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What is a torrent poisoner?


Drealm

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I recently saw this in the list of my peers:

[FAKE] uTorrent/1.8.2.0

So, I searched the internet, and discovered that this is probably a "torrent poisoner".

So, I searched the internet again for this term and curiously, nearly nobody can explain what is that and what they do exactly. The term have been said in this topic: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=463890 by Moogly and Switeck, but nobody explained:

What is a torrent poisoner?

What they do exactly?

For what purpose?

Is it safe to seed them, or as soon as we see one we should stop seeding?

Is this some kind of P2P police?

So an answer would be VERY appreciated, because this time, Google let me down.

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All fake clients are not necessarily torrent poisoner, they can be client spoofers.

Real poisoners are run by firms mandated by rights owners to polluate the p2p networks.

They track a popular torrent (like the last fashion movie) and with a modified client (coming from an open source client like Azureus), they catch leechers (honeypot strategy) and flood your client with bad data.

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Thanks a lot. But I still have interrogations

What is a client spoofer? (and what they do, why they exist, etc)

What are the consequences of poisoners flooding my client with bad data? Can it give a corrupted file once downloaded by the client? Can it really stop p2p exchanges?

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Client spoofers do exactly what you're observing. They are clients that pretend to be other clients.

The only direct consequence of poisoning that bandwidth is wasted -- potentially a lot. The indirect consequence is that it can slow the entire swarm down by inundating it with useless data, which may also cause peers to become disinterested in the swarm.

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