PeerGuardian is blocking passport

[borarp]

Hello!

1) version of BitComet 1.14

2) Internet connection DSL ()

3) no modem or router

4) Windows XP SP3, Firewall is disabled, Antivirus - Avira

I'm using Peerguardian2, but some lists on it are blocking BitComet passport. Can anyone tell me what ip range should I allow? I looked throw PG2 log's but couldn't find any range, which have something to do with Bitcomet...

(BitComet passport is working fine without PeerGuardian.)

I have to disable most of PG2 lists in order to use passport, but it would be much better if I just could add BitComet range to Permanent Allow list.

[greywizard]

Forgive my asking but if you don't have a modem how do you connect to internet through xDSL? B)

About your question, you should check in the logs for the next URLs:

ip-us.bitcomet.org

torrent-cache.bitcomet.org

inside-stats.bitcomet.org

and allow them. The IP ranges that I've encountered so far, are:

221.130.193.23

221.130.193.33

221.130.195.221 - 221.130.195.222

221.130.195.224 - 221.130.195.227

221.130.195.231

221.130.199.139

[kluelos]

Or you could simply stop using PG2. It's giving you an utterly false sense of security, and provides no real protection.

Blocklists only work to the extent that the lister knows which addresses need banning. It's trivially simple to stay off of such a list.

[borarp]

Forgive my asking but if you don't have a modem how do you connect to internet through xDSL?

My mistake - I have ethernet connection... :)

Thanks alot for help! I've allowed these ranges and some other, under similar names and now everything works. B)

Or you could simply stop using PG2. It's giving you an utterly false sense of security, and provides no real protection.

Blocklists only work to the extent that the lister knows which addresses need banning. It's trivially simple to stay off of such a list.

You probably right, PG is not 100% safe, but who knows, better safe than sorry... ;)

[kluelos]

Most of the people who've really looked at the issue, are who know. Cliches aside, an MPAA shill would have to be just stupid not to see the obvious ways around PG2, which can't demonstrate that it's even 1% effective. But it's your time, trouble & computer resources to waste if you insist on doing so.

[greywizard]

Well, I have to admit that I still use PG2. While I'm perfectly aware that it's a far cry from offering me a thorough protection, I kind of like the thought of blocking at least all the known anti-P2P addresses which try to monitor your online torrent-related activities. For that reason I neither encourage its usage nor discourage it. I've been monitoring it in the beginning and it does always use at most 1% of my processor and it also has a small footprint.

Cliches aside, an MPAA shill would have to be just stupid not to see the obvious ways around PG2...

Well, as a very smart man said once: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." :D

My point being that for many downloads, especially newer torrents tested, I could observe the scrolling blocked IPs list running like crazy (Media Sentry and others), which obviates the fact that it really blocks something extremely frequent in the said cases. While I understand how easy it is to go around it, the fact that many don't do that makes me still keep it running (it will block them at least). I guess I'll quit using it at all, the day when the blocking list will stay still for a very long time. B)

[kluelos]

MediaSentry's issue has never been with detection. It's trivially easy to detect who-all is sharing a torrent. The problem has been with the legal theory -- you can't find out without obviating the law yourself. If you're an authorized agent for the RIAA, but you yourself are participating in unauthorized file sharing in order to get the evidence, well, you're the agent, so you just authorized it when you started sharing it.

The RIAA can't have this legal cake and eat it too, as they recently found out.

They've found themselves a target-rich environment, as the saying goes. There wasn't ever a problem finding thousands of filesharers to threaten to sue. It won't be a problem finding thousands more. If these organizations want to catch you, you will be caught and PG won't make that even a little bit more difficult for them. It's the financial issues and the legal issues that give them pause. The technological issue isn't even a hiccup.

What bothers me about PG2 is the sheer futility of using it -- like taking off your shoes, and filling little bottles in the clear plastic bag, pointless "security theater" that has never caught a single evildoer. Defended on the basis that, well, it's not THAT much trouble. It is that much incompetence and that much surrender of liberty.

PG2 may or may not block any useful addresses, but it definitely does block innocent ones, including many college students. You're depending on PG2 to be right, but much like our "no-fly" list, if they're wrong it's too bad. You can't find out why you're on the list, you can't get off the list, you can't appeal, you can't even sue anybody.

All those IP's it's blocking? There's absolutely no assurance that any of them need to be blocked, or that others which should be blocked actually are.

I intensely dislike useless, ineffective "solutions" like this, whether from the federal government or from Phoenix Labs. They shouldn't be supported, they should be laughed at.

[greywizard]

So all this pre-lawsuit notices that a lot of people are complaining about on many forums are just a intimidating scheme without legal grounds to support it? I'm asking because I don't know personally anybody who's been subject to this and I don't know exactly how they work or how far they go.

[Dark_Shroud]

Let me jump in here and simplify the argument.

All the RIAA has to do is load a .torrent and "update" the tracker to get the full IP list. They don't even have to start the .torrent and actually share data.

At one point in time it was even discovered the **AA was using modded versions of Azureus to get IP lists and poision swarms.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

There are groups that log IP addresses they connect too, and send threatening letters to ISPs of the IP address, and the torrent containing illegal content.

Some ISPs pass these notices on to their customers, and "if" the customer calls the company that sent it, this will be the first time the company has identified the person, because he just surrendered his identity.

Normally they sweet talk the person, tell them to say they are sorry for breaking the law, in other words to "incriminate" themselves, then legal threats come directed to a person, not an IP address, and if the person surrendered not only his name, but also his IP address, then they look back at the history of that IP address, and all this info "may" be enough to get a court order to make the ISP produce records of the IP/IPs the customer has used, and the charges pile on, until the person gets a lawyer, and ends up paying a blackmail fee to stop the threats.

Peer Guardian if used properly will keep you all the bulk of these databases, but if you go installing every block list you can find, your going to suddenly lose a lot of speed, because some of the best seeders are on commercial servers and college LANs that are usually on these lists. The ONLY lists worthy of blocking are the anti P2P, spyware, adware, and government. The rest won't do any good, and surely will do harm.

Also, these lists are maintained by bluetack, who will remove an ip range if you submit all the required data and demonstrate that the IPs are not hostile to p2p users. I have successfully had an IP range removed that was used by a completely legal bittorrent tracker that was hosted on a company that was known to be hostile to ILLEGAL bittorrent use, but when I presented the info, they removed it from the list.

I'm also going to be submitting a list of IPs to them that bitcomet uses. I'm currently awaiting a "complete" list, because they will only give us one "shot" at requesting the ranges be removed, so I don't want to go back and ask for more to be removed. When I get the complete list, I will submit it. I can't say if they will remove them or not, it depends on how good my explanation is, and how willing they are to listen, so we will see.

To sum this up, both sides of this debate have their merit, but I use peer guardian, and will continue to do so. Besides staying off the top of these databases, one point that was barely touched on is the groups that poison torrents, like "ziptorrent", that sends out corrupt data to use up a persons bandwidth. I often get hundreds of ziptorrent blocks a minute, and they rent very fast commercial servers to send you corrupt data, and it will easily use all your bandwidth until your client blocks the peer, if it does at all, and they have thousands of IPs to flood you with bad "corrupt" data, and peer guardian IS quite good at blocking this form of harassment.

[greywizard]

@ The UnUsual Suspect: I actually use a supplementary list, too, compiled from bluetack lists with Blocklist Manager and imported in PG2. I do this mostly because I've added to that all the bogon IANA unused, reserved and private ranges and to my great surprise I've got quite a lot of these IPs blocked by PG2, too. This is another means that anti-p2p groups are known to use, that is, spoof unallocated IPs, because normally you should never get connection attempts from such addresses.

Besides, you're totally right about domains like ziptorrent; I can vouch for that. Just yesterday I was meddling with a presumably "hot" torrent and although the tracker reported a few thousand seeds and peers I was getting 0kbps speed. When I checked PG2 it was scrolling like crazy only IPs from MediaSentry and nothing else. After running it for about 30-40 minutes I had to delete it. Basically BC didn't manage to make any successful connection.

As I said, for the toll it takes (pretty much nothing) I think I get a little something out of it. At present time, when it's running with all the block lists selected my PG2 is counting more than 2.680.000.000 IPs (of course 4/5 of those are unallocated IPs) and nevertheless I always get speeds as high as my connection limit under BC. Though, I usually leave the edu list unchecked, except for the very "hot" torrents.