How do stores or coffee-shops with free wifi block torrent use?

Question

Recently, I was having issue with my home wifi, so I went to the Apple Store to see if my laptop worked fine on their wifi, just to eliminate the laptop from the problem. I connected and was able to surf the web, but then I opened uTorrent, and noticed nothing connected, and I wasn't able to upload/download. Later on, I went to a coffee shop that has free wifi, and it was the same thing. Curious, I looked this up online, and saw it is normally very hard to block uploading/downloading, etc. So I'm just curious, how do stores that offer free wifi block people from downloading torrents? They didn't block the port, because I randomized the port several times. Thanks!

Answer 1

There are several ways they can do it. Yes, they can block ports, as you experimented with. Many will also generally check out certain types of traffic - though you have to be able to download to start that sort of traffic. Most of it will depend on the firewall in use these days - modern (generally enterprise level) ones will actually inspect and block the traffic, regardless of port. They've even coined a newer term for them - Unified Threat management devices.

Answer 2

Most likely they have a "blanket" firewall with only specific ports open for web browsing and email access, plus an IP block list of known dubious sites.



That's quite common for businesses etc.



In other words, _every_ port is blocked except ones they consider safe, when used to safe sites or servers.



Firewalls have different options for "default policy" actions if no specific rule exists. Set that to "deny" or "drop" and no traffic is allowed unless there is an over-riding rule to permit it.

Answer 3

They may block known port ranges that utorrent uses. Even though you randomized the ports, they only randomize within a specific range (lets say 31000-99999 as an example). Some people beat it out by using a vpn temporarily.

Answer 4

There are indeed filtering systems available and very worthwhile for "FREE" use connections. The people that offer free use have to PAY for bandwidth to give away, they really don't want to pay for your use of torrents!

Why do you think they filter that use? Here is one good reason ... torrents often offer illegal downloads of copyrighted material. The person whose connection you use is responsible for your illegal download thus they keep it shielded. Why should they have to pay for your criminal acts.

Answer 5

We had a list of blocked sites supplied to us once a week. Any site that was blocked would not connect. This is quite common.

Answer 6

Many "public" wireless networks have firewalls that only allow TCP port 80 (http), TCP port 443 (https), TCP and UDP port 53 (DNS) traffic through. Anything else is blocked.

Answer 7

yes

Answer 8

take it easy . it is not a big problem