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It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. It would be nice if BitTorrent v2 made it harder for ISPs to identify what is bit torrent traffic. AT&T

It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. It would be nice if BitTorrent v2 made it harder for ISPs to identify what is bit torrent traffic. AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds.

mac01021 6y ago
Why don't ISPs bill by the gigabyte and be done with it?
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  BC billshock scares people away. It would set us back to the early '90s
- wwwhizz 6y ago
  So watching Netflix and YouTube gets more expensive? No, thanks. I'm fine with European net-neutrality and pay for bandwidth.
- 101008 6y ago
  It would be horrible to live in a world like that. Imagine deciding to watch a shorter film on Netflix because you will pay less.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    That's basically what happens with mobile data plans in India. Fixed speeds, pay X amount per 1 or 1.2 GB
    - SL61 6y ago
      It's also how Google Fi works. Every time I loaded something, in the back of my mind I'd think "this page is costing me two cents". It makes everything you load feel like an individual transaction, making it super uncomfortable to use.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Because customers lose their minds with that model, largely as a result of conditioning that "internet" is an unlimited resource (which of course it is when instantaneous demand <= supply, but during high traffic periods that isn't the case). Personally I understand the economics around it, but still don't like the idea of paying per GB. I would end up skipping some Netflix and would get mad at kids for playing Netflix to an empty room (much like I currently get mad when they leave the lights on in an empty room). It's nice on a personal level to avoid that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyfon 6y ago
    That kind of depends on the price pr gb. To use the power analogy, when I was young the price of power was relatively high but in recent times it has now dropped to 0.6 NOK / kWh so even charging the car from 10-80% (~61 kWh) cost 40 NOK or $4. I do not get mad at the kids leaving the light on like my mother did to me. I (or rather my job) currently pays about 1000 NOK/ month for unlimited 500 MBit synchronous fiber internet. I transfer maybe 500 GB/month so for it to be cheaper for me it would be under 2 NOK/GB or $.2 which sounds really high but that is what I currently pay with my usage.
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      I thought internet in Norway was cheaper than in Denmark. Interesting. For comparison I pay 449 DKR/month for 1000/1000 unlimited fiber with a guaranteed bandwidth of minimum 950 (they are upgrading the network atm. hence not a guarantee on the full 1000 yet as some customers equipment is too old). Is it a normal connection or a business connection perhaps?
      - iso947 6y ago
        Bandwidth to where? Do they really have 1gbit per customer peering with say level3? And with cogent, and telia? And a full non blocking internal network? And enough packet buffers to ensure that microbursts don’t saturate any link?
- liability 6y ago
  Why won't ISPs stop advertising 'unlimited' service that is actually limited to N gigabytes a month, where N is substantially lower than what's possible given the speeds they provide? Because they can get away with it.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    Because it is insanely expensive to actually provide that. The nature of internet traffic is short bursts, not 100% utilization. In a commercial setting you can purchase fixed pipes that are entirely yours and they’re tens or hundreds of times more expensive. Why wouldn’t you want to pool bandwidth with your neighbors so you could all get faster speeds when you were using it instead of rate limiting everyone?
    - jeromegv 6y ago
      The issue is that there's no way to know what this limit is. I understand the cost, but then tell us exactly how many GB I can use at full speed and when does it start to throttle. Instead I have to rely on internet anecdotes.
      - selectodude 6y ago
        They do. I'm pretty aware of what my data transfer limits are on both my home and wireless connections. Granted my new ISP has no data caps and symmetric gigabit speeds so I'm a bit spoiled.
        rand49an 6y ago
        Unless you work for that ISP though, you don't know what the limits to their network are or how many people you actually share that line with. It's gigabit speeds until all your neighbours suddenly want to download something too.
      - proverbialbunny 6y ago
        The problem is my fiber gigabit duplex internet throttles me from the first KB. Net neutrality is dead.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y ago
  Agreed, this would align incentives nicely. Maybe we would see more innovation in compression technology that way.
- hysan 6y ago
  Some thought experiments for you to try: - Does this guarantee that you get the speed that you pay for? If not, then should the price during heavy congestion cost less per GB? I’ve had the unfortunate luck of having lived in areas where the internet is unusable for anything other than email and light browsing during peak hours. Bonus: Do you know why this happens? If not, I encourage you to research this. - How will this affect the advertising model of the entire internet economy? If you, like me, have lived your whole life on a mobile data plan that is priced based on data usage, you’ll realize just how much bandwidth is consumed by advertisements (worst are the video/audio types that auto play). - How will this affect “future” technology such at smart homes? Most devices send data back (Amazon Echo devices) and the growing security camera ecosystem that sends recordings to the cloud would suddenly cost users a ton more. - Speaking of cloud, what will happen to the gaming industry that is heavily cloud based? Many games don’t even ship in a completed state anymore. Instead, part of the install requires downloading a ton of additional updates. Not to mention online play, DLC, etc. There a many many more everyday examples like this that would be heavily affected by pricing per GB. Your question sounds like a simple solution but like many things in life, that is rarely the case.
  - gkfasdfasdf 6y ago
    I think the answer to most of these questions is, let the market decide. E.g. consider this: congestion during peak hours is bad now, but there is currently no penalty on an ISP for being slow. However if billing was based on bytes moved, for an ISP to underserve during times of demand means lost revenue. Thus ISPs would be incentivized to provide the best service.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - hysan 6y ago
      With respect to the US, this answer is incomplete. The theory of letting the market decide only works when there is a free market. Most places I’ve lived has only had a single choice for ISP effectively making them monopolies.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Because their costs aren’t based on usage, but installing and maintaining the infrastructure then collecting rent on it. Actual usage is an exponential curve and if you bill on it you have a few angry users paying for everybody else’s infrastructure.
- slyall 6y ago
  Well in New Zealand we used to charge-per-byte but as things got cheaper this has largely gone away. Some of the cheaper how fibre accounts have something like a 100G/month limit but I guess it isn't worth the trouble to charge even here where bandwidth is much more expensive than the US.
  - geoffmunn 6y ago
    Flashback: I was on Actrix which charged $5 per megabyte. Downloading Netscape Navigator 2 nearly bankrupted me. I used to browse the internet with images disabled, which ironically gave me an appreciation for accessibility issues which served me well later in life. When Xtra came out at $2.50 per hour, it was a complete game changer.
    - brokenmachine 6y ago
      Netscape Navigator 2 is 8Mb, for anyone who was wondering.
    - phire 6y ago
      I remember when Xtra bought out their $27.95/month unlimited dialup plan. It changed our internet browsing habits so much. With hourly charges, you would try to plan out what you would do before connecting and instead of reading webpages, you would save them to disk for reading later. With unlimited, you could just sit there and browse. Or leave it on overnight to download files. At some point we got a second phoneline and I was downloading torrents on dialup all day and night for years before we finally moved somewhere with ADSL in 2006.
  - driverdan 6y ago
    100Gb/month is practically nothing. I primarily use a hotspot for internet access and routinely do way more traffic than that.
    - slyall 6y ago
      If you don't use video then it'll be plenty. Plenty of people get their TV the old-fashioned way but still want fast Internet. Looking at pricing for Spark (one of the largerproviders). [1] For each of the fibre speed plans you can get 60GB/month, for another $10 you get 120GB/month and for a further $10 you get unlimited traffic. BTW: "Mb" = Megabits, "MB" = MegaBytes [1] https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/ https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I imagine the data whales would not cover the loss revenue from people who just use online banking yet pay the same amount. I've used 15 TB in the last 5 weeks with my torrent client alone (and considering my Backblaze backup size, that's not nearly all of my traffic), but how many people like me are there in the general public?
- bsder 6y ago
  Because then people will get REALLY grouchy about ads. In addition, it gives people a solid measure over which to sue you. If you aren't delivering, you're headed to court. The ISPs like all the vagueness.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
Why would the that be the protocol's responsibility?
- convery 6y ago
  Maybe not 'responsibility', but I guess it'd be nice to have some kind of proxy protocol so that seeders can proxy requests for people with annoying ISPs.. or they could just use a VPN like everyone else =P
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    I'm not sure that makes sense for regular torrents (e.g. linux distros, large audio software packages, WoW updates, Adobe downloader, etc. etc.) even if it would be a nice-to-have for folks who use torrents for less than legal purposes. And as such, probably not something they can put in without it basically being a signal that they're "helping piracy" (something bittorrent has had to fight an uphill battle for already... I doubt they want to redo that fight)
- greycol 6y ago
  I'd assume that a protocol that gets faster for files the more nodes who use it and the faster those nodes transmit would try to solve real world issues stopping more nodes/faster speeds from those nodes. The word 'responsibility' that you used is of course too strong a word, however the comment 'it would be nice' to have is definitely true assuming we want downloads to be faster.
- chii 6y ago
  may be "design goal" is more appropriate a term, rather than responsibility.
kardos 6y ago
> It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. The hash it relies on is broken, so their hand has been forced.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  sha1 is not meaningfully broken for BitTorrent, It would require a second pre-image attack to meaningfully hurt it, you can not take an existing hash you don't control and synthesize a matching set of incorrect/malicious data. Second preimage attacks are MUCH harder to pull off, even md5 is still safe from them, many years after they were found to be broken in other contexts. The only thing that sha1's weakness would let you do in a bittorrent context is create a torrent, then let you send fake data for a chunk, which really does not seem very useful, because you could just make the data malicious when you created the torrent.
  - __s 6y ago
    The writing is on the wall, no need to wait for these attacks to actually exist before beginning migration
    - upofadown 6y ago
      Everyone thought that for MD5...
  - admax88q 6y ago
    It's not super easy, but you could create a legitimate torrent of some popular content, as well as a malicious version. Use the legit version to gain popularity and then distribute malicious chunks to select peers. Certainly not a trivial attack, but not benign either.
huhtenberg 6y ago
It's nearly impossible to obfuscate a protocol to work around filtering. You'd want to look like some other protocol and you want that protocol be encrypted by default. Otherwise yours will get fingerprinted via the deep packet inspection. The most obvious choice is to run your protocol over TLS. But then they can just throttle long-lived bulky TLS connections where neither side is on 443. You can then require the responding side be on 443 (which is already a big hassle), but they will then throttle down TLS connections towards residential IPs or throttle them down cumulatively, as a group. Other choices here are OpenVPN, WireGuard and, possibly, IPsec. But, again, it will come down to defeating the throttling of multiple inbound bulky connections of the same type, which is doubly hard to bypass if you are on a residential IP and your ISP is really bent on throttling. Any successful obfuscation technique is short-lived, so it has no place in the protocol itself. Instead it should be delegated to a transport layer and the clients should be coded to support BT tunneling over X or over Y.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  This is all true. The best way to make your application work now matter what filtering is in place is to disguise it as something which the ISP has to make work in order to get customers. Fundamentally, nothing has the same characteristics as BitTorrent - almost nothing has the same high uplink requirements, which is an absolute signature of BitTorrent traffic. Oh, also some of the shaping is implicit, not explicit. Most home internet connections are asymmetric - they dedicate more channels to downlink than uplink.
  - myself248 6y ago
    > almost nothing has the same high uplink requirements Streaming video, whether that's a Skype conversation or showing your gameplay to Twitch, can be a pretty bulky upbound stream. I wonder how fingerprintable those are, and if they have diverse enough endpoints to be able to disguise other traffic as them.
- moonbug 6y ago
  >Other choices here are OpenVPN, WireGuard and, possibly, IPsec or, get a better ISP? not all technical problems need a technical solution.
jedberg 6y ago
> AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds Do you have a source on this? I believe you I just want to know more. It explains a lot. I have a gigabit link. I can download torrents at almost line speed. But I can barely get uploads past 5K/s. I spent hours at one point trying to tweak every possible setting and eliminate every bottleneck, and still couldn't get past 5K/s.
- toyg 6y ago
  > I just want to know more. There is little to know, it's largely a commercial preference (that has, over the years, driven technological research; see ADSL for example, the first A is for Asymmetric). Average consumers are precisely that, consumers: they rarely upload anything, but they download tons of content (from webpages to streamed media). So it makes sense for residential ISPs to maximize downstream bandwidth, since it's what consumers will evaluate them on. One way to do that is to simply throttle upstream, to ensure resources stay available for downstream. (This has the side benefit of reducing headaches, i.e. less people distributing questionable material on your network...). If you need good upload speeds, you simply have to talk to your ISP.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    I already have a symmetric line. I can upload at full line speed to other things. It's only torrents that seem to have a problem.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Just first hand experience like yourself. I'm on gigabit duplex too. What's interesting is while I'm downloading my upload far less throttled (I upload at 100mbps sometimes), but when I'm seeding I tend to max at 1 mbps out of the 1000 I'm paying for. Something else is the router AT&T requires will not completely open ports for you. What it does is it is closed for incoming connections that do not hit it multiple times then it opens up, so I appear like my ports are not open on AT&T. But even when I get around that (you can rip the certificates off of the router) AT&T itself limits the connection. If you transfer too much on one port on the backend they will remotely block the port sometimes. (Transferring too much being very little here, around 50MB, maybe even 10MB.) Good news is Comcast does not pull this crap and has fiber internet. Bad news is they start at 2gbps and start at $210 a month in most areas. I'm paying $60 for AT&T gigabit.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
grishka 6y ago
BitTorrent has encryption and most clients use it by default. The problem here is that you can't really have something that's as wide open as the BitTorrent network but at the same time impervious to "bad guys" like copyright holders and ISPs. In other words, how would you authenticate peers? How would you prevent ISPs from mitming your encrypted p2p connections if you have no authentication for them, and you in principle can't have any?
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  ...by using bittorrent over i2p.
Avamander 6y ago
Would be nice if it made QUIC and/or TCP-FO heavily recommended.
- samoa42 6y ago
  why?
  - Avamander 6y ago
    For multiple reasons. QUIC or HTTP/3 is going to be the next web standard widely deployed. Getting mandatory encrypted UDP traffic that looks like web is a big benefit. TFO recommendation primarily because torrenting is big, the feature is not super well-known, it would be a chance to increase its adoption, need for its support and that would benefit the web in general.
    - the8472 6y ago
      Bittorrent wouldn't benefit much from TFO because that would require a cookie from a previous connection to that remote client, which is unlikely to happen among random peers. Plus connection setup is not really a limiting factor for current use-cases. Some low-latency applications of bittorrent might benefit, but that requires specialized clients tuned for low latency throughout the stack, a single change won't do it. QUIC's encryption could be beneficial, but bittorrent-over-TLS would work equally well (not standardized, but libtorrent supports it). QUIC's stream multiplexing would not be all that useful either since bittorrent's maximum message size already is fairly small so clients can already interleave and prioritize control messages as needed. Bittorrent clients usually don't run on roaming (mobile) devices due to bandwidth limits, so QUIC's path migration probably doesn't provide much of a benefit either. Being UDP-based might make NAT-traversal a bit easier, but so does µTP. If you want QUIC's congestion controller benefits then you can also get that with TCP if you're on linux. Set BBR as congestion controller and set the TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT socket option and bittorrent should work well over long fat pipes (i.e. international peers). I'm not saying QUIC is terrible, but it's mostly designed to improve web traffic. Bulk transfers à la bittorrent benefit only marginally if you have a modern TCP stack and use it properly.
crest 6y ago
Switch ISP or retire its management by any means necessary.
- Volt 6y ago
  Switch to what?
tomcam 6y ago
What are you doing to help? Coding? Contributing money?
- pessimizer 6y ago
  You're allowed to have an opinion on the quality of things that you're not involved in the production of. You should hear me talk about movies.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    I see your point, but... Movies are (largely) by definition well-funded with people who make union wages whether they do a bad job. Parent seemed a little flippant to me considering that the work discussed is a labor of love used by millions, but remunerated by (maybe) thousands
    - Can_Not 6y ago
      I'm sure parent would be first in line to contribute if a random investor showed up and said "Hey I'll pay you more than your current boss to stop making apps focused on children gambling via microtransactions and do literally anything else."

It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. It would be nice if BitTorrent v2 made it harder for ISPs to identify what is bit torrent traffic. AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds.

mac01021 6y ago

Why don't ISPs bill by the gigabyte and be done with it?

jbverschoor 6y ago
BC billshock scares people away. It would set us back to the early '90s
wwwhizz 6y ago
So watching Netflix and YouTube gets more expensive? No, thanks. I'm fine with European net-neutrality and pay for bandwidth.
101008 6y ago
It would be horrible to live in a world like that. Imagine deciding to watch a shorter film on Netflix because you will pay less.
- ffpip 6y ago
  That's basically what happens with mobile data plans in India. Fixed speeds, pay X amount per 1 or 1.2 GB
  - SL61 6y ago
    It's also how Google Fi works. Every time I loaded something, in the back of my mind I'd think "this page is costing me two cents". It makes everything you load feel like an individual transaction, making it super uncomfortable to use.
freedomben 6y ago
Because customers lose their minds with that model, largely as a result of conditioning that "internet" is an unlimited resource (which of course it is when instantaneous demand <= supply, but during high traffic periods that isn't the case). Personally I understand the economics around it, but still don't like the idea of paying per GB. I would end up skipping some Netflix and would get mad at kids for playing Netflix to an empty room (much like I currently get mad when they leave the lights on in an empty room). It's nice on a personal level to avoid that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tyfon 6y ago
  That kind of depends on the price pr gb. To use the power analogy, when I was young the price of power was relatively high but in recent times it has now dropped to 0.6 NOK / kWh so even charging the car from 10-80% (~61 kWh) cost 40 NOK or $4. I do not get mad at the kids leaving the light on like my mother did to me. I (or rather my job) currently pays about 1000 NOK/ month for unlimited 500 MBit synchronous fiber internet. I transfer maybe 500 GB/month so for it to be cheaper for me it would be under 2 NOK/GB or $.2 which sounds really high but that is what I currently pay with my usage.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    I thought internet in Norway was cheaper than in Denmark. Interesting. For comparison I pay 449 DKR/month for 1000/1000 unlimited fiber with a guaranteed bandwidth of minimum 950 (they are upgrading the network atm. hence not a guarantee on the full 1000 yet as some customers equipment is too old). Is it a normal connection or a business connection perhaps?
    - iso947 6y ago
      Bandwidth to where? Do they really have 1gbit per customer peering with say level3? And with cogent, and telia? And a full non blocking internal network? And enough packet buffers to ensure that microbursts don’t saturate any link?
liability 6y ago
Why won't ISPs stop advertising 'unlimited' service that is actually limited to N gigabytes a month, where N is substantially lower than what's possible given the speeds they provide? Because they can get away with it.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Because it is insanely expensive to actually provide that. The nature of internet traffic is short bursts, not 100% utilization. In a commercial setting you can purchase fixed pipes that are entirely yours and they’re tens or hundreds of times more expensive. Why wouldn’t you want to pool bandwidth with your neighbors so you could all get faster speeds when you were using it instead of rate limiting everyone?
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    The issue is that there's no way to know what this limit is. I understand the cost, but then tell us exactly how many GB I can use at full speed and when does it start to throttle. Instead I have to rely on internet anecdotes.
    - selectodude 6y ago
      They do. I'm pretty aware of what my data transfer limits are on both my home and wireless connections. Granted my new ISP has no data caps and symmetric gigabit speeds so I'm a bit spoiled.
      - rand49an 6y ago
        Unless you work for that ISP though, you don't know what the limits to their network are or how many people you actually share that line with. It's gigabit speeds until all your neighbours suddenly want to download something too.
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      The problem is my fiber gigabit duplex internet throttles me from the first KB. Net neutrality is dead.
gkfasdfasdf 6y ago
Agreed, this would align incentives nicely. Maybe we would see more innovation in compression technology that way.
hysan 6y ago
Some thought experiments for you to try: - Does this guarantee that you get the speed that you pay for? If not, then should the price during heavy congestion cost less per GB? I’ve had the unfortunate luck of having lived in areas where the internet is unusable for anything other than email and light browsing during peak hours. Bonus: Do you know why this happens? If not, I encourage you to research this. - How will this affect the advertising model of the entire internet economy? If you, like me, have lived your whole life on a mobile data plan that is priced based on data usage, you’ll realize just how much bandwidth is consumed by advertisements (worst are the video/audio types that auto play). - How will this affect “future” technology such at smart homes? Most devices send data back (Amazon Echo devices) and the growing security camera ecosystem that sends recordings to the cloud would suddenly cost users a ton more. - Speaking of cloud, what will happen to the gaming industry that is heavily cloud based? Many games don’t even ship in a completed state anymore. Instead, part of the install requires downloading a ton of additional updates. Not to mention online play, DLC, etc. There a many many more everyday examples like this that would be heavily affected by pricing per GB. Your question sounds like a simple solution but like many things in life, that is rarely the case.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y ago
  I think the answer to most of these questions is, let the market decide. E.g. consider this: congestion during peak hours is bad now, but there is currently no penalty on an ISP for being slow. However if billing was based on bytes moved, for an ISP to underserve during times of demand means lost revenue. Thus ISPs would be incentivized to provide the best service.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hysan 6y ago
    With respect to the US, this answer is incomplete. The theory of letting the market decide only works when there is a free market. Most places I’ve lived has only had a single choice for ISP effectively making them monopolies.
colechristensen 6y ago
Because their costs aren’t based on usage, but installing and maintaining the infrastructure then collecting rent on it. Actual usage is an exponential curve and if you bill on it you have a few angry users paying for everybody else’s infrastructure.
slyall 6y ago
Well in New Zealand we used to charge-per-byte but as things got cheaper this has largely gone away. Some of the cheaper how fibre accounts have something like a 100G/month limit but I guess it isn't worth the trouble to charge even here where bandwidth is much more expensive than the US.
- geoffmunn 6y ago
  Flashback: I was on Actrix which charged $5 per megabyte. Downloading Netscape Navigator 2 nearly bankrupted me. I used to browse the internet with images disabled, which ironically gave me an appreciation for accessibility issues which served me well later in life. When Xtra came out at $2.50 per hour, it was a complete game changer.
  - brokenmachine 6y ago
    Netscape Navigator 2 is 8Mb, for anyone who was wondering.
  - phire 6y ago
    I remember when Xtra bought out their $27.95/month unlimited dialup plan. It changed our internet browsing habits so much. With hourly charges, you would try to plan out what you would do before connecting and instead of reading webpages, you would save them to disk for reading later. With unlimited, you could just sit there and browse. Or leave it on overnight to download files. At some point we got a second phoneline and I was downloading torrents on dialup all day and night for years before we finally moved somewhere with ADSL in 2006.
- driverdan 6y ago
  100Gb/month is practically nothing. I primarily use a hotspot for internet access and routinely do way more traffic than that.
  - slyall 6y ago
    If you don't use video then it'll be plenty. Plenty of people get their TV the old-fashioned way but still want fast Internet. Looking at pricing for Spark (one of the largerproviders). [1] For each of the fibre speed plans you can get 60GB/month, for another $10 you get 120GB/month and for a further $10 you get unlimited traffic. BTW: "Mb" = Megabits, "MB" = MegaBytes [1] https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/ https://www.spark.co.nz/shop/internet/plans-and-pricing/
Hamuko 6y ago
I imagine the data whales would not cover the loss revenue from people who just use online banking yet pay the same amount. I've used 15 TB in the last 5 weeks with my torrent client alone (and considering my Backblaze backup size, that's not nearly all of my traffic), but how many people like me are there in the general public?
bsder 6y ago
Because then people will get REALLY grouchy about ads. In addition, it gives people a solid measure over which to sue you. If you aren't delivering, you're headed to court. The ISPs like all the vagueness.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

Why would the that be the protocol's responsibility?

convery 6y ago
Maybe not 'responsibility', but I guess it'd be nice to have some kind of proxy protocol so that seeders can proxy requests for people with annoying ISPs.. or they could just use a VPN like everyone else =P
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  I'm not sure that makes sense for regular torrents (e.g. linux distros, large audio software packages, WoW updates, Adobe downloader, etc. etc.) even if it would be a nice-to-have for folks who use torrents for less than legal purposes. And as such, probably not something they can put in without it basically being a signal that they're "helping piracy" (something bittorrent has had to fight an uphill battle for already... I doubt they want to redo that fight)
greycol 6y ago
I'd assume that a protocol that gets faster for files the more nodes who use it and the faster those nodes transmit would try to solve real world issues stopping more nodes/faster speeds from those nodes. The word 'responsibility' that you used is of course too strong a word, however the comment 'it would be nice' to have is definitely true assuming we want downloads to be faster.
chii 6y ago
may be "design goal" is more appropriate a term, rather than responsibility.

kardos 6y ago

> It feels like this isn't a large enough leap forward. The hash it relies on is broken, so their hand has been forced.

throwaway2048 6y ago
sha1 is not meaningfully broken for BitTorrent, It would require a second pre-image attack to meaningfully hurt it, you can not take an existing hash you don't control and synthesize a matching set of incorrect/malicious data. Second preimage attacks are MUCH harder to pull off, even md5 is still safe from them, many years after they were found to be broken in other contexts. The only thing that sha1's weakness would let you do in a bittorrent context is create a torrent, then let you send fake data for a chunk, which really does not seem very useful, because you could just make the data malicious when you created the torrent.
- __s 6y ago
  The writing is on the wall, no need to wait for these attacks to actually exist before beginning migration
  - upofadown 6y ago
    Everyone thought that for MD5...
- admax88q 6y ago
  It's not super easy, but you could create a legitimate torrent of some popular content, as well as a malicious version. Use the legit version to gain popularity and then distribute malicious chunks to select peers. Certainly not a trivial attack, but not benign either.

huhtenberg 6y ago

It's nearly impossible to obfuscate a protocol to work around filtering. You'd want to look like some other protocol and you want that protocol be encrypted by default. Otherwise yours will get fingerprinted via the deep packet inspection. The most obvious choice is to run your protocol over TLS. But then they can just throttle long-lived bulky TLS connections where neither side is on 443. You can then require the responding side be on 443 (which is already a big hassle), but they will then throttle down TLS connections towards residential IPs or throttle them down cumulatively, as a group. Other choices here are OpenVPN, WireGuard and, possibly, IPsec. But, again, it will come down to defeating the throttling of multiple inbound bulky connections of the same type, which is doubly hard to bypass if you are on a residential IP and your ISP is really bent on throttling. Any successful obfuscation technique is short-lived, so it has no place in the protocol itself. Instead it should be delegated to a transport layer and the clients should be coded to support BT tunneling over X or over Y.

richardwhiuk 6y ago
This is all true. The best way to make your application work now matter what filtering is in place is to disguise it as something which the ISP has to make work in order to get customers. Fundamentally, nothing has the same characteristics as BitTorrent - almost nothing has the same high uplink requirements, which is an absolute signature of BitTorrent traffic. Oh, also some of the shaping is implicit, not explicit. Most home internet connections are asymmetric - they dedicate more channels to downlink than uplink.
- myself248 6y ago
  > almost nothing has the same high uplink requirements Streaming video, whether that's a Skype conversation or showing your gameplay to Twitch, can be a pretty bulky upbound stream. I wonder how fingerprintable those are, and if they have diverse enough endpoints to be able to disguise other traffic as them.
moonbug 6y ago
>Other choices here are OpenVPN, WireGuard and, possibly, IPsec or, get a better ISP? not all technical problems need a technical solution.

jedberg 6y ago

> AT&T artificially slows down upload speeds Do you have a source on this? I believe you I just want to know more. It explains a lot. I have a gigabit link. I can download torrents at almost line speed. But I can barely get uploads past 5K/s. I spent hours at one point trying to tweak every possible setting and eliminate every bottleneck, and still couldn't get past 5K/s.

toyg 6y ago
> I just want to know more. There is little to know, it's largely a commercial preference (that has, over the years, driven technological research; see ADSL for example, the first A is for Asymmetric). Average consumers are precisely that, consumers: they rarely upload anything, but they download tons of content (from webpages to streamed media). So it makes sense for residential ISPs to maximize downstream bandwidth, since it's what consumers will evaluate them on. One way to do that is to simply throttle upstream, to ensure resources stay available for downstream. (This has the side benefit of reducing headaches, i.e. less people distributing questionable material on your network...). If you need good upload speeds, you simply have to talk to your ISP.
- jedberg 6y ago
  I already have a symmetric line. I can upload at full line speed to other things. It's only torrents that seem to have a problem.
proverbialbunny 6y ago
Just first hand experience like yourself. I'm on gigabit duplex too. What's interesting is while I'm downloading my upload far less throttled (I upload at 100mbps sometimes), but when I'm seeding I tend to max at 1 mbps out of the 1000 I'm paying for. Something else is the router AT&T requires will not completely open ports for you. What it does is it is closed for incoming connections that do not hit it multiple times then it opens up, so I appear like my ports are not open on AT&T. But even when I get around that (you can rip the certificates off of the router) AT&T itself limits the connection. If you transfer too much on one port on the backend they will remotely block the port sometimes. (Transferring too much being very little here, around 50MB, maybe even 10MB.) Good news is Comcast does not pull this crap and has fiber internet. Bad news is they start at 2gbps and start at $210 a month in most areas. I'm paying $60 for AT&T gigabit.

deleted 6y ago

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grishka 6y ago

BitTorrent has encryption and most clients use it by default. The problem here is that you can't really have something that's as wide open as the BitTorrent network but at the same time impervious to "bad guys" like copyright holders and ISPs. In other words, how would you authenticate peers? How would you prevent ISPs from mitming your encrypted p2p connections if you have no authentication for them, and you in principle can't have any?

dependenttypes 6y ago
...by using bittorrent over i2p.

Avamander 6y ago

Would be nice if it made QUIC and/or TCP-FO heavily recommended.

samoa42 6y ago
why?
- Avamander 6y ago
  For multiple reasons. QUIC or HTTP/3 is going to be the next web standard widely deployed. Getting mandatory encrypted UDP traffic that looks like web is a big benefit. TFO recommendation primarily because torrenting is big, the feature is not super well-known, it would be a chance to increase its adoption, need for its support and that would benefit the web in general.
  - the8472 6y ago
    Bittorrent wouldn't benefit much from TFO because that would require a cookie from a previous connection to that remote client, which is unlikely to happen among random peers. Plus connection setup is not really a limiting factor for current use-cases. Some low-latency applications of bittorrent might benefit, but that requires specialized clients tuned for low latency throughout the stack, a single change won't do it. QUIC's encryption could be beneficial, but bittorrent-over-TLS would work equally well (not standardized, but libtorrent supports it). QUIC's stream multiplexing would not be all that useful either since bittorrent's maximum message size already is fairly small so clients can already interleave and prioritize control messages as needed. Bittorrent clients usually don't run on roaming (mobile) devices due to bandwidth limits, so QUIC's path migration probably doesn't provide much of a benefit either. Being UDP-based might make NAT-traversal a bit easier, but so does µTP. If you want QUIC's congestion controller benefits then you can also get that with TCP if you're on linux. Set BBR as congestion controller and set the TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT socket option and bittorrent should work well over long fat pipes (i.e. international peers). I'm not saying QUIC is terrible, but it's mostly designed to improve web traffic. Bulk transfers à la bittorrent benefit only marginally if you have a modern TCP stack and use it properly.

crest 6y ago

Switch ISP or retire its management by any means necessary.

Volt 6y ago
Switch to what?

tomcam 6y ago

What are you doing to help? Coding? Contributing money?

pessimizer 6y ago
You're allowed to have an opinion on the quality of things that you're not involved in the production of. You should hear me talk about movies.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I see your point, but... Movies are (largely) by definition well-funded with people who make union wages whether they do a bad job. Parent seemed a little flippant to me considering that the work discussed is a labor of love used by millions, but remunerated by (maybe) thousands
  - Can_Not 6y ago
    I'm sure parent would be first in line to contribute if a random investor showed up and said "Hey I'll pay you more than your current boss to stop making apps focused on children gambling via microtransactions and do literally anything else."