Switeck

Advanced settings questions: Might enabling bt.prio_first_last_piece cause µTorrent v1.51 beta to try to download at least slightly more pieces at once? Also, how does bt.connect_speed differ from net.max_halfopen? Does µTorrent use the lesser of the 2 (presumeably net.max_halfopen) during the moments when connections are attempted but before any replies are received?

The scheduler needs a caption for "upload only mode". I heard you can hold down shift while clicking a timeslot to have it turn light red, signifying µTorrent will only seed during that hour. Using shift+click is probably not as good as just adding it to the click options. As Scheduler grows in complexity, how about marking a whole continuous timeslot to all change at once?

I just thought of something odd: Why do we know any of this in the first place? Why are we even aware of any link at all between PeerFactor(or whatever its offshoot company became named) and µTorrent? The only person that could've told this to anyone is Ludde...that person could then go on to tell others, but at some point Ludde had to tell someone -- or PeerFactor did. From what I see here, it seems Ludde willingly made it known instead of hiding it...which due to NDA's might be very easy to do! And all sides would be blissfully aware of the whole situation. This suggests to me that Ludde didn't have any intent to lie to us. Plus, it shouldn't be too hard to confirm if the anti-p2p part broke off from the company Ludde is signing with. If that's the case, the only thing you should worry about is what sort of deals go on under the table.

Neither do I. If it's spyware, where can it hide all its monitoring functions if it's only ~150KB in size? However the business association that Ludde has chosen to make with PeerFactor...seems unsavory. PeerFactor/RetSpan is among the worst kind of p2p-copyright-monitoring company -- they monitor, report, and FLOOD file-sharing networks with fakes. I don't think anyone can defend their actions strictly on the basis of "we're just protecting copyrights" if you knew anything about the kind of "DDoS attacks" their flooding of fakes has done to the Gnutella network. (Generating fake resonses to searches for anything with certain keywords in them, monitoring every attempt to download them -- logging them as copyright violations without consideration of legal downloads with same keywords, and even disrupting the network by not properly routing searches which do no contain "forbidden" keywords.) Companies like these are actively working to destroy file-sharing, illegal AND otherwise.

Minor problem: When I tried to add a new torrent, I didn't like the folder it was going to save to -- so I clicked the "..." button. Problem was, after I chose the folder I wanted, µTorrent gave me an error saying that filename with extension .mp4.* was not allowed. (The real filename's extension was .mp4 .) I have to exit the "..." button menu and manually type out the folder before the torrent would work. Oddly, I've tried to duplicate the error on another computer without success. It may just be filename+path length too long, but it wasn't as long as many I've done in the past.

Sounds more to me like bad documentation...bad design would be it doesn't work at all.

Any connection that uploads to you encrypted deserves an encrypted upload in return by default. This requires them to encrypted upload to you first before your connection will automatically encrypted upload to them. Otherwise, throttled connections will likely suffer from high upload speeds and low download speeds. If we don't help them, they won't/can't help us!

Do you mean if you download an encrypted stream from an ip that you'll ONLY upload encrypted to them to even if you have encryption set to default (allow but don't always use)?

Actually, throttled connections need US to enable this...and they need it enabled to...for us to have 2-way full-speed connections with them. There almost needs to be a flag to 'demand' an encrypted transfer, but at the same time that would be easily spotted by ISPs. So encryption by default is probably the best choice. Alot more ISPs throttle than most people realize. And even the little ones that don't...often connects through a bigger one that does!

For what it's worth, although 8 bits equals 1 byte...it may take about 10 bits of bandwidth to transmit 1 byte of data. Communication overheads are what cuts into all broadband connections maximums. TCP is probably not the most efficient since it has both error correction and prevention in it. But accuracy is wanted over efficiency so it's the way to go. I've seen estimates that put somewhere between 10-25% of all bandwidth on broadband connections is just for the overheads.

Sorry, I overlooked 1 CRITICAL detail! You're on an ISP that has been rolling out BitTorrent blocking and throttling everywhere. That alone may explain your problem. I've heard that their VoIP ip port of 1720 will allow BitTorrent traffic if you use it. It might even solve your NAT error problem (though I doubt it) -- if your ISP is firewalling your ip ports from incomming access. Chances are, you need to get a newer firmware update for your cablemodem -- if one's even available. I'm sure if it contains a router that there's some way to port-forward it. Or barring that, to just turn off the router altogether.

I remember there was a worm that specifically targetted a vulnerability in a couple versions of Zone Alarm firewall (about v3...quite some time ago.) If you were running the firewall the worm could auto-infect your computer. If you weren't, it might use another security hole to get in. But if you have a different firewall or router, it wouldn't be able to connect to your computer to infect it. Firewalls aren't the be-all, end-all. And adding more constantly-running software to a computer certainly doesn't make it faster. That's why I agree with Firon that being behind a router is generally best. Btw, a truely "dumb" computer connected directly to the internet is uninfectable. It's only beacuse of security holes in the OS or apps we're running that we're vulnerable to viruses and worms at all. Many of the security holes are well-know to Microsoft...but they won't remove a few of the security holes because they call them "features".