BitThief Review - Speed tests needed!

[SomeGuy]

An interesting thing about what BitThief's programmers said in that article is that they are thinking of a safer way to increase the reported upload to the tracker that goes like this:

They report a very "optimistic" upload and sharing rate, and at the same time they will report a peer id to the tracker that justify that rate.

For example, let's say there is a torrent with 2 seeders and 2 leechers, and you want to report an upload rate of 1 mb/s. What you do is that you announce that there are actually 20 leechers that you are uploading to, and therefore dead torrents and weak ones are not that dead anymore

They present a lot of great ideas that they will keep implementing into this client. I like that about them. They also test each one thoroughly to make it be safe.
For example, that thing about sending rubbish data, they did not implement it into their client because they said that Azureus/Vuze detects this and bans the clients that do this, which could lead to speed reduction. Since they want as much speed as possible, they avoided this, although they talk about different ideas they had to make it work, still Vuze clients were too smart and still got them banned, so they did not implement any of the rubbish sending behaviors.

They also talk about how amazed they are that they never got banned at any private tracker. I guess nowadays maybe trackers are too aware of such behavior.

[anon]

They report a very "optimistic" upload and sharing rate, and at the same time they will report a peer id to the tracker that justify that rate.

For example, let's say there is a torrent with 2 seeders and 2 leechers, and you want to report an upload rate of 1 mb/s. What you do is that you announce that there are actually 20 leechers that you are uploading to, and therefore dead torrents and weak ones are not that dead anymore

Are you sure? As far as I know you only announce how many bytes uploaded, not how many people you've done so to. I'm currently reading the PDFs, so if you took this from there, tell me on which document and page I can find it.

About the rubbish, so does uTorrent and most other clients. This really fucked up MediaDefender's fake clients - all their IPs would end up banned sooner or later.

And we'd need to see which private trackers they've tried BitThief on...

Currently trying my luck at decompilation.

[ghostfucker]

Since this is based on Java, it may be possible to decompile it (if they aren't using obfuscation/etc.), fix the announce faults,

yes, they use a obfuscation
but if there is enough interest, i could try to change the spoof...(e.g. bitornado, bittorrent)

[anon]

I kind of noticed that when I saw the classnames, but thanks for confirming.

Having at least a hard and well-coded BitTornado spoof in BitThief would be great, since it appears to be a very fast mod.

[SomeGuy]

I can confirm that I did 15 minutes same torrent test with BitThief, BitComet, and uTorrent on a public tracker. I did stop and restart the torrent every 5 minutes to ensure spreading the connections to the swarm.

BitThief maxed out my speed with 51kb/s. uTorrent 16kb/s. BitComet 20kb/s.
I am impressed

[anon]

Can you try ThunderMOD as well?

[SomeGuy]

Here is the part taken from the PDF

For instance, in a torrent
with 100 seeders and just one leecher, it looks suspicious
if the leecher is constantly announcing large amounts of
uploaded data. Alternatively, the sum of all reported download
and upload amounts could be analyzed over different
torrents and time periods, in order to detect and ban dishonest
peers.
The tracker can also be cheated easily: Clients can
announce bogus information and fake peers so that the
tracker’s peer list fills up with dozens of clients which do
not exist. The seeder and leecher counts reported by the
tracker can therefore be misleading as there are usually
not that many real peers downloading a given torrent. Even
worse, peers asking a tracker for other peers can get a lot
of invalid or stale information, which makes torrent starts
slow.

They didn't decide whether they will implement it yet as they try to choose the most effective techniques everytime.

However, I have witnessed it happen on a tracker.
There were only 1500 active users at the time, and then a torrent started and it showed that it had 3000 leechers. The uploader noticed this, and talked about it on IRC with the admin.
They talked back and forth, and he found out that this was caused by some unidentified client from a chinese ip. The client was reporting all those leechers.
3000 leechers is very unwise. I think though that it is an auto setting in that chinese client, and that it is proportional to the upload speed.
The guy probably chose 500mb/s or more

---------- Post added at 20:19 ---------- Previous post was at 20:17 ----------

Can you try ThunderMOD as well?

I couldn't. I tried to download it from the modder's website, but his registration link has a problem. If you could attach it to me here please, I would :)

He is also asking whether he should continue to mod xunlei or not, as he is saying that his mod results in a bugger client than the original, and that also he is afraid of lawsuits because he is breaching their agreement.

I voted that he should continue

[anon]

Thanks for the info.

MediaDefender did that as well - they made several hundreds of fake peers announce to the tracker (BTSeedInflator, anyone?), but that was on public trackers and to increase the torrent's popularity - i.e. harvest more IPs.

Doing this on a private tracker is at first, almost impossible, unless you have hundreds of accounts, and suicidal both if you announce to different passkeys with the same IP - just as you mentioned - or use different peer_ids on the same account. (uTorrent is light, but few people run 500 instances of it.)

There's a peer_id the people here couldn't match to a client:

'hk' (example: -hk0010-) Chinese IP address, unrequestedly sends info dict in message 0xA, reconnects immediately after being disconnected, reserved bytes = 01,01,01,01,00,00,02,01

It could very well be the one you mentioned.

I can't attach ThunderMod here if its violates Xunlei's EULA, but try enabling HTTP referers to download the file if you had them disabled.

[SomeGuy]

I will try it.

BTW, if this is going to be modded by SBI, I hope that this icon will be changed. It makes me feel too eveil

SBI's logo is a good idea

[anon]

Changing the icon should be no problem

[SomeGuy]

I am downloading ThunderMOD at the moment. Will report when testing is done :)

---------- Post added at 21:25 ---------- Previous post was at 21:00 ----------

I tried ThunderMOD. It is very fast.

It asked me to change my open Half connections to 256 but I cancelled that so that I can compare it to my previous findings. I already have my Half Open Connections at 50.

It is fast, very fast. It consistently reached the speed of 54kb/s as an average.

I can confirm that I did 15 minutes same torrent test with BitThief, BitComet, and uTorrent on a public tracker. I did stop and restart the torrent every 5 minutes to ensure spreading the connections to the swarm.

BitThief maxed out my speed with 51kb/s. uTorrent 16kb/s. BitComet 20kb/s.
I am impressed

It uploads though at 80% of my upload speed. To me, it feels also like a confusing client. I guess it is the translated feel to it. It doesn't send a fale upload neither

[ghostfucker]

just decompiled bitthief, and a hardcoded spoof should be np.

but they suck

POST /projects/bitthief/et.php HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
User-Agent: Java/1.6.0_13
Host: dcg.ethz.ch
Accept: text/html, image/gif, image/jpeg, *; q=.2, */*; q=.2
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 121

pieces=0&piecesize=1048576&event=START&infohash=aa46602690f7ede99346b7c0d7f9c0fe2d7dcb74&version=0.3.0-368&size=740532162

[anon]

That's great to hear, ghostfucker.

That call-home is known, you can toggle it off in the torrent settings.

[SomeGuy]

just decompiled bitthief, and a hardcoded spoof should be np.

but they suck

Could you tell us how much they suck?

---------- Post added at 21:35 ---------- Previous post was at 21:28 ----------

Ok, it is the call home. I understand :)

[slikrapid]

BitThief maxed out my speed with 51kb/s. uTorrent 16kb/s. BitComet 20kb/s.
I am impressed

this should be tested on some other connections with higher bandwidth on the download side, so ~0 UP 1+MB down, since 50k is way too low for testing purposes, nhf

also it would be interesting to know if the 'call home' has really been removed

and the question of opening too many connections at the same time - there should be a way to limit that so that the modem won't be over saturated with connections

fast one, ghostfucker