Tuesday, March 13, 2007

BitLord out, utorrent in

It was fun while it lasted, but I have just confirmed that my ISP at home is throttling torrent traffic. Which ironically helps somewhat because I can indescriminently leave my torrents running and not worry about paying for over-limit bandwidth I might have used. But then, I'd just as easily prefer saving on my electricity bill by not having my PC on so much...

To that end, BitLord, which although has a very pretty GUI which is both powerful and intuitive (it was my first ratio-controllable torrent client), does not support data encryption.

utorrent however, does support encryption. By hiding the relevant information, the encryption fools the ISP into not recognizing torrent traffic when it sees it. The throttling isn't applied and presto: speeds increase dramatically. And I moved at least a couple of Gb last night (at a glance anyway).

A note to others who are considering switching over to utorrent: DHT tracking is on by default in this client. Some trackers don't like DHT, particularly community-site trackers where you are keeping score of you transfer ratios. DHT tends to screw with their tracker statistics so turn it off if you frequent these kinds of trackers.

2 comments:

MrBabou said...

I installed uTorrent on Annie's PC, and since then, I installed it on mine. I like it.

Anonymous said...

Used it for a while.. nice little app. As for the ISP throttling.. they should go F**k themselves.