie to other clients by sending to them that they have a rare part of the torrent so that they connect to them and then download to them while transmitting rubbish and then not send the last sub-piece so that the other client will download it from somewhere else and realize that it was rubbish but the other client that sent the sub-piece will be banned while you continue having fun with the high speeds, and they are even developing sending the information from many IPs to the fastest uploaders so that they open a lot more connections with you increasing your speed etc. etc.

Actually, what they are trying is to find out how much is it possible to cheat in any swarm. They are taking it to the next level including a lot of great ideas (you should definitely check out those 8 pages pdf article I linked to in my post.
They included in their client a modification to the bittorrent protocol which makes it impossible to do all these things that they implemented in this client. However, the other clients have to implement it for it to work or other users use BitThief with that modification enabled.

That LAN thing made me remember something I once read on the Internet: BitComet being able to reach 1.5mB/s on a college network when the swarm was full of other BitComets, but uTorrent fighting to get above 5kB/s.

About the rubbish-fileld pieces, that sounds a bit like what Xunlei and BitComet (again) are infamous for doing: cheating other peers by making it "look like" you're uploading, but actually only leech, and exploit super-seeders by tricking their system into thinking it's you that deserves to be focused upload on the most, when you actually won't bother too much to give it to other peers after grabbing a full copy. (You've stated you wanted to try Xunlei, but couldn't because of its malware. Google "ThunderMOD" - it's a clean version.)

So its No Upload partly works like the Azureus Hack's, but this also uses those nasty tricks, that's why it's faster. (BC is fast too )

The fact that BitTorrent's tit-for-tat algorithm doesn't apply on peer-to-seed or seed-to-peer connections further enables such leeching. I'll check the PDF later.

Since this is based on Java, it may be possible to decompile it (if they aren't using obfuscation/etc.), fix the announce faults, and use it as if it was the real Mainline 4.4.0. But as that's a very old version of the client, private trackers could simply ban it because otherwise no one uses it nowadays.

They included in their client a modification to the bittorrent protocol which makes it impossible to do all these things that they implemented in this client. However, the other clients have to implement it for it to work or other users use BitThief with that modification enabled.

They're actually helping BitTorrent if they found a way to fix the free-rider problem.

So is BitComet really that fast? Could you please tell me more about it? How fast can it get, what is good and what is bad about it? Thanks anon

PS: You can download a Jar file of BitThief from their website, so it is super easy to decompile :)

Originally Posted by SomeGuy

So is BitComet really that fast? Could you please tell me more about it?

What do you want to know?

If you're going to try it, use the Original mod from Butcho's leecher pack. All call-homes are removed.

It uses various "tactics". I can mention:

• exploiting super-seeding - as I said before, this makes the first seeder of a torrent think BitComet will spread the data it receives more efficiently, when it won't.
• it favors other BitComets - that college LAN experiment should be a prime example. But this can actually speed things up if everyone uses BitComet in the swarm
• it hammers the seeders - by sometimes disconnecting and reconnecting right after that in hopes of getting an optimistic unchoke and therefore be treated like a newly arrived peer, being uploaded to a lot without expecting too much in return - and then further "resets" its status
• older versions ignored the private flag, but this has been fixed.
• also, I haven't checked this, but supposedly it sometimes reduces the tracker announce interval to get more peers, putting more pressure on the server.

Why don't I use it? Simple - it's banned at a lot of private trackers, and it's of no use to me since my ISP shapes me. I could connect to 20 seedboxes with BC and still be unable to go higher than 30kB/s. uTorrent 1.9 has uTP (UDP transport), which enables me to max out my line. (I use my 1.8.2 emulation mod)

Originally Posted by SomeGuy

I hope I am not straining you out anon. You helps means a lot to me.

You aren't at all.