Valid statements about DHT/local peer & private flag?

[Lanix]

Recently it has come to our attention that with an update to the latest version of µtorrent (1.7.7) by default there are several options turned on that absolutely must be turned off. DHT (distributed hash tables) and Peer Exchange, as well as Local Peer Discovery are features in µtorrent that allow you to connect to peers that are not part of the tracker. Failure to turn these options will cause µtorrent to misreport data to the tracker.

For those of you who think to themselves "I know better - the torrents are created as 'private torrents' so therefore I don't have to do this", let me offer you some interesting information. Recently a member was banned because his statistics on a torrent were absolutely impossible. The anti-cheat script detected this and he came onto IRC as he was legitimately seeding, and not cheating. I saw his WebUI and noticed that the tracker reported someting like 55 seeds and 12 leechers, but he was seeing 210 seeds and 180 leechers (or thereabouts).

Some of you think you are such torrent experts, and that the "private" flag should ignore the peer exchange and DHT protocols, explain how so many more peers were seen. He disabled DHT and Peer Exchange, as well as Local Peer discovery, and bingo magically the numbers matched, and he wasn't seeding outside the tracker.

Has anyone actually reproduced this error? IMO it seems just that 1 user had this problem now this story is spreading on the net and everyone seem to think utorrent don't respect private flag anymore.

So how is it?

[DreadWingKnight]

I would like them to reproduce it for us under controlled conditions.

Honestly those numbers sound to me like incoming connections getting counted separately from tracker peerlists.

[Lord Alderaan]

The only time in years µtorrent was banned on quite a few respectable trackers was when 1.7.1 came out and it became apparent it had this exact bug. 1.7.2 fixed the issue and was released within days. It seems unlikely the devs would make the same mistake again.

Besides its easy to properly test if µtorrent is having this bug again if you have a tracker. It should even be possible with wireshark inspecting DHT and LPD traffic.

[GTHK]

I checked it with Wireshark after seeing this and it didn't announce a private torrent, a hacked version of µT however will announce private torrents.

[jewelisheaven]

But if we even get into hacked versions... that requires actually verifying legitimacy on a case-by-case basis. And most admins are overloaded as-is; those who don't accept current UT stable due to the OLD bug with 1.7.1 not-included. Therefore to ask them to do more to identify this is usually not within their realm of patience... and only a handful of sites have appeal procedures for spurious cheat flagging and re-enabling account access.

As DWKnight said noone to date has been able to reproduce any case for uT not respecting private swarms staying private not announcing to sites not on the tracker list and keeping extra ways of getting/sharing peerlists disabled.

[Firon]

Lanix: nope, just a bunch of morons. One, private flags prevents them from being used on a torrent, and two, it doesn't make you report less upload/download (that's a myth).