LibTorrent Peer ID?

[jazd]

Yeah adding an option to spoof any client would be trouble. I dont think it would be a problem if it was simply a checkbox under the "Other" category in preferences that switched between the Deluge and libtorrent peer ids.

[Ideal]

Wouldn't this be considered spoofing by the trackers? <grin>

I was thinking of writing a peer-id changer plugin, so that you could spoof as any of the popular clients. I'm a bit hesitant to do this because I don't think it should be necessary and it's nice to see stats on where Deluge is used. If everyone switched their Deluge to identify itself as uTorrent or whatnot, then we'd never know who or how many people are using it.

I'd say about this - never hesistate/afraid of consequences to give people even more freedom than they have now at least if there are quite visible good applications for that freedom.. And thats probably regarding anything at all, not only software.. If they want that freedom for quite strong enough - they will have it anyway, because everything is open..

I guess what you're saying is that we should give users the option to spoof right in Deluge since it's so easy to anyways? Just for those curious, it only takes 1 line modification in Deluge to spoof your peer-id.

My real concern is that this isn't really a solution. The real solution is to educate tracker admins to stop their evil ways and abandon their pointless whitelists.

That is your interpretation of what i said above.. I talked about the freedom and more of it, not about the term "spoofing" or anything else. Do you see the difference ? The more freedoms everyone have - the faster everything and everyone will go even if in the short-term or mid-term period that can result in some difficulties (this is what most of the people afraid - short- and mid-term difficulties, but they forget about "GOOD" in the long-term) because of more chaos in the "system" - the world's p2p system(in this case), because people(all of them - users, tracker admins etc) have to adapt to new freedoms they have. But in the long-term - everyone benefit from this even if you can't see now how exactly that will happen. Do you understand ?

Think large-scale long-term, not just about 1 line change or some tracker admins..

[loki]

There's always the option of just modifying it yourself... don't take everyone else down with you though if you intend to or not to get deluge banned as a client that can identify itself as any other client on a private tracker.

[Ideal]

There's always the option of just modifying it yourself... don't take everyone else down with you though if you intend to or not to get deluge banned as a client that can identify itself as any other client on a private tracker.

This is a usual fear-based short- and mid-term thinking most people have i talked above, yea.. Think "through" Love and freedom and long-term, not "through" fear and slavery(of the circumstances in this case for example)..

[andar]

There's always the option of just modifying it yourself... don't take everyone else down with you though if you intend to or not to get deluge banned as a client that can identify itself as any other client on a private tracker.

You can't really ban a client that can spoof though..

[jazd]

There's always the option of just modifying it yourself... don't take everyone else down with you though if you intend to or not to get deluge banned as a client that can identify itself as any other client on a private tracker.

You can't really ban a client that can spoof though..

They try and scare you though

The modification of clients to bypass our client requirements (spoofing) is explicitly forbidden. People caught doing this will be instantly and permanently banned. This is your only warning.

[Ideal]

There's always the option of just modifying it yourself... don't take everyone else down with you though if you intend to or not to get deluge banned as a client that can identify itself as any other client on a private tracker.

You can't really ban a client that can spoof though..

They try and scare you though

The modification of clients to bypass our client requirements (spoofing) is explicitly forbidden. People caught doing this will be instantly and permanently banned. This is your only warning.

Yea, thats a usual practice among people to limit others freedoms with fear. F$CK THAT. Looking at all of this i maybe write that changing peer-id plugin myself.

[Ideal]

You can't really ban a client that can spoof though..

They try and scare you though

The modification of clients to bypass our client requirements (spoofing) is explicitly forbidden. People caught doing this will be instantly and permanently banned. This is your only warning.

Yea, thats a usual practice among people to limit others freedoms with fear. F$CK THAT. Looking at all of this i maybe write that changing peer-id plugin myself.

Speaking about that i even today found an wikipedia article of such or very similar behavior of people - thats called Appeal to fear - i went there from the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) article.. And they say in the latter "FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear".

[wdaniels]

I think all this talk of freedom and FUD is a long way off the mark. I found the place to spoof this stuff (top of core.py) in about 5 minutes when I went looking for the peer ID that Deluge uses and when I pointed the tracker admin to that file, s/he didn't start spouting warnings about spoofing the IDs.

I explained that it's both inconvenient and ineffective, particularly for linux users (because upgrades get handled by the package manager) and for developers to fix a whilelist of specific clients and versions. The response was that so far it seems the best option available to get good quality data reported to the tracker and that s/he hopes that future improvements to the tracker script might help to improve the situation. I didn't agree with that 100% but I can see the other point of view and I accept it.

So I then came here to suggest that the LT version might be more indicative of the protocol implementation in such cases, which I still think was a reasonable suggestion, and I'm quite startled by the dismissive and sometimes angry tones of the replies here. I don't think that many tracker admins would start banning Deluge, no matter how easy it is to spoof the peer ID, because so long as Deluge/LibTorrent are behaving correctly, it's not really helping anyone to "cheat the system". And merely providing a checkbox to switch to reporting the LibTorrent version does not fall into the realm of "spoofing" by anybody's definition.

My intention when posting here was only for making an obviously bad situation work slightly better. Nobody has to use any particular tracker - if you don't like the rules then you go somewhere else. That is not true in many other cases, and those are where I prefer to expend my efforts for "freedom fighting". I guess I touched on a sore topic for torrent client developers, and for that I'm sorry, but seriously, some of you guys need to get your priorities straight IMHO.

[loki]

Alright lets add even more to this topic...
Here's another way to look at it, why does any client give version information anyway? They could all give utorrent and nobody would ever know if it's actually utorrent or just any different client saying it's utorrent. I believe the answer to this is that it's a way for the developers to get their name out there... sort of free advertising if such a thing exists... if anybody ever goes in and looks at the clients tab to see what everyone else in the tracker is using, maybe somebody at some point would be looking through peer id's and see Deluge then they are curious about what it is, it could bring them to search for the client in question and lead more people to a client based on features they like or if they might just be looking for something new to try.

So if we all had the option of changing our peer id's to 'look like everyone else' what makes our client unique based on an external observation? And you think maybe even less people would see Deluge as they download off a torrent as a client they would consider? Besides maybe wikipedia and this site obviously, how many other websites mention Deluge?

I'm actually a member of a private site that bans libtorrent but all Deluge above 0.5.7 has been allowed... figure that one out. The site actually lists me as unknown client or just blank.