Prevention of Freeriders

[dcerisano]

With the new pulse functionality that prevents flooding, torrent-stream has become friendly on shared networks. So now might be a good time to throw a stone or two at freeriding and other hackery.

Freeriding seems to be an issue with all implementations of the peer wire protocol, even though it chokes non-givers (has a GT criterion).

The best solution may likely be an extension to the protocol itself coming from an opensource implementation like this one.

• Freeriders rely on a swarm's amazing ability to flood a network.
• Even streamed freeriding may be possible when torrent availability is very high.
• Perhaps targeting peers that serve freeriders is a good candidate for protocol extension.
  For eg. By masquerading as a freerider (there are many nefarious examples) only during peer discovery.
• If successful, the protocol extension could be published to the peer community at large.

Al least this thread could be used to keep abreast of the state of the art around this issue.