Bittorrent: An effective way of blocking/shaping
A few months now I’ve been busy with traffic shaping and P2P communication. First to optimize the bandwith in my old student house Van Houtenlaan, now to can use VoIP when downloading at the same time. I like downloading free content. But telcos making it hard to do so. On the one hand you do not want to use encrypted P2P because your local traffic shaping does not work anymore and telephony would be impossible then when downloading a big file. Tor is not an alternative either because all your traffic is bottlenecked by the hops.
When I moved to Germany recently I realized that with Alice/Hansenet downloading sucks. I didn’t know why. I checked into that and realized that Alice seems to be blocking certain Torrent sites and others. It’s not a DNS block where the DNS record is flagged and points to an other site because I use my own DNS. This technique slows downloads very much so that it makes no sense to do it all.
Thus I think a good way for a provider is to make a blacklist with domains which are possible P2P sites and block their traffic OR even better slow down their traffic to something so slow that the browser, client whatever loads into his death (this is actually what Alice is doing).
The only way to circumvent this is to use something like Tor, transparent or forwarding proxies. Tor is very slow but it is working actually. With FoxyProxy – a Firefox Plugin – for instance you are able to configure some rules and can program the sites blocked by the provider to be routed over Tor.
Conclusion: With this methodology a provider is able to slow down and thus decrease the load on the network without shaping the actual traffic. This means a provider still can claim that there are no traffic regulations in place.
