BitHQ's Wall of Shame

[Quarterquack]

this "wall of shame" is a way to fairly deal with people who took it upon themselves to disrespect a site and its peers, as well as possibly the beginnings of a way for private trackers to publicly share email and ip blocklists with each other. the process of adding people to the list obviously wont be automated, so one can only assume that the root of peoples' concerns is that other sites will add the wall of shame ip/email info to their blacklists. and they should. disagreeing with an uninformed, selfishly motivated opinion doesnt make me a "troll" -- it makes you seem childish for using the "I'm rubber and you're glue" argument to justify why cheaters should be given second and third chances to poison bittorrent swarms.

but then again, i suppose i could end up coming back to this topic and apologizing to you if im ever make the "mistake" of burning through my 500 GB buffer on bithq. also i dont see how being "bum-raped" would affect me, since im not and have never been homeless

Touche. Your first reasonable argument. How about these two extremely reasonable pointers:

1) Give me one legitimate way by which a cheater hurts, rather in your own words "poisons", a swarm. The swarm will be just as active with or without him. He only stands to benefit himself, and hurt no one.

2) Do you think What's system is unreasonable? Dealing by people in a simple case by case basis when they have 100,000 members seems a tad much, but if you're not made of enough patience and perseverance to work for the better good of even the rotten eggs in a society then you shouldn't be running a tracker at all. (Not you directly, staffers in general). If you truly care about the health of the tracker and its community, you will try to help everyone, including those who have made mistakes. Being an active/helpful member doesn't need much if you're only willing to provide those resources to the people who don't need it, like the non-cheaters.

As I said before, the pros on the circuit will go around and keep waffling (or whatever it is they call it) and avoiding all efforts to catch them. You'll only harm the people you could have helped this way.

I hope you can see that I'm resorting to my last ounce of remaining patience/civility. Should you choose to mock the entire situation one more time, I'll have to sink to the same level. And I assure you, I am funny when responding to witless remarks.

[OlegL]

1) Give me one legitimate way by which a cheater hurts, rather in your own words "poisons", a swarm. The swarm will be just as active with or without him. He only stands to benefit himself, and hurt no one.

If everyone started cheating, there would be nothing to download/upload. So, of course, cheaters poison swarms.

[stoi]

I should not really get involved, but alas, i cant help myself lol

1 cheater probably doesnt hurt a swarm, but i uploaded a 10 gig torrent 2 days ago, i only have 80KBs upload, so its going to take me 2 days to seed the thing, someone jumps on and helps me seed, he is uploading at 200KBs i think great (this is all true btw).

Now if i was not the owner, so could not see behind the scenes, I may have thought, great i will turn my PC off tonight, I have help, then i will jump on again in the morning, and by then, quite a lot of the leechers will have a huge chunk of this, only to find out, the other "seeder" has uploaded 6 gig and no one else got anything.

I did PM the member in question, and he gave me a bullshit story about hackers on his line, but i let him keep his account and warned him I would be watching him like a hawk.

if there are 1000 seeders/1000 leechers, they yes 1 cheater wont harm it, but its more about etiquete then harming stuff, why should that 1 member get away with not uploading 1 byte of that torrent, when 1999 others have to.

I would say that most cheaters either cheat because

A: they dont want to get banned
B: they can make a buffer and then hit and run on other torrents
C: they want to get to a higher class, to get invites, so they can trade for better/other trackers

But a lot also do it just because they can, I wont lie we get our fair share of cheats, even members that want to cheat the wait time to get SP (even though they cant), so most are just impatient and bone idle (even though letting your client seed for awhile is probably less work than actual cheating lol)

As for this wall of shame, its entirely up to them what they do, but I for one wont be adding anything to it, I just dont agree with making it public, with IPs and Emails listed for everyone to see. There are ways and means of doing this, and to me, this is not the way, but up to them like i said.

[OlegL]

Yeah, I don't agree with this Wall of Shame thing too.

[Aristocles]

What would concern me is the implementation. Here is an in concreto , albeit completely empirical example:

I joined a tracker. This tracker tracked "apps". I meandered around a bit and choose something to download that I had no interest in but for the time being would be good to get myself started with. The next day I checked in, or attempted to, and found some pathetic puerile tripe, in the form of a message using vulgarities and slang; the best I could discern, it accused me of 'cheating'. I turned to "IdolEyes" for an explanation, as I am not internet savvy about such matters. He confirmed my suspicions. Do I?, have I?, do I even have knowledge of how to CHEAT? Nope. In no way. "IdolEyes" and I reasoned that it was the seedbox that I employed. He advised contacting them and informing them that I had a seedbox and that it was the answer to the issue at hand. I choose not to based on the "mesage/accusation" that I read. But I wonder if they had slapped good ole "Aristocles" onto some sort of list what might have been the consequences? I have, for the most part informed any tracker that I am a member of that I have a seedbox, now- as per "IdolEyes'" advice. Live and learn. Perhaps this is meaningless, as the policy in question is intended to be implemented in such a way as to avoid the above. If so then take this as the ramblings of a bored mind.

[ca_aok]

1) Give me one legitimate way by which a cheater hurts, rather in your own words "poisons", a swarm. The swarm will be just as active with or without him. He only stands to benefit himself, and hurt no one.

2) Do you think What's system is unreasonable? Dealing by people in a simple case by case basis when they have 100,000 members seems a tad much, but if you're not made of enough patience and perseverance to work for the better good of even the rotten eggs in a society then you shouldn't be running a tracker at all. (Not you directly, staffers in general). If you truly care about the health of the tracker and its community, you will try to help everyone, including those who have made mistakes. Being an active/helpful member doesn't need much if you're only willing to provide those resources to the people who don't need it, like the non-cheaters.

As I said before, the pros on the circuit will go around and keep waffling (or whatever it is they call it) and avoiding all efforts to catch them. You'll only harm the people you could have helped this way.

I hope you can see that I'm resorting to my last ounce of remaining patience/civility. Should you choose to mock the entire situation one more time, I'll have to sink to the same level. And I assure you, I am funny when responding to witless remarks.

1) Many cheaters turn off their upload entirely, some of their client mods have this functionality built in. Why bother seeding when you can just fudge the numbers? Not only does this decrease the number of actual seeds in the swarm, but can at times lead to more hashfails for the regular users depending on the sophistication of the cheating tool.

2) While publicly posting their IPs is in bad taste, you must be aware that these sorts of details are constantly passed around. There are entire forums/subforums and IRC channels dedicated towards this sort of thing. (Pro tip: what sort of things do you think get posted in torrent celeb forums?).

I have no respect for these people who go against the very spirit of P2P and the spirit of the system. As far as I'm concerned, they can fuck right back off to the pirate bay, newsgroups, etc if they don't want to bother seeding. Compared to trading, cheating is about a hundred times worse, as at least a trader might legitimately use their account. Cheaters leech a place dry for the sport of it. If your upload speed is so terrible you can't participate in a system where you're meant to share back, perhaps private BT isn't the right filesharing method for you. There are many others. Or hell... use a ratioless tracker! There are a million of those these days for all sorts of content, and plenty others with bonus systems to help those with poor upload speeds.

If someone is new to torrenting, perhaps they'll see a board like this and be like "hey, trading is ok". They might not know any better. Cheating, on the other hand, requires a conscious decision on your part to break tracker rules you know are being broken. There's no one who "accidentally" cheats. You have to go seek out the methods and install them on your machine.

As for someone being "nice" determining their character... some of the most upstanding people I know are total jackasses, and some of the nicest people I've met are liars, criminals, thieves, and idiots. Welcome to the real world.

[echohead]

As I said before, the pros on the circuit will go around and keep waffling (or whatever it is they call it) and avoiding all efforts to catch them. You'll only harm the people you could have helped this way.

since youre obviously not aware of its existence, allow me to introduce you to shadowolf. its a bittorrent tracker very close to being completed, and will be used on many prominent trackers.

what makes shadowolf different is that its 1) written in java, 2) highly secure even by private tracker standards, and 3) has built-in automatic cheater detection. the cheater detection is highly accurate and error-proof, so these "pro" cheaters you speak so highly of will be either banned from the sites in question, or will have to write a completely new cheating program that takes advantage of an exploit in the world's only java bittorrent tracker.

I hope you can see that I'm resorting to my last ounce of remaining patience/civility. Should you choose to mock the entire situation one more time, I'll have to sink to the same level. And I assure you, I am funny when responding to witless remarks.

heres the thing. youre a tool arguing in favor of cheaters being allowed to keep doing what they do, and i couldnt give less of a shit about anything you have to say. have fun arguing with someone that posted here 4 times.

[ca_aok]

Is that the tracker that oorza is coding? I was under the impression it was sorta stalled due to lack of free time. By the way, XBTT has built in cheat detection as well (a rather basic system), at least the last build I was playing around with did. We're talking basic on the level of "this user is uploading faster than he should be", which can then be followed up with a check for a seedbox, etc. But it'd be interesting if he's come up with some robust detection methods. There's also a possibility that Ocelot will be released at some point, though everything I've been told leads me to believe that project is stalled at the moment as well.

[Quarterquack]

heres the thing. youre a tool arguing in favor of cheaters being allowed to keep doing what they do, and i couldnt give less of a shit about anything you have to say. have fun arguing with someone that posted here 4 times.

You seem to think that resorting to childish semantics is akin to winning an argument. You think righteousness is synonymous with being right, and anyone who disagrees with you due to moral implications is either a tool or a cheater. Decorum is fine, as long as you accept the fact that some people have issues with what you're doing for reasons other than you think they have.

By the way, good job stepping down from infantile wit right down to verbal animosity. How many arguments has that won you?

1) Give me one legitimate way by which a cheater hurts, rather in your own words "poisons", a swarm. The swarm will be just as active with or without him. He only stands to benefit himself, and hurt no one.

2) Do you think What's system is unreasonable? Dealing by people in a simple case by case basis when they have 100,000 members seems a tad much, but if you're not made of enough patience and perseverance to work for the better good of even the rotten eggs in a society then you shouldn't be running a tracker at all. (Not you directly, staffers in general). If you truly care about the health of the tracker and its community, you will try to help everyone, including those who have made mistakes. Being an active/helpful member doesn't need much if you're only willing to provide those resources to the people who don't need it, like the non-cheaters.

As I said before, the pros on the circuit will go around and keep waffling (or whatever it is they call it) and avoiding all efforts to catch them. You'll only harm the people you could have helped this way.

I hope you can see that I'm resorting to my last ounce of remaining patience/civility. Should you choose to mock the entire situation one more time, I'll have to sink to the same level. And I assure you, I am funny when responding to witless remarks.

1) Many cheaters turn off their upload entirely, some of their client mods have this functionality built in. Why bother seeding when you can just fudge the numbers? Not only does this decrease the number of actual seeds in the swarm, but can at times lead to more hashfails for the regular users depending on the sophistication of the cheating tool.

2) While publicly posting their IPs is in bad taste, you must be aware that these sorts of details are constantly passed around. There are entire forums/subforums and IRC channels dedicated towards this sort of thing. (Pro tip: what sort of things do you think get posted in torrent celeb forums?).

I have no respect for these people who go against the very spirit of P2P and the spirit of the system. As far as I'm concerned, they can fuck right back off to the pirate bay, newsgroups, etc if they don't want to bother seeding. Compared to trading, cheating is about a hundred times worse, as at least a trader might legitimately use their account. Cheaters leech a place dry for the sport of it. If your upload speed is so terrible you can't participate in a system where you're meant to share back, perhaps private BT isn't the right filesharing method for you. There are many others. Or hell... use a ratioless tracker! There are a million of those these days for all sorts of content, and plenty others with bonus systems to help those with poor upload speeds.

If someone is new to torrenting, perhaps they'll see a board like this and be like "hey, trading is ok". They might not know any better. Cheating, on the other hand, requires a conscious decision on your part to break tracker rules you know are being broken. There's no one who "accidentally" cheats. You have to go seek out the methods and install them on your machine.

As for someone being "nice" determining their character... some of the most upstanding people I know are total jackasses, and some of the nicest people I've met are liars, criminals, thieves, and idiots. Welcome to the real world.

1) I understand. It was more of a pointer to remind him that cheaters while not adhering to the rules are still not doing as much damage as they are made out to be. Some trackers run with minimal cheating detection/repercussions and are still alive and kicking.

2) I'm on a couple of torrent celeb forums myself and I've seen the thread issues; I've heard of the things that come up on p2pg and the irc chans as well. I understand the necessity of trackers holding hand in hand to provide as much effort repelling cheating efforts as are made by the other party proliferating them. It's one big melting pot and everyone's doing their job, I have no gripes with that.

Accidental cheating without tools happens all the time with multiple trackers per torrent entry in uT etc. and a bunch of other "innocent" acts that could be noted as cheating. No cheat detection system is 100% proof, and a fair bit of the time innocent users are caught in the backfire of these systems. What happens when a user like that (like myself and TL, or Aristocles and whatever tracker he had problems with) are posted for the public to see? See, I have no problems with paying for my mistakes, and I'm sure cheaters who do it knowingly understand the consequences and carry out their actions after being informed of the risks. Just as it's stupid to assume that all traders do it knowing that it's wrong, a lot of cheaters do it without knowing it's wrong either.

Let me just explain my perspective really quickly: I ran a game hacking business not too long back, it is now defunct, but I did come across a lot of people that used my hacks just because they saw everyone else doing it and thought it was the norm. The large majority (over 90%) of gaming communities forbid this behavior, but in their perspective, it was the norm. I'm sure Anon has similar stories to share about how he knows someone cheated without knowing it's wrong, or because they saw someone link to it off-forum and thought it would be cool to try out.

Blatantly assuming that all cheaters do it knowingly and intentionally hurt the trackers is stupid. As I said, I'm not defending cheaters, I'm defending the infinitesimally small minority of them that could see the light/turn around/are reasonable/don't know it's wrong.

As for the last part of your post; your fault for hunting for honor among thieves.

[stoi]

Going to bed in a minute but have to reply.

Why do you think tracker vannilla sources and even forums with mods on the for that tracker software, never have cheat scripts built in or on those forums.

A: because people like anon, can get the code, see how it works, and then write code to make it defunct before it even goes on 2 trackers.

Personally, that is the first time i have heard of that java tracker, lets see how it does when it is released but PHP and mysql and C are lightweight and can handle lots of peers and connections, java if azureus is anything to go by cant. and if it has cheat detections in from the get go, it wont be long before they are null and void.

Its just like gaming and the scene, game companies try all sorts to stop piracy, but the scene is 1 step ahead (well apart with the bloody PS3) but 99.9% of the time they are, a tracker will do somthing, the cheaters will negate it with something else.