BitThief

A Free Riding BitTorrent Client

BitThief Help

Requirements

• A recent version of a Java Runtime Environment is required (JRE 1.5 or newer). You can download Sun's JRE from www.java.com.
• If your host is behind a firewall, make sure it can receive incoming TCP connections on the port you have configured BitThief to run, as this will improve performance significantly.
• If you have an old version of BitThief installed, please remove the “bitthief” folder in your home directory before using the new version.

What's New

• Version 0.1.7 of the BitThief client was a first proof-of-concept that free riding in BitTorrent is possible.
• The new version 0.3.0 adds a real tit-for-tat mechanism, based on source coding (plus some other new features).

Running BitThief

Windows

Download “BitThief.exe” from the download page, and execute it.

Mac OS X

Download the tgz-file from the download page, decompress it and run the enclosed application (“BitThief.app”).

Linux/Unix

Download the tgz-file from the download page, decompress it and use the enclosed starter script (“BitThief”). You can do that by opening a shell prompt, changing into the BitThief directory and running the script as follows:

./BitThief &

Jar File

If you want to run the jar file directly, you can download it from the download page, change into the enclosing directory and enter the following in a command prompt:

java -Xmx512m -jar BitThief.jar

Configuration

The following global settings are available:

• Limit Connection Number — Sets the maximum number of TCP connections that BitThief will maintain.
• Limit Traffic Speed — Sets an upper limit to BitThief's download and upload speeds.
• Upload Statistics — Allows BitThief to transmit download statistics to our webserver. No personal data or information about the downloaded files is transmitted. Enabling this option will help us doing our research.
• Check For Update — If enabled, BitThief will check for a new version on startup.

These options are specific to a single torrent download:

• Upload Data — If unchecked, BitThief will not upload any data to other peers. If checked, BitThief will behave like any other BitTorrent client.
• Upload Slots — How many clients BitThief will simultaneously upload data to.
• Use Tit-for-tat Protocol — If enabled, BitThief will use the T4T protocol to communicate with other BitThief clients and engage in fair data exchange.
• Listening Port — Defines the network port on which BitThief will listen for incoming connections. Open this port in your firewall.
• Download Pieces In Order — Instructs BitThief to try and download the file(s) sequentially. This can be used to start using files before the download is complete (e.g. media files).
• Initial Announce Interval — Time in seconds between subsequent tracker queries.
• Share Ratio — The share ratio that BitThief will announce to the tracker.