BitTorrent Under Fire

Over the last several months a silent war has been raging between some of the big Canadian ISPs and their customers. Rogers and Shaw, two of the larger cable internet providers in the Greater Toronto Area, have begun to implement traffic shaping policies to dramatically curtail the ability for subscribers to make use of the BitTorrent protocol. This is accomplished though bandwidth throttling, which limits the amount of requests the ISP’s servers will respond to. BitTorrent users can set their own limits by imposing restrictions on maximum upload and download rates already; the issue here is that the ISPs are imposing these limits indiscriminately, restricting the ability of their subscribers to make use of BitTorrent, often to such a severe degree that it becomes useless. Maybe it’s time for Rogers and Shaw customers to take their business elsewhere?

New versions of µTorrent and Azureus have both implemented encryption in order to get around these problems, though it should be noted that the creator of BitTorrent does not condone obfuscation. I’d have to side with those who argue for encryption as a pragmatic solution to the oppressive actions of the ISPs in question. An interview with µTorrent developer Ludvig Strigeusat at Slyck may shed some more light on the subject.

I suggest all BitTorrent users upgrade to the newest beta version of µTorrent at this time, and enable encryption by opening Options, Network, and then setting the appropriate properties.