[slyck article]BitComet Banned From Growing Number of Private Trackers

[boo]

http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1021

The advent of DHT (Distributed Hash Tables) has been a valuable asset to the BitTorrent community. Most newer BitTorrent clients now support this network layer, which boosts the efficiency of the already capable BitTorrent protocol.

The DHT layer works by creating a virtual network on top of the BitTorrent protocol. Each node that participates in the DHT layer indexes a small portion of files on the network and helps with network communications. This works great for public trackers as it puts less of a burden on centralized server resources, helps distribute files more efficiently, and saves bandwidth. It's an underappreciated quantum leap that has been overshadowed by more visible advances such as BitTorrent or eDonkey2000.

On the other side of this spectrum are private trackers. Private trackers are not looking to widely distribute their files. These communities are designed to only allow sharing within this closed community by assigning each registered member's IP address with a passkey. In addition, a 'private' flag within the torrent file tells the BitTorrent client not to share on the DHT network.

However, BitComet does not honor the flag. Instead, the torrent is shared and those who do not belong to the private tracker can freely leech off the resources of that community. For example, let's say an individual is banned from a private tracker for leeching. In that period of time, he managed to download 50 torrent files. Since he is also using BitComet, the client ignores the flag and shares the torrent on the public DHT network.

This is highly frowned upon in private communities. To ensure sharing and save bandwidth, many trackers have tight download/upload ratio policies and enforce them strictly. Since the neither the DHT network nor BitComet have any concept of ratios, the torrent is traded freely. This situation has especially been a kick in the µTorrent for those donating to private trackers in return for higher status and more privileges.

The solution? Ban BitComet. Most of the leading private trackers such as ScT Torrent and Midnight Torrents will not accept BitComet clients. Some trackers such as TorrentIt.com have recommended the use of other, private tracker friendly, clients.

"Unfortunately due to tracker security issues with BitComet 0.60 we will be banning this client to protect our users," an announcement on TorrentIt.com said. "The ban will take effect at 13:00 GMT December 9th and will be effective until such time as the bug is fixed by the BitComet developers. This ban is NOT up for debate, do not make posts in the forums about it, they will be locked. As some of you may be aware several private trackers much like ours are banning the use of BitComet because of an issue with the client enabling DHT despite the existence of the 'private' flag."

The banishment of BitComet has drawn mixed reviews. Some believe the security of private trackers is paramount and must be respected. Others cite that banning BitComet forces some users to loose advantage of its 'end to end' encryption. One of BitComet's newest features, some contend 'end to end' encryption conceals BitTorrent traffic on throttled ISP's like Shaw Cable.

Whether BitComet will upgrade at this time is unclear. The developer of BitComment, "RnySmile",did not return requests for comment.

Now there is even an article on slyck about trackers starting to ban bitcomet

[BlackLion]

All I can say is.....0w.

[DomZ]

Good thing for UT. On the priavte trackers I am on, UT is now the most popular client

[1c3d0g]

Poor bastard. Well he can still change the way BitComet's Private Flag function is implemented and get support for it... :/

[hofshi]

all that is left now is for µtorrent to have an end to end encription as well, and Bitcomet will be officially gone.

[boo]

I hope that bitcomet dont take the knowledge of BT header encryption to it's grave

[bleh]

Well, this proves it, the scene apparently has it's own set of rules to live by, and sadly BC hasn't conformed to this standard. But come on, has this client ever been kosher to use? I remember two or three more instances where this client has been banned in the past, so this isn't news really.

(it's just a sad fact)

[Firon]

It's been banned for a lot of reasons, this one just broke the camel's back, since it was basically the worst violation yet.

[BlackLion]

add another to the list. the WB knocked them too:

RE: Bit Comet 0.60 Banned From Site

As you may have noticed a lot of other sites have banned the use of Bit Comet ver. 0.60, well after a lot of checking into the situation and problems thrown up by this client, we al Wild-Bytes have also decided to ban it too.

If you continue to use Bit Comet 0.60, you will notice that although you are transferring data to users, you might not be getting credited with the transfer stats. This is due to the coding that does not check the Private Flag on DHT. That means that you will then be able to seed to 1000's of users who are not connected to Wild-Bytes. As you can see this would be a bad thing, as they would be getting our Torrents with out actually being a member of Wild-Bytes.

I would suggest moving to either:

uTorrent - h**p://www.utorrent.com

Bit Tornado - h**p://www.bittornado.com/

Be Happy.

Things seem to be snowballing for the Comet atm.

[ICleolion]

Its always nice when on top of BitComet getting banned, UTorrent gets recommended. YEAH!!

[BlackLion]

heh. Looks like the Comet finally made the Big Time, the Slyck article made it to Slashdot. really 0w.

[Firon]

:lol:

Title: BitComet as a Client

IF YOU ARE USING BITCOMET AS A CLIENT PLEASE CHANGE AS SOON AS YOU REASONABLY CAN WE WILL BE BANNING THIS CLIENT SHORTLY.

We include a 'private' flag within the torrent file that tells the BitTorrent client not to share on the DHT network.

However, BitComet does not honor the flag. Instead, the torrent is shared and those who do not belong to AradiTracker can freely leech off the resources of this community.

This means your bandwidth is being stolen and the uploading you are doing can be going elsewhere,and not to the other members of AradiTracker

For full information see here http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1021

[sixshot]

This newsbit has now been SLASHDOTTED!

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/11/1940250&tid=185&tid=230

[lorcro2000]

µTorrent seems to be the client of choice to recommend to Bitcomet users. Most of them are using Bitcomet in the first place because they couldn't live with the resources consumed by Java, when running Azureus, so µTorrent looks like a very nice alternative.

Someone should get their shit together and create a standard way to do header encryption for BT traffic. Would be great if all clients could do that, would make it quite a bit harder for ISP's to throttle BT traffic down to a pittance.

[Firon]

sixshot: you're a bit late, BlackLion posted it 22 minutes before you.

lorcro2000: it might happen if ludde has time, but I'm not too sure, I imagine it wouldn't be all that easy to do it right.

[sixshot]

Doh! Can't blame me! I was watching anime when all that happened!

[BlackLion]

Okay, slight change, only Comet ver .60 is banned from the WB, earlier versions are ok for now. Not a coder so I wouldnt know why that is but that is how it is for the time being. But those earlier versions are a bit sucky so I dont know how good that news really is for Comet users.

[Ultima]

@Firon: Was wiggo wrong when he said that ludde was already (in the process of?) making the protocol for it?

[ColdArmor]

well gg bitcomet your done

[Ultima]

Heh they've been banned several times before, but managed to endure. That was when µTorrent wasn't in the picture yet. I wonder how they'll hold up now, with a much better alternative out there... =P

[nightshifted]

Okay, slight change, only Comet ver .60 is banned from the WB, earlier versions are ok for now

That was a strange choice on their part. BitComet 0.59 acts the same as 0.60, I thought.

[Ultima]

This situation has especially been a kick in the µTorrent for those donating to private trackers in return for higher status and more privileges.

I just read the article, and I've been wondering... what exactly does this mean? "Kick in the µTorrent"?

@nightshifted: I agree, it really is odd. In fact, I thought 0.59 was worse than 0.60 when it came to abiding by the private flag... O.o

[BlackLion]

I will keep an eye on it, I thought it was kinda strange too but we shall see......

[nightshifted]

Today on the tracker where I'm a moderator the administrator made the official proclamation: announcements from BitComet and BitLord will be rejected by the tracker starting December 24, and users whose last-client-used record has BitComet or BitLord (which registers as "BitComet 0") will not be able to download their personalized .torrent files as of January 31. DHT isn't the only problem with them; that's why pre-DHT versions of BitComet and the DHT-unaware BitLord are also to be banned.

[BlackLion]

And the Noose tightens....

Hello

We have just added the Bitcomet 0.60 Client ban to Wild-Bytes tracker. We are still looking into the option to ban all of bitcomet and this could happens as soon as tomorrow.

Thank You For Your Time

WB Staff