Deluge Anonymizing Browser Now Includes Bittorrent

markybob writes "An open-source bittorrent client, Deluge, now provides an internal, anonymizing browser to protect its users from overzealous ISPs. The client runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. From the site: "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent. If an ISP is throttling or blocking bittorrent traffic, you can pretty much bet that they're tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users." Their forum has more info"

More Accurate Headline...

[Symbolis]

"Deluge BitTorrent Client Now Includes Anonymizing Browser"

And to be exact, this is Deluge 0.5.8RC1

Mac OS X

[christurkel]

Small correction: The Mac OS X version uses X11, not Cocoa.

Anonymizing Browser Now Includes Bittorrent?

[stsp]

In related news, semantically reversed article headlines now include slashdot!

Also, the summary is highly misleading. This is not a bittorrent-based replacement for TOR as one might conclude from the summary. The browser is merely designed to conceal the IPs of people surfing websites hosting torrents by going through a proxy. You also see ads while using the service. I wonder how long it will take ISPs with an anti-bittorrent agenda to block their proxies... Quoting TFA's FAQ:

Can we use the internal browser to surf any site?

No. This is a very touchy subject, so I want to be very clear. Our proxy servers have a whitelist of bittorrent-related sites (trackers, index sites, etc), which it allows you to visit.

Why are there ads? Are you turning evil? This is free software!

This is free software, however, our proxy servers (which anonymizies the browsing) costs us very real dollars.

I can't download any files. What is that about?

To prevent abuse, Deluge's internal browser only allows you to download bittorrent files..

Re:Legitimate use?

[burris]

BitTorrent works just fine behind a typical "firewall." It is not necessary to accept incoming connections, especially with a well seeded legitimate torrent. If you can't download with BitTorrent at all then you have a problem with your firewalls policy not the firewall per se.

It's not a horrible method of distribution. Its an excellent method of distribution, especially for free software. Thats why it is being used for such distribution.

Re:Legitimate use?

[the_B0fh]

Why the hell are comments like this marked insightful?

*waaa* I can't download via p2p, all the free stuff I want, at work

Either go home and do it, or work with your IT. If you have a business need to download linux distros, it's up to your ork IT to provide that to you. If you don't, well, go suck at Microsoft's teat.

I used to run a firewall, and I allow out what is business appropriate. If that includes bit-torrent, so be it.

Re:Legitimate use?

[pringlis]

Yup, you're correct. WoW does use it for patches and updates. Given that the patches are at least 100megs in size and there are 9.5million subscribers I'd say it's one of the better examples of a problem for which BitTorrent is the ideal solution.

Re:Ad-supported and whitelisted sites

[Tom9729]

Not sure where you got the idea that "the main point" of using his software is to be able to download anonymously.

I've used Deluge for a long time before the announcement of this feature. It's a bittorrent client, just like Azureus or Ktorrent. The new anonymous browsing feature is nothing more than a built in web browser that uses their proxy.

I haven't been able to run the new release yet (download links are broken), so I might be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure the anonymous part is only referring to finding the torrents. Downloading them works just like always. In fact, if you wanted to, you could probably use their proxy in a normal web browser to look for torrents.

It's also worth pointing out that he's not "making a buck". He's paying for the proxy out of his own pocket, he'll be lucky if he even breaks even.

Relakks, an anonymous VPN

[wdebruij]

The best solution, ofcourse, is to switch to a less zealous ISP. But that is not always possible: I, for example, find myself subletting an
apartment that comes with horrible, horrible Comcast DSL (who actively reset with your TCP connections [slashdot.org]).

In these cases say Aye, matey and hook up to the swedish Pirate Party's Relakks [relakks.com] VPN service (as seen on Slashdot [slashdot.org])
to get past your pesky ISPs rules. It's also be very useful if you use coffeeshop wireless a lot and your email provider still requires plain-text passwords.

Arrr, we be lootin' again!

Re:Legal uses for Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no such thing as intellectual property. They're intellectual property rights - property rights that work on intellectual goods. A "property right" (as opposed to a "liability right") is the right to exclude, rather than just receive damages. When we talk about intellectual property rights, we're talking, literally and only, about the right to exclude - not about something that you "own."

Re:Everyone knows: I don't know

[Poppler]

If I was a java coder I'd be hacking Azureus to use UDP instead of TCP

I would think that using UDP to actually download chunks would be horribly inefficient; the client wouldn't know if it received the data intact until it does a checksum on the chunk, and then you'd have to re-download the whole chunk if you missed even a single packet.

not this ISP

[not_anne]

"...you can pretty much bet that they're tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users."

My employer, a large cable ISP, does not track or monitor what sites customers visit. However, we do track the types of traffic on our network and shape traffic as needed to keep the network reasonably healthy.

We don't single out users, we monitor nodes, which many customers are attached to. If a node is exceeding healthy levels (different nodes have different max levels, there's no one set "healthy" level) then that node is shaped until the traffic goes down.

Re:Everyone knows: I don't know

[oggiejnr]

According to a quick search (so may not be accurate) current "semi-official" block size is 16KB which easily fits into a single datagram packet (allowing for IP Fragmentation). Or if you are determined to keep your datagrams under the Ethernet MTU then you could employ some form of erasure coding to the data (at the expense of CPU cycles) and then if a few packets get lost then not to worry or you could advertise a 1k block transfer size at the expense of great application level overhead. Any system would rely on the client knowing the available bandwidth and only scheduling to receive a volume of packets it could.

There was once talk of using the Vivaldi round trip estimation which has been in Azureus for no particular reason to select peers closer to the client, and some research was done into using it for estimating the bandwidth of a pipe to allow for UDP data connections not needing feedback.

In BitTorrent the sending side never needs to know that a block arrived at the client so in some circumstance UDP could be better due to less connection overhead. Also most home NATs have better support for UDP hole punching than for TCP allowing for greater possibility that two incorrectly set up peers could talk to each other.

Re:Legal uses for Bittorrent

[PopeRatzo]

no respect for copyrights, intellectual property,

You've got this much right. Copyright and the concept of "intellectual property" is doing nothing to encourage innovation and creativity or to enhance the circumstances of innovators and creative makers. It only serves to enrich people who can afford to buy the abstract "intellectual property" of others and then bring lawsuits to create a money stream for themselves and for their lawyers.

Most important, copyright and "intellectual property" is no longer necessary for those who are doing the making. I have first-hand experience with the transformation from the creative equivalent of an indentured servant into an artist that has control over my own product and income. Step one was examining just how corrupt and useless the current system has become. Step two was learning about Creative Commons, direct to public domain and other innovative approaches to distributing work and getting paid for it. Step three, at least in my case, was "profit!!" (of course).

The experience has also radicalized me in terms of how I see not only the way artists support themselves, but also how I view the entirety of economic life in these United States (and beyond). Reading Adam Smith and Milton Friedman and comparing their words with the actuality of 21st century life, has convinced me that the entire system of "free markets" "supply and demand" and "the unseen hand" are all so much baloney. It's all been a dodge to keep those of us who work for a living from noticing that we're getting less for working more while our bosses are gaining wealth and producing less.

Notice how the the bosses (executive vice-presidents) at Circuit City have been forced to accept mere 1 million dollar bonuses (called "retention awards") this year because their company has performed so poorly. If any of us were to perform so poorly, we'd get pink slips instead of six-figure Christmas presents. To complete the picture, notice how Circuit City has unceremoniously fired their most experience sales staff, who were earning as much as $14.00 per hour, and then offered them their jobs back a $9 per hour and no benefits! The French Revolution was not so long ago that these "executive vice-presidents" can't learn a few lessons regarding what happens to people who oppress a working class. Hell, some of them must have seen V for Vendetta.

Deluge is great.

[lattyware]

The best client out there for Linux users with Gnome (KDE users can look to kTorrent). Been using it for some time.

Re:Legitimate use?

[garbletext]

The problem is you're defining 'efficiency' in a very limited and incorrect way. True, FTP is good at transferring a large chunk of data from exactly one host to exactly one more. But that is a trivial problem these days; Any network programmer could easily write a protocol/application that sends data from a server to a client as fast as the bottlenecks will allow. And yeah, that's "efficient," in a way because it maximizes your resources. But efficient peer-to-peer downloading is much harder. I suppose a 100% efficient p2p download ecosystem would be one where each and every downloading peer is saturating his download speed. FTP has *no chance* of ever achieving this for popular files, and could never near the level of data transferred on popular trackers without absolutely massive investment in geographically disparate clusters and bandwidth (e.g. akamai). BT accomplishes for free what could otherwise cost thousands of dollars for a content distributor. It sounds to me like you don't understand how BT works, or you're upset that it's the wrong tool for what you use it for. Anyways, if both your bittorrent clients are configured correctly, and the downloading one is the only one receiving from the other, you should achieve very similar speeds compared with FTP, as it just uses HTTP for sending data. Given your clear ignorance on firewall issues ( A good firewall doesn't allow any incoming connections. Really? How does such a host serve requests or recieve replies to sent packets? ), the disparity you report is probably best explained by PEBKAC issues.