the forums at degreez.net

What's with all these "Unknown<random characters>" clients (As reported by Azureus). They seem to be bogging things down. Are people starting to cheat bittorrent?

What tipped me off though was like fifty "unknowns" connecting from the 217.232-236. and 172.178. subnet blocks, they're not uploading or are uploading very little. The wait, get snubbed, then disconnect or stay connected doing nothing, then more appear.

This isn't a Shad0w's client problem per-se, but it's not an Azureus problem either; it's a general BitTorrent community problem.

So, does anybody know more about what's going on here? Is there some new cheating client that's gaining popularity? If so, perhaps the Big Two (Shad0w's, Azureus) could block out these unkown clients, killing them off.

i guess that would mean making them unable to connect to server, that would mean coding new stuff in teh server, but bittorrent is a client, therefore it can't touch teh rest
if the other cheaters are considered evil, the server will be forced to change yes

That's a permanent solution, yes. But not one that is likely to happen, due to the large number of different tracker implementations in use.

On the other hand, there are a small number of clients used; the vast majority seem to be Shadow's, and Azureus. If those two clients were to not allow connections from these unknown clients (or disconnect from them immediately), it would reduce the effectiveness of the cheater-client to near-zero, thereby killing it off. If the client doesn't work, people won't use it.

However, we don't know for sure if it is in fact a cheating client; that's for people like Gudy or Shad0w to look into.