Hi,

when I just purged and reinstalled my Torrent client due to configuration issues, the program still knew what U/D ratio I had before purging. Also, I read that individual trackers also keep a record of a user's history, which seems likely as my client takes some time to report it to them when closing. Thus, I am wondering how this statistic is kept. How is BT able to identify a single machine, maybe in a private network, or even a single user on it?

Unfortunately, Google only points me to sites telling me how to cheat programs and / or trackers, no matter what I search for, which is not what I want. So, could anyone tell me in quick words or point me to a site explaining what the underlying mechanics of the system are?

Furthermore, are there possibilities to adapt the ratio generation to your bandwidth circumstances? Unfortunately, as most people in Germany, I am connected via ADSL, which allows for great download rates, but only minimal upload, which is why it takes me forever to equalize what I downloaded. Is this problem thought of in the concept of BT?

I am in no way interested in cheating, so please don't mistake this for an immoral question - if I'm stuck with this situation, fine. Either way, I would still like to read about the technical concepts. (In an plain way, if possible, scientific English is quite hard for me to understand.)

[I am aware that this is not a "problem" with software, but seeing how BT is quite popular with Linux users, I thought this was an acceptable place to ask. If it is not, please forgive me.]

Sincerely,
V

Boy, you have a lot of misconceptions! The ratio is only a widely inaccurate measure (but see below) of the amount of data downloaded vs uploaded by a bt client. The only numbers closer to reality are those given by your client, in your computer. The only people who know that number are you and those you let having a peek.

Now, if you use private trackers for whatever reason, they take advantage of the fact that most clients when signing up with the server and when asking for peers, also report the amount of data uploaded and downloaded to the peers that have exchanged data with that client. The people that manage private trackers, especially those that deal with illegal content (why else you would want to keep the contents of a tracker private anyway? Yet, what is illegal is defined by the law of your country of residence. I'm thankful that I live in a country where the equivalent of the concept of fair copy in the US law hasn't been perverted, yet), take advantage of that information to enforce fair sharing by members of the tracker. Be it by forcing the user to log into the tracker to record the IP the user connects from or be it by forcing the user to use a seed file that uses an embedded identification token in the tracker announce address so that the seed file is unique to that user.

In any other use case, having a sharing ratio of one or higher (more data uploaded than downloaded) is a matter of ethical behavior. I, for one, always seed the ISO images of the distros I download. Others just hit and run.

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