sandvine

[Anoid]

if you were noticing connections fail and torrents are slower there is a reason. A company called Sandvine has developed tools to allow a broad level of censorship on internet traffic and that especially includes torrents. Sandvine can inject reset packets into torrents effectively breaking connections. This has been especially widely used in the USA. Sandvine has been used widely but some countries are comparatively safe such as Russia, Bulgaria and some African nations.

According to independent testing, Comcast injected reset packets into peer-to-peer connections, which effectively caused a certain limited number of outbound connections to immediately terminate. So far Sandvine has been used in many countries for blocking Internet more generally.

I do not yet know if torrent programs are able to cope with the reset attack yet or not as this needs to be addressed. I have noticed well seeded torrents seem to be working fine, it seems to be less popular torrents that seen to be vulnerable to ISP abuses. For this observation I suggest equipping laptops with 2TB or even 4TB SSD and use them as a steal seed box with a web page or game as the foreground. This way torrents can get around ISP blocking one way or another.

Now the company is on the US entity list due to abuses. Egypt and Belarusian protests are reasons for the entity declaration.

Edited September 16 by Anoid