On halfopen limits and user stupidity regarding them.

Far too often, I'm seeing people increasing their halfopen limits in their BitTorrent clients without realizing just what they're doing.

They seem to THINK they're increasing their speeds, but they actually aren't.

The halfopen limit only limits the speed at which you can make outgoing connections. Having it increased is completely useless beyond about the first thirty seconds of starting a new torrent and gets progressively more useless as the torrent continues. If your client is set up and able to accept incoming connections, the benefit window shrinks to under 10 seconds.

Incoming connections aren't affected by halfopen limits.
The total number of connections you can establish in total isn't affected by halfopen limits, only the speed at which they can be established.
Your total speed is NOT affected by any halfopen limits.

Seriously.

My thoughts on the paranoia surrounding uTorrent versions newer than 1.6.1

All you people who think that uTorrent 1.6.1 is "safe" for whatever reason have to realize this:

People have been wiresharking their traffic for WEEKS at a time and have only been able to find proof that all your paranoia is complete and utter bullshit.

Nothing that people have claimed uTorrent does in regards to reporting to anti-p2p groups directly has ANY basis in fact.

And any of you who use BitComet because you think uTorrent spies on you need a MAJOR wake-up call. BitComet is the one that spies on you.

uTorrent DHT Troubleshooting.

There are some people having trouble getting uTorrent's DHT working. There are several things that need to be checked for you to get it working:

1. UDP Traffic needs to be allowed in firewalls for DHT to function.
2. PeerGuardian needs a smarter blocklist selected. Several of the blocklists generated by Bluetack block the DHT bootstrap nodes used by uTorrent.
3. IF DHT has worked in the past, try torrents from OpenOffice or Depthstrike Entertainment's Open Source and Freeware tracker
4. Shut down uTorrent, remove the dht.dat and dht.dat.old files from %appdata%\utorrent and restart uT, then retry.

Some configurations outright block DHT traffic due to the nature of the connection. There's nothing that can be done in these cases.

If you're going to post on the uTorrent forums for further help, post useful information, like a list of the internet security software you have installed, HOW it's not working, and what you've done to troubleshoot.

I don't handle troubleshooting of uT issues here.

New CBTT unstable branch.

Weedy, a developer I know who has done some work on the CBTT core, is working on switching CBTT fully to a libevent-based tracker package.

Because of the incompleteness of libevent on windows, this is currently a linux-only project.

Once he gets the tracker link code working, I'll look into deploying it in my own system. Until then, single tracker operators are free to use it in theirs and test the environment.

uTorrent 1.7.1 and all the claims about MAFIAA involvement.

There have been a lot of claims that uTorrent sends data back to the MAFIAA (RIAA/MPAA).

I have this to say:
1> Wireshark log saying it doesn't. The IP addresses that you are all claiming uTorrent reports to aren't getting any traffic. I don't use any IP blockers or software firewalls, so this log is 100% accurate for packet data.
2> Put up (your wireshark log giving proof of your claims) or shut up.

As for uTorrent leaking data outside of the tracker, it's not. 1.7.1 has added a UDP multicast search for peers on the local subnet.

(update: this all also applies to 1.7.2)