RoadRunner Blocking Use of Kazaa

An anonymous reader submits: "You should know that RoadRunner is quietly blocking the use of Kazaa in certain markets. Particularly in Texas, they have some sort of port scanner in place which scans for Kazaa activity and then disables use of that port, rendering the program completely useless. Grokster, iMesh, and all other FastTrack programs are similarly affected. Yet RoadRunner is not disclosing the practice in any way. Not only that, I'm troubled by the possibility of them arbitrarily choosing to block other programs in the future. If this becomes more widespread, they will have many angry (and former) customers." The poster provides these four links to forum postings with more information: one; two; three; four.

Comments

This is why Gnutella is useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Got an open port? You can get a Gnutella connection. (Sure it may always be easy, but you can!).

If they keep doing this, people will just start encrypting their traffic and using non-standard ports, making it even harder to crack down on.

Re:This is why Gnutella is useful

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm wondering wether they block the protocol or just the port...

Re:This is why Gnutella is useful

[91degrees]

It seems to be the protocol. Perhaps they might mistake gnutella for HTTP though. Could happen. Otherwise we'll just have to learn to tunnel the protocol over something a little more palitable.

This isn't uncommon

[Anonymous Coward]

and people will bend over and take it. Don't think that just because we don't like it, people won't take what the monopolies give them

Re:This isn't uncommon

[Anonymous Coward]

This has to be one of the lamest statements ever.

Of course it's modded up too haha.

I mean think about that post, that's just a stupid thing to say.

Re:This isn't uncommon

[Anonymous Coward]

And, why shouldn't they again?

"My right to saturate the network by downloading pirated software, music, movies, and pr0n has been violated!"

Deal with it.

Re:This isn't uncommon

[miketang16]

I for one would not take it. This is completely hypocritical of RoadRunner. They claim that you get "Unlimited access with NO hourly charges!", on their site. If they don't want to contradict themselves perhaps they should say, "Unlimited access to a point, where that point is when we decide you use too much bandwidth."

What to do???

[msaulters]

As a user of Roadrunner in Austin, I don't see that I have much choice. Yeah, I can dump them, but then who do I use for high-speed access? DSL is priced higher, has terrible performance in the area. In fact, most of the DSL users I know have switched to Roadrunner. On the other hand, if they start blocking all the programs that make high-speed access worthwhile, there's not much point in paying $40/month to use it.

Re:What to do???

[kurowski]

what do you mean you don't have "much" of a choice? you have the quintisential (sp?) choice of the consumer: cheap, fast access through an isp with poor service, or more expensive, slower access through an isp that doesn't suck. most americans seem to go for the numbers- less money and more speed must be good, right? well, just keep thinking that way while you watch the utility of your net connection degrade until it's only good for viewing banner ads. then you'll regret the fact that the competition has gone under since nobody appreciates quality service...

not much of a choice... sheesh!

Re:What to do???

[jandrese]

Often times the choice isn't between Cable and DSL, rather the choice is between Cable and Modem/T1/ISDN. Modem is of course almost unacceptably slow for people who become accustomed to Cablemodem speeds (or even dorm ethernet speed). ISDN and T1 tend to be priced in the stratosphere (and ISDN is frequently only somewhat faster than modem and priced per megabyte and minute.)

I know locally if ComCast wants to start screwing it's customers even worse than usual the only choice we'll have is to go back to modem. In case anybody has any illusions let me spell it out: modem sucks. I don't want to loose my cablemodem, and I don't know what I'll do if I start getting screwed too hard.

Re:What to do???

[MImeKillEr]

I'm using RR, and I'm in Round Rock (for those not in the know, you could spit in Round Rock and hit Austin) and am currently *on* the Grokster network..

Re:What to do???

[tonywong]

Instead of limiting programs and ports, ISPs should implement another scheme that monitors your traffic amounts and limits the speed in inverse proportion to the amount that you've transferred.

That way they can run uncapped cable modems. Infrequent users get maximum speed and transfer rates, moderate users get moderate transfer rates, and heavy users (eventually) get slow transfer rates.

To avoid a congested high speed consumption situation, resets of the rates are done on a rolling basis so everyone has a different monthly reset. A web page should give you your current stats (up, down traffic, current speed cap, amount transferred, reset date etc.)

That way everyone can be happy, running servers or p2p apps, and if they want to use up all their high speed bandwidth they can be stuck with modem like speeds for the rest of the month without suspension of service. I think you'd find that people who are serving without concern for bandwidth will all of a sudden monitor their own traffic a lot more.

This also takes the ISP out of the content monitor police service and relegates them to a bandwidth metering service, which is all they and everyone else wants them to do.

Re:What to do???

[schwatoo]

RoadRunner Austin recently re-opened port 80 after a few months of blocking it off completely due to one of the various Microsoft IIS server exploits. Now I don't have to take 8080 onto all the URLs I give out...

Re:What to do???

[mellonhead]

I'm paying $39.95 a month for SBC DSL in Pflugerville (north Austin). There were problems initially, but it's been excellent since (2+ years).

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

well, just keep thinking that way while you watch the utility of your net connection degrade until it's only good for viewing banner ads.

People really need to take this to heart. TPTB would like nothing better than to see the net desolve into a television-like utility where they continue the decades old tradition of feeding our culture garbage based on polling data from the masses. Affordable consumer level services that ban servers are just one of the ways they want to keep control of content out of the hands of the individuals and back into the hands of a few corporate mega-media giants. Sadly, since most of them now are gaining huge control over consumer access to the net they may win out in the end and it will turn into nothing more than interactive television. We really need to fight back and not let this happen though. What can you do though? Buy a T-1? Support small ISPs who are fighting the good fight against the huge backbone providers who are getting kickbacks from media giants? What can we do?

Re:What to do???

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

you get what you pay for. i pay 15-20 bucks more for my DSL line than i would normally have to, simply because i -love- the service they have constantly provided. and, they make it clear that hosting my own webserver is okay. yeah, maybe i only download at 100K/s, but that's the same speed i get 24/7, and when something goes down, i make a phone call and it is fixed pronto (and usually Verizon's fault, not my ISP's).

as for all the people complaining... uh, DUH. you are buying broadband from a cable company, which also owns a large motion picture company and a record label (among other things). did you REALLY think they wouldn't shut down file sharing?

Re:What to do???

[patchmaster]

Is Time Warner in Austin offering AOL and Earthlink as ISPs like they do here? I get mailings all the time from Earthlink wanting me to switch my cable modem service to them.

Road Runner has, so far, been the best ISP I've been with, but if they're going to start blocking ports and limiting service, it may be time to start looking for alternatives. I don't mind paying for the services I'm using, but this sounds like they aren't even giving you the option.

Re:What to do???

[Big_Ass_Spork_II]

I am on RR in El Paso, and am currently on Kaaza and Lime Wire (Gnutella). Downloading mucho Morrissey/Smiths songs in antisipation of the Morrissey concert on 8/6/2002 at Club Volarre. No problems here...

Re:What to do???

[big_hairy_mama]

Even if they were to block all the programs worth using, it would still be worth paying $40/month. My reasoning behind this is that it would cost me ~$20 a month for a second phone line, and then $20 more for an ISP. It comes out about the same, and you still get fast connection to other pages and games.

If my Kazaa were blocked, I'd just use Gnutella (which I do anyway), IRC, or just get some plain-old leech FTP.

Re:What to do???

[Big_Ass_Spork_II]

I use DNS2Go's service to give myself a "permanent" address. I am on RR and run my web/ftp/telnet/mail/etc on non-standard ports. D2G auto forwards www to the port I specify, making addresses I give out easy ones.

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, I'd rather pay more to the ISP for more traffic than have my bandwidth cut. Simply billing customers more seems to be what ISPs are doing now anyway.

Re:What to do???

[blitziod]

well the good thing is that unlike many cable companies, the telco's are offering DSL to resellers. So you can buy DSL from about 100 companies in say dallas, even though there are only 2 telcos that provide the lines. If only cable where forced to openly compete also.

Re:What to do???

[Ironpoint]

This is just plain idiotic. First, ISPs already monitor bandwidth and throttle speeds. Mine is capped at 1.5 megabit.

What you're suggesting could be called 'bait and switch'. Whats wrong with paying by the gigabyte or something?

Secondly, heavy users DO NOT slow down the light users. What they do is eat into ISP profits. ISPs have to pay for bandwidth too. Their profit is, more or less, user fees - bandwidth costs. So which one do you work for?

Lastly, I don't pay for simply "access", I could get that with a dial-in, I pay for bandwidth, and when that bandwidth changes and the price stays the same, I'm getting ripped off.

Re:What to do???

[flonker]

Actually, if your ISDN dialup number is in your class A ring, then it's per call. (Or that's how we had it set up for our customers.) But make sure that your ISDN dialup number is local.

We had a problem with one of our customers who wanted to sue us, because we were setting up an on-demand ISDN connection at their site. One of our techs had it working for a class B number, but was having some trouble getting it to connect to the class A. So, he left it on class B, and was supposed to come in the next day. They then talked to their neighbor, who happened to have a T1. They decided to pay their neighbor for sharing the T1, and cancelled the ISDN. They called us up, cancelled the visit, FedExed the ISDN modem back to us, and that's it.

A couple months later, they call us, demanding that we pay their phone bill. It had run up to the area of several k's of $'s. They had unplugged the modem, but it was connected at the time they unplugged it. ISDN, being as it is, didn't close the connection. So, they had a non-local ISDN connection up for quite a long time.

Eventually they went away. And no, we didn't pay their phone bill.

Re:What to do???

[oaksey]

iiNet http://ii.net use a similar plan for dial-up users, they have a soft cap which level changes depending in which plan you are on. Once you go over that level your traffic is given a lower priority. They used to have different end of months for different people but they found that confused some customers, so they just changed it to the calendar month for everyone.

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah sure, I own an ISP and I pretty well know the technologies involved.

The limiting is not so easy to do, for that kind of traffic shaping you need so expensive equipment per customer that you need to increace your prices at least ten fold to have break even per customer in three years.

I'm not limiting the bandwidth but I'm not selling cheaply either so effectively I have only companies as my customers who need the clear channel that I can offer.

So really, as many have stated before, if you need to transfer large amounts of data, buy a proper connection (T1 in states, E1 in europe etc.)

There is no such thing as a free lunch. (real bandwidth costs money)

Re:What to do???

[smcdow]

DSL is priced higher

That presumes that you already have cable installed, which I don't ('cause TV sucks). If you add up standard cable (~$35/month) plus high speed access (what, around $10-15/month?), then you're more expensive than DSL. I pay $40/month for 1.2 Mb and one static IP address. That's in austin.

has terrible performance in the area.

I don't have anything to compare to, but I get a solid 1.2 - 1.5 Mbits pretty much all the time, which is fine for my uses.

Just an info point.

Re:What to do???

[Megane]

DSL is priced higher, has terrible performance in the area.

It all depends on what part of Austin you live in. When I lived down at the north end of Manchaca, I was capped at 384K because I was so far from the CO. Yes, that sucked mightily. Then I moved intentionally near a CO and found out I was on a remote terminal anyhow. My line tests for the max 8 megabits down. DSL kicks ass again. And it's rock solid. But you're still limited to 1.5M downloads/128K uploads unless you pay some big bucks.

Re:What to do???

[drinkypoo]

For the record, at least in Texas, ISDN is not priced per minute. AFAIK it is STILL priced per minute during peak times (0700-1900 I think) in California, even though Pacific Bell is owned by Southwestern Bell which gives unmetered ISDN in the South.

Re:What to do???

[MindStalker]

Or you can get a T1 split the price among a group of people, and use wireless to connect them all. Become your own ISP! :)

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

Calculate it out, you can't share a T1 and have speeds much greater than a modem for the price that you pay for cable or DSL.

Re:What to do???

[patchmaster]

You don't have to subscribe to cable TV service to get the cable modem internet service, at least not in my area (which is Time Warner). They do charge a slightly higher fee -- $5 more per month. It would be $41/month if you didn't have cable TV service. That's for 2.5Mpbs/384kbps. And I do get that speed. They don't offer static IP addresses, but if you leave your system online all the time, in practice, the IP almost never changes.

In this area, DSL is $50/month for 1.5Mbps/128kbps, and still no static IP address. That's the advertised speed, of course. YMMV. The last time I looked into getting DSL, the best they were offering was 128kbps downstream. (I'm apparently a long way from the CO.)

Re:What to do???

[Rosonowski]

When I was doing my threaded cass study for "The world According to Cisco", I remember coming across an ISP offering 100mbps connections for 1,000 bucks a month.

It struck me as kind of odd, but apparently, it's legitimate, as far as I can tell.

While I would love to post a URL, I haven't got one.

By the way, the name was cognet, or something along that line.

I shouldn't post while tired. I should sleep.

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a HORRIBLE idea... if as a user of this type of network and you "become" a heavy user by downloading some patches, software, spam, banner ads, or anything else your internet connection will slow down. If your internet connection slows down then your large download will take longer thus making your account a heavy bandwidth user at the same time because you are maxing out your net connection for longer periods? Isn't that how such a system would work. if user a has % bandwidth used for n time then throttle bandwidth ...

Re:What to do???

[hansroy]

I signed a contract for $x/month for an x b/s connection. I'm going to use up to that amount as much as I want. If the ISP wants me to use less, lower the price.

Re:What to do???

[Anonymous Coward]

You do have a choice. Check out http://www.grandecom.com
Faster than road runner.

Re:What to do???

[jweinshe]

Uhh... earthlink is available via cable modem in Austin.

And it's cheaper than RR.

Re:What to do???

[realdpk]

Cogent. They're generally regarded as craptacular, but they are indeed cheap where you can get 'em.

Legality

[daemones]

At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract? Once people realize that I can swap files using HTTP, will they remove my ability to browse the web?

I don't have a contract handy, so if it's covered so be it; But if it _is_ in your contract then maybe you should re-think who you pay $50 a month.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

My ISP (Verizon) removed my (and everyone else in the former Bell Atlantic territory) ability to run a webserver on the standard port 80. Pain in the arse.

Re:Legality

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You are only supposed to use it for email and web access, and on the ports they designate for this. You aren't allowed to delete spams, or close popup ads.

Anyone doing anything else, is obviously an evil hacker, and thank god the good legislators in this country have realized that all hackers are terrorists. You're all evil.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The really annoying part though, is that I'm too close to the mark, in how these ISP's think...

Re:Legality

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Some contracts have a no-server clause. In that case they would probably be allowed to block this program- P2P programs run as a server.

Re:Legality

[Darth_Burrito]

Most Road Runner outlets have a no server clause. They've had one in the aup for at least 3 years. When I first signed up with them, I hadn't done my research. I asked the sales rep if I could host web/ftp servers and she said she didn't see why not. I asked the tech who installed the same question and he confirmed that it was ok to host servers. Later a friedn told me it was against the aup and sure enough it was. At one point I switched over to DSL and then back to Road Runner. Again I asked the Road Runner sales/techs the same question and they always said it was ok. The following is an excerpt from a nebraska branch of Road Runner. It looks like they may have different terms depending on what market you are in:

Road Runner AUP6. Customers are strictly prohibited from running server-based applications on Residential Road Runner accounts. This would include, without limitation to the running of HTTP Web servers, FTP servers, Gaming servers, SMTP and POP Mail servers, Domain Name Servers, Chat servers, etc.

When a business tells you one thing and then does something completely different after you become a subscriber, are there ever any consumer protections that kick in?

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract?

At the point where you're not using that capability to break the law.

Re:Legality

[Anonvmous Coward]

"At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract? "

If you're interfering with other people's connections, then you are breaching contract. I'm not talking about bandwidth hogging, I'm talking about IP addresses.

Let me share a little experience I had with you. I had Kazaa running for a couple of weeks to get some eps of MST3k. When I turned it off, I discovered my IP address was being bombarded with hundreds and hundreds of kazaa users sending requests to the port Kazaa used. The number of these requests was so high that I could barely use the internet, and Quake was a joke.

If ATT&T had rotated addresses, somebody else would have inhereted my garbage. Imagine that for a sec: One day, your internet connection goes to crap, and AT&T has no clue as to why. Chances are pretty good that'll cause customers to blame AT&T's service without realizing the true cause of it.

In that case, it is possible that your use of Kazaa could severely interfere with other people's internet experience. The more Kazaa users there are out there, the more likely it is going to happen to somebody. The one who gets burned the most is the ISP.

I don't agree with what they're doing (personally I think they should send me a cable modem that has a built in firewall so I can stop the kazaa traffic myself), but I understand it.

Only the ISP's know what their real intentions are, but that's something else to consider when you use a prog like that. Now you know why I stopped using it.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

"When a business tells you one thing and then does something completely different after you become a subscriber, are there ever any consumer protections that kick in?" Yes there are. Consult an attorney if you wish to take action.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract? Once people realize that I can swap files using HTTP, will they remove my ability to browse the web? *sighs* Unfortunately, running any sort of server is already considered a "breech of contract". Read your eula carefully. I called up the national call center, and was told that they block no ports, but upon calling the local one was promptly informed that they block numerous ports, including Port 80, which pretty means that you can't use http , or any service for that matter, over that port.Of course, the national call center denies that they do this, while the Tier 1 (local level) acknowledges it.

Re:Legality

[jbolden]

Depends on the state. I know in PA the written document would take precedence over the verbal. In Cal the easiest to understand and most clear document generally takes precedence and in case of direct conflict you get to pick which document on a point by point basis. So yes you would have been protected.

You could try taping the next "yes" you get. RR might be forced to upgrade you to a business level plan :-)

Re:Legality

[Planesdragon]

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The really annoying part though, is that I'm too close to the mark, in how these ISP's think...

Actually, I don't think you are. KaZaa is a baltant tool for copyright infringement--a reasonable man could very well find it to be so, and that means a Judge could as well.

An ISP is required to stop copyright infringement that it's formally warned about. Road Runner could be quietly blocking KaZaa as a preventive measure--they're trying to figure out if the "lost sales" from subscribers leaving will overrule the legal costs of not blocking them.

And, of course, the fact that Road Runner is owned by AOL Time Warner means that all it takes is an inter-company memo from the media group to the 'net group to start figuring out a way to kill KaZaa. Trust me--they'd much rather change based on internal stimulus than external lawsuits.

As for the TOS--your service is exactly what you agreed to with them, nothing more and nothing less. It's up to them to find the happy medium between the white hats that want to have unfettered access and the scared newbies that just don't want their boxes owned; once they find that happy medium, they maximize their profits and they're happy.

Don't like the way they work? Start your own ISP. Upstream bandwidth can't be that much once you reach critical mass, and you might even be able to use RR's cable networks to boot.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the TOS--your service is exactly what you agreed to with them, nothing more and nothing less

What people agreed to was "We pay-a you money, you give-a us Internet access."

Denying parts of the internet is not part of that.

Re:Legality

[toga98]

I'm a roadrunner customer and the contract that I accepted when signing up for service is so broad that it could prevent most internet activity, including web browsing. Basically, very open contract. Not much to do but switch services if they decide to enforce it.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

I always found this clause annoying... because strictly speaking, it means that you cannot run a ssh server, vpn server, icq/aim/yahoo messenger (because they function as both server and client). Even more, if you haven't close your netbios service to the internet side, you broke the contract.

Re:Legality

[drDugan]

"""
Actually, I don't think you are. KaZaa is a baltant tool for copyright infringement--a reasonable man could very well find it to be so, and that means a Judge could as well.

An ISP is required to stop copyright infringement that it's formally warned about. Road Runner could be quietly blocking KaZaa as a preventive measure-- they're trying to figure out if the "lost sales" from subscribers leaving will overrule the legal costs of not blocking them.
"""

several points here:

just because people with lots of money can get laws passed, it doesn't make it 'the right way to live' -- you are cringing behind an absurd and unthinking stance of "it's the law"

these people running the large businesses are being dicks. they are squeezing people every chance they can TO TAKE MORE MONEY. its all about the money, and the ingrained definition of business to take as much as possible while pushing the envelope of human decency. Their dicks, so I'm a dick. fsck 'em I serve 800Kb/s 24/7 of all I can.

at its heart, the REAL ISSUE with copyright is that it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to OWN information. if you look carefully, without the screwed up context of "business promotion" in which we currently live, then the whole idea of allowing excusivity of information is COMPLETELY ABSURD and
UNENFORCEABLE. The only reason big money buys/sets up laws to allow copyright now it to promote businesses (NOTE: not content creators any more) into taking more money than they otherwise could without it.

technology will bring down copyright. maybe not eliminate it, but certainly reign in the ABSURD notion of life +70 years or whatever unbelievable state we have now. These companies "suffering" from copyright infringement are FSCKING DINOSAURS and deserve to be raped by the sting of new technology. I wanted to puke when hollings bitches about our precious multi-billion dollar content industry that is just a short toss from a mass indoctrination engine. tell me one thing Sony pictures or universal pictures has done to innovate, to create something of value for our society. to make their product better. NOTHING. (well, maybe extra scenes on DVDs) The create content/crap. its information with no value other than the artificially created market of scarcity that is now GONE because of technology.

YOU (Planesdragon) ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. pick a problem. (really, any problem) this problem is that some poor sods in austin cant download buffy from last week. look carefully at what is causing the problem. HUMANS are causing it. some executive looked at the RR network and said, "hmm, I can be a dick today and make us more money." this is true of every problem you can name. HUMANS ARE CAUSING THE PROBLEMS. ... makes you think twice about the best way to solve the "world's problems"

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a good argument for static IP addresses.

My cableco shut off port 80 when the code red shit hit the fan. It did nothing to stop the spread of the disease within their network because machines could still send to :80 on the local subnet. Over a year later, the same handful of machines on my subnet are still spewing.

I was pissed about the blockage and let them know it. They told me i had agreed to it in the AUP, but i hadn't. They had changed the agreement after i had signed up. The old one was still up on their website. It went as far as to explain "how to" run a webserver.

They silently re-opened the port for me and then for everyone else a few weeks later.

The lesson i learned is that the AUP is a one way street. They'll use it to tell you what you cannot do, but they will not honor what it says you can do.

Now i'm hearing talk about capping the 24x7 30x faster than a modem that was their major selling point. They need to get going on MBone. There's no reason to transmit duplicate info over the same wire at the same time.

The cablecos get a monopoly in the town by promising to deliver a service at a price. If they make unilateral changes they are in breach of contract.

We need some alternatives, stat.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Planesdragon wrote:

YES, I'm a Christian. Got a problem with that?



well let's see where to begin.

most religion, (and especially Christianity) is based on a bunch of lies.

religion and disease are neck-and-neck for killing the most people in history.

Roman catholic priests are Christian, right?

Christianity teaches that you are not good enough. -- BUT by bringing christ into your life, you CAN be good enough, because he will help you with your sins. this has a direct link to non-accountability in society. "It's not my fault, I'm flawed." This doesn't even get into the complete mismatch between the tenets of Christianity (10 commandments) and the basic nature of humanity and suvival pressures in our current cultural conexts.

Most religions make people feel good. That's how, in a world of competing ideas, the major religions of today have withstood the test of time. they are viral sets of ideas, all major religions. its not so clear to me that "Christians" are any better people than any other religion, or than any people without religion. But that's not what Christinity teaches, especially the more fundamental versions. Sinners/ heathens / non-Christians must be helped -> translation, they are not good enough, or good like us Christians. Bigotry and elitism -- pretty close ideas.

Do really belive the lies they tell you?

Re:Legality

[ergo98]

My god, this has got to be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen on Slashdot (and that's saying a lot): In essence your argument boils down to "Their content is all crap, so therefore I should be able to copy it." How utterly ridiculous.

As far as the "false scarcity" BS: No, it's REAL scarcity because we, society in general, realized that without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place. As such we offered up some basic legal protections for creators to profit from their work. You got a problem with that then either fight copyright legislation (realizing that, regardless of how foot thumpingly righteous you are about your insanely contradictory argument, that doesn't mean that you can write your own laws just because you disagree), or pack up and move to China. Enjoy your stay.

You really top off your argument with that final paragraph.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

"""
My god, this has got to be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen on Slashdot (and that's saying a lot)"""

... actually its not saying a lot, its stating your opinion. big woop for you: woop woop.

you are mis-characterizing my post -- I am saying that 'content' only has as high a value as it does because we have laws that make it that way, so content producers can earn 800 million on a movie. There is no reason to have this system, except for their profits.

I also disagree with your point on scarcity: with a digital world, and fast interconnectivity -- there is no scarcity of 'content'. In the limit, information can be effectively free.

the reality of our current system is that individuals have zero ability to fight legislation. big money and pofit motive controls our governemnt and our laws.

The solitary island excuse is trite and old. Hearing dissent and saying, "why don't you leave?" is a cop out; it still does not address the issue. Besides, with our "globalization" there will be no islands to go to soon.

And what is so "off the top" about the last paragraph? it was quite to the point: people cause our probelms.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking about Legality, when it's a freakin P2P program being blocked here...

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh... the senseless rantings of the ill-educated!!! Most entertaining!

It sounds like you have some serious self-esteem issues here. Maybe some professional help is in order!

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

"""
As far as the "false scarcity" BS: No, it's REAL scarcity because we, society in general, realized that without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place. As such we offered up some basic legal protections for creators to profit from their work."""

I can't stand this shit

what you are saying is NOT TRUE. It is a convenient lie we tell ourselves to rationalize the current situation. Without copyright, people would still make music. they would make plays and movies and all the other forms of entertainment we all love. If you are about to disagree, THINK. people have been entertaining themselves for many many generations before we had copyright, the vivendi group, and 800 million dollar blockbusters.

the reason why you can be so off base, is you are assuming that the 'way life works' is the only way we can live, and the only way that it makes sense to have our system work.

the reality is that content producers work for businesses. businesses are designed to take money from the population. copyright in its current form keeps these businesses profiting very very well. nothing in this story about things NOT happening without copyright -- just what IS HAPPENING with copyright.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

do ma'am, enlighten me....

how am I mistaken?

as for my self esteem, blogs are a poor surrogate for evaluation or therapy. I'm just fine. but do defend religion -- this will be fun.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

breakin' the law...
breakin' the law...

They aren't even checking to see if the content being transported is copyrighted. Guilt by association?

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad to see you fixed the problem with your caps lock key, tardboy.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to get it too much attention by mentioning it here, but just in case you didn't know about it, try searching google for mystery science theater digital archive project. The vast majority of episodes can be found quite easily on edonkey2000. Plus they've gotten a thumbs up from every main actor on the show now, always a plus.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Never once mentioned you were mistaken, your insight into this conclusion shows you were intentially looking for this response. Your knowledge of factual data aside, attacking religion on a thread about corporate monopolistic behavior really paints a picture of your level of maturity.

Although your level of bias, and forceful portrayal of opinion on the topic in general is quite amusing.

Re:Legality

[erpbridge]

Of course you had Kazaa users traffic bombarding your machine. The way Kazaa works is it queues up a transfer, and retries it every so often (just like almost all other P2P programs these days). After X number of retries (probably 10 minutes), it assumes you are not available, and removes you from the list. So, you'd have all this queued traffic attempting to connect to a non-existant node (your machine) using the Kazaa port.

This would be made even worse if you had any uploads/downloads being worked on when you closed Kazaa. The machines you were uploading to would suddenly not see you there, and attempt to reconnect, similar to the queue machines mentioned above.

You also have to take into account the Kazaa indexing capabilities, and remember that anytime someone wants a file, they do a search of random nodes on the network. (FastTrack was, and still is, originally based off a customized variation of Gnutella protocol.) You would still have machines attempting to search your node for shared files, until it filtered through the machines closest to you in the Kazaa network infrastructure that you were offline and should be removed from the tree.

Also, were you functioning as a SuperNode? (If you chose any type of connection other than 56K modem when setting up Kazaa, it automatically enables SuperNode.) SuperNode acts as a index reflector for slower nodes (namely 56K modems). They look toward the SuperNode nearest them to perform searches on their behalf and to hold their index lists on their behalf. This is done to try to cut back the problems Gnutella had with 56K users cutting back network efficiency.
These 56K users (of which there could have been quite a few) were probably lost because their SuperNode wasn't responding on first try, so they were probably trying to reconnect... and other machines out there were trying to hit your SuperNode to get the index list for those 56K machines.

Yes, you'd continue to get Kazaa traffic for a little bit of time after you shut it down. That's the nature of the program. However, the problem you suggest, about rotating IP's, would not be an issue unless your ISP had their DHCP server set to expire leases at 15 minute intervals and not allow renewal on the same IP address. Even so, the traffic would die down as soon as the changes filtered through the Kazaa network tree that your node no longer existed. This would not take DAYS, as you suggested.

Re:Legality

[Anonvmous Coward]

Yeah I'm aware of that. As a matter of fact, quite a few of the eps I've found on Kazaa are D.A.P.'s. Until Best Brains can get DVD's made of all the episodes, I don't have a lot of choice.

Good news is, though, that they do have a few eps available on DVD and VHS. Hopefully more will trickle down over time.

Oo oo I did run across a very early ep of MST3k back before Kevin Murphy did the voice of Servo. That was interesting to see heh.

Re:Legality

[supremebob]

Almost every terms of service contract that I've read contains a clause simular to this one: "The terms or conditions of this agreement can be changed by (COMPANY X) at any time. Continued use of goods or services from (COMPANY X) shall be considered as acceptance of these updated terms" In other words, the contract that you signed with your ISP when you started can be changed at any time without your prior consent. If you don't like the changes that they've made, your only recourse is to drop the service. Your statement of freedom sounds nice, but it's probably NOT in the contract that you signed. Welcome to corporate America.

Re:Legality

[Anonvmous Coward]

Interesting stuff. Was I a supernode? I honestly don't know. However, the traffic bombardment lasted for 2-3 days, not 10 minutes. (That may be proof it was supernode, no idea.)

With that amount of time involved, it's possible my IP could have been given to somebody and be affected by it. I'm not saying it'd happen so frequently that AT&T'd be punting users left and right, but it could be a '2-day' problem that ATTBI would have to credit back.

Fortunately, AT&T doesn't reassign IP's too often. I'm only aware of them doing it once. I vaguely remember heearing it's done once a month, but have never personally verified that. It's been a long time since I've peeked into my own IP.

Again, thanks for the info. Never knew about SuperNode before. :)

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Before these laws, and indeed, before recent history entertainers generally lived miserable lives. Either as puppets to the wealthy or as poor retches.

So what's your point, exactly? That we should reduce the diversity of our entertainment, and through extension, all intellectual content because it can only produced by a few people, but otherwise useless people such as yourself feel entitled to it?

Re:Legality

[Planesdragon]

what you are saying is NOT TRUE. It is a convenient lie we tell ourselves to rationalize the current situation. Without copyright, people would still make music. they would make plays and movies and all the other forms of entertainment we all love. If you are about to disagree, THINK. people have been entertaining themselves for many many generations before we had copyright, the vivendi group, and 800 million dollar blockbusters.

And they were doing it in one of two ways, musically speaking:

* Badly done performances by whomever happened to live nearby

* Live performances on the rare occasion that a good musician was in town.

The modern world is *vastly* different than the old world, and the differences pretty much all boil down to easier copying.

Copyright was invented, not for music, not for software, but for the written word. It was a legal construct so someone who writes something--be it a novel or newspaswer clip--would have legal recourse when the publisher / newspaper printed it, made oodles of money, and didn't give the author one red cent.

Copyright has been expanded to cover other creative acts, as media for conveying those acts has become convenient and copyable. Since it's a extant legal construct, it's what's used by the people who hold the rights to creative works (be they software or music) as a way to exert control over how their creations are used by going to court and suing people for "copying without permission." The courts decided that sometimes the argument of the other guy was a good idea to let stand, and so Fair Use came about.

the reality is that content producers work for businesses. businesses are designed to take money from the population. copyright in its current form keeps these businesses profiting very very well.

"interesting. Wrong, but interesting." (*grin*)

I'll agree that "Content producers" work for businesses--anyone who calls themselves that doesn't deserve even a distant relation with *art*. But businesses use copyright rather effectively--they sell a copy (or in software, a specific permission to make copies) and get money for it. A lot of money.

But that's how money works. Businesses (or just plain ordinary people) make something that other people want, and then get money for it so they can get what *they* want. Businesses exist, in a social view, to provide a valued service or good to the community. In a capital view, they exist to exchange a valued service or good for money, which the owner(s) of that business then exchange for the things that they want/need/lust after.

Personally, I think copyright's just find as it is--asdie from that software bit, but even that can be dealt with. Stephen King's still got the copyright notice on his book, and I can be confident that whenever I buy something with his name on it (or the name of any other author), he's getting his $.50 for the bundle of paper he didn't pay anything to print, but which he made worth printing.

Re:Legality

[Planesdragon]

# just because people with lots of money can get laws passed, it doesn't make it 'the right way to live' -- you are cringing behind an absurd and unthinking stance of "it's the law"

Hardly absurd. It *is* the law. We believe in rule of law here on Planet Earth, and that means that we obey the laws until such time as those laws are changed.

Copyright, in all its glory, was passed not by people with lots of money, but by people who wanted to read books. And it was extended to cover movies, music, and software by judges who probably didn't have a lot of money.

(If you feel like living without rule of law, then by all means show up at my door so I can beat the @$$# out of you. ;) I mean, not doing so would just be obeying a silly law, right?)

# these people running the large businesses are being dicks. they are squeezing people every chance they can TO TAKE MORE MONEY. its all about the money, and the ingrained definition of business to take as much as possible while pushing the envelope of human decency. Their dicks, so I'm a dick. fsck 'em I serve 800Kb/s 24/7 of all I can.

Actually, the ingrained, legal purpose of a business is *to make the most money*, and that's it. Rarely is the best way to make money pissing the majority off.

Hence, AOLTW's Road Runner business test-markets its blockage of KaZaa, to see how it can make the most money--by blocking it and avoiding the fines and legal fees it would have to pay, or by not blocking it and keeping the % of subscribers that would unsubscribe with KaZaa blocked.

at its heart, the REAL ISSUE with copyright is that it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to OWN information. if you look carefully, without the screwed up context of "business promotion" in which we currently live, then the whole idea of allowing excusivity of information is COMPLETELY ABSURD and
UNENFORCEABLE. The only reason big money buys/sets up laws to allow copyright now it to promote businesses (NOTE: not content creators any more) into taking more money than they otherwise could without it.

I am a "content creator", though I prefer the terms "writer" or "author." I currently have a manuscript out there looking for a publisher. Copyright law is the *only* thing that keeps a random publishing house from saying "I want to see it all" and then publishing it without my consent.

Copyright law is the only thing that keeps a random recording company from walking into an indi band's free show, buying one copy of their lovingly-mixed CD, then mass producing it and selling it for billions of dollars and not giving the band one red cent.

We live in a capitalistic society, drDugan. People do things because they can make money doing them. I would not have spent nearly as much time writing as I did if I did not think that I could make money by finishing the story. I would still have written, but unless I could make money by writing the story, it would not have been worth my time to do it as anything more than a recreational activity.

Personally, I'm grateful that we live in a society were the creation of new stories and songs and movies is as valued as the creation of a bunch of other things that *don't* bring any happiness to us all. I gadly pay $18 to go see a movie with my wife; that's about what we pay if we just go out to eat, but we enjoy the movie a lot more than we enjoy the dinner.

# technology will bring down copyright. maybe not eliminate it, but certainly reign in the ABSURD notion of life +70 years or whatever unbelievable state we have now. These companies "suffering" from copyright infringement are FSCKING DINOSAURS and deserve to be raped by the sting of new technology. I wanted to puke when hollings bitches about our precious multi-billion dollar content industry that is just a short toss from a mass indoctrination engine. tell me one thing Sony pictures or universal pictures has done to innovate, to create something of value for our society. to make their product better. NOTHING. (well, maybe extra scenes on DVDs) The create content/crap. its information with no value other than the artificially created market of scarcity that is now GONE because of technology.

Sony Pictures, specifically, created Final Fantasy (which I enjoyed seeing, even if it was a disappointment), and I can guarantee that they wouldn't have done that if they couldn't have made money on it.

Sony, Universal, and a whole bunch of other companies sell their movies on DVDs and VHS, which means I can buy a copy and watch them whenever I want to. If America didn't give them the legal tools to reduce copying of those DVDs down to the point where they profit, I assure you that we'd never see another DVD again--or at the very least, that the price would skyrocket up to the new market's profitability point.

Before you complain about how cheap a DVD or CD is to make, I want you to think about something. Do you have a better idea? Not just for you. Not just for me. For everyone, everywhere, who likes movies and wants to see more movies and music and software and books and stuff made. Do you have a plan to implement this idea, a way to change the world so we *can* get everything "for free," and everyone who worked to make these things as they are still gets to eat and be happy and be encouraged on a basic level to make some more.

Linux and most OSS suffers from a very real, basic problem, a problem that I'm suffering from right now as I realize that I was supposed to start writing four hours ago. It's not the day job. This great, creative effort that others will enjoy and love and makes the world a really better place (in a way that answering phones and sending letters doesn't), DOES NOT PAY THE BILLS.

Until these great things *do* pay the bills, it's irresponsible to devote the bulk of one's time to them. The bills have to be paid. The rent has to be met. Food has to get onto the table, and gas needs to get into the car. Once all of that's done, THEN me and the OSS hackers and every other creative person who hasn't won the creativity lottery gets to do what we love to do, and spend even a little bit of time making something that will enrich the world.

Now, if I can state a practical case to *someday soon* make some money from my Art, I can justify putting more time into it. I can stay up late. I can sacrafice things that I need to do to stay healthier and get promoted on the bet that I will make some money from doing this thing that I love.

If you take away copyright, you kill that long practical bet. I'd be limited to the generosity of others. I'd be limited to only the recreational time I can spend on the work. I and hundreds of thousands of others like me would lose even the slim chance of getting appreciated--really, basically, fiscally appreciated--for what we do.

If you've read this far, I do have one last point to make. Copyright does need to be reformed. It should not apply to engineered software. It should not last for 70 years past the author's death. It should not be able to be held by corporations.

Ideally, were I to re-write the law, traditional copyright would apply only to works of art--things that are *not* practical necessities. It would last for the life of the author or his spouse, and then for two years after their deaths to pay off the final bills. Nothing at all could be authored by a corporation, and only those with a substantial creative input (as defined by the time-honored reasonable man standard) could be co-authors.

Software innovations could be covered by patents, with hard-coded RAND rates for patents. Breaking news and technical journals and compiled software programs would not be covered by copyrihgt, but by a "personage" right. Make it a crime to attribute something to Microsoft or Dan Rather or whomever without their permission, and you let them set their own market worth through marketing.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not sure what i am more amazed at. that you think we have diverse entertainment or that entertainers don't live miserable lives as puppets to the wealthy. except for relatively few exceptions, this is true today.

Re:Legality

[Hope Thelps]

Hardly absurd. It *is* the law. We believe in rule of law here on Planet Earth, and that means that we obey the laws until such time as those laws are changed.

Your planet might be very nice but it doesn't sound much like Earth. Here we have people, not robots, and in general they follow their consciences plus consider the consequences to them of their actions (considering the consequences to others of course is part of folowing their consciences).

If people don't think that something is wrong and don't think the potential penalty outweighs the advantage then generally the fact that it's illegal will be at most a minor consideration.

For example, a typical individual will probably be unwilling to commit murder, both on grounds that they view it as immoral and, if they need to think beyond that, that the consequences of being caught are severe. In contrast, they will most likely be happy to park illegally if it's convenient and they don't expect to get caught. Even with a high likelihood of being caught they may consider the likely penalty to be low enough not to deter them. You should be able to find lots more examples of your own, just look around.

If you're familiar with our legal systems at all you'll know the prominent part that penalties play. This is precisely because just making it illegal won't stop it happening.

(If you feel like living without rule of law, then by all means show up at my door so I can beat the @$$# out of you. ;) I mean, not doing so would just be obeying a silly law, right?)

I think this more than anything suggests that you have real problems. If committing random acts of violence against you were made lawful I wouldn't want to do it. For many of us not beating people up is not just obeying a law, silly or otherwise. However, if the only thing keeping you in check is your respect for law then I can see how important it is that you retain that and I regret now anything I've said that might cause you to waver in that.

Have fun on your planet, just try not to confuse it with Earth again. It's really very different.

HTH

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

I HaTe NiGgErS.

I hate jews, niggers, spics, towel heads.

Re:Legality

[Fat Casper]

Fortunately, AT&T doesn't reassign IP's too often.

My ISP does it every 3 months, but it won't take effect until I reboot.

I don't agree with what they're doing (personally I think they should send me a cable modem that has a built in firewall so I can stop the kazaa traffic myself), but I understand it.

Open good; proprietary bad. Take an old box, slap an extra nic into it and POW! there's your firewall. Run the line out to a hub and every computer in the house has a fat pipe. You can block or monitor anything you like, not just what they want you to be able to block. As an added bonus, you know it's secure. Try saying that about a black box that AT&T sends you. The IP changing won't kick in until you reboot, so if you get a good UPS it's damn near static.

Re:Legality

[Phibian]

And many (if not most) contracts have a clause stating that they are allowed to change the terms of the contract at any time...

I'd doubt if a legal challenge would get very far, especially if you couldn't prove that your use of Kazaa was completely 100% legal (ie not for illegally trading copyrighted material)

Re:Legality

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yes, any illegality of your use of Kazaa could be an issue; the ISP may have records of your connections to other Kazaa servers and they would probably try to bring that up in court.

Re:Legality

[onepoint]

I really don't know if it holds water, I have not seen it tested in court. I would think it might be enforceable if they gave you advance warning that the changes will be taking effect.

Onepoint

Re:Legality

[Cloudmark]

onepoint in this case does have a good point. However, in general it hasn't held up in court. Most ISP terms of service do specify that the customer is responsible for keeping up to date on changes to the TOS. Usage of the service is seen as tacit acceptance of those terms. It's not what most people would consider to be fair, but it is the way the agreements are setup. Unfortunately, alternatives are hard to find. If an ISP did want to notify customers of each change (to reflect changing environments, laws, etc) it could cause issues. Do you read all the spam your ISP sends out? Furthermore, given the scale of broadband providers, the mail volume would be prohibitive.
Finally, when it comes to what you can and cannot do with your connect, it unfortunately is regulated, as has been posted in other parts of this thread. The TOS (or in some cases AUP - Acceptable Use Policy) spells out what can and cannot be run. Some ISPs prohibit servers on residential accounts, others limit IRC connections, etc. It's a matter of trying to find a provider that can offer the combination you require. Sometimes the smaller but more expensive ISPs are the way to go for freedom and flexibility.
If you're really looking for pure access, as has been mentioned, you really do have to get a dedicated pipe (T1, etc).
I'm sorry for the negative view, but I work as a Bandwidth Specialist at a large (1 million client+) ISP and have had to look at this situation from all sides. ISPs don't want to lose clients...they're in business to do business, but they do have to put restrictions in place. Sometimes it's hard numbers (limits, caps), other times it's a clause that lets them tell you to back off when you start congesting your router. In any case, there's always a tradeoff.

Re:Legality

[mike_the_kid]

Their are certain specification made in many contracts that one party or another can end the contract at any time. You can not have a contract that says, at any time, one party can change any of the terms of this contract. Thats like a self referencing definition.

They can not say "We will provide you cable modem service for $40 a month for 1 year, and we can change any terms of this contract." If they did, as soon as you signed it they could say "well, we are going to change this from $40 to $400 and from a year to 30 years, and we're not going to be your isp, you are going to be our indentured servant."

People always bitch about the service they get from big companies, be it the phone, cable, ISP, whatever. Lets get this straight: There are other ISP's with significantly different sizes and structures than Earthlink / AOL / Roadrunner / SBC. I'll bet if you looked, you'd find at least five or six serving your area wholly owned and staffed by less than 10 people. They are out there but they can't compete when it comes to advertising. Dig a little deeper, you'd probably be very pleasantly surprised with what they can offer.

Re:Legality

[linzeal]

This guy is so spun from anything resembling free will, its quite sad & insane.

Re:Legality

[martyn s]

NO. The point is we should reduce copyright to the point that it actually provides a means to finance artists. Anything exceeding that is unnecessary. If all art that has been created would've been created anyway had copyright been only 12 years, then there is no reason it should be more than 12 years.

Copyright is *NOT* "incentive". You don't need "incentive" to create art. People who are passionate about art create art because of their love for it. What you need copyright for is to *finance* art. In other words, the scenario we'd like to avoid is where a very creative person who would love to devote his life to art, cannot because he needs to hold a dayjob. The prospect of becoming rich does not motivate anyone to make worthwhile art. Copyright is just to support these people, not to motivate them. Therefore, I feel copyright would be much better if it were only 12 years.

Re:Legality

[Lew Payne]

"Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The really annoying part though, is that I'm too close to the mark, in how these ISP's think..."

It's amazing how many people on here *think* they know how others think. What's more amazing is that they have a problem with the "well of illegal activity" drying up. Yep... the P2P file sharing networks that are predominantly used to commit copyright violations, including Napster.

I can hear it now, "You're depriving me of the use of file sharing for *legitimate* purposes." Oh yea... sure, sure. How often have you used Napster for "legitimate" purposes that did not result in a copyright violation? Oh.. I see.. so now you've changed your tune to, "Well, you're denying me my *future* right to use it for legitimate purposes." That's what I thought, a cop-out excuse.

Hey, you want file sharing? Turn on Windows file sharing on your computer, and let the world connect to you. Or, post to an appropriate newsgroup. Afraid of getting shut down or, even worse, sued for copyright violation and/or pirating? Aha... so now we've uncovered the real motivation behind your objection to the shutting down of P2P networks, the pressure on ISP's to cut off customers who commit crimes using their networks, etc.

Get real. Get some morals. Just because you're surrounded by geeks who don't think twice about the law or what implications the "latest and greatest" has on existing laws doesn't mean that you yourself have to become brain-dead to reality.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

they could make blocking of ports 'legal' in a heartbeat. its in the same TOS all rr users sign. They can change the terms of services at any time they want. If they do that its not a very good contract is it...

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost every terms of service contract that I've read contains a clause simular to this one: "The terms or conditions of this agreement can be changed by (COMPANY X) at any time. Continued use of goods or services from (COMPANY X) shall be considered as acceptance of these updated terms"

Well, I only accepted those terms under my own terms, which say I can change the terms anytime I want....

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ISPs prohibit servers on residential accounts,

This is wrong. If I pay for bandwidth, I should be able to use it for whatever I want. Otherwise, it's like the electric company telling me what appliances I can plug in, or the water company demanding I not use certain faucets. Or the phone company giving me a list of approved subject that I can speak about over the phone lines.

I pay for bandwidth. What I use it for is MY business.

they're in business to do business, but they do have to put restrictions in place

Fine. But most broadband companies advertise 'be online all the time'. This implies you can be using the bandwidth you paid for 24/7.

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

a no server clause

These suck! I paid for the bandwith, let be use it the way I want!

Re:Legality

[ichimunki]

No, it's REAL scarcity because we, society in general, realized that without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place.

Wrong. It's a generated scarcity based on the *assumption* that without copyright protection those works wouldn't be made. FWIW, I support the idea on faith... in many cases artists could not afford to continue making art if anyone could duplicate and copy their works. But without scientific studies to bear this out, we are operating on faith and conjecture.

Either way, the simple fact is that extending the period of copyright protection to even one minute past the artist's death does nothing to incent that artist create more art. Several extensions of copyright have (by being --illegally, imho-- retroactive) actually prevented work from falling into the public domain at the time it would have were the law not applied retroactively. Hopefully the Supreme Court will judge that retroactive copyright laws are unconstitutional.

Finally, your "move to China" tactic is lame. Stuff it, okay? It is totally unnecessary and only makes your otherwise cogent post look like a bunch of drooling reactionary claptrap. I suppose if you want to some like some "love it or leave it" redneck tool, go ahead, but it's jingoistic garbage in a debate this complex.

Re:Legality

[ergo98]

Stuff it, okay?

I'm sorry, did I miss you being nominated (and elected) master debate leader? The point specifically dealt with communism, and the prior poster's incoherent ramblings about how ownership is artificial (by that regards you can say that all ownership is artificial. If I come to your house with a bat and kick you out, is that legitimate? I mean, really, all "ownership" is is a couple of papers filed with a government office). I would say that China, one of the very last communist strongholds, is perfectly relevant.

Re:Legality

[ichimunki]

I'm sorry, did I miss you being nominated (and elected) master debate leader?

I think you must have. :)

By the way, I don't see the word China or the word communism in the post to which you were replying. I think you inferred that. How I'm not sure, since the description was more one of lawlessness than anything else.

Re:Legality

[Phibian]

"They can not say 'We will provide you cable modem service for $40 a month for 1 year, and we can change any terms of this contract.'

Sure they can (and do!). And your options then become: "accept the terms of the agreement" (usually occurs if you continue to use the service within x period of time after being notified of the changes), or "quit using the service". Neither of which are particularly palatable.

And hey, there are definitely other small ISPs in my area - and they all either resell the service offered by the bigger guys, or cost $400+/month and are on the verge of bankruptcy.

And in my case, I have to put up with the price going up on average 5-10%/ year because there are very few alternatives due to location.

The alternatives are:
-Dialup (too slow, requirement for second line means comparable price)
-Satellite (requires dialup in addition)
-Wireless (has Cdn$400 installation fee, which doesn't make sense given I'm not planning to live in this location long enough to recoup the cost)

Other suggestions are welcome of course, but we've done fairly extensive research...

Re:Legality

[Anonymous Coward]

KaZaa is a baltant tool for copyright infringement--a reasonable man could very well find it to be so, and that means a Judge could as well.

A gun is a baltant tool for murder--a reasonable man could very well find it to be so, and that means a Judge could as well.

Big deal

[electricmonk]

Nobody forces anyone to use RoadRunner. Just get another broadband service or go back to 56k if you absolutely *must* share your 0-d4y l337 m0v13z with the rest of the world.

Re:Big deal

[acasto]

That's not the point. With the state of the broadband industry today, your comments would be like telling people if they don't like their power service, to just go get another. If there was a resonable level of competition, then I don't really think this would be an issue. The problem is however, that people don't really have much of a choice. Look at some of the annoyances with AOL, now imagine if they were the only isp you could choose. People tolerate if they have a choice, but in this case, you don't have a resonable alternative.

such corporate horseshit....

[jiminy]

undisclosed blocking of communication on certain ports at router-level?!?!?! what kind of nazi plot is this?!?!? you know hitler blocked ports at router level right?!?!?

Re:such corporate horseshit....

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic?? WTF??? Is my penis offtopic now too? HUH? HUH? IS MY PENIS FUCKING OFFTOPIC!? I'm sure your sister wouldn't think so.

Re:such corporate horseshit....

[Anonymous Coward]

I demand you recant your rant stating that corporations are horseshit.

I buy horseshit direct from my friend's cattleranch and i consider horseshit the best thing on earth next to snapple iced tea. and anyone puting any form of taxation on me buying horseshit will receive an affidavit direct from my friends Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.

Corporations are people too. but why do you let the bad corporations walk all over you and crack the whip on you as if you were their property?

"angry ex-customers"

[John_Booty]

True, but they don't really care about losing file-sharing customers. They eat up a disproportionate amount of the bandwidth, and they probably lose money on most of these customers.

Now I'm not agreeing with this ISP - this action totally sucks for the reasons the original poster outlined. They need a more diplomatic solution... a slightly-higher priced service plan that allows use of such programs, or maybe they could just throttle traffic on those ports. And above all else though, they need to disclose this practice- otherwise it's completely unethical, PERIOD.

But the point is they really don't care about losing that kind of customer from a business sense.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of people that have broadband that never use one of these programs is quite small I'd imagine. You simply don't need that much bandwidth if you're just using email, or even just the web.

Most users may not be hardcore, 24/7 users, but they are users. They're just going to cost themselves customers.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[$carab]

Parent makes a very insightful point:
Roadrunner is saying "fuck off" to these customers, and they dont give a damn about whomever gets pissed off by this.

Users who get pissed off are going to be the largest consumers of bandwith - that 10% that consumes 90%. This is also why ISPs block ports 80, 21, etc.

I fully agree with the Roadrunner on this issue. It makes a great deal of sense if you look at it from a buiness perspective. The number of consumers who feel so adamantly about file-sharing that they will jump ship is relatively small - an overwhelming amount of net users dont even know what the hell "ports" are. Oh, and Roadrunner wont hafta service any more of those irritating DMCA-violation RIAA letters.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Balagan]

Considering that file sharing is one the biggest/only things driving the growth in numbers of high speed internet customers, along with how big a deal AOL and TimeWarner made of the importance of "broadband" to its marketing strategy at the time of their merger, and not to mention the fact that the new AOL-TimeWarner has lost at least a third of its total value as a company since the merger, i would say alienating current and potential internet users is highly relevant to the companies bottom line interests.

If they are losing money on the customers it isnt because of technical fundamentals. As a former customer i can say from first hand experience that their technicians and sys admins arent as skilled as one would hope.

My concern is more about what other options there will be if this becomes an accepted method of enforcement for misguided laws and for the response by a majority of ISPs to the smallest threat of litigation by a big media label. Im not saying that if we dont do something now all hell will break loose... all hell has already broken loose - who cares if it can and continues to get worse. It isnt the end of the world if i dont have my high speed file sharing, but i dont want my MTV anymore and havent for a very long time... i want to take whatever steps can be taken, no matter how small they may be, to push back against these restrictions from the labels and from those ISPs cooperating with them and those lawmakers who happen to be in their pockets. My question is how can any of us do that effectively? How can we increase our options in choosing an ISP and how can we increase our freedom to use those connections?

Any ideas from the /. community?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[parliboy]

"You agree that to protect the SERVICE we may restrict your usuage to reasonable levels. Additionally users agree not to run any "servers" or "services" that use upstream bandwidth".

Upstream bandwidth? Oh you mean like e-mail?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[NightRain]

Roadrunner is saying "fuck off" to these customers, and they dont give a damn about whomever gets pissed off by this.

The problem of course is that they will also piss off the occassional users of p2p software, that don't place much burden on the network. It seems a better idea would be to do the same thing that Optus cable here in Australia is doing.

Simply throttle the speeds on the ports in question. Low end users can still get access to p2p, and don't mind so much about the slower speeds, and the high usage p2p customers are still forcefully moderated in their usage

Ray

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

If this kind of thing becomes wide-spread, you can expect an arms race in the technology. It won't take long for the p2p guys to come up with stuff that is able to dynamically change ports as often as needed. Eventually the ISPs will either have to accept it and work with it or give up.

Meanwhile, don't forget that cable companies sell other services, like television and in some cases telephone. Right now I get all three from my cable company (ATT) but I am on the verge of going to satellite for my tv. If my provider tries something like that, it will probably be enough to push me over the edge to DSL (which is priced competitively in my area) and satellite tv, as well as the old baby bell for my telephone service - and I am not even much of a p2p user.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect! If everybody is violating the terms of service, they can shut off whoever they like and be perfectly within their rights.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chasuk]

I work for an ISP in the Pacific Northwest, and we block access to all p2p file-sharing programs.

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong. Yes, that _is_ the primary reason. If you can demonstrate to them that you have reasons for using a p2p file-sharing program which do not violate their principles, then they will remove the block for you individually.

As a beneficial side-effect, getting rid of, or limiting the 5% of our users who used these programs, saved us over 50% of our bandwidth. We are not weeping at their loss.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

The ISPs don't just "have to accept it". If blocking ports doesn't stop people, they'll just continue converting services from "unlimited" to pay by the byte. When they're collecting money for every byte you send, there will be a whole let less caring on their end about where the bytes are going.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Not The Real Me]

Right you are buddy!

The biggest crybabies are the ones that suck up all the bandwidth in a desperate attempt to create their own personal pr0n or warez server.

It is within the right of any ISP to throttle bandwidth.

What RoadRunner should do is institute a metering system where people pay for the amount of bandwidth consumed.

The legitimate users are not affected by this.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Peyna]

I don't see what the problem with running a web server on a cable connection or ftp is. Most cable ISPs have your upstream capped to a much lower speed than your downstream. Also, most other people are going to use the majority of their bandwidth downstream anyway. The problem isn't the people that are serving the files, but the people that are getting the files. They're sucking up much more bandwidth than the people who are merely hosting.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[waytoomuchcoffee]

I work for an ISP in the Pacific Northwest, and we block access to all p2p file-sharing programs. These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong.

You are basically saying the medium is immoral somehow, without regard to the message. Given this logic, you can just as easily say FTP, HTTP, email, usenet, and every other port can "promote activities which are immoral and wrong". Hell, I would guess that kiddie porn is transmitted through each of the above protocols everyday, so why aren't you blocking them?

Why stop there? Most of the files transmitted through p2p can just as easily be sent through the mail on a disk. Why not ban mail?

It's pretty sad when your users have to "demonstrate" their piety to use a particular protocol. What ISP did you say you worked for again?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Peyna]

'services' that use upstream bandwidth? Funny, everything uses upstream bandwidth. Even the ACK packets while I'm downloading stuff via FTP. Could be interesting if I can't use that upstream pipe.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Perfect! If everybody is violating the terms of service, they can shut off whoever they like and be perfectly within their rights.

But they are discriminating against certain people then, unless they shut off EVERYONE.

Discrimination suits are big....

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Kwikymart]

You simply don't need that much bandwidth if you're just using email, or even just the web.

Then why do these people use the service?

Most users may not be hardcore, 24/7 users, but they are users. They're just going to cost themselves customers.

Yes, but those customers they can do without. They want people that don't use their service (see above) so they can pack on the customers to the local cable networks by the thousands. Oh, and anyone that actually uses their service to its potential are accused of being bandwidth-hogging warez fiends.

This is quite a business model; sell stuff to people that don't need it and those that do get shafted. Its almost better than a casino. People go in, empty their pockets, and walk out. Oh, and the people that can play cards properly are kicked out. Its a fucked system where geeks are being catagorized with the general public, and everybody knows comparing geeks to normal people is not proper.

Why cant a t1 connection be cheaper (but not as cheap as cable) so we (the geeks) can all bypass this crap?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[marxmarv]

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong.

Would you mind naming this ISP, so that the rest of us can, uh, give them our God-fearing Merkin-loving business?

-jhp

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

To a very large extent P2P is simply a new and exciting way to pollute the commons. Most of the P2P proponents I've met have simply been leaching onto to other people's bandwidth. The dudes in the dorm sucking up the University's bandwidth, the dudes on the call center who dish out the company's bandwidth. P2P pretty much starts and finishes with disgusting little people who want that momentary gratification of dishing out someone else's resources. Very few would actually be willing to pay the real cost of what they are doing. People who are actually willing to pay for publishing usually find less band width intensive solutions like web sites, streaming audio, etc...

Good job Road Runner.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[rich22]

Meanwhile, don't forget that cable companies sell other services, like television and in some cases telephone. Right now I get all three from my cable company (ATT) but I am on the verge of going to satellite for my tv. If my provider tries something like that, it will probably be enough to push me over the edge to DSL (which is priced competitively in my area) and satellite tv, as well as the old baby bell for my telephone service - and I am not even much of a p2p user.

I recently moved into an area (Jacksonville, FL) in which ATT provides telephone, cable tv, and cable modem service. Originally I signed up for all three packages assuming that the quality was the same as their competitors and thus ATT deserves my business based on price. Within one week, ATT missed two appointments and I had a 2 day service outage at my location. I decided as a consumer to put my money elsewhere. So now Directv will be getting my monthly cable money, Bellsouth bills me for telephone service, and a DSL provider to be named later will get paid to provide my IP connectivity. I'm not penalizing ATT - they will hardly miss me. But I am economically rewarding companies who are offering the higher quality of service I want - in the end, this is the only way to win the battle. Speak with your wallet.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[FuzzzyLogik]

I think he was simply stating that, file sharing apps are almost always used for immoral activities. It's highly doubtful ISP's would block FTP and HTTP access. Sorry this pretty much kills any use of the internet for nearly EVERYONE. Besides, he said it affected 5% of their users. Big deal. FTP, HTTP, email, usenet, they are used for other things than immoral activities. BUT, A LARGE MAJORITY of p2p apps are used for MOSTLY immoral activities. Which is why they are blocking it. Not that I agree with it, but their reasoning is logical. They can't really play police as far as i'm concerned though. It shouldn't be blocked. I imagine if EVERYONE complained about it, they'd remove that block, but since it doesn't affect many people it'll stay.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[drDugan]

class action lawsuits - even bigger

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[FuzzzyLogik]

As an example, AOL. I'm not sure if you've ever used it. My parents use it (Delphi's $3/mo or whatever), and I occassionally use it (as i started out on aol many years ago. Do you have ANY idea how much warez/mp3/porn goes through AOL's email servers? I could direct you to chat rooms where its all done if you need examples. AOL knows about it, they block the chat rooms that they use, but they don't block email because its being used for it, quite heavily i might add. Its the only place i know of where i can have 100 gigs of warez in my mailbox and consistantly download it at rates of 100k/sec or more.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong.

Sort of like fathering an illegitimate child with a Korean prostitute while serving overseas, then abandoning her upon conclusion of your tour of duty?

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[demaria]

I think I remember AOL having a limit on the size of an email attachment and the whole mailbox as well. Aren't these limits in effect?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[FuzzzyLogik]

Well, kind of, i believe the limit is 15 megs. But that doesn't keep people from using winrar to just split the files into large groups of files and uploading a "set" of files for an app or game. It works kind of like this. Say, Warcraft 3 for example. It's 1 cd, I could create a cd image of it, and rar it, telling it to split it into 15 meg chunks. Then uploading a seperate email for each file. Emails would be named Warcraft 3 ISO CD 1 [xx/xx], and you'd have to download all the parts (similar to newsgroups) and unrar it into the original ISO. That's what the server apps are for, you say you want files x through y and it sends them to you automagically.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chasuk]

If ftp, http, e-mail, usenet, etc., had been designed for the *primary* purpose of aiding and abetting thieves, then my employers would not be in the ISP business.

I am not defending their decision, but nor am I condemning it; they are following their own conscience, and I admire anyone who values principle over business considerations.

The reason I contributed to this thread was not to engage in a discussion regarding the morality of exchanging warez via a p2p network, but rather to indicate that RoadRunner might be blocking access to KaZaA for reasons that hadn't been yet suggested.

Not all businesses are run by predatory immoral bastards.

To further clarify, I have not expressed my own views regarding p2p file-sharing because it isn't relevant within the context of this thread.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[XO]

Comcast had blocked my port 80 when Code Red came into existence.. after about two weeks.. and didn't unblock it for almost 6 months. But that's ok, I just setup my webserver on port 82. No big deal.

I think they blocked me for longer than everyone else because I was using a shitfuckload of traffic, with a webserver that was serving 80GB/mo, in straight HTML text.. lol the wonders of running a popular game.

Unfortunatly, that game was sued out of existence.. so now I serve out about 100MB/mo. oh well.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chemical]

The problem of course is that they will also piss off the occassional users of p2p software, that don't place much burden on the network

Wouldn't bother me, an occasional mp3 downloader, if SBC did this to my DSL. I would go back to what I did before the days of Napster et al: IRC - the original black market of the internet. The thing about IRC is that everyone knows what is really used for- porn, warez, and mp3s- It's just that nobody seems to care. And the best part is that it doesn't have enough mainstream press to draw any attention to itself. It's an all around winner!

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[waytoomuchcoffee]

To further clarify, I have not expressed my own views regarding p2p file-sharing because it isn't relevant within the context of this thread.

I realize you are not the ISP you work for. However, while you are distancing yourself from their decision, you also said that "we are not weeping at their loss". You can't have it both ways.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[pyro_peter_911]

but I am on the verge of going to satellite for my tv

I suggest that you do change. I've been using DirecTV for years and enjoying great service from a company that knows that you could go somewhere else in a heartbeat if they didn't provide quality service at a fair price.

I recently switched from my cable modem to DirecTV's DSL service also. I'm not sending another check to Time Fucking Warner ever again. And take a peek at this: VPN? FTP servers? Web servers? No problem!

You do have a choice and IMHO your local cable company is generally the wrong one.

Peter

just another happy customer...

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Joe Tie.]

limiting the 5% of our users who used these programs

Wait, five percent? Out of curiosity, when did this happen to get that low a score? Things might be a little different in my location since it's a college town, but I've never met any cable modem user who didn't use some kind of p2p software occasionally. I would have thought it wouldn't even have been close to single digit percents.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Essron]

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong. Yes, that _is_ the primary reason.

Regarding AOL/TW (not your employer) I strongly disagree. Their primary reason for any action as a firm is to make money. AOL/TW is a well diversified media conglomerate, and arguably the company with the most to lose from the inevitable devaluation of copyrighted works resulting from data transfer. They are doing this to make you buy CD's, go to movies, and watch television commercials, not because they are committed to some moral highground. Any company that allocates resources to moral battles goes out of business rapidly, AOL/TW's actions are motivated by survival and nothing else... and I would not be suprised if Vivendi/Universal was paying for some fraction of this blocking project.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[glwtta]

Eventually the ISPs will either have to accept it and work with it or give up.

um, yeah, and I guess then you win? yes, driving your ISP out of business by finding ways to use inordinate amounts of bandwidth is a l33t accomplishment indeed.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Baki]

An ISP should not intervene in what is right and what is wrong to transmit/receive. Once they start doing that, IMO the ISP ackknowledges that they are responsible for what happens on their network, whereas normally the ISP is just a medium .

Also, if this becomes widespread, you can be sure that the filesharing apps shall be changed such that they are hardly to track to discern from 'normal' WEB usage.

Should the amount of traffick be the real point (thus money/costs being the issue): that is legitimate. In that case the only logical (though impopular) solution is to introduce limits on monthly bandwidth usage, and have the cusomer pay per amount of data.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Danse]

They are attempting to regulate without disclosing what they are doing, why shouldn't users attempt to bypass the regulations?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you're saying that he needs to weep, to prove he isn't taking sides???

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Danse]

If they gave me reasonable prices and a reasonable method of monitoring my usage, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But that's definitely not what they're doing. They aren't even telling anyone what they're doing. Strange though. I live in South/Central Texas and RR doesn't seem to be blocking Kazaa here.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Baki]

No, the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective is to pass on the costs that your customers cause (plus a profit margin).

So if the uesrs of lots of bandwidth cost you money, the solution is not to silently hinder them (I would consider that as dishonest and immoral) but simply to let them pay for what they use. It is not popular (and I'm glad I still have an unlimited ADSL subscription) but it is the only right thin to do, i.e. you have to pay per amount of traffic generated (with the first N gigs of data which should suffice for 'normal' usage being free).

Imagine, for example, electricity company delivering for free (after taking a subscription for a fixed cost) but detecting certain devices that consume a lot of power, and causing power outages if the customer connects such devices.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chasuk]

I realize you are not the ISP you work for. However, while you are distancing yourself from their decision, you also said that "we are not weeping at their loss". You can't have it both ways.

When posting hurriedly in the middle of the night, it is often difficult to remember which hat one is wearing.

Okay, that isn't the only explantion for my "I/we" dualism.

I personally feel that sharing warez across p2p network is theft, and is justifiably discouraged. Let me add, however, that I consider it theft because consumers agree that it is. If you buy a piece of software covered by a particular EULA, and that EULA specifically forbids sharing copies with friends or strangers, then the only moral option is to return that software if you disgree with that contract. Whether you consider the contract fair or not is irrelavant, as is any other consideration (those who whine that the EULA can't be viewed before purchase, as an example). Virtually all EULA's contain such restrictions, so it shouldn't take a brain surgeon to realize that the Warcraft III EULA probably contains the same restriction.

I know that returning opened software can be difficult or impossible. If I bought a product which did not allow me to view the EULA beforehand, and I later objected to its provisions, I would first attempt to return the software. If return was impossible, I would protest to the software manufacturer. If they did not accomodate me, I would feel free to make as many copies as I could and distribute them widely. Consider these "spite" or protest copies, if you will, but I do believe that the principle is more important than the law, and, after attempting to right a wrong within the framework of the law, and failing, it is my natural inclination (and perhaps obligation) to ignore the law while attempting to change it by reasonable means.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the software industry does complain too much. The vast majority of software traded on p2p networks is traded by individuals who would never have bought it in the first place, but the thrill is in the collecting. As they were never potential customers, no theft is involved no matter how many copies they produce or cause to be produced. It is only theft when the software manufacturer has been denied their (due) profit.

I consider that the profit is "due" any time you, as a customer, agree to a EULA. You agree to a EULA everytime you purchase a product 1) with the foreknowledge that it will have an unnaceptable EULA and you buy it anyway, 2) or when, to you HONEST SURPRISE, you find the EULA unnacceptable but do not take reasonable measures to return it for a refund.

As I said before, if they don't honor their EULA by refunding your money when the EULA indicates that it will, then make as many copies as you want. Your obligation to them has ended.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In this context "give up" means stop pretending to be full service and to start being real clear and up front about exactly what is allowed and what isn't.

Except that things change so quickly on the net that any list of allowed/disallowed uses would be quickly obsolete. If they want to follow that kind of mindset, they will ultimately find themselves counting bytes and imposing limits at that level because anything higher up the OSI model will change to rapidly to be controllable.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[thales]

" If this kind of thing becomes wide-spread, you can expect an arms race in the technology. It won't take long for the p2p guys to come up with stuff that is able to dynamically change ports as often as needed. Eventually the ISPs will either have to accept it and work with it or give up."

Not really. The ISP can simply do the same thing they do to people who bypass the bandwidth caps. Pull the plug, ban the user for life. Using P2P can be considered running a server, something that is banned in the TOS. All they have to do is enforce this provision and it won't mater what new tricks you load into your client, because you won't be able to connect to the internet.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Nailer]

Why stop there? Most of the files transmitted through p2p can just as easily be sent through the mail on a disk. Why not ban mail?

Because the makers of all the email clients don't promote their systems as a warez network - Napster and Kazaa have in the past. These days Kazaa certainly goes out of its way to deliberately not promote the issue of piracy, but at the same time they refuse to implement even the most simplest of filters over a network *they* control (Fasttrack still has centralized directory services).

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[waytoomuchcoffee]

Believe it or not, I agree with you that most p2p use is for theft. You don't have to "feel" sharing warez across p2p is theft, it IS by definition.

Your ISP has a number of valid reasons (IMO) to ban p2p -- bandwidth is a completely fair one. Illegality (if proven) is another. However, morality has got to be just about the worst reason. I don't want someone qualitatively deciding what is "moral" or not for me. And I don't want my ISP presuming that what I am doing is illegal. The burden of proof for illegal activities should be on the ISP, NOT the customer.

A EULA on bandwidth - well, I don't like it (actually I hate it), but I realize the necessity. I have yet to see a EULA with a morality clause, and hope I never will.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Ironpoint]

>we block access to all p2p file-sharing programs

"Damn that rap music. We have to shut it down..."

>As a beneficial side-effect, getting rid of, or limiting the 5% of our users who used these programs, saved us over 50% of our bandwidth. We are not weeping at their loss.

Why don't you block everything, you'll save 100% !!!

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are some questions you can ask your company.

Did the Tim Berners-Lee "aid and abet" world-wide child pornographers with HTTP?

Did Phil Zimmerman "aid and abet" the 9/11 terrorists with PGP?

Did Senator Gore "aid and abet" copyright infringers by securing funding for the Internet in the '80s?

Surely, to all of these questions, your company will say is "no". But the explosion of phenomenon like child pornography wouldn't have happened without all three of these things -- a widespread electronic network, strong crypto, and an easy to use protocol.

Your company needs to realize that the Internet is a P2P application, and if it has a moral bent, it should be out of the ISP business altogether. There are much worse things in the world going on out there besides "copyright infringement", and step one is to detect and block all IPSec packets, VPNs, PGP encoded email, and SHTTP traffic. Your company could also put a filter on web traffic to block all attempts to access certain sites. It would mean that you could stop child pornography and terrorism on your network -- atrocities far worse than any mp3 trader's crimes.

But no, your company won't block those protocols for any moral reason. Rather, your customer base will erode to all the competing ISP's that allow that traffic. So it's clear your ISP is not seeking the high moral ground, but trying to save money on bandwidth by labeling certain protocols "immoral".

And that's dishonest.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[kkirk007]

If you buy a piece of software covered by a particular EULA, and that EULA specifically forbids sharing copies with friends or strangers, then the only moral option is to return that software if you disgree with that contract.

But what if you don't really have an OPTION as to whether or not you accept the EULA? Let's say (hypothetically, of course) that a certain business used unfair, predatory, even CRIMINAL tactics to drive its software to a position of 95% dominance on all desktops...what then? If the software company (a convicted felon, in this case) is doing illegal things to force you into using their software, is it still so illegal and immoral to warez their products?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[badzilla]

But here actually is an EULA with a morality clause! The (very nice) time sync program "AboutTime" is distributed under a "CareWare" license model.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chasuk]

Your ISP has a number of valid reasons (IMO) to ban p2p -- bandwidth is a completely fair one. Illegality (if proven) is another. However, morality has got to be just about the worst reason.

I personally don't care whether something is illegal or not. I have no moral obligation to obey unjust laws; I have an obligation, in fact, to actively oppose unjust laws. Use laws to oppose laws, if possible. If not, use ethical means to change unjust laws, even if those means are not legal in and of themselves. But that is another topic.

And I don't want my ISP presuming that what I am doing is illegal. The burden of proof for illegal activities should be on the ISP, NOT the customer.

Every time that a policeman makes an arrest it is under the asuumption that you are guilty. Do you really think that a policeman could legally kidnap and incarcerate you if the actual presumption were not that you were guilty, the "innocent and proven guilty" notion aside?

Policeman: "I'm sorry, but I'm going to cuff you, cage you, humiliate you in front of family and friends, severely stress you out and scare the shit out of you, but I really do think that you are innocent. Really."

That's what arrest and taking into custody is: legal kidnapping. In other words, kidnapping which the government, and by extraopolation, all (or most) of us, approve. The prisoner is presumed to have been doing something illegal.

American Express and Discover have recently been sued for aiding and abetting illegal on-line gambling casinos. The assertion is that American Express and Discover profit from illegal online gambling by issuing merchant accounts to casino operators who accept bets from customers located in areas where such gambling is illegal.

I haven't followed the suit, so I don't know whether it is pending or finished, or, if finished, how it was resolved, but my sympathies aren't with American Express or Discover. Yes, I'm saying that I consider that an ISP which allows p2p warez distribution to occur is guilty of aiding and abetting. Banning p2p programs, used almost exclusively for warez distribution, is merely preventive health management.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Chasuk]

I don't know who you are, but you apparently know who I am.

First, I didn't know that Hae Jin was pregnant until long after the fact. Second, I didn't abandon her. I loved her deeply, and tried to marry her, but she stopped responding to any of my phone calls or letters.

I tried to locate her for years on the Internet to no avail. I still think about her, I still love her - because if you ever really loved someone you always do - and I want to know desperately what happened to her.

I am happily married now, but I still wonder about her quite often.

Did Hae Jin really have my child?

Hmm. Was this just a troll, and am I the victim? No matter. I can't take the chance that it isn't and not respond. I really want to know what happened to Hae Jin.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[waytoomuchcoffee]

Wrong analogy. Police need just cause and evidence. Hanging out with criminals might be enough to get you stopped and investigated, such as hanging out near a drug house, but unless they actually find some drugs on you, they can't arrest you. Or rather they can, but you probably have a case for false arrest.

And on-line casinos aren't illegal everywhere -- they are legal in some places. In any event, concern for liability would be another good reason to ban p2p. However, that doesn't have much to do with morality, to stay on topic.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

you probably got trolled by some pissed off kazaa kiddie. i was trying to figure out what isp you worked for (sorry, i'm a snoop) and found some usenet article that mentioned the same kind of thing.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Erasmus Darwin]

"Once they start doing that, IMO the ISP ackknowledges that they are responsible for what happens on their network, whereas normally the ISP is just a medium ."

I suspect the law agrees with you.

This article talks about a suit against Prodigy a while back where it was determined that the fact that they exercised editorial control over postings on their boards made them liable for everything that was posted there. The only major difference here is that the control is this case is in the form of limiting certain protocols. However, the (apparently) public explaination that it's over moral reasons might be enough to establish that the ISP is engaging in such control.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Ilgaz]

Man, I'd care less about p2p since those programs doesn't fit to my music choice etc even...

But let me say, bandwidth... Haha... If you have quake III at a friend, just launch it and see how much bandwidth it uses. I say, basically ALL the available :))

I don't want to see yet-premature directplay's bandwidth use even.

So, you will block them too?

What about broadband radio/tv? What about launch.com?

First you say "they are promoting non ethical use", no... Especially Kazaa is unethical spyware. You have a bit point, I'd support you even.

But "unethical" use etc are bs. Block IRC first than... Geez

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[91degrees]

It is of course possible to copy software without agreeing to an EULA, and there are all sorts of arguments against their validity, however this is just a nitpick. Piracy is a crime.

However, it is possible that I decided to use p2p purely for legitimate reasons. There are a number of mp3 files shared with permission of the authors. It is possible to get some GPL software. These types of files may be the minority, but the possibility is there that these are the only reason I want to use the software.

Now, it appears that if I want to get this, I have to explicitely ask permission from an ISP, who may decide not to let me for any reason they choose. The point being that I have to prove my innocence. While I appreciate that an ISP is not bound by the constitution, this still goes against many people's sense of fair play. It is unethical to assume that someone is going to commit a crime, even if the majority of people are.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Planesdragon]

Your ISP has a number of valid reasons (IMO) to ban p2p -- bandwidth is a completely fair one. Illegality (if proven) is another. However, morality has got to be just about the worst reason. I don't want someone qualitatively deciding what is "moral" or not for me. And I don't want my ISP presuming that what I am doing is illegal. The burden of proof for illegal activities should be on the ISP, NOT the customer.

The ISP is, presumably, a private company. They can, if they want, decide that you can't use their network unless you go to their church and their political party.

File sharing programs are, quite simply, used by the vast majority for the express purpose of copyright infringement. If you had a water bong, you *might* be using it to smoke tobacco, but that's not likely. If I carry a rifle into the mall, I *might* just be looking for one in the sporting goods store with the same stock, but the security guard isn't going to assume I am until that's proven.

When you're dealing with something that's reasonably going to be used for an illegal activity, don't be surprised if people assume that you're using it for illegal activities while you're dealing with it.

(And besides the point, KaZaa's evil bloated spyware that crashes PCs and doens't know when to let up. It deserves to die, and other p2p file sharing programs can stay or go with no care from me.)

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

LOLZ becuz u can email mp3z too

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe you are dumb enough to confirm what some anonymous troll says on a website known for bullshit postings. Jeez... get a fucking clue.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

it's illegal to "serve" power to the local power grid. so maybe your reasoning is wrong.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[riven1128]

I would like to announce WarezPro! it uses the pop3 and smtp protocols in order to send warez as *wink* e-mail attachments *wink* ..

Just open up ports 25 and 110 in your firewall and you're all set!

** Coming Soon! **

WarezBrowser - Browse literally hundreds of warez "sites" using HTTP on port 80!

Oh wait .. these programs already exist .. outlook express and internet explorer! QUICK BLOCK 80, 25 and 110!

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, it appears that if I want to get this, I have to explicitely ask permission from an ISP, who may decide not to let me for any reason they choose. The point being that I have to prove my innocence. While I appreciate that an ISP is not bound by the constitution, this still goes against many people's sense of fair play.

I think you'll find that most people's sense of fair play is not absolute, but depends strongly on context. The context of p2p is that the vast, vast majority of its use is trading copyrighted material outside the bounds of fair-use. People as a group will therefore tend to expect that any specific case of p2p is for the same purpose. The obligatory, hyperbolic analogy from the Real World: the vast majority of people who get on airplanes with bombs do so in order to hijack or destroy the plane. Therefore, people as a group tend to expect that people who carry bombs onto planes intend some kind of harm. Not all of them necessarily do, but do you want to sit next to one?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you haven't been paying 50 bucks a month for internet service for the last five years. If you had you'd be a little pissed, `cause they're restricting access to a network that we payed for. It might make sense from a business perspective, but it will not be tolerated where I'm from.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[m0rph3us0]

Most of us sped, most people on the road speed. LETS BAN CARS!, Somehow I don't think so. If someone is doing something illegal, charge them. Otherwise, don't pretend their doing something illegal. Have you heard of Fair Use? Even if 90% of the traffic was legal thats no reason to ban the protocol entirely. How would you like it if you couldn't drive because everyone else sped.

ISP's like yours are shit.

Fair Use says I can record something off the radio and use it for myself. Whats the problem if that recording comes off someone else's hard drive. People like your management is why the sound of silence can be copyrighted. I don't have a problem with artists making money for their music. But until they are I don't plan to buy CD's.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

The EULA is not a contract. You are not bound in any way to honour it. It has never been upheld in a court of law. You are not required to accept it being imposed on you.

It's still illegal to violate copyright, mind you, but I just thought I'd point out the irrelevance of these references to the toothless EULAs.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[binarybum]

Disagree. Trading Warez is definitely not a clear cut example of theft. I would argue it completely fails to meet the "definition" of "theft."

Theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See {Thief}.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.

Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See {Larceny}, and the Note under {Robbery}.
Courtesy Webster's dictionary

Software is not removed, nor is it in the complete possession of the thief.
I think that you really do have to "feel" that it is theft. By definition it hardly is. I consider myself a person with strongly established morals, and I do not consider warez trading theft by the literal or moral definition of the word.

Please never forget that "law" does not equal "right," consider the most clear-cut example in our community, the DMCA. There are hundreds of laws as unjust.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[RickHunter]

Believe it or not, I agree with you that most p2p use is for theft. You don't have to "feel" sharing warez across p2p is theft, it IS by definition.

Then you're both wrong. It is not theft, legally or morally, no matter what the copyright cartel tells you. And if you believe their "theft of income" argument, then you should just send them your entire paycheque right now. Because by not spending that money on their products, you're reducing their income!

Trading of "warez" or non-sharable MP3s over a file trading protocol, like FTP or SMTP, is copyright infringement. Not "piracy", not theft, not terrorism. Copyright infringement.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[handsomepete]

"Most of us sped, most people on the road speed. LETS BAN CARS!"

I really didn't want to get involved in this enormous thread, but AFAIK, no one is banning p2p programs, so stop pretending that they are. If one ISP blocks the port your preferred program uses, switch to another one. Or find a way around it. If every cable provider blocks it, switch to DSL. DSL blocks it? If it's so important, save some money and go to dial-up. There isn't a law stopping you from using p2p or switching ISPs. It's just a private business, move along. I don't particularily care if you don't buy CDs of these artists (I haven't purchased a CD from any non-indie retailer in almost 6 years and I'm rather happy about it) and I really don't care if you want to distribute 80gb of mp3s and movies. Just stop expecting the people who provide you with the bandwdith to bend to your needs. Time Warner started pulling this shit in my area, so I switched. I have slightly crummier service, but the freedoms to do what I please. No big deal. They don't owe us anything. As far as I'm concerned, the more that is done to discourage people from overtly sharing the entire RCA catalog, the better for those of us that do believe in fair use and don't want to see restrictions on CD burners and ripping technology. Would you prefer that the p2p networks were wide open and available but CD-ROM drives were hardware restriced so that CDs could no longer have tracks extracted? Not me.

And besides, preaching fair use rights to an ISP is like preaching christianity to a devout studied atheist. You won't come up with a single argument that will change their minds.

"Fair Use says I can record something off the radio and use it for myself. Whats the problem if that recording comes off someone else's hard drive."

You've got to be joking.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Pedrito]

Most of the files transmitted through p2p can just as easily be sent through the mail on a disk. Why not ban mail?

I have to agree with the original author. Most people use P2P software for illegitimate, or more precisely, illegal activity. The other methods, HTTP, FTP, e-mail, are different. They are not use PRIMARILY for illegal activity.

If you deny that P2P software is being used primarily for illegal activities, then you're kidding yourself.

Hey, I'd be pissed if my provider cut off my p2p access, but I'm not going to be disillusioned about why.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[silverhalide]

Instead of completely blocking access, the best compromise seems to be using Quality of Service software on the server end. I know of several universities that are starting to do this, and it seems to keep everyone happy. Leave all the P2P programs working, but just throttle them back when they interfere with higher priority services.

On another note, P2P programs are simply another aplication of the 20-80 Rule, aka Pareto's Principle where 20% of your users account for 80% of your bandwidth.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[opto]

Instead of all this talk about blocking every port, lets here from the legitimate users of P2P apps. How many people do you know that use P2P apps to transfer legitimate and legal files.

I'ld be willing to bet we're talking somewhere in the less than 1% region.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

The EULA is not a contract. You are not bound in any way to honour it.

Or by extension, the GPL which is little more than a EULA.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

You simply don't need that much bandwidth if you're just using email, or even just the web.

Then why do these people use the service?

If you're just browsing the web-say /. -- then you download a 150kb file and spend 5 minutes reading it. Technically, that's about 4000 bits/second, so you only _need_ 4kbps. At the same time, you'd be pissed as hell if it took 5 minutes to get your /. Its the difference between aggregate and burst...everyone wants great burst speed, but only a few people use it constantly. That's how the ISP makes money-it sells you on the burst and gambles on its estimate of your average,

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[crawling_chaos]

I would certainly hope that this ISP blocks NNTP and IRC as well. They can always open traffic to those customers who prove they have a legitimate use for those services as well. Nothing like being morally consistent.

Under this model, it would be better to work under a "that which is not expressly permitted is denied" model. Proxy the HTTP requests to make sure that the customers aren't doing anything illegal, log all the e-mail in case law enforcement wants to take a peek (with a warrant, issued by a rubberstamp, errr judge, of course).

I wonder if the position that these folks are taking leaves them open to prosecution if something illegal does happen on their network? Seems to me that they are no longer common carriers if they are editing their customer's content.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[drinkypoo]

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong. Yes, that _is_ the primary reason. If you can demonstrate to them that you have reasons for using a p2p file-sharing program which do not violate their principles, then they will remove the block for you individually.

As a beneficial side-effect, getting rid of, or limiting the 5% of our users who used these programs, saved us over 50% of our bandwidth. We are not weeping at their loss.

I do not believe you.

I do not think that you are lying (necessarily) but I think that you are wrong. Many things done in the name of principles are actually done in the pursuit of money.

The fact that you are a mere employee means that you are not privy to what goes on at the highest levels. You might think you are, but you are wrong.

These people are in the business of making money. If it made them more money to allow P2P applications, and not less, then they would not discourage its use over these false pretenses. Even if they truly believe that getting music and/or video (or other files) via P2P is wrong, if they truly believe that stopping P2P will stop the transmission of those types of files, they are stupid. They of course cannot have this particular belief, because they are managing to keep the company afloat.

Or in other words; simply by operating an ISP they are in fact condoning all kinds of illegal (and potentially unethical) behavior by making it possible. It's not like P2P is the only way to get warez, music, and movies; there are many IRC channels to which one can go to download verified site lists. So now they have to ban FTP, HTTP, and IRC to prevent warez distribution. If they are not doing so, then they lack the courage of their convictions.

Of course, doing so would cost them probably all of their customers. The only ones they'd be left with is people who use their connection only for email. Oh wait, you can get warez through email too. So basically, they have conveniently blocked only the activity which costs them the most money but left other avenues open for piracy. This makes them hypocrites.

If you are not a troll, you have been deluded, and allowed yourself to be deluded, probably because you want to believe that they are good people. In reality they are like a version of the post office which refuses to send your letters somewhere because of a belief that any mail to or from a location must be criminal in nature. That is not the post office's job, and this is not the ISP's job.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

"We just don't have the resources to catch everybody."

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[toddhisattva]

Not all businesses are run by predatory immoral bastards.

Evidently some are run and populated by sanctimonious shit-heads.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Coppit]

You are basically saying the medium is immoral somehow, without regard to the message.

Question: Why did Napster lose in court?

Bonus question: Why are fully automatic weapons illegal, but semi automatic are legal?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[supernova87a]

It's interesting how selective some people/companies can be when deciding what things do or don't violate moral principles. Read: "we just decided that we don't want to let you do this, so we're saying it's immoral."

Here's the thing, people -- not everything that is illegal is wrong, and not everything that is wrong is illegal. It's up to rational people to think and make those decisions.

Does that isp use products assembled by poor exploited workers from 3rd world countries? If so, why don't they declare that wrong? Or would that be too inconvenient for them to stand up for? In my opinion, that's a whole lot more immoral than some file sharing which deprives company executives of revenue.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Wolfier]

>These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because
>the owners feel that they promote activities which
>are immoral and wrong

"Immoral and wrong" eat my shit. You'd better have said "illegal", or admit that the bandwidth saving is the original intention and NOT a side effect.

How do you define "immaral" or "wrong"? Is swearing "wrong"? If so, you might want to block slashdot and IRC as well. Is porn "immoral"? If so you might as well block HTTP as well.

So, my opinion is, your post contradicts with your action. Either:

A: you are a damn lier, or
B: your employer has successfully brainwashed you

Both are correctable, so don't panic.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[waytoomuchcoffee]

Question: Why did Napster lose in court?

The court ordered Napster shut until it could guarantee none of the music it allowed to be shared was copyright protected. It did not rule that p2p was illegal. In fact, it stated that it had other, legal uses besides copying protected work, which was why it could stay in business as long as it fulfilled the court order (or ran out of money, which is what ultimately happened). What is your point?

Besides, you seem to be confusing "immoral" with "illegal". You might want to read the rest of this subthread, where these issues have already been addressed.

Auto weapons are illegal because the Congress said they were. Not all guns (the medium) are illegal. Again, what is your point here?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking moron.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Palarran]

Sort of like a TV, no?

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[XO]

That's awfully nice of you to say that. NOw.. why did you say that? hmm..

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Peyna]

you don't make 'requests' with a tv though, everything is bouncing off your antenna all the time and you have to tune that frequency.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[duren686]

I think his point is that most of Kazaa's usage is centered around trading illegal materials. Kazaa has a really weak legal argument for it (people trade legal things like public speeches and independant music) and most of the users don't abide by this statement.

However, the other stuff you mentioned (with the possible exception of usenet) is used mainly for perfectly legal purposes, so it wouldn't make sense to prevent its use.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[joFFeman]

Chasuk said "Not all businesses are run by predatory immoral bastards." agreed. for example, i once saw a child on the sidewalk selling kool-aid. just because not all businesses are run by 'predatory immoral bastards' is no reason to believe roadrunner isn't screwing people over. i don't think little suzy downloading mp3s of britney spears makes her a thief... i think it makes her an idiot, but not a thief. even if it is technically against the law, i think an isp offering 'unlimited internet access' should refrain from LIMITING in regards to specific ports or protocols.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[nelsonal]

T1s are the connectins for people who want o fill them up all the time, and run what ever they like on them. As you noted they cost alot more, although I would guess the prices carry about the same mark up. You want to get a t1 like connection at a price that is set for normal users. That's a free lunch, enjoy it while it lasts, but don't expect it forever.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

>> You don't have to "feel" sharing warez across p2p is theft, it IS by definition.

"theft, n. 1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it"

When you make a copy of something, you don't "remove" anything, therefore it is not theft.

What you are "depriving" the rightful owner of is *not* the property, but their chance to *sell* you a copy of that property they made themselves, instead of you making your own copy for free.

That's why there's a law which says the owner has the *right* to copy it, but you don't (unless they grant it to you). That's why it's called "copy-right," not "theft," capisce?

This is not just semantics. There could just as easily be a law which states the owner has no right to charge you for making a copy.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatic weapons are not illegal to own in the U.S. They are heavily taxed and regulated.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Kwikymart]

You want to get a t1 like connection at a price that is set for normal users.

I didnt say anything of the sort. I said something completely different. Here is my exact quote:

Why cant a t1 connection be cheaper (but not as cheap as cable) so we (the geeks) can all bypass this crap?

What I want is for a T1 or similar connection to be cheaper as for enthusiasts to be able to afford it, but not cheap enough so it would be worth everyone else getting one.

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone moderated the parent post as "troll" in spite of the fact that it was pertinent and insightful. Well, to whoever did that: I am metamodding your ass right now to "unfair".

Re:"angry ex-customers"

[joshuarat]

Interesting. A company witha moral back bone? (not saying anything about copyrights/sharing/whatever) but a company, built for profit, that sticks to whatever it's founders morals may be? Heck, the Catholic church has not managed to do that.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What about Peek-A-Booty?

[rickthewizkid]

Would a program such as cDc's Peek-A-Booty be able to work around the use of such port filters?

What if we were to move the kazaa style P2P programs to a port that is often used for other things, say 21 (ftp) or 80 (www) - I don't think that RoadRunner would want to block _those_ ports...

Then again, my DSL provider (Verizon) blocks my port 80 inbound to "protect me against viruses" - I believe that RR does this as well... am I right?

-RickTheWizKid

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[waspleg]

no
i have rr in cincinnati and have not had 80 blocked..

although abny time i updated teh IP's of my domains i lose my connction as soon as the DNS change propagates until i physically reset the modem a billion times and it releases the address and give sme a new one

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[ogre2112]

In Raleigh, NC we have zero blocked ports on Roadrunner. (Fingers crossed)

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on your typing, I'm going to guess that you only have to reset the modem once and it just takes you a billion tries to actually hit the button.

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[waspleg]

wasn't that clever, i guess tha'ts why you're anonymous

fucktard

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alot of times the ports themselves may not be blocked. Here on the Kansas State University campus, they preform traffic analysis to determine what ports file sharing programs are using. They dont block those ports, they simply max the available bandwidth to somethink like 2kb a second.

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

what up, raleigh /.ers? i run BritSys DSL. slower than RR but the service has been amazing...

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'm anonymous because I'm so certain that if I wasn't, you'd track me down, come to my house, and beat me up.

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[Anonymous Coward]

go troll, go! lol

Re:What about Peek-A-Booty?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in Cincinnati.

Problem with these programs.

[papasui]

Is that they eat up a large amount of the upstream, which when is being maxed by a large number of customers will begin to have a negative effect on the downstream for other customers. Beyond this, you are not allowed to run a server with their residential service so if your sharing your violating your contract.

Re:Problem with these programs.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they don't eat much upstream, because the upstream is tightly capped.

As for banning all servers, that's another part of their problem.

Re:Problem with these programs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would the ISP has a smaller pipe down stream than upstream other than the fact that it is cheaper ?

Last time I checked t1, OC3, OC48 etc are full duplex and full wire speed.

Re:Problem with these programs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't I technically running a server everytime I request a webpage? I mean, I am sending info out, right?

Running a "server"?

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

I guess if you get completely technical, it could be considered a breach of contract. Most ISPs have clauses against running servers of any kind on their networks. P2P programs could be considered servers since they "serve" content to other clients who want it. I'd say they are justified, but it still kinda sux...

Oh well, at least the RIAA didn't force it on them, they had the initiative to do it on their own...

Re:Running a "server"?

[buss_error]

Who is Road Runner's largest client? Who owns the cable co's in the cities discussed?

My guess is that RIAA didn't have to do squat. Now you know why letting large media conglomerates own everything in sight is a Bad Idea(tm).

Re:Running a "server"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Roadrunner is owned by AOLTW, which is a member of the RIAA.

Re:Running a "server"?

[ocbwilg]

I guess if you get completely technical, it could be considered a breach of contract. Most ISPs have clauses against running servers of any kind on their networks. P2P programs could be considered servers since they "serve" content to other clients who want it. I'd say they are justified, but it still kinda sux...

But what if I use AOL Instant Messenger (AOL/TW owned of course) to directly transfer a file to another AIM user? That is also a kind of P2P, and my PC is technically acting like a server. Would they be justified in blocking that?

Re:Running a "server"?

[i0chondriac]

I guess I'm in violation of my contract if I run the X windowing system, right?

Re:Running a "server"?

[CoyoteGuy]

Last I checked, peer to peer meant no server involved... just generic clients connecting to each other..

Re:Running a "server"?

[Anthracks]

I think from a low-level standpoint though, each one could be considered a server to the other. Your client has to connect to another computer, and any computer that accepts incoming connections can be said to be hosting a server. From dictionary.com, a server is "a kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester". Kazaa sitting on your computer waiting for another Kazaa client to call up and say "do you have this file?" is fulfilling that definition.

Re:Running a "server"?

[ScottBob]

Roadrunner is owned by AOLTW, which is a member of the RIAA.

Yessiree, folks, the parent of a record company also owns the wire connected to the side of your house, so therefore, you're paying for music whether you download it through that piece of wire or you buy it stamped onto a piece of plastic sold by the same company, right? I think those who are on any ISP owned by a member of RIAA or MPAA ought to be entitled to download all the music they want, because they're getting paid for it, anyway. In the meantime, I'm hoping and dreaming that the big media conglomerates will collapse as spectacularly as Enron and Worldcom did.

Re:Running a "server"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most ISPs have clauses against running servers of any kind on their networks.

Winamp now has an http server in it, does that mean its banned?

Re:Running a "server"?

[RickHunter]

Server clauses are total bull. They're basically generic "prevent any activity we don't like or find remotely inconvenient" clauses. Why? Well, what exactly is a server? Something that listens on ports? Ooops, you just banned ICQ, AIM, and normal FTP, in addition to countless other programs. Something intended to provide data in response to remote requests? Oops, same problem, and you've also just banned web browsers.

So, please, tell me. What exactly is a "server"?

Re:Running a "server"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, at least the RIAA didn't force it on them, they had the initiative to do it on their own...

Sarcasm? Road Runner is owned by Time Warner, a member of the RIAA/MPAA.

Re:Running a "server"?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I guess I'm in violation of my contract if I run the X windowing system, right?

If it's a publicly available X server (!), then yes, you would be.

Then again, the ISP's probably only concerned with huge bandwidth users; if you had a publicly-available SSH server, yet you were the only one who used it, I doubt you'd draw enough attention to yourself to cause a problem. Same with that hypothetical public X server.

[on by] More random crap at 0! Enjoy!

[Anonymous Coward]

PJ4PzkOXWl

oh no...

[zootread]

oh no!!...

This is not cool.. Kazaa has great legitimate uses like the one I just stated. They have no reason to block it.

But seriously folks...

[mark-t]

How many people use Kazaa for stuff that's legal that couldn't be obtained through other avenues? I've yet to find even one.

Napster was actually used legally by some people (albeit a far cry from the majority), I've never met anyone who's used Kazaa for anything but media piracy.

Re:But seriously folks...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never met anyone who's used Kazaa for anything but media piracy.

I don't use it for piracy, I primarily use it for downloading people's inbox.dbx, amazing some of the stuff people are accidently sharing.

Re:But seriously folks...

[Reziac]

This is slander. Why, I've seen some people use Kazaa to share worms and trojans!

[thinking] Um. Wonder exactly *cough* who was doing said sharing??

Re:But seriously folks...

[PaulBellini]

How many people use Kazaa for stuff that's legal that couldn't be obtained through other avenues? I've yet to find even one.

How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez? As for the other stuff, I'm sure it could be obtained through other avenues (i.e. http)

Re:But seriously folks...

[Ironpoint]

Please... come up with an original argument. This type of argument has been used in so many debates I bet it has a name. I'll give it a name: The fundamentalist's flawed formula. You'll hear this in every morality debate. The reason the formula is flawed is because it only works if the debater is fundamentally and indisputably correct. Look for negatives such as no, never, noone.

an example:

No one needs a handgun and they're only used to commit murders. I've never met anyone who's used handguns for anything but murder.

Law enformcement officers, rangers, hunters, soldiers, ranchers, sports shooters, and Buffalo Bill would all disagree.

Re:But seriously folks...

[mark-t]

You are absolutely right... but as I said, if there IS significant non-infringing use, point it out to me. I know a number of people who've used Kazaa, and each and every single one of them have used it to download movies or music. Just because you can contrive a legal use for it that could, with no real significant extra effort, be done just as well with other mechanisms doesn't make it right. As I said, show me the proof. Of the people I knew that used Napster, about 1 out of every 5 or 6 of them were actually using it within the rights granted by "fair use" -- although this is hardly a majority, it is still significant. I was dead-set opposed to the RIAA's attack against Napster even though I never once used it.

It's funny... you accuse me of not coming up with an original argument, yet you try to lend strength to your own view by coming up with an example that's outside the domain of the discussion entirely. We weren't talking about handguns (which, by the way, I know only ONE person who has ever used a handgun illegally, and he is now in jail. Conversely, I know many dozens of people who use handguns completely within the domain of the law, so unless the people with whom I'm acquainted do not represent at least some marginally unbiased form of cross section of society, I'd say that's SOME evidence for my point). So, it would appear to me that you pulled your example argument out of a hat randomly -- or have you not had the pleasure of meeting ANY of the people in the categories that you mentioned? If that is the case, then perhaps both of our views are biased by the limits of our experience.

Show me a significant usage of Kazaa that _IS_ legal, and maybe I'll shut up about it.

Re:But seriously folks...

[mark-t]

How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez? As for the other stuff, I'm sure it could be obtained through other avenues (i.e. http)

Well... how much free softare is there out there? Seems like there's a heckuva lot... all the GNU stuff, Linux, FreeBSD... and that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Seems like almost all free and/or open source software is available via ftp from somewhere, and while http DOES exist, ftp was here first. Many ftp servers were serving free software via anonymous ftp before http even existed.

So... at least in the case of ftp, it's possible to actually _show_ substantial non-infringing use. So if you're going to answer a question with a question, at least come up with one that actually is commensurate with reality -- it will lend some semblance of strength to your argument. Better yet, if you actually hold to the opposing view, present some evidence to that effect. My evidence is, admittedly, biased by the limits of my personal experience, but I seriously doubt that the number of people with whom I'm acquainted could represent such a wrongly skewed cross section of society that it would not be SOME sort of indication about what the rest of the world is like. If I'm wrong, please show me how.

Re:But seriously folks...

[bbqdeath]

OK, so all your friends are thieves. How is this my problem?

Really?

[Rupert]

The symptoms they describe (gradually decreasing download speeds) don't sound like RR activity to me. If I were an ISP and wanted to block a port it would be blocked. I can't imagine RR going to great lengths to effect a bandwidth fade when they can just shut the whole thing off.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is probably how they have it working. It's not portblocking per se, but they probably are injecting extra packets that screw things up when they detect excessive bandwidth usage. It becomes too damned obvious when they actually block ports, and some apps might get fscked up, so they just throttle down the upload speed (kazaa works on an up/down ratio - if you aren't uploading, it won't let you download quickly).

Re:Really?

[ogre2112]

BLocking a port in this can't wouldn't work, would it? Or, does Kazaa just use one port?

I was under the impression it used several dynamically, but I may be wrong.

Re:Really?

[Peyna]

Do you really think they are that smart? I wouldn't give them that much credit. I would suspect they are either wholly blocking the port or throttling it at their router. Either way, what you say about kazaa is not true. My firewall (read iptables) gets thousands of hits from people TRYING to get stuff off of me when I run kazaa, etc.; but I never have any trouble downloading.

Re:Really?

[dimator]

Well, my guess is: what the users who report gradual fade-off are actually witnessing is the client's use of a running average to tell you at what kps you're downloading. If I'm leeching at top speed, and the connection goes down, it's going to take a while for the client to report "0 kps" as it will perform an average over time of how fast my download is going.

Is this really wrong

[ViceClown]

Im not trying to troll or draw flames but by the letter of the law - trading copy-writed music is illegal. I'de rather have the music swapping services shut down then have the record companies try more wide-spread cd protection that would further limit legitimate fair use. Im not saying I agree with the way the system works now... but Im not going to cry when I can't use music-swappers illegally anymore.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Is every use of these services illegal? No. You can do the same things using http, or ftp, or email, or irc/dcc, or... If you start saying "This can be used for illegal purposes and needs to be shutdown" then pretty soon, the whole internet will be shutdown.

Don't let the RIAA convince you that all music is illegal to download. It's not.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Balagan]

Im sorry, but it isnt clear that sharing copyrighted music in a non-commercial way is illegal. Regardless of how you personally feel about it, it is something that is highly debatable. Besides, this is a free country (in some ways at least), where laws can be argued and *changed*. Whether file-sharing is or should be illegal is in no way a settled matter. The reality of whether it is or not can change from one day to the next, from one year to the next, from one sway of the courts and of public opinion to the next. If you personally feel file-sharing should be illegal that is fine as long as you can back it up and dont just try to pre-empt discussion by asserting that you are right and everyone else is doomed to failure because of some undeniable fact of your choosing before any discussion even begins.

As far as im concerned, the fights over the legality of filesharing, the nature of copyright and free/fair use, the growth of technology and the internet, and all the rest of the assorted battles that are related to these are in no way over yet.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Jester99]

Im not going to cry when I can't use music-swappers illegally anymore.

Just to play devil's advocate: What about all the people who did use the service legally? There were plenty of people (myself, for instance) who actually downloaded music to test it -- and then bought it. And I also downloaded music that wasn't owned by the RIAA -- the content authors agree to let their music be distributed.

No, you're only going to cry when they go after something you use. But by then, you'll be lucky if anybody's going to have a shoulder for you to cry on.

"They came for the communists, but I wasn't a communist. They came for the terrorists, but I wasn't a terrorist. They came for the hackers, but I wasn't a hacker. Then they came for me, because I was the last one left."

Re:Is this really wrong

[ogre2112]

Kazaa isn't illegal. Trading copywrited songs is, yes. But I can trade copywrited songs over HTTP also. Should they block that?

I really don't see the point in doing what RR is.. There is a way around *everything*.

They already had a press release stating they would charge customers more money if they exceeded a monthly download quota. Is blocking Kazaa required? It seems redundant to me.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Hella rant, but point well made. With all the discussion here at slashpot about copyright issues, you'd think people would be able to spell it correctly.

oh yeah, for the dumbasses: THAN and THEN are two seperate words with different meanings. Get a dictionary and RTFM.

OR does not equal ARE. Just because you speak with a mouthful of marbles doesn't mean you must write like you have a brain full of the same.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

downloading it to "test" it? that's not legal. I think that if they put it on the radio for free then you should be able to time shift it, but nonetheless, what you are discussing IS illegal, even if you pay for it eventually. I'm not saying that's right, but it's the law.

Re:Is this really wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

so have you ever loaned your brother a cd?

how about your cousin?

newphew?

sister in law?

neighbor?

well THEN YOU SHOULD BE HUNG BY YOUR NUTS YOU MUSIC SHARING CRIMINAL!!!!!

only you paid for the right to hear those songs, not your brother, not your cousin, not your sister-in-law, and not your neighbor.

did you recently buy an art print or poster? if you let one person in your room, WHO GAVE YOU PERMISSION TO ALLOW OTHERS TO VIEW THAT POSTER?????

YOU SHOULD BE EXECUTED WITH LEECHES AND RAZOR BLADES!!!!!!

ever take a boom box to the park? and some strangers heard the cassette you were playing???!?!!!?!?

THAT'S ILLEGAL!!!!! they never payed for the right to listen to a recording you purchased, so you should be flogged and beaten to an inch of your life.

everything's so conveniently black and white for you ehh????

well i'll tell you what.....it's sure easy to pick on the most defined of cases.

of course my examples are rediculous. just as your point was so obvious and so repeately posted over and over.

in essence you are saying "illegal activity SHOULD be stopped"

WHOAAAA!!! DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT BY YOURSELF?!!@#$%

Can I ask you what the point of stating the obvious is?

do we really need someone like you stating something that 95% of us already know????

you sound like a fucking parrot.

might as well just cut and paste a link to RIAA and other such crap.

as i said, most of us know file sharing is a problem.
what most of us are discussing is to what lengths corporations will be allowed to stomp on our rights.

i don't break the laws...yet i'm getting tcp/ip ports shutdown on my internet connection.

what the fuck is going to happen when anyone is capable of breaking the laws on ANY tcp/ip port?!@#$%

shut them all down!???

you should try making a REAL insightful contribution. instead of the broken record that you sound like.

i would not even post to this topic, cause i really don't have anything useful to contribute, but i'm tired of seeing people like you post the same old tired crap.

1 "it's wrong"

2 "it's right"

3 "i don't care"

Knee Jerk

[El Pollo Loco]

My initial reaction was one of "Fuck those ho's", they can't do that! But then i realized that they own the network, and i am paying to use it. The worst that would happen is I would switch services. But p2p users are a small minority(even if the riaa and mpaa would have you belive they aren't), so they wouldn't lose too much money, and might even make more because other users would have faster access.

Re:Knee Jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

What good is the faster access if everytime you take advantage of it your ISP blocks you out?

Hell, they may as well limit us to 56k on broadband, thats all we 'really need' for legal uses, right?

No real choices

[BuildMonkey]

Here in central Fort Worth (700,000 strong), within walking distance of a University (Texas Christian University) we have only two choices: dial-up or Charter cable modem. DSL is NOT available in this area, despite being within 4 miles of downtown. Charter has consistently downgraded serivce in the three years its been available, with two steps-down in speed (3Mbps -> 1 Mbs -> 128 kbps), changing from static IPs to DHCP, and going from unrestricted to port blocking (no mail servers, web servers, etc.) If they offered a higher class of service (static IP, ability to run servers are important to me, 128 kbps isn't a big problem) I'd jump on it. They keep talking about adding better service tiers, but never get around to it.

Re:No real choices

[Anonymous Coward]

Charter here in birmingham alabama limits us to 1.5 megs a sec but of course its easy to uncap so you can have whatever you want :)

Re:No real choices

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope you enjoy being raided by the FBI, dumbass.

How ironic. I'm using roadrunner. Cannot download.

[RyanFenton]

I can't download any files through "Save target as..." in Internet Explorer for the past half a day. Even attempting to right-click links to save web pages that load normally results in a 7-second wait followed by "Internet Explorer was unable to open this internet site..." I was wondering what was happening.

Ironically, I CAN still use Kazaa Light - it's working perfectly. I've been able to download several techno songs mentioned in a recent slashdot article. Incidently, happy hardcore is a fun little sub-genre, though I still prefer video game remixes - which I can't download now from overclocked!

I'm located in central Florida. Perhaps the local Time Warner folks are just experimenting now. I'll call tech support monday if nothing resolves itself.

It appears that another peice of evidence that ISP's can't police intellectual properties and still be expected to provide a stable service, if that's what they are doing in my case. :^)

Ryan Fenton

Come on

[scott1853]

The discussions are the result of a single post saying it's not working. Most replies to the primary posts say that everything is working fine for them. Other provide technically inaccurate information such as Kazaa "slowing down" before it just completely stops and then attribute that to port blocking. How about some general skepticism here before ranting about some mega-corp stomping all over the end users rights. Here's one of the initial posts:

"The only way i can search is if i log off and on real fast on kazaa. Doing that i can get one search off. I resume downloads fine jus no searches. I'm running XP if that helps. Can anyone please help. Thanks"

Hmmm, XP, and it works for a couple seconds and then stops. Yeah, rights, there's somebody at the RR NOC sitting there watching all traffic and manually flipping a light switch that controls your port 1214.

The second post linked to in the article is of about the same quality only by a jumpy conspiracy theorist. I couldn't stand to read the other 2.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be more suspicious of port throttling rather than blocking, which is possible to do. That would fit some of the symptoms a bit.

Re:Come on

[dwsauder]

They are probably having problems because they have AOL installed. :-)

Seriously, AOL is known to have problems with Windows XP.

Re:Come on

[Reziac]

You bring up a good point. I haven't read the posts in question, and don't use kazaa myself, but I used to read the kazaa bug report forum. This slowdown problem has apparently plagued *some* kazaa users since way back when, since that (or variants thereof) was a common complaint on the bug forum.

Re:Come on

[Unknown Relic]

I have found that this behaviour of searches not working properly can actually be caused by running older versions of Kazaa. It has been my experience that running more than one or two versions out of date will cause serious problems with searching. This is most likely done on purpose by Kazaa to ensure that all the users are running the latest and greatest distributed computing software which was the topic of countless other /. articles.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

Automatted port monitoring dumbass.

>>Yeah, rights, there's somebody at the RR NOC sitting there watching all traffic and manually flipping a light switch that controls your port 1214.

Re:Come on

[Phocker_]

I live in upstate new york, and I am a RR customer...on that note...what RR has done here to heavy bandwidth users is block kazaa upstream only. Upstream traffic is not completely blocked however, data seems to go in 128k bursts every couple of minutes. While most of those uploads will time out after 30 seconds or so of inactivity, i have had a few small uploads (approx. 700K-1M) actually complete over an extended period of time. I set my file transfer port to 1214 on AIM and attempted to upload to a friend, and the same periodic bursts occured..

I emailed then about this a few months ago....got a message that basically said RR reserves the right to block users from using any file sharing program...the response did not however suggest that the port blocking/whatever was done to help curb illegal file trading.

Re:Come on

[Blue Stone]

It's strange but the poster describes my experience of Kazaa to a "t." I have WinME, and a 56k modem. I can usually squeeze a couple of searches off, but after that, nada, until I re-start Kazaa.

Re:Come on

[ajs]

Sounds like they've QoSed you into the ground. Good tactic, actually. You get to use the network, but real traffic wins.

What do you expect

[Sayten241]

What can one excpect the ISPs to do now that the record companies are getting on their asses about this file swapping. Granted, I don't agree with Road Runner (which just so happens to be my current ISP and one I would recomend to anyone because I have had absolutely no problems with) blocking the use of certain peer to peer software, however, I cannot blame them in light of recent events.

And More Happy Ones, Too

[kmellis]

"If this becomes more widespread, they will have many angry (and former) customers."

And probably an even larger number of happier customers who suddenly notice that they have bandwidth again.

P2P is cool in theory; but in practice people are using it merely to move around huge pirated mp3s and mpegs and as a result a small number of users are consuming a grossly disproportionate amount of bandwidth. It's a tragedy of the commons. See previous /. stories on how this has already played out at college campuses across the US (and elsewhere).

I'm in Austin, and I've actually switched away from Road Runner to SBC ADSL. Why? Because, of course, the bandwidth I saw decreased dramatically over the years since I was an early adopter; and they were charging me too damn much money, anyway. I don't get a ton of bandwidth with my ADSL connection, but the service is more reliable, and it's less expensive. And so far, I've not seen any port blocking or scanning for servers -- something I've been hearing about from the cable side of the fence.

Honestly, I'm ambivalent about a lot of these issues as my idealistic and practical sides of my personality come into conflict. Ideally, I'd like the consumer's access to the internet to be pretty much like what it meant to be hooked up to the interent in the good old days before it became commoditized -- the internet was designed for hosts to be servers, not just clients or even peers. I should be able to run my own web server, my own smtp and pop/imap server, my own nntp server, my own streaming multimedia server, share my filesystem, run distributed applications, network games, P2P apps....whatever. To me, that's part of the whole point. On the other hand, as a practical matter, there still isn't enough bandwidth available for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to use their home internet connections this way. Yeah, there's a lot of dark fiber -- but none of it is the last mile connections. And some people are consuming far more networking resources than they are paying for. That's a legitimate problem, and it certainly can't be justified on the basis of a need to share files that are illegal in the first place.

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[Anonymous Coward]

>> And probably an even larger number of happier customers who suddenly notice that they have bandwidth again.

Very doubtful, at least with RoadRunner. You may not be aware of this since you switched to DSL, but RoadRunner is now capping uploads at 384Kbps and downloads at 1.5Mbps for standard residential service. They'll sell you 786Kbps up and 2Mbps down for another $35/month on "Business Class".

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[Anonvmous Coward]

I agree with you.

P2P generates a lot of babble with very low throughput. It's decentralized nature makes it really easy to keep it going, but truth be told, the amount of data flying around just to get to where you're going presents a huge problem.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised P2P hasn't caused a larger ruckus than it has. I think that the devleopers of technologies like this should look into ways of reducing the chatter and making it more optimal. I mean think about it, the ISP's not going to care if your 1.5 megabit connection's downloading 4 128 streams. Your ISP is going to care, though, if everybody who uses it is being bombarded with "Hello? Are you there?!?" requests on commonly used P2P ports to the point that the connection's of little use. The last time I turned off Kazaa, it took 3 days for my connection to return to normal.

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[dwsauder]

Good point about a tragedy of the commons. The Internet was build with an idea of some degree of cooperation among the parties involved. So far, at least at the backbone service providers, it has worked out pretty well. But there are problems at the edge of the network -- specifically with cable modem access. I have a cable modem and don't see any problems with bandwidth hogs. I suppose if I started seeing bandwidth hogs, I would not be very happy. (I don't use any p2p applications.)

However... I don't think blocking ports is a good way to handle the situation. If it is just a small number of subscribers who are consuming too much bandwidth, then it seems like those subscribers could be dealt with on an individual basis. They should be sent a notice that because of the excessive bandwidth they use, that they will be charged a premium over and above their current subscription rate. Really, the solution to the file sharing systems like KaZaa is to make those who run the servers to pay for their use of bandwidth.

Now, I must say, I have a big problem with ISPs blocking ports. Why? Well, just imagine what it would be like if telephone companies started controlling what kind of communications could pass over the phone lines. When online services, including Internet access, started becoming popular, the telcos had real problems with the change in usage. Whereas calls used to average less than three minutes, they found that those who used online services were making calls that lasted much longer. It seems like they had every financial incentive to restrict modem calls. If they had, then it is doubtful that the Internet revolution of the 1990s would have ever happened.

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[tabdelgawad]

" And probably an even larger number of happier customers who suddenly notice that they have bandwidth again."

I thought this was no longer an issue with the new bandwidth-capped DOCSIS modems everyone uses nowadays. And of course this has never been an issue with DSL.

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[balloonhead]

Agreed. The problem with what is happening here is that reasonable and fair use is being blocked. But the "good thing" is that an awful lot of "unfair" and illegal use is being blocked too.

Most of the bandwidth that the ISPs are worried about is being used by a minority of heavy downloaders. They are a business, they have every right to be agitated by this. This is just the simplest way for them to cut out a lot of heavy users of whom (almost guaranteed) very few are legitimately using that bandwidth.

Sure, in the process a lot of legitimate downloaders might have a few problems, but they feel they are doing it for the "greater good" (and a big part of "greater" to them means "their own") but the point is that most users will be affected very little or not at all.

It is true to say a bandwidth cap/meter would be fairer - this would allow legitimate users to use their ports as they want and warez users would have to fork out for extra - but as I said they are a business. The likelihood is that they have looked at what they could do and worked out the most cost effective / efficient way of doing things (although they may be wrong).

Another thought - could they be under pressure from the recording industry? Does their service make them an accessory in the same way that Napster represented a central server which could be closed down?

Re:And More Happy Ones, Too

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, let's say we're moving around mp3s and mpegs we own the copyright for. Now the story changes slightly. Broadband users are using a grossly disproportionate amount of bandwidth, compared to dial-up users. But I thought the whole reason for broadband was to have more bandwidth. What happens when morons reallize they can use broadband as their phone system or video conferencing. The problem is not the users but the ISPS who would rather people create P2P wireless nets and route their own broadband traffic than provide customers the bandwidth they pay for. Unlimitted 10Mbps access should let me download at 10Mbps, or they should charge for bandwidth usage from the start so I know not to purchase an internet connection through them. Nobody knows how legal P2P content is. And in the future it will be almost impossible to find out. So let's not assume people are guilty until proven innocent. Please? Fellow American.

Beware they have sophisticated blocking programs

[Buggered Choirboy]

A few months ago, we were using a Bell-Sympatico DSL
line for our web server. Easy-dns provided(bell.easydns.com) provided the dns. Weirdly, out site would not load for our customers. I took the graphics out and the pages loaded fine. They had blocked graphics to port 80. All kinds of graphics: jpeg, gif, and png. I think there is software and/or hardware to block any specific protocol they want.

This is already happening in Australia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh yes. This happened a few months back with Optus in Australia "blocking" kazaa. In this case it is not so much blocked as rendered pretty useless.. You can still connect but the speeds you reach will be very very throttled (like 1k/sec).

I guess the concern is always there that this could prompt more blocking if there was no uproar but really not many people have recourse to complain to optus about this because after all - almost every single person who uses kazaa has the intent to break copyright law.

I would never consider what the RIAA is doing on the kazaa network with regards to phantom mp3's and the like to be wrong because they have to do something. Imagine there was no fightback against copyright violation - people would get out of control.

The great thing about being blocked by Optus for me is that I don't have to use that crappy virus ridden, fake file filled network any more. You wouldn't believe how much trouble that has caused for a great number of cable users in Australia on overpriced bandwidth connections. Companies like telstra have been sending out bills charging people almost $200 (100 USish) per gig worth of extra usage caused by idle kazaa programs. I wonder if optus will lift their kazaa blocking when their metered bandwidth comes into play :)

RIP Audiogalaxy though, if ever there was a good network that was it.

Re:This is already happening in Australia.

[aivic]

I guess you are a regular reader of Whirlpool too I see? :)

Re:This is already happening in Australia.

[NightRain]

Just like me :)

Ray (Macey)

Re:This is already happening in Australia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whirlpool is good :-)

There is a clause in the TOS

[waytoomuchcoffee]

There is a clause in the TOS restricting bandwidth, at least in the San Antonio RR TOS.

Subscriber acknowledges and agrees that Time Warner Cable shall have the right to monitor bandwidth utilization (i.e., volume of data transmitted) arising out of the Service provided hereunder at any time and on an on-going basis and to limit excessive use of bandwidth in order to effectuate these provisions and other terms hereof

Scary stuff. They, and only they, decide what "excessive use" really is.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[realdpk]

Heh, what are they gonna do, send out an e-mail. "You've used 125GB of bandwidth this month. Do you think this is effective?" Of course they decide what excessive use is.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[realdpk]

Previewing is hard. s/effective/excessive/

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, they could simply set a montly limit and advertize a certain amount of service each month for a certain amount of money.

Nahh, too simple and objective. Better to put vague clauses in the fine print so you can get away with whatever you feel like that day.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[waytoomuchcoffee]

There is a big difference deciding qualitatively vs. quantitatively.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[Erasmus Darwin]

"They, and only they, decide what "excessive use" really is."

Even so, I think they'd have a hard time justifying that a certain P2P application always qualifies as "excessive use" no matter what. For example, if I were to hop on to KaZaA just long enough to download a single 5 MB file (such as an mp3), my bandwidth usage is going to be significantly less than if I download a single 51 MB file via HTTP (such as the latest update for Day of Defeat). So they're limiting users even in cases of non-excessive bandwidth usage, which wouldn't be protected by that TOS clause.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[RickHunter]

No, I imagine it'd be more like "you're hosting MP3s for an indie music label that competes with us. Since we control all high-speed access in your region, we control your ability to do this. We have therefor capped your account to 2400 baud. Please enjoy your AOL-TW "Unlimited" service package."

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[realdpk]

1) Cable isn't designed for hosting. They disallow servers, too.

2) Cable is not the only high-speed access in your region. You ignore T1s and the like - it can cost the same to string up a T1 and sell wireless service to your neighbors (in an apartment complex, perhaps), too.

3) There are plenty of places that will let you host MP3s, many for free, and all available from your region. It won't come straight off your computer, but that's better for you anyways.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[RickHunter]

Cable isn't designed for hosting. They disallow servers, too.

Care to explain to me what exactly a server is? Is it something that listens for connections to a port? Ooops, you just banned ICQ, AIM, normal FTP, and half-a-dozen other commonly-used programs. Something that sends information at the request of a remote server? You just added web browsers to the list, and a bunch of other programs. What's that about not designed for hosting? Its an internet connection. There's no "designed" about it. You provide a connection to an IP network, and programs use that connection. They may not have intended people to use it for hosting, but when their average bandwidth figures and activity estimates are based around usage on dial-up connections (namely, some web browsing and e-mail), I'm rather suspicious of their judgement and motives.

The no server clause is bull. Its used as a generic stick against people doing things they don't approve of, but which forbidding in the ToS would drive away customers.

As a note, I get service through Eastlink, one of the best damn cable companies in the world. They don't block ports, they don't limit traffic beyond the usual cap, and they don't try to justify control grabs with these flimsy arguments about bandwidth. If they can do it way out here in the middle of no-where, why can't Roadrunner do it in the middle of huge American cities?

Oh, right, I forgot. The massive file trading would cause the immediate collapse of civilization. My bad.

Cable is not the only high-speed access in your region. You ignore T1s and the like - it can cost the same to string up a T1 and sell wireless service to your neighbors (in an apartment complex, perhaps), too.

For me, it isn't. In many places in the US, it is. In many of those same places, T1 lines are prohibitively expensive. Given the con games being run by many of the "high-speed" access companies (and their media giant owners) I expect to see more apartment complexes going this route. Get a T1 for the entire complex, cap each apartment at about 1 Mbps upstream and downstream, and spread the cost through the rent of the entire complex.

There are plenty of places that will let you host MP3s, many for free, and all available from your region. It won't come straight off your computer, but that's better for you anyways.

Ah, so because there's another way to speak, it doesn't matter that they're duct-taping my mouth shut? Wonderful logic, there.

I don't know of anywhere that lets you host MP3s for free. Care to name one that lets me host at whatever bitrate I want, puts them on file-sharing networks, provides HTTP and FTP access, and lets anyone and everyone download my music for free without registering for an account? And doesn't attempt to throw in contractual restrictions on the redistribution of material they host?

Oh, right. Audiogalaxy. Look what happened to them. Isn't the "free(*) market" wonderful?

(*) The usual limits apply to free. You may not be free to compete with certant government-protected industries. You are not free to compete with the rich. You are not free to sell "disruptive" products. You are not free to wonder if you're really free. You are not free to do business without employing at least five lawyers at all times.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

There's still an option for the P2P people - upgrade to the business class of RoadRunner service. Sure, it's $110/month vs. $45/month, but you do get more bandwidth in return.

Re:There is a clause in the TOS

[realdpk]

Cable internet access is designed to be weighted in one direction. That's what I meant. They need to keep the upstream usage to a minimum to maintain their bandwidth contracts. You're perverting my words - ICQ, AIM, etc would not be a problem.

Eastlink must have negotiated different bandwidth deals. I've never heard of them, myself. If they're smaller, maybe their providers don't care as much about their up/down ratio. The bigger providers, the ones that have to arrange peering and transit interrelationships and make them profitable, do care, and care very much.

I highly, _highly_ doubt that T1 service is not available in your area if cable modem is. So, sorry, I don't buy it. Maybe you're not in the US - that'd be the only way I could wrap my brain around that.

You want unrestricted, free hosting for your MP3s. You won't even let them require registration. Well, sorry, I can't help you, and it's likely nobody can.

one counterexample

[timothy]

is the one mentioned in the 'department' line -- L. Lessig had (or still has) a Morpheus server in his office at Stanford, serving up MP3s of his own speeches. In other words, content that he had complete right to distribute, and which he put on Morpheus to make distribution simpler.

Why more teachers don't put lectures up on the web in *some* format (MP3 / Ogg) and either on P2P networks or just as static files on websites is something I don't understand, but I think it would be great if they did. Likewise, audio / video materials in the public domain (like all the films at the Internet Film Archive) and which private citizens (like Lessig) *want* to release are all good justifications for not blocking things like kazaa. (Some bands, for instance, release some music for free, or even all of their music.) I've never used it, but I've seen kazaa being used, and as far as I can see, it's a neutral technology, as well suited for carrying indisputably legitimate content as it is for carrying stolen master tapes of illegal midget porn. If you don't think there's enough non-infringing content available, put up some funny home videos :)

timothy

Re:one counterexample

[Anonymous Coward]

The technology can be neutral and it doesn't matter. Where were the legions of people giving away their content on Napster after all of the pirates left? Where will the hordes be to fill AudioGalaxy now that it filters out pirated music? When I do a query for 'lecture' on gnutella, why is the only stuff that comes up happens to be pirated books and music? No one seems to be sharing the latest Lessig on my end.

People use these technologies, almost to exclusion, to steal content that would cost them money. They use the actions of an almost non-existent minority to justify the means they use to engage in activities that are not legitimate. You can do the mental masturbation thing and show a handful of people using these technologies for non-illegal purposes, but don't be surprised when no one at Road Runner or Sony Music cares.

Re:one counterexample

[Anthracks]

It doesn't necessarily seem as though KazAa and its brethren were exactly designed with that in mind though. To find a file you have to type in parts of the filename and then search based on that criteria, which for something like a mainstream artist's song, is pretty easy to guess. But what if you want all lectures on the geology of volcanoes? For all you know there are 50 different lectures on KazAa, but they're named "GEO203 Lecture 17.mp3". Until filesharing programs facilitate something like this, I don't see how they can really be used as a conduit for legal, niche-interest content.

Re:one counterexample

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you just had people typing in a descriptive file name instead of being lazy or limited by the amount of space for a file name, it'd be an entirely different matter. Don't blame the technology because the users are idiots.

Ooh, time for a fresh new alternative!

[B3ryllium]

Check out Ozone (Windows and Linux clients available)

http://www.ozone-o3.net/

Ozone was just recently opensourced on Sourceforge, as well.

Re:Ooh, time for a fresh new alternative!

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be so difficult for them to say WHAT this program does? There is nothing on that page that even tells you what "Ozone" is! I'm assuming it's another P2P program due to the context of your post, but geez..

Re:How ironic. I'm using roadrunner. Cannot downlo

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very unlikely they could disable your "Save As" without disabling all of your web access. Could it just be that IE is retarded? Try another browser like Mozilla or Opera. You do have choices you know.

[on by] More random crap at 0! Enjoy!

[Anonymous Coward]

One day i decided to pray
fOiiw4wN5B

then try to block their scans

[twistedcubic]

I noticed that my isp periodically scans me. So natuarally, I just collected the ip addresses (they use the same ones) and set my firewall rules to drop them. Gave me a little peace of mind.

Re:then try to block their scans

[bagofbeans]

My SBC DSL does the same, maybe once every few days (difficult to tell - I turn the modem and router off when the computers are off) and it's trapped by ZoneAlarm.

Interesting that Mozilla tries for server rights when installed, but works fine with just internet access rights.

Re:then try to block their scans

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a ZoneAlarm false alarm. Mozilla is only an internal server, not an external server.

Re:then try to block their scans

[bagofbeans]

Ok, so what's the effect of the server rights being revoked? Mozilla is a browser after all; why should it serve the intranet?

Usenet, people

[pfrets]

It can all be found on usenet. If you're going to spend an extra $20 a month, use it to subscribe to a decent news service.

Re:Usenet, people

[ogre2112]

IRC is quote wonderful as well for this purpose.

Re:Usenet, people

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah... Usenet is great. I just downloaded part 3 of 719 and I only have 716 more files to go! Woo Hoo! Go Usenet! Oh shit! Part 76, 84, and 123 are corrupted.... could someone please repost?

Re:Usenet, people

[pfrets]

Note the caveat...Get a DECENT news server, not that pile of crap that comes with ATT or RR or whoever runs your ISP.

The ATT or RR news server caches up to GB of messages....most subscription news services caches up to DAYS of messages. Your section 3 of 767 might actually be there, or someone has already posted the fixed section. I can request an object, and usually get it, within a few days.

Sorry, you sacrifice instant gratification...too bad! Most things worth getting are worth waiting for.

ATT Broadband blocking online game ports too...

[DigitalHammer]

ATT BI is blocking game ports in the Chicago area as well as file sharing progs... check out this link for more details...http://www.dslreports.com/comment/1900/2 8460

Re:How ironic. I'm using roadrunner. Cannot downlo

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Sounds like you have a virus of some sort, ace. I'm using RR in Orlando and have no problem. Not getting a context right-click menu for 7 seconds smacks of a java script (you should block those for any site you don't trust with your wallet, you know) preventing you from LEGAL operations. I'd get a virus scan done ASAP.... probably too late though. If RR tried to force scripts that blocked functionality of software that I was using, I'd sue in a heartbeat. They dont' have a right to interfere with my private systems. In fact, since I frequently work at home in addition to my regular schedule, they'd likely be sued by my employer (yes my employer is big enough to take on Time Warner in court.)

Charter and Kazaa problems

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been having problems with Kazaa lately, as well. However, I use Charter. When I load Kazaa, I get repeated disc-write errors, and disc activity shoots through the roof. This inevitably causes my PC to crash. If I then merely restart, then it happens as soon as the computer starts back up. This leads me to believe that it might be a memory resident virus, but I've used Norton and detected nothing. Any other users having this problem?

Re:Charter and Kazaa problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Your computer is fscked up, moron.

Re:Charter and Kazaa problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit fuck! I was going to say exactly the same thing!

Re:Charter and Kazaa problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess.. you run Windows as your OS?

You need to put it back in the box and take it back to Best Buy. Tell them you are too fucking stupid to own a computer!

There are other reasons to block Kazaa...

[Anonvmous Coward]

Before I comment on this, I just want to be clear that I don't support blocking of ports etc. However, my use of Kazaa opened up some insight into how it works, and why ISP's would kill it.

I used Kazaa solidly for a couple of weeks, trying to get a few eps of MST3k. When I was done, I shut down Kazaa and moved on. When I went to go play Quake, I noticed I had low ping times, but I was still getting intermitting lagging that was ruining my game.

I figured out what happened. Kazaa users were constantly bombarding my IP address with requests. This was happening so often that my connection was getting lagged from it. If AT&T had switched over my IP address, some other user would have gotten all that garbage. It is very possible that this isn't about bandwidth at all, but it's affect on other customers.

Only the ISPs really know for sure, but it is understandable, tho regrettable.

Re:Comcast already dealt with this

[MrPippers]

Comcast caps the upstream bandwidth at 16kB/s. I don't think any company will be looked favorably upon for blocking a filesharing network that everyone knows about. I'm glad Comcast didn't take that route.

Many Examples of Legal Content

[ROThompson]

As a long time user of Grokster, I have seen many examples of legal content: Jiveplayer files (www.jiveplayer.com) Independent Artists MP3's Free games Free software Free porn Grokster is always promoting independent musicians and their music...see their newsletters or the page that is on the front of Grokster when you start it. These independent artists WANT their MP3's distributed via Grokster.

Re:Many Examples of Legal Content

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunatley for the majority of MP3s out there..it's not the case.

Besides, there are other ways to distribute their music that would be more effective. If you don't know what you're looking for on these file sharing apps, you're not going to find it. The people downloading this way, were already looking for it. They could find it if the artist had a website for it...

Where as if there is no KaZaA, Grokster, Gnutella, whatnot, there would be a serious drop in illegal trade. The days of putting them on the web are all but gone with the DCMA....

Re:Many Examples of Legal Content

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever you want to type DMCA remember that though it might have been passed in D.C. MA had nothing to do with it.

Earthlink and Charter Pipeline too?

[flacco]

I almost never use P2P software, but recently I did notice that my cable modem connection speed overall seemed to drop significantly if Gnutella was running. And, that I had trouble actually connecting to the file I was trying to get, even after trying for hours overnight.

After shutting down Gnutella, speed went back up. I think there was far too little actual network traffic resulting from Gnutella to cause this. It made me wonder if Earthlink / Charter Pipeline was acting punitively.

Incidentally, while that doesn't affect me much, here is a possibly related experience: I handle a number of servers at work. I noticed that if I did a portscan on one of our own servers - presto, no more cable connection. Gotta unplug the modem and reboot. Now I just ssh into a server at work and scan from there, but it kind of pissed me off for awhile. Sometimes I want to know what our network looks like from the outside, too.

Re:Earthlink and Charter Pipeline too?

[GigsVT]

If you are running a windows firewall, like Tiny firewall, it will start dropping connections and cut you off if you try a portscan from inside it. It's some built in hard limit on NAT connections, I can't figure out how to change it.

The only reason I know is because I use Starband and I'm forced to use a Windows firewall. I get the same thing if I try to log into Gnutella too, everything gets very slow, or disconnects completely.

Re:Earthlink and Charter Pipeline too?

[esper_child]

Gnutella is a well known bandwidth hog and has to potential to do an expodential consumption of your bandwidth based on the number of hosts you are trying to connect to for addresses of other hosts. There is a site somewhere that shows the actual numbers but i can't seem to remember what they are off the top of my head.

It doesn't have to be blocked - just QoSed down.

[Mordant]

Modern routers and layer-3 switches have Quality-of-Service, or QoS, features, which allow specified types of traffic to be policed at any desired rate.

So, if one can identify the ports/protocols used by the lusers in question, one can then use QoS features to rate-limit the appropriate ports so as to make file-swapping useless, -without- blocking the ports.

If anything this should make you HAPPY!!

[Rooked_One]

Come now... Most slashdotter's consider themselves to be elitest in one area or another in the realm of electronics, so it should be no big deal to simply use the ports that the ISP's HAVE to allow... or just use IRC.

Anyways, where I live, people have been uncapping thier modems and I feel it becuase I am a gamer. I say GOOD FOR THE ISP! I remember one isp saying "1% of our customers use 20% of the bandwidth." If anything, kazaa needs to come with the settings set to NO UPLOADS ALLOWED becuase i'm sure most people that are quite ignorant are a majority in the bandwidth hogging. All in all, I just want a low ping to frag the rest of you in Q3... but isn't that what we all want? (aside from downloading resevoir dogs of course :)

Re:If anything this should make you HAPPY!!

[GigsVT]

kazaa needs to come with the settings set to NO UPLOADS ALLOWED

A) It wouldn't be much of a P2P network with no one uploading.

B) P2P is incredibly inefficient and uses tons of upstream bandwidth just sitting idle, connected to a few servers.

Fake Files

[aivic]

In addition to this, there has been a huge increase of renamed/fake files. Particularly with the latest bootleg movies. Could this mean the first sign of P2P dying? I certainly hope not! Nobody likes waiting in a queue on a Fserve ;)

Re:Fake Files

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it sucks. I tried to download WC III (F BLIZZARD!) and when I unzipped it, it was NHL2K2!

Sucks... I hate sports.

I'm not sure what's more, well, unsurprising...

[Anonymous Coward]

That Slashdot actually posted this, or that about a hundred people posted outraged comments before (never mind all the outraged comments *after*) your post...

The other 2 links are just sillier and sillier ("My downloads are slow!" "Morpheus doesn't work very well!")

HTTP . . . actually

[Idou]

They closed down http and ftp for a while because
of Nimda (which kind of pissed off us Linux users).

Also, I am not sure yet, but I think they might be
cutting off my downloads between another cable
modem user in town. We're using http and I can
download mp3s fine, but when I try a movie, it gets
cut off after 50MB. If I confirm they are screwing
with this then I am going to swith to DSL. Corporate
pricks . . .

Re:HTTP . . . actually

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno about you, but I would rather have cable through the time warner megalopoly than have DSL from Amerisuck. At least that's my only 2 options here (aside from dial-up of course.)

Already blocking HTTP in Florida

[ipoverscsi]

I sent in an article about Road Runner blocking HTTP port 80 about a year ago (rejected), when I noticed I couldn't get to my web server on my home machine anymore. Good or bad, one of the side effects was that the Code Red worm could no longer sread on Road Runner's network. My daily logs dropped dropped from over a meg to a respectable 100K. Plus, I just relocated my web server to a higher port.

Larger Issue

[B. Vhalros]

Above, I notice posts saying things like "Just use xxx filesharing program instead". This ignores the bigger picture.

Does no one see the obvious issues here? If a provider is able to get away with things, they are essentially allowed to arbitrarily restrict various services. This is a dangerous ability for them to have, and as several posters pointed out all ready, in many areas there is no usable alternative.

Re:Larger Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

You can pick up and order your own T1 circuit any time you want.

So what?

[nizo]

How long before these types of services start streaming over port 80? Are they going to examine the actual packets to make sure they are valid web traffic, or do you think they would actually block all port 80 traffic?? Feel free to pick any port used by some other service instead of port 80 (or better yet, just stream valid html back and forth over port 80, with a web file sharing service gateway out on the net)

Re:So what?

[B. Vhalros]

Actually, many cable ISP's (AT&T for instance, atleast around here) already do block port 80, on the incoming any way. Any packet sent to my port 80 will be eaten by their routers before it ever reaches me. Is this annoying? Yes, now I have to run my webservers on port 81.

Re:So what?

[Aaron Denney]

They already do look at (and modify) all port 80 traffic... most ISPs do transparent proxying for web traffic.

Yes, encoding it over valid html/http with the proper caching flags set should actually work fine.

Re:So what?

[buffy]

How long before these types of services start streaming over port 80? Are they going to examine the actual packets to make sure they are valid web traffic, or do you think they would actually block all port 80 traffic?? Feel free to pick any port used by some other service instead of port 80 (or better yet, just stream valid html back and forth over port 80, with a web file sharing service gateway out on the net)

It is not necessary to block port 80 to impose these kind of restrictions. If you run a transparent proxy (say squid) you can easily monitor traffic being passed on the http port. Once that's in place, it's not difficult to pick out unweb'ish apps. I can easily see which of my users use AIM, just by the number of repeat connections to a limited number of hosts--it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Were a sharing app like kazaa to start streaming over port 80, it would be the same. You wouldn't be able to identify based on server, like the above AIM example, since it is peer-to-peer, but the client making the connections would stick out pretty readily.

Just my $0.02.

Re:So what?

[hackstraw]

Are they going to examine the actual packets to make sure they are valid web traffic, or do you think they would actually block all port 80 traffic??

Where I work, they already do this with a device called packetshaper (http://www.packeteer.com/products/packetshaper/). I work at a university, and the kids were killing all the bandwidth using Morpheus, etc. But blocking ports would not work, since the port numbers could simply be changed. The packetshaper device looks into the packets and looks for signatures vs port numbers.

Kazaa users are all fucking pirates

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you'd get off your lazy fat fucking slashdotter asses and went to a store one of them perky little girls behind the counter would take interst in you... oh, you've got lazy fat fucking asses, sorry... never mind.

Re:Kazaa users are all fucking pirates

[Anonymous Coward]

Piracy will never die! It will be reborn in some new P2P client instead (that circumvents the moves of RoadRunner. I like stealing and I'm proud to be a pirate! I won't stop until the MP/RI AA are both dead and buried! Yo Ho Ho!

so?

[Duncan3]

If you dont like it go create some content people want and put it in the public domain for people to copy. Not commercial, not GPL, but public domain...

What? you want to be paid for your work or restrict it somehow? Yea, I thought so...

Oh really.

[glrotate]

Please cite a single case where the court ruled that sharing with a million of your friends over the internet was legal.

For the opposite see RIAA et al v Napster.

Re:Oh really.

[Balagan]

One court case does not an end to a battle make. For a random example of how courts arent always right i would refer you to Dred Scott vs. John F. A. Sandford (1857). My point wasnt that the courts have ruled extensively in favor of file sharing, it was that the courts havent handled the issue extensively at all... the case you have mentioned isnt finished yet. What you are talking about is the injunction before trial against Napster, which had the unpleasant effect of shutting it down. The case itself has been overshadowed by that injunction and by the subsequent bankrupcy and aquisition of Napster by one of the record labels.

I just dont think its appropriate for you to role over and play dead whether this one case has so far been decided in our favor or not (remember, the same judge allowed for exploration of whether the big media labels engaged in copyright abuse - which if found to be true would have lead to the charges against napster being thrown out). It may create a single legal precedant but our laws dont work by decree, there is a process that involves argument in court involving many precedants, and in lawmaking bodies, and ultimately by the public itself over whether something is acceptable or not. That process is far from over. It has in fact hardly even begun.

Does not make sense to me...

[psych031337]

...and I'm not sure why /. published this? The links are more are less free of any real substance. Timothy, some personal beef with RR?

What does not make sense to me is:

-if they want a port blocked, it would be blocked (no short functionality, no slowdown of transfers but a termination of transfers)
- lots of people say kazaa and other p2p actually works for them, but browser http traffic on port 80 sucks big time
- blocking the port would send people to just use another one - continous scanning with a script is possible, but in that case it makes no sense to piss the customer off, they could just regulate that port down some kbytes
- from what the users say this more or less sounds like heavy load balancing problems, lack of bandwidth or routing problems. and some things the users describe sounds like an OS screaming to be reinstalled ("...rebooting seemed to solve the problems...")

sent from .de's fastest EuroDOCSIS cable modem network - 2MBit up/2Mbit down

ISPs have beend doing this for a while...

[TeddyR]

Many ISPs have been blocking certain "undesirable" services/traffic for a while...

Example: CharterPipeline in Glendale blocks users from setting up DNS servers [packets destined to port 53 blocked], WEB servers and Mail servers. They also throttle nntp traffic.

Some for example block ports used by competitor's software... [there is at least one ISP that I know of that blocks the traffic used by AOLs client]

Speak out

[dh003i]

Well, I hate to break it to you all, but TimeWarner/AOL probably is NOT reading these Slashdot posts. If you want to have an impact, "send feedback" to your local Road Runner service. I sent this message to the the Rochester Road Runner "Feedback" form:

To whom it may concern:

I've heard on slashdot ( http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/14/02 37258&mode=thread&tid=153 ) that Road Runner is blocking certain ports which use file-sharing and other types of internet software in certain cities, particularly Texas. I am e-mailing you to express my disapproval of that, and to tell you that I will strongly consider changing services should Road Runner do such in Rochester. I am paying to get access to the internet and other internet users, not that portion of the net and other users which TimeWarner/AOL thinks appropriate. You should be in the business of providing a bandwidth service, not determining how your users use that bandwidth.

Sly tricks like this and other forms of architectural control by ISP's is a sure way to severely anger customers. Other than blocking specific programs like KazaaLite, WinMX, or Gnutella clients, other despicable tactics would be providing faster access to sites which TimeWarner was affiliated with, slower access to sites of rivals (i.e., DSL home pages). What's next, is TW going to use its power over architecture to mandate that its users connect to RR with Windows/Mac through Internet explorer, and not on alternate OS' such as Linux, BeOS, etc, nor through alternate browsers like Mozilla (which I'm using now)?

These types of architectural controls are just the sort of nightmarish 1984 dystopia Lawrence Lessig described in "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace".

I urge you not to not to use such architectural controls here in Rochester, and to abandon those ill-sighted attempts elsewhere.

On a separate note, I'd also like to ask TW to start trying to build architectures which allow a dynamic ballance of upload/download bandwidth depending on what a user does. I.e., at any given time, if at any given time a user has access to up to 500 KB/s of bandwidht total (upload and download), why should it be split up into 400 KB/s download and 100KB/s upload always, even if the user is not downloading anything but uploading something? In other words, you should engineer architectures to adjust the download/upload bandwidth alotted depending on what the user is doing.

Re:Speak out

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't a whole lot cable companies can do right now to make the service more synchronous, without raising your monthly bill to $100.00 a month and spending 100s of millions on more plant upgrades. However, there is a upcoming change in DOCSIS 2.0 (www.cablelabs.com) that helps make the service more synchronous by changing the way the data is modulated. However it's several years down the road.

Re:Speak out

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice going dumbass. Now if they weren't blocking those ports - you just gave someone a brilliant idea to implement come Monday morning. Bend over and start lubing your asshole because the dick is coming!

Re:Speak out

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Warner isn't going to care what you say if you talk to them like that. There should be some valid reasons for them to not block the port, if you're in a local band and kazaa is your way of spreading music to the world then put that in there. They're not going to let you use those services if you're only going to use it for downloading illegal files. There aren't many people who aren't using Kazaa for illegal reasons, if you tell them why your port shouldn't be blocked I'm sure they'd just lift the block for you.

Also, what good will it do them to give you EXTRA bandwidth? They have to pay for the bandwidth you use and if you're using an extra 100K (uploading and downloading at the max speeds) then that's extra bandwidth they have to pay for. What's in it for them? The same goes for blocking mozilla, linux, port 21, or any other evil things they might do. Sure they COULD do it, but why? Is there any sane reason to block mozilla, especially when AOL owns netscape, and Time Warner and AOL have been merged? They'd block IE if anything (although they'd lose most of there customers.) Besides the more stuff they block the more work the servers have to do at blocking that stuff, if the servers need to do more work then they're going to need more powerfull servers, which means more money they have to spend and less profits they make.

Re:Speak out

[Anonymous Coward]

nightmarish 1984 dystopia, lol

That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

When there is a monopoly, whether government sanctioned or driven by market forces, there has to be regulation or the consumer will be screwed.

In my county, Cox Communications has a monopoly because no other provider can envision a way to run a parallel service and get enough people to switch that it would be profitable. Most of the phones go through multiplexing equipment that makes DSL impossible.

The result? Horrendous problems with outages, packet loss, and latency. Service appointments for outages are typically five days or more after the report. The price recently jumped between 17% and 25% (25% for those of us who do not also subscribe to cable TV). Servers, which were permitted at the time I signed up, are now banned and port 80 has been blocked to prevent people from running web servers. I hear from reliable sources that more port blocking is on the way.

This is why "normal" utilities (phone, water, electricity, etc.) are regulated. The government realizes that the infrastructure costs make it virtually impossible for competitors to join the market and that without competition, the consumer will be the loser.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Warped-Reality]

Well, the port 80 block isn't neccesarily because of running servers... i know Verizon DSL in my area blocks port 80 because there network was getting raped with code red worms a good 6 months back.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Anonvmous Coward]

Who says it's anything to do with bandwidth? Maybe I'm unusual, but I've never hit full bandwidth with Kazaa. Instead, I get 1 5KB/s stream for a few hours. I may have used as much as 400kbits at one time for a small bursty period, but I have trouble getting a number of connections going once all at the same time.

I think the real reason they're doing it is because of the ridiculously high number of requests that go through. The overhead of the chattiness between P2P users is enough to make the connection lag. I ran Kazaa for 2 weeks and then turned it off so I could play QUake. Was I able to? No. I was getting so many inoming requests from Kazaa users not realizing that I had shut down that my game was getting 2-second lags every 10 seconds or so.

I'm sure that at some point, this is a problem for my provider. Fortunately, they've never contacted me about it.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Arker]

When there is a monopoly, whether government sanctioned or driven by market forces, there has to be regulation or the consumer will be screwed.

Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention. Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.

Cable companies are wonderful examples. Monopolies created and sustained by (typically municipal) governments. Why do you think Cox (or whoever they bought out in your area, more likely) was allowed to lay all that cable across both public and private land, but no one else can lay a competing network the same way?

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

Well, the port 80 block isn't neccesarily because of running servers.

That was the excuse used when it was initially blocked. Then when Cox switched from Road Runner to providing their own service, the port 80 block was temporarily removed. The number of Code Red worm hits on my resurrected web server was minimal and certainly insignificant to bandwidth. I, and friends, compiled lists of all infected users on the Cox network and there were only a handful. We provided the information to Cox. Their response was to block incoming port 80 connections for everyone, leaving the infected machines free to attack web servers outside of the Cox network.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention.

Monopolies exist whenever the startup costs are high enough to prevent profitable competition. Cable modem/TV is a prime example. Monopolies also exist when there are insufficient customers to support multiple businesses. For example, there is only one store in my area that sells high-end equipment for amateur astronomers. There is only one store that sells and custom-fits foam products (such as is used in custom equipment cases). The government did not create those monopolies nor did they intervene to sustain them.

Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.

Thank you Timothy McVeigh. Federal, state, and local governments do a reputable job of keeping monopolies in check when they put their minds to it. That's why your utility bills are not astronomical.

Monopolies created and sustained by (typically municipal) governments. Why do you think Cox (or whoever they bought out in your area, more likely) was allowed to lay all that cable across both public and private land, but no one else can lay a competing network the same way?

Fairfax County never gave Cox (or its predecessor Media Genearal) an exclusive contract. They have encouraged other cable companies to enter the market and run competing networks. The only competitor that seriously considered entering the market was RCN but they eventually backed out because they believed that the cost to run the network, when weighed against the likely number of subscribers, would have meant that profitability would have been unlikely. Fairfax County is still looking for a company willing to compete in the cable TV/modem arena. If you know any, send them our way.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[LinuxIsDyingGuy]

When there is a monopoly, whether government sanctioned or driven by market forces, there has to be regulation or the consumer will be screwed.

Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention. Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.

Cable companies are wonderful examples. Monopolies created and sustained by (typically municipal) governments. Why do you think Cox (or whoever they bought out in your area, more likely) was allowed to lay all that cable across both public and private land, but no one else can lay a competing network the same way?

mmmm, the sweet scent of copyright violation

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[io333]

Wow! You are one of the few people I have ever seen in person or print that actually understands this. Let me guess your graduate degree:

Sanford or Yale, Business or Law... or both?

Am I close?

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Warped-Reality]

I wasn't talking about kazaa... I was talking about them blocking web servers to stop Code Red & friends. Not really a bad idea, as i get hit with codered-ish viruses scores of times per day

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

Sanford or Yale, Business or Law... or both?

Since he was wrong about my cable system being a government-granted monopoly (via an exclusive contract), I can only assume that you don't have much respect for "Sanford[sic] or Yale" or "Business or Law" degrees.

The monopoly that my cable system has was neither granted by the government nor protected by it. In fact, the county government is actively seeking competitors willing to enter the market. But, since this is a naturally occurring monopoly (in that a competitor would be unlikely to win enough converts to make entering the market profitable), it is likely to remain one and the best that the government can do is regulate it to protect the consumers from abuses (much as they do with electricity, water, telephone service, etc.)

Want to see what a lack of regulation does? Take a look at cost of cable television after it was deregulated. In 1986, when the deregulation took effect, cable TV rates began to skyrocket at three times the rate of inflation. Cable TV remained local monopolies with no competitive pressure to restrain rates or improve customer service policies.

In response to the grotesque rate increases, tens of millions of cable TV subscribers contacted their Congressional representatives. In response, the House Telecommunications Subcommittee and Senate Commerce Committee crafted legislation (the "Cable Television Consumer Protection And Competition Act of 1992") to reign in cable rates which had increased 60% since deregulation only six years earlier!

So don't be too quick to agree with those who would bash regulation of monopolies. You'd be in a lot worse shape if there were not such regulation.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Arker]

Thanks to the lame so-called lameness filter my post was rejected. I don't have the time or inclination to try and figure out why it's breaking. You can read my reply, and reply if you wish, here.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[ClosedSource]

"Monopolies rarely appear and never persist without government intervention."

Well, if the granting of patents is considered "government intervention" then I guess you have a point. What other government intervention was invovled in Xerox's monopoly on copiers? In the case of MS, it would seem that government intervention might be the only way its monopoly will NOT persist.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[electronerd]

In the case of MS, it would seem that government intervention might be the only way its monopoly will NOT persist.

Good Point!

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[Arker]

Well, if the granting of patents is considered "government intervention" then I guess you have a point.

Of course they are. What more blatant example is there? Patents and copyrights are explicit state monopoly grants.

In the case of MS, it would seem that government intervention might be the only way its monopoly will NOT persist.

If you think the government is going to do anything useful about MS I have a big section of seaside property in Oklahoma to sell you.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

In your reply, you wrote:

Correct. And, as I said, that is a rare condition and one that doesn't persist forever in any case, barring regulatory support.

Forever is a long time. Why don't you tell me how many areas have choices of cable providers? The vast majority, even when you exclude those communities with contractually guaranteed exclusivity, have only one provider.

Fairfax county, for instance, as I was able to ascertain within a few minutes using google, has something called the 'Department of Cable Communications and Consumer Protection' which does exactly what I posited - it raises the costs of running a cable company in the area, which in turn discourages competition from entering. All well intentioned, of course, but the economic effects are no different than if the whole scheme had been set up to assure Cox a monopoly - economics doesn't respect intention, only action.

The office to which you refer is a consumer protection group that fields complaints about extended outages, poor service, missed service appointments, and so forth. In other words, they monitor Cox Cable to assure that Cox complies with its contractual obligations.

By your argument, the court system encourages monopolies by forcing vendors to comply with their contractual obligations.

And 'the cost to run the network' on their estimates, you can be certain, included a sizeable chunk of money for complying with the various regulations of the Fairfax CPD.

That is simply unsubstantiated conjecture.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[fmaxwell]

Thanks for demonstrating the bankruptcy of your position by resorting to silly ad-hominens.

So let me get this right; you are claiming that my position is "bankrupt" because you feel that I made an ad-hominem attack? Isn't that hypocritical? I thought that ad-hominem attacks were considered poor form because they were an attempt to discredit the position by discrediting the person arguing for the position. Isn't that what you just did?

As to why it was not a "silly" ad-hominem attack: I was pointing out, by comparison, that you were making strong anti-government statements with no apparent evidence to support your position. You equated the government as some kind of enemy of the people:

Looking for regulation to solve a monopoly problem is very much like expecting the fox to keep your chickens safe.

When you equate the relationship of the government and the citizens to that of foxes preying on chickens, the comparison to Timothy McVeigh seems an apt one.

---

Since you apparently did not see my other post, I will excerpt it here:

Want to see what a lack of regulation does? Take a look at cost of cable television after it was deregulated. In 1986, when the deregulation took effect, cable TV rates began to skyrocket at three times the rate of inflation. Cable TV remained local monopolies with no competitive pressure to restrain rates or improve customer service policies.

In response to the grotesque rate increases, tens of millions of cable TV subscribers contacted their Congressional representatives. In response, the House Telecommunications Subcommittee and Senate Commerce Committee crafted legislation (the "Cable Television Consumer Protection And Competition Act of 1992") to reign in cable rates which had increased 60% since deregulation only six years earlier!

I've pointed out that your assertion about the government denying competitors (in my county) permission to run cables was false. I've shown you the effects of deregulating cable. I have brought to light (unanswered) that electricity, water, and other utilities are regulated and the prices and quality are kept under control. I have shown how, despite having a level playing field, other cable companies cannot foresee a way to enter a competitor's market. If this discussion is going to degenerate into you voicing your distrust and/or dislike of the government, I'd like to bow out now.

Re:That's why government regulation is needed.

[ClosedSource]

"Of course they are. What more blatant example is there? Patents and copyrights are explicit state monopoly grants."

Well, usually intervention implies that something special is done in a specific situation or for a particular entity. If, for example, Congress passed a bill that allowed MS to use open source software without following the GPL, that would be government intervention. Since patents and copyrights are available to everyone, I don't see it as intervention.

"If you think the government is going to do anything useful about MS I have a big section of seaside property in Oklahoma to sell you."

I didn't say that. The point was that government intervention specifically targeted at MS has been the most effective at causing changes in its business practices. This is evidence in contradiction to the original claim that government intervention is required for a monopoly to persist.

Not just RoadRunner!

[SectoidRandom]

Here in Australia our often favourite Cable ISP, Optus@Home, has a nice descrete policiy of capping P2P bandwidth. That practice combined with their recent data caps put them definatly out of the good isp category. :(

Any Optus@home users wondering why they cant get more than 2k/sec on average in kazzaa? Now you know...

ps. This is not confirmed, i have a friend in the network centre that is what he claims...

5 minute fix if yer using iptables

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do is deny (not drop) any packets from the network they're scanning from, and let the rest through. So easy, no wonder it's number one.

Re:5 minute fix if yer using iptables

[Anonymous Coward]

For linux:

/sbin/ipchains -I input -s 24.30.217.0/24 -j DENY -l
/sbin/ipchains -I input -s 24.30.218.0/24 -j DENY -l

For BSD:

ipfw add reset log tcp from 24.30.218.0/24 to any
ipfw add reset log tcp from 24.30.217.0/24 to any

RoadRunner's security scanners operate from those two /24's so blocking them should do the trick, at least for the time being.

Tech Support and Viruses

[or_smth]

To get right down to it, I doubt that this "Kazaa Kut-off" (like my title =D) has anything to do with bandwidth and everything to do with Tech support. Perhaps not everything, but a good deal.

I can't count the number of times that a few of my buddies have to get me over to fix their computer because they downloaded a virus while trying to download some porn of Kazaa. Hell, just last week I ran a Adaware test on my friends (note: pretty decent) PC, and it came up with 300 instances of spyware found. 300! I have a feeling that RoadRunner is fed up with getting thousands of people calling everyday saying that they have viruses/whiped out computers.

Re:Tech Support and Viruses

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, there is the danger or getting viruses and all kinds of nasty stuff.

BTW: Adware doesn't test for viruses.

On the other hand there are many more viruses spread through email. Sould that be blocked too?

DNS is the answer

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the start of a trend which we can't stop. Often we will have little or no choice of broadband providers so we're stuck with what's offered. The solution is a technical countermeasure: We need to tunnel all our sharing over a protocol which they can't realisticly block. I'm talking about DNS of course.

DNS has several different record types. It is normally transmitted as UDP packets of up to 512 bytes in length. Header takes up 12 bytes, so that leave about 500 bytes of data that can be carried, perhaps in a TXT record type.

There is no reason why basically any sharing protocol couldn't tunnel over nearly-unblockable DNS.

I'm going to start working on a client and server that does DNS file transfers. It will work like good old FSP, except it will all be safely encapsulated in unblockable DNS packets. Then we'll be ready to play hardball with those guys.

OK then I want a guaranteed info rate w/ rebates

[gelfling]

IF they want to LIMIT my use then fine. All I want in return is a published and agreed upon committed information rate and I want a fucking rebate if they can't deliver it.

I am sick to fucking death of bandwidth providers telling me less is more, restriction is freedom and then not delivering on the bandwidth. How many of you people in restricted regions get BETTER service? How many get CHEAPER service? Is there ANY FUCKING BENEFIT you've received in return for having some of your rights stripped away?

And if they want to tell me that it forgoes capital investment to maintain their service levels, which they don't have anyway, then I want to see official proof. I want to see one damn scrap of paper they'd be willing to send to the FCC.

Otherwise RoadKiller?, Fuck Off. And the bird ya rode in on.

Re:But seriously folks... I agree

[puto]

I agree. I have in to free speech, free beer, free software as much as the next guy. But also I grain of salt evreything as well.

People have replied that teachers, independent artists, etc, have their medium out their for the masses. WTF? Who says " Want to download our stuff? Just hit Kazaa, Grokster, the most unprotected, virus laden network out there. A decent amount of webspace with almost unlimited bandwidth can be had for next to NOTHING! If I was an independent artist it would be on MP3.com or some other music venue. I agree these p2p's might be another way to get heard, but really, come off that. "Dude get my tune and Nimda all in one shot"

I would venture to guess that %5 of the traffic is legit warez. Only 5 though, and that is probably a way high estimate.

No time to rip a cd I already own? Hmmm, so when you sleep at night you can't pop it in a box and hit enter? But not busy enough to wade through Grokster to find a complete mp3 after ten minutes of searching?

I know if I want a full blown copy of something to try I will look on Kazaa, and if I just want a song on a cd I do not own, I will get it off the net.

I am up front about this. I buy many cd's and I leech many too. I have been on this scene since probably 1980 with boxen but the difference is we were a little more upfront with out 'piracy' try before you buy.

P2P should be allowed, but who is going to police us.

And you know what, people in the IT industry are the biggest pirates of all. "Need it? We got it at the office, I'll burn a copt, I'll rip an image".

How many people are downloading Rob Jeremy rips for backups? How many people here didnt leech AOTC? Are the Testkillers, Transcenders, Solaris guides?

I bought the MacroMedia suite this week, it hurt. But in a way it felt good.

Puto

Blocking Ports is nothing new...

[ahamos]

Verizon (DSL) blocks TCP 80 outbound. They've done it since Code Red, and when I called them to bitch, they said they'd probably never re-open it.

Such is life. We're buying into the service they provide. Don't like it? Start your own.

Re:Blocking Ports is nothing new...

[ahamos]

Um, I meant inbound. D'oh!

Sorry, but no

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that when your cable modem / dsl router hands you an IP address, you also get handed two or three DNS servers. Technically, the ISP only needs to allow you to hit port 53 on those particular servers, and nothing else, in order for you to have a fully funtional internet connection. As long as recursion is enabled on the DNS servers (and it is) they'll hunt down the IP address you're looking for so you don't have to.

RR to buy Adelphia and continue the same practice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adelphia (head quatered in PA) runs like 99% of the cable service here in Buffalo, NY. My parents, whom live in Syracuse, NY have Road Runner and I was seriously impressed with their service. The Turner people run a very good service and I was pretty hopeful that they would buy Adelphia and fuck the Regis's out of the company.. and run my service considering that Adelphia is a fucking shady company.. like WorldCom and Enron.. etc etc etc..

but after reading this.. and visiting the links.. well damnit.. doesn't ANYONE give a shit about customers anymore?

jesus.. we pay like 50-100 bux for service.. and fuck if we get any real access anyways!

Really pisses me off that we pay a premimum price for bandwidth (poor college student speaking here), and we get fucked in the end.

As Chris Rock would say, "There is no sex .. .in the champague room".

Let's face it

[teetam]

Things will become progressively worse as long as our options are limited to ONLY ONE company for cable and one for DSL.

For all bad things about MicroSoft, it is still an earned monopoly - a company whose products I can always replace with something else if I want to.

I am amazed that people don't scream at these monopolies and the government seems to be unwilling to break these up further. Be it cable internet or tv, I would like a few more choices.

More To Come

[N8F8]

Expect more stuff like this to happen. Here's why:

Collusion of ISPs - Remember the story last month where the leading companies in the Cable internet Biz got together? Think the only thing they talked about was capping bandwidths lower? Call it the OPEC of the internet. A handfull of companies control the fastest growing, and only viable, highspeed internet access. They can either backbight each other or agree to sell under terms where everyone gets a profitable piece of the pie

Market consolidation. look to see even more consolidation in the industry. Bandwidth providers combining with connection providers and maybe even content providers. The market is unhealthy with all the instability on Wallstreet many companies are ripe for takover or ready to deal.

My friends, the days of the "good deals" are over. Cable internet providers know they own the future of internet access and are making sure that future is profitible to the max. Look at it this way, what choice do you have?

Re:More To Come

[OneFix]

I hope you're right, because then the .gov will be forced to file an anti-trust suit against the cable companies.

You know, there's a reason why those laws exist, and yes, they have a history of "looking the other way", but the abundance of broadband is probably going to change the industry (not as much as HTML / HTTP), but when Joe Six Pack has broadband, it will probably prompt a major re-growth in the industry.

The funny thing is, not everyone has broadband right now...alot of /. users don't see this, because they hang around with other geeks that are more likely to have broadband.

When did you see a site that actually put the "power of broadband" to good use.

I don't know of many. Oh, we see a few things like higher bitrate streaming video or always-on apps, P2P, etc... But in general, the industry is still opperating at 56k...

And then again, I'm sure the DSL providers can't wait for this...most places that have Broadband Cable either have or are getting DSL. The biggest reason most ppl have gone with cable is the speed, but that can change. Free markets necessitate lower costs and higher quality over a period of time. It's just the way it works. So, if RR pisses off the 5% of their users that most likely bring about more than half of their business, then they will be forced to change policy or drop the service.

I have RR broadband, and I'm not worried in the slightest. If they become too "difficult", I'll jst switch to DSL/Wireless/etc...And I'll take all of my friends and family with me...

Rebel Alliance Network

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its time to implement the rebel alliance network, what, with the Empire trying to take control of the public internet.

It would be a completely isolated network that existeted parallel to but independent of the public internet. Maybe it could exclusively use ipv6. Maybe it just needs an underground top level domain (.ran?) and its own set of DNS servers. Maybe it would implement its own security protocols to keep the Empire out! I suppose that maybe it could use the public internet in some cases (tunneling?) but it could never /depend/ on the public internet. If the Empire ever ceased control of the public internet, the rebel alliance network would still have to be function.

It would be just like the early days! So whose going to set up Rebel Alliance Linux? I think M$ Pandemonium (er, Palladium) could be used in our favor!

Re:Rebel Alliance Network

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll go ahead and set it up tomorrow....

Say... can I borrow $14 Billion dollars?

Re:OK then I want a guaranteed info rate w/ rebate

[rnicey]

Get a T1 installed and stop whining. You lost your rights to all that you claim when you signed up for the service. You did read the small print, right?

Telco's do control content.

[glrotate]

If you are a biz you pay biz rates.

Same Old Broken Promises

[NetGyver]

Cable companies complain that power users use too much bandwidth and thus drowns out normal to light users. So they impose restrictions such as this to curtail it.

Cable companies also said that cable itself would be free of commericals, however it's all i see now-a-days on the tv. Even premium channels like HBO et al promised in their beginnings that it would be commerical free. But even they have commercials. I mean, that was one of the big incentives to pay that premium price.

It wouldn't matter if its a handful of power-users who use kazaa or any other p2p, or those power-users who utilize cable modems for streaming media, such as music and video, which is WHY BROADBAND WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SO GOOD AT.

Thing is people, they designed a system, and promised you all you can eat for a flat fee per month. Around here at least it wasn't $x.xx per MEG/kbps, it was just like the 19.95 dialup ISP deals that is common place today outside of AOL, MSN and Earthlink.

What would the cable companies do if Broadband (totally legit) media took off with consumers, and people started really USING the bandwidth that is given to them? They'd start restricting just like their doing with Kazaa and other p2p's now. Same thing different usage.

I don't understand why they can't just cap their customers to X kbps and make sure everybody can reach that max and be done with it. At least then you have your limit, and you can utilize all of the bandwidth that is given to you.

I have Adelphia cable, and I use it well. However i am capped at around 60kbp or so, but every so often i can reach up to 90kbps to 120kbps depending on the time of day, in my case it's after midnight to the wee hours of the morning.

I haven't been sent any letters or anything to indicate that i'm a "bandwidth hog" (thank god) but I think differnet cable companies have different setups and polices.

Cable broadband I don't think has reached the commodity status yet. But I really dislike the "pay per meg/kbps" model.

I'd pay for the "a limit and all i can eat within that limit" model though. Just like dialup and the 19.95 deal, just more bandwidth and more money. None of those weird ass restricitons. I think that's what i'm getting now, at least until i'm notified and told otherwise.

I don't think I make much sense, but maybe i can make some change.

Gnutella-gtk in San Antonio

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Roadrunner user in San Antonio. As soon as I saw this article posted I fired up gnutella-gtk to see what was going on. I haven't used gnutella-gtk in at least a month so its host cache was stale, but after 15 minutes or so things lit up - no blocking here, at least as far as gtk-gnutella is concerned. Two files are being downloaded from me right now.

what about the bandwidth?

[Anonymous Coward]

why would they be mad about the increase in bandwidth usage when they cap everyone off already? supposedly they have enough available bandwidth to have everyone using thier maximun amount, and some to spare. or are they lying about how much cable they have buried?

Either way - dangerous for RoadRunner

[iamacat]

If they are trying to avoid copyright lawsuits, they are actually making it worse for themselves. By censoring my online communications, they also assume responsablity if I send hate mail, download warez and so on. On the other hand, if they are worried about bandwidth - well why would people get high-speed access if they were not going to use bandwidth? I bet most customers will at least occasionally download audio or video. They can cap the total bandwidth and document the limits but it has nothing to do with what exactly I am doing - sharing files or videoconferencing.

Now included in your RoadRunner new user kit...

[Wanderer1]

Here, you'll need this - KY Personal Lubricant.
It makes the hiney reaming much, much more bearable.

Stop complaining and PUT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS. RoadRunner has systematically cut back on features you found reason to pay high prices for, fast file transfers, full time servers, VPN. There's really no point to fast WWW browsing or e-mail retrieval.

As distasteful as it may be to dunk bossy broadband, its a real treat to select a nice, small ISP and not worry that they're going to block next. If you have ISDN as an alternative, pick that up. 128K isn't anything to sneeze at, especially with an upstream provider that doesn't believe in their right to get in your way.

-b-

Shared resource

[groundclutter]

quoted from: http://securityscan.sec.rr.com/policy.htm

The Internet is known as a "shared resource", and Road Runner accounts operate using these resources. Excessive use or abuse of these shared network resources by one customer may have a negative impact on all other customers. Misuse of network resources in a manner, which impairs network performance, is prohibited by this policy and may result in termination of your account. You are prohibited from excessive consumption of resources, including CPU time, memory, disk space and session time. You may not use resource-intensive programs, which negatively impact other customers or the performance of Road Runner systems or networks. Road Runner reserves the right to terminate or limit such activities.

copyright and piracy....or profits?

[Erpo]

I don't think their actions have anything to do with copyright or piracy. Think about it: if a cable company has a node serving a neighborhood through a single coax loop providing 30Mbit of shared bandwidth with each user being able to snag up to 3Mbit downstream (the situation where I live), and there are just three people on the loop who are downloading 24/7 using some fastrack servent, then nearly a third of their bandwidth capacity is being used by three people.

They're not blocking fastrack for copyright/piracy reasons. They're doing it because fastrack users consume a _lot_ of bandwidth and internet service provider business models are completely and utterly dependent on customers that don't fully use what they pay for. In the same way that modem ISPs never have enough modems for every customer to dial in at once, cable ISPs never have enough bandwidth for every customer to download (at full speed) at once. They blocked fastrack because:

-Blocking it frees up a _whole lot_ of bandwidth. That bandwidth can then be oversold to many more customers, increasing revenue without having to increase network capacity.
-99.99999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999% of all activity on the fastrack network violates copyright. Users have no means of legal retaliation.
-It's used by relatively few people. Blocking port 21 (ftp) would cause an uproar. Blocking port 1214 (fastrack network search traffic) caused only the tiniest of squeaks.

Re:copyright and piracy....or profits?

[Anonymous Coward]

But when you order a service, that service indicates 1.5Mbit down, and 128K up, you expect to get 1.5Mbit down, and 128K up, right?

That's the problem I have with all of this, they are selling bandwidth, not content. They advertise a speed, they should provide a speed, regardless of the content being sent along that bandwidth.

If that 30Mbit pipe isn't big enough for all of the users they sell to get their full 1.5Mbit down and 128K up, then that's their problem, not people utilizing what they pay for.

and the problem is ..... ???

[H3XA]

oh no.... an ISP is taking action stop the illegal distribution of copyrighted material (in virtually all cases of Kazaa use). How is this a problem? Maybe we need a poll to see how many of the whiners are using Kazaa for illegal purposes - me thinks the will be a correlation between the two. Abuse a service and you will loose it - why is that so hard to understand ? - HeXa

Re:and the problem is ..... ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you and the jackass you rode in on. Stealing media and software is my god-given right!!!! It is the Ultimate Purpose(tm) of the Internet!

Re:and the problem is ..... ???

[H3XA]

That made me think.... does Bill Gates have a son yet? IF (!!!) and when he does - will that son trade illegal copies of MS software with his school yard mates :) - HeXa

Use Speakeasy!!!

[SPYvSPY]

Unless, that's who you work for. I doubt it though, since my experience is that Speakeasy is friendly with the subversive elements of the net. At the end of the day, I am willing to pay a premium to the ISP that gets off my fucking back.

Re:Use Speakeasy!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.speakeasy.net/main.php?page=bus_dsl

eh.. speakeasy needs to get it together. They adverstise that all business class DSL packages include primary and secondary DNS service. I picked the netvantage plan starting at 124.95, but thats only for 128k so for 384k it was more. When I needed DNS they told me it was extra and that DNS was only inlcluded in the netvantage plus plan. To thier credit they added the service to my plan after a lot of byatching on my part but they have still not fixed the website which states DNS service is included, seems deceptive to me, they should have fixed this its been some time since i told them and Im sure I am not the only one.

Kick Roadrunner to the curb, and tell them why.

[uncoveror]

Anybody who is angry about Roadrunner blocking their p2p file sharing should cancel their sevice, and tell them why. If no other high speed service is available, groups of former subscribers could get together, and start a Motorola Canopy Wirelss ISP of their own. Slashdot posted a story about those a while back. No one should continue to do business with a company that won't give them what they are paying for. Pull the plug.

Re:Opera users love it wide!

[Anonymous Coward]

you asshole, you got me

Corporate BS

[kasparov]

... if you look at is from a business prospective.

It's responses like this they REALLY get to me. I'm assuming that you (like me) are a U.S. citizen. In this country, so many people think that if there is a legitimate business reason for taking an action, then it must be justified. I can't even begin to say how much this pisses me off. Yes, I understand that businesses are in business for one thing--to make money. But there are so many more lofty goals that people should pursue. Capitalism is not the be all end all of morality.

What ever happened to people who started a business because they wanted to provide a service to the community? They worked at a profession because it meant something to them. When did we all adopt this middle-management company man attitude that a company is entitled to profit at other people's expense?

Yes, Roadrunner has the right to do what they want with their service. But if they are selling "Internet Access," then they should be selling "Internet Access." They don't advertise "Web and FTP access." But obviously it doesn't really matter what they advertise, because it's more profitable if they fudge a little bit. Well, bull shit. I've had enough. I'm sick and tired of Corporate America(TM) and their never ending pursuit of profit. Their are some things that capitalism is ill-equipped to handle. With more and more corporate mergers in the works (which equals less and less choice for consumers), it looks like customer service may be one of those things.

Re:Corporate BS

[Baki]

Indeed, the only honest thing to do would be to pass on cost + profit margin to the customer, meaning to introduce metered access.

Because that looks bad from a marketing perspective, what they do is just lie to the customer: promising unlimited internet access but not delivering it (only unlimited WEB/email access). That is dishonest and immoral.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

" What ever happened to people who started a business because they wanted to provide a service to the community?"

They are providing a service to their community. Cutting off the bandwidth hogs is going to result in faster service, at no extra cost, to the remainder of the people using the service.

P2P is a cool idea, but face it, the vast majority of it's users are just trying to snag copyrighted material without paying for it. They don't give a damn about the Artist, they don't give a damn about other users on the network, they don't give a damn about any negative effects like DRM that may result from their activities.

Nice rant about companies persuing profit. How about the profit the "pirates" are making. Songs that would have cost them thousands of dollars. If they can download $100.00 worth of songs a day or $3000.00 a month that gives them a profit of $2,950.00 after paying the ISP's bill. Tax free. Funny how I don't hear them being blasted for being greedy little shits who only care about making a profit.

Re:Corporate BS

[MiTEG]

To restate what you said in true Southpark fashion:

Phase 1: Download music from p2p service
Phase 2: ...
Phase 3: Profit!

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Hee Hee,
If you think it isn't a profit because no little slips of paper with images of dead Presidents on them changed hands I suggest you read the IRS regulations on barter.

BTW, the tax free part only holds until the RIAA hits apon using the IRS barter regs against the larger file sharers, and starts reporting them for income tax evasion. If the RIAA dosen't go for it there is also the posibility of ratting for rewards since the IRS is willing to pay rewards for finks that turn in tax cheats.

Re:Corporate BS

[SparkyMartin]

They don't give a damn about the Artist...

Oh PLEASE! If I had a dime for everytime a mininformed soul said something like "if you share mp3's the poor artist will not get any money and will starve", I'd have a hell of alot more dimes.

Most bands make from zilch to next to zilch when you buy a CD. A few lucky few maybe a few dimes per cd sale. Bands are given lump sum payments to make a record, and from that amount they have to pay ALL their expenses from renting the recording studio, paying the producer, director,editor, burning the CD, marketing, etc,etc. Whether the CD flops or sells a million copies most bands do not see much of a difference. Touring and promotion is where bands make their $$. If the CD sells well and their contract is up then they can use that as leverage for a better contract. That's about it.

Cutting off the bandwidth hogs is going to result in faster service, at no extra cost, to the remainder of the people using the service.

Well Sympatico just implemented a 5GB/month cap. Does that mean that my speed will now double, eventhough it is remains capped at 1Mbit/sec? Does this mean that my cost will decrease, even though on the same day as the cap they raised prices by $4/month? You certainly are making a leap of faith if you think any corporation will pass savings onto its customers instead of using them to pad their own books. Silly rabbit!

Nice rant about companies persuing profit. How about the profit the "pirates" are making. Songs that would have cost them thousands of dollars. If they can download $100.00 worth of songs a day or $3000.00 a month that gives them a profit of $2,950.00 after paying the ISP's bill.

Nice analogy, but using logic like that means that everytime I drink tap water instead of buying bottled water, I am stealing. Or when I carpool I am stealing money from the local bus company. Or if I skip commercials when watching TV I am stealing from the network. Not!

Re:Corporate BS

[kasparov]

1. They are not providing a service to their community by "cutting off the bandwidth hogs." They cap their internet access at a certain bandwidth limit. They gaurantee a certain speed. The "bandwidth hogs" are only using the amount of bandwidth they have purchased. Should their be a tiered access plan? Probably. But they don't currently offer that. So they are not increasing the benefits of their service for their customers by blocking kazaa.

2. The pirates are not making a profit in the general sense of the word. The average "pirate" can listen to radio for free to hear songs. They can even tape the radio for free and not get in trouble. To the average mp3 downloader, there is no moral difference between downloading a song for free and listening to one for free on the radio. The internet way is just more convienient. They are not selling the songs. They are not minting CDs and taking the music industries profit. They are listening to music. Plain and simple

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

"The pirates are not making a profit in the general sense of the word"

I Sugest you look at IRS regulations regarding Barter. If you swap goods and services, those goods and services ARE Taxable income. If a Radio station engages in swapping air time in lieu of royality payments, the value of those payments IS taxable income for the purpose of figuring the stations profits.

The P2P networks are a method of swapping files. These files have a certain economic value. When you place material in your share folder you are providing the service of making files with an economic value availble. When you download files from the P2P you are recieving services from other P2P clients. This IS taxable income as per IRS regulations on Barter. If your costs (Internet fees) are lower than than the value of the files you have recived, you HAVE made a profit.

If you listen to the radio you are recieving a service, but are NOT providing a service to the radio station so no barter (exchange of services) has taken place. If you tape a song off the Radio you still are NOT providing a service to the station so there is no barter.

If you do NOT make the files you have downloaded availble to others then no barter has taken place. If all you do is run a server and don't do any downloads or accept uploads from third parties then there hasn't been the exchange of services that constitutes barter. (Copyright infringement yes, barter no).

Claiming that the value of goods and services exchanged through barter isn't income or proft is a loophole that the IRS closed a long time ago.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

If you are unable to reach your peak speeds during peak hours because of demand exceeding availble bandwidth, then removing the hogs from the network will result in increased speeds (up to the ammount on your cap). You will get better service.

Re:Corporate BS

[grmoc]

If I download an application which I would otherwise buy for $500, I do NOT profit by that amount!

This assertion is ludicrous and false! Their "profit" is one of increased functionality or happiness. If they download software, they are going after increased functionality. Their "profit" is what they can do the aforementioned software.
Same for music- Unless they are attempting to resell the things they download (which, I might add would be a larger market if people couldn't download them in the first place), in which case, yes, it is fair to state that they are making a profit.

You should restate your analogy.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Fine, go tell the IRS that you are running a file swapping service, and since you don't consider the files you barter to be income, you don't intend to pay any taxes on them.

Let us know how it turns out.

Re:Corporate BS

[SparkyMartin]

Hmmm....if there are slowdowns then I think it more of a problem that the ISP doesn't have enuff stuff!
I remember having slowdowns, busy signals, dropped connections during peak times when I had dialup, and that was in the pre-napster era before every tom, dick, and harry knew about file-sharing. And our local cable internet connections have only gotten better since they left @home, yet in that time filesharing and the amount of data transmitted has definitely increased.

Instead of blocking ports all an ISP has to do is implement a data cap it and that would clear up the congestion pretty quick. Someone who is transferring 80GB/month will certainly curtail his habit if there is a $20 gig limit with $2/gig overuse charge.

Re:Corporate BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Im a starving student. I cant afford 15$ cd's. If I dont download music I dont get music. They arent loosing my business because I dont have the money to give them any business. Im in college all my extra money goes to buy beer and gas for my car. Music is the last thing I buy. Most people cant and never will buy 3000$ worth of music a month. I cant imagine buying that many cd's in my entire life. These companies need to stop bitching. They sell CD's at an extroidonary premium. People buy them because its faster and less troublesome then having to burn your own, those that cant afford to purchase CD's spend their time burning them. CD's make great gifts but no CD is worth $15. My parents can afford to buy CD's Im on a fixed income I have little extra spending money and only make $8 an hour. That CD equals almost 2 hours of work. If they think they will get my money they can kiss my ass because no song is worth 2 hours of work. People who have money will always buy CD's because it will always be faster ane easier than burning your own, but some of us cant.

Re:Corporate BS

[mrbrown1602]

When the artists actually start getting the money that the RIAA & record company are holding on to, I'll stop pirating. Heck, they're getting more money out of me this way - I've gone out and bought the most CDs that I have ever bought in a year.

Re:Corporate BS

[Anonymous Coward]

EBAY 1 CENT CDs is a cool idea, but face it, the vast majority of it's users are just trying to snag copyrighted material without paying much for it. They don't give a damn about the Artist, they don't give a damn about other users on the network, they don't give a damn about any negative effects like DRM that may result from their activities.

. . .

It would seem the record companies don't give a damn about the artists either! Come on, are you so blind that you can't see what's really happening here? No "value" has been lost, only the distribution methods have modernized--and obviously the current encumbent distributors are too fucking slow on their feet to continue to be leaders in their respective marketplaces, thus the rampant kicking and screaming coming from their "control organizations". *THE ARTISTS* are the big winners here, as well as whoever chooses to control the new media distribution network. (and you better fucking believe Microsoft sees this and is going to ATTEMPT to conquer this market too)

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

BOYCOTT RIAA labels and you send a message of moral outrage. Boycott means you have NOTHING to do with them. You don't Buy CDs. You don't download Tracks. You don't make tracks availble for download. You don't attent concerts. You don't listen to stations that play RIIA music.

PIRATE music and you send a message of "I'm a deadbeat who's too cheap to pay for entertainment" regardless of how many CDs you claim you buy.

BTW, didn't you listen when your Mama told you two wrongs don't make a right?

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

An AC wrote:
" Im a starving student. I cant afford 15$ cd's. If I dont download music I dont get music. They arent loosing my business because I dont have the money to give them any business. Im in college all my extra money goes to buy beer and gas for my car."

Oh yer breaking my heart (NOT). "starving" and blowing $$$ on beer? Kid starving people look like those famine pics out of Africa you see on the news. They look like the Jews in the Nazi camps in those pics in your history books. If you are "starving" and buying Beer, then your priorities are fucked.

Oh I want it but can't afford it. ROFLMAO. Music is a damned luxary. You won't die of music starvation. Are you going to claim there are no radio stations in your town where you can get a fix of free music?

Oh I'm a "starving" freelance programer. I want a 1967 427 Cobra roadster but can't afford the $750,000 minium they cost so it's ok if I steal one.
Sound stupid? So does ANY I'm poor so it's ok for me to take it argument.

Next time you sign up for classes, see if they have an ethics class. you need it.

Re:Corporate BS

[Qwaniton]

Okay, if the radio shares songs via radio signal, that's NOT barter, but if I share songs via electrical signal, that IS barter? Please clear this up.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Since they are in effect running a server if they pay the same rates as ISPs charge for a hosted web server they'll quit a lot sooner. Earthlink charges 34.95 a month for 20 gig and 10 cents a megabyte. yes that a meg, not a gig price.

If they want server bandwidth they should be paying server prices, not residental prices.

Re:Corporate BS

[BGl]

Is this a record company first year aching for his first heart attack or just a wank with a very small p? I can't tell.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Barter is exchanging a service for a service. This is the actual IRS example. A Plumber does some work for a dentist to pay off his dental bill. They have exchanged a service, dental work for plumbing work. The value of the Dental work and the Plumbing work is taxable income.

There is no exchange of services with a radio station. You recieve a service (music) from the station, but you don't provide them with a service. No exchange of services has taken place. If you were providing songs to the radio station as well as recieving them, then it would be an exchange of services.

If you have MP3s in your share directory you are providing a service. When you download MP3s you are recieving a service. You are trading the service of providing MP3s for the service of recieving MP3s. As long as you are providing AND recieving a service via the P2P network it is considered barter and is taxable income. The income is the value of the file(s).

If you remove ALL MP3s from your share directory you are no longer providing a service, you are only recieving a service, and the same situation applies as with the music from a radio station. Since you are no longer trading a service for a service no barter is taking place. Of Course if everyone does this the P2P network becomes worthless.

Right now the IRS is not going after P2P nodes for tax evasion, but it is possible for the RIAA to file a tax evasion complaint against people running a P2P network, or for the IRS to decide to start going after it on their own. Most likely this would involve people with very large numbers of copyrighted songs in the share directory.

Re:Corporate BS

[NeMon'ess]

How can you assign value to a song when most of the labels won't do it? I can't get get track 3 of Soundgarden's SuperunKnown as a single because it wasn't ever made. My only option is to buy the whole album. So does getting that copy off Kazaa mean I profitted by $17.99 or $17.99 divided by the 15 songs on the album? Even Pressplay doesn't let me buy songs for a set price. Now if the labels would offer me the option to buy an mp3 for $1 I would do it. I'll buy my entire collection of mp3s minus my ripped CDs, legit. Also, what if I declare my profit to the IRS but I don't tell RIAA? I pay my taxes owed and I'm in the clear aside from copyright infringement.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Back when Music came on LP's the record companies released 45 RPM "singles". An album with an average of 10 tracks sold for around 5 dollars, while a 45 cost 99 cents. Even tho it was called a "single" it had two tracks. The cost per track was about 50 cents for a LP or a "single" So one way of looking at it is the Labels have established a precedent that a track off the album is worth the cost ratio in simple division. A $15 CD with 15 tracks would have a value of $1 per track.

On the other hand since they called the 45s "singles" it could be argued that only the "A" side had value, and the "B" side was just filler. In this case a precedent was set by the Labels of valuing a good track at twice the average track value, so that $15 dollar CD with 15 tracks would have a value of $2 for a "single" quality track off it.

The Labels HAVE used a per track sales model in the past. It worked out good for the fans on two levels. If there was only 1 good song on an LP you could just buy the 45. This ment that in order to sell the LPs they had to have more than 1 or 2 good tracks on them.

Re:Corporate BS

[Snover]

Cutting off the bandwidth hogs is going to result in faster service, at no extra cost, to the remainder of the people using the service.

Except it doesn't, because RoadRunner caps ALL cable at 2Mbps.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

I Don't expect the ethically challenged to understand the concept of speaking out on moral prinipals.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

Unless you can't reach that 2 Meg because you share a node some kids gobbling all of the shared bandwidth to rip off IP. Removing the hogs allows you to reach the full bandwidth up to the cap.

Re:Corporate BS

[Zamt]

Of course if 1967 427 Cobra roadsters were able to be copied for about a penny, I kind of doubt the owner could justify charging $750k for them, but the music and movie industries don't seem to understand that.

Re:Corporate BS

[thales]

They can copied for around 30k. There is a thriving market for Cobra replicas, but it just isn't the same to a collector, so the price isn't affected. Can't get away with a counterfit either, the Shelby club has detailed records for every one that was produced.

Re:Corporate BS

[Zamt]

The Cobras can't really be copied. You can make something that appears to be a Cobra, with a similar engine. It isn't a Cobra. You can however make an EXACT DUPLICATE of CDs and DVD movies. You cannot tell the difference. Your argument falls somewhat flat on that principle. We can make exact copies of something for free, yet the music/movie industry insists on charging us the same or more to actually purchase it. THAT is where the essential problem lies.

Re:Corporate BS

[ryman]

I've agreed with most of your points so far, but you just stepped way out of line. The "stealing cars vs. stealing IP" argument seems to come up every time something of this nature is mentioned on /., only to get trod in the ground for the umpteenth time. I could go ahead and explain to you again the concept of product deprivation vs. product duplication, but I think it's been said enough EVERY SINGLE DANG WEEK, so I won't waste my time. Kudos to keeping most of your argurments logical, you've been fighting off defenders valiantly, but know when you've gone too far.

Re:Corporate BS

[ryman]

I think I meant "...fighting off detractors..." . Wow...and it's only Tuesday. This is going to be an interesting week... ;)

well, set your gnutella port to port 80

[Anonymous Coward]

so they block Gnutella port - why not change the gnutella port to port 80 and start that fav gnutella again...

Re:It doesn't have to be blocked - just QoSed down

[LogicX]

and more importantly -- they can bandwidth limit during peak times; and let it go full during non-peak times -- their bandwidth during non-peak would go unused anyways, so what should they care?

What really gets me is...

[Manuka]

I heard an ad on the radio this afternoon, for roadrunner, advertising how "with roadrunner high speed online, you can download music for your road trip".

So, on one hand, to get people to sign up, they're touting broadband for downloading music, but once you're paying for the service, they yank the carrot away. Cute. And they wonder why AOLTW debt is trading around junk levels.

Re:What really gets me is...

[SomeGuyFromCA]

Yup, attbi does that too. Wonder if a lawsuit for false advertising is in order...

already begun

[Erpo]

This kind of technology has already been implemented in many gnutella clients. Gnucleus (my favorite one) can be configured to use random ports.

I was was working on a custom tailored compression algorithm for gnutella search traffic that would reduce search network traffic bandwidth usage to (a rough guess) 20% of what it is now, but that got shelved for a while when real life (tm) suddenly became a priority. I will undoubtedly resume work on it soon, but while I was toying with a few different ideas regarding the gnutella protocol I came up with an idea for a completely unrecognisable (from the ISP's point of view) communication system for p2p. Briefly:

Step 1: Use the current system of random port assignments using gping/gpong/GWebCache to spread node data.
Step 2: Upon connecting to another node, before any handshaking of any kind is done, exchange public keys (generated by each instance of the node software upon install) and use them to set up an OpenPGP compliant encrypted tunnel.
Step 3: Use the standard gnutella three way handshake to exchange node data and negotiate options (e.g. QRP support, compression, etc...)
Step 4: Begin normal network operations.

It's undetectable because there is no distinguishable pattern even if the ISP decides to sniff packets.
-The ports and IP addresses are random.
-The first 2 kbits (or whatever length) of the connection are random (public keys would be generated randomly by the node software on install). Especially paranoid nodes could generate a new key pair for each connection.
-All the data following that would be encrypted (random).

Since everything (IPs, ports, data) would be random (not to mention protected from snoops!) ISPs would have no way of blocking it. Their only option would be to execute a man in the middle attack, but that would require modifying the data stream which, while undetectable & successful in the event that the connection in question is in fact a gnutella connection, would really confuse anything else.

In short, an ISP would not be able to check a connection without destroying it in the case that it's not p2p.

Re:already begun

[Anonymous Coward]

Except in this case they'll just take to detecting a random distributions of port usage to single people out. Not to mention bandwidth usage by p3p users won't disappear. They'll probably also consider using major networks for tracking down their own users for violations.

Re:already begun

[Anonymous Coward]

All this random port use is unneccessary. Why not just take the same view of firewalls as Microsoft and its .NET? Shove everything through port 80... you can encrypt it... ISP can't block it since they'd be blocking the web.

Re:already begun

[richieb]

Hmm... Gnutella as a web service... :-)

News from February?!

[tabdelgawad]

I can't get to the first two links on dslreports, but did anyone notice that the third link was to a discussion thread dating back to February?! (The big clue was that they're referring to Morpheus being part of fasttrack, which it hasn't been for a while). The fourth link seems mostly about a guy who's suffering dl/ul speed problems, hardly symptoms of port blocking. Oh well, at least it's an interesting hypothetical ...

Kill your Karma for Migor

[interstellar_donkey]

Migor is angry. Migor has identified a creature worse then the common household troll.

Migor calles them retarded mods. They are evil. They mod down insightful and informitive comments because they don't understand them, or worse, are too stupid to reconize the humor when a joke is made.

Migor is here to help. Migor will keep posting to waste those mod's points so real mods can mod up the good comments. If the retarded mods spend their time modding down the comments of Migor, they can not use their points modding down relevent comments.

And then, upon the day of conclusion, Migor shall eat the soul of the retarded mods. He will have a great feast, and will BBQ the souls of the retarded mods in his mighty spaceship. There will be plastic forks and spoons. There will be pasta salad. Cake will also be served.

I am NOT Migor, only a vessel through which Migor speaks.

Get a better pipe....

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit whining about how $40 doesn't buy unlimited 1.5M up/down. You probably have access to better terms, but it will cost you more. I have DSL: Speakeasy gives me a static IP and lets me serve anything I want. The downside is that it's slower than cable, and it's $20 more expensive. My choice.

If you don't have multiple choices, talk to your city and figure out why. They're the ones granting the franchises.

This sounds like "traffic shaping", done badly

[Animats]

From the complaints ("I can get one search through, and then it slows down"), this sounds like one of those "traffic shaping" systems has been inserted in the data path somewhere. Maybe a bandwidth limit has been imposed for Kazaa traffic.

Packeteer can do things like this to traffic. See their management-level Flash presentations. It's a quality-of-service system, with a "lousy service" option. There are other vendors; I have no idea whether RoadRunner uses Packeteer, but there's a good chance that they have something comparable.

First most intelligent post i've read.

[SlashdotTroll]

Yes, encrypt your traffic and use non-standard ports. Or how about this: let's all design a dynamic scheme for network traffic whereas ports opened are opened randomly and highly encrypted RC5'd PGP signed tunnels are used in every aspect of communication.

Oh wait, a beaurocrat says my 1st ammendment doesn't apply to messages I code and send through my computer. How about I think of a message to say in my mind, I then encode it in rc5, and I speek to everyone I know in rc5? I'll goto my local grocery store, and the bumm at the entrance will ask me for a dollar and I'll say:

"Leet Leet Zokukuboo 4232 roo oon on foo 3wef 0909j 09j09 FWW hmish mak toong gwah arc loo funt nock allyicht NEE NEEE NOOO NEEE NOOOO no not NOOOO NEEE NEEE yes NEEE NEEEE not NEEE yes NEEE" ...which interprets to:

Hello. How's life been treating you? Too late, I've already asked. Here is a dollar and I'll only give it to you if you give me a big smile. ENOUGH, ENOUGH! Here's a 2nd dollar for you to not smile!

similar attbroadband experience

[picono]

Mediaone (now att broadband) has already acted quite deviously with me last year. They set not only set a port scanner but also set a scanner to monitor my outgoing CGI data so that they can detect all my different OS's under my router and so shut down my router's IP. As a result I was forced to roll back my network and now have to pay extra for the extra IP addresses. What a scam...

One obvious point

[alizard]

The cable companies have made it clear that what they want people to do with their broadband is Websurf, send e-mail, and download an occasional MP3 from an "approved source" and watch TV in a real small RA or WMP window.

In other words, what they want is for people to pay a lot more per month to do very little more than they can do with dialup.

If they manage to prevent via port/IP blocking and/or AUP the use of their system for anything more, even Joe Sixpack from Deadfish, ID might start wondering why the hell he's paying $50-70/month for the kind of interactivity he was paying $20/month for.

Do you have any new sort of things that might be worth trying with broadband of the sort that might be the next killer app... the thing that will make everybody realize that they can't live without broadband?

Try it with a cablemodem and you might have the police or FBI kicking down your door.

If you have anything more interesting than a P2P server in mind, think in terms of relocating to a place where you can get citiLEC service or of creative DIY alternatives... find an ISP willing to let you stick a microwave antenna on their roof or do the other end of a DIY DSL setup. Or start looking for dot.com investors and get yourself a T1.

'Illegal' Bandwidth hoggers?

[Gabrill]

Why is this even an issue? If an ISP sells 100kps of upstream and 1000kbs of downstream, are they not legally required to provide that as often and as much as requested? Road runner users should get a class action to charge Road Runner with a breach of contract, as well as a court statement saying that "no servers but 100kps upload" is self-contradictory.

Yep...

[Danse]

I'm in South/Central Texas, and RR doesn't seem to be blocking Kazaa here. I'm downloading just fine right now. Did some searches too. Worked for me.

Kazaa Uploads

[Anonymous Coward]

Tools -> Options -> Traffic -> Disable sharing of files to other Kazaa users.

Done.

Re:Kazaa Uploads

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and if everyone does this --- all the files would suddenly disappear. Connecting to KaZaa would be useless. There is a reason that parasites don't kill their host. You are just a fucking leech. Soon you will be dead.

A better idea

[Proc6]

How about the cable companies offering speeds they can support users taking advantage of? The cable companies keep offering faster connections, then denying users the ability to use the speed. Just give everyone a solid 60 kps or whatever their pipe can stand and forget about it. That's what DSL providers do more or less.

Cable internet is becoming useless....

[Newer Guy]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but cable Internet is quickly becoming useless. The prices keep going up, multi tiered access is right around the corner, they're harassing anyone who uses a router, forget about using VPN, newsgroups suck, IRC sucks, email sucks, etc. etc. The glory days of unlimited cable Internet died with @home. Right now, DSL is a much better choice...but for how long?

Just move it to port 80

[Proc6]

I'd guess most people running Kazaa aren't running it on a server. (In fact I run it in a virtual machine in VMware so I can isolate it and shut it down when not in use.) So I say put it all on 80, that'll fuck with the cable companies. >:)

Re:Just move it to port 80

[HiThere]

That is, unfortunately, the most reasonable response, and the one that will happen.

This is not only underhanded and unethical, and, possibly, illegal. It's also silly and stupid. I can see no advantage, and lots of disadvantages, in forcing everything through port 80.

What angers me.

[Anonymous Coward]

They advertise this crap on TV as "Fast, Always on, virtually limitless bandwidth etc. etc." And show a guy streaming music videos and crap. Then they strip you of the right to be able to do crap like this.

Sure we can make a client with rotating ports. But what happens if an ISP decides to proxy all traffic?

Time to go back to dialup or ISDN... the last time we were truly free!

Communicomm (netcommander) does it too

[Anonymous Coward]

except theirs isn't completely blocked, they have a huge range or ports capped at .5k or less

also, they have a 1.0mb download and a .6mb upload cap on EVERY modem when they advertise 1.5mb.

wrote in and complained about it, their reply : "there is no way you can actually get 1.5mb/sec on the internet, so don't worry about it"

replied back and told them that we can't get it B/C they had it capped, they replied w/"oh..... i talked to 3com, they said their modems misread the config file. I'll get around to change it, but its not a top priority"

1)the "misread the config file" thing is total BS
2)its been months and still no change

Re:Communicomm (netcommander) does it too

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.netcommander.com/filesharing/

^ webpage for the filesharing restriction (which is more BS)

3 points http-tunnel ... etc

[t482]

1. Try http-tunnel and you should be able to get through without problems

2. Kazaa doesn't support linux so who cares others will fill the void (gnutella)

3. People will just revert to other methods - so it doesn't stop them it just limits their efficiency at copying for a while....

Anthony

Maybe Luck

[Inferno666]

Well i wish that my ISP would block KaZaa ports. I don't care about the other P2P programs but i'm really not liking the idea of an attack on KaZaa's stupid many million user network knocking out my cable provider. Granted i'm really paranoid and don't like the idea of my cable company imposing anymore of their near monopoly privilages. I figure what they should be concentrating their efforts on is getting rid of popups and spam, there's some bandwidth for them, all the java and pictures coming through just so i can click close button, that's just waisting their bandwidth 5K at a time.

Horrible Idea

[shepd]

Search deja for "DirecPC FAP" (your idea is part of their Fair Access Policy) and you'll notice exactly how much the users like that idea.

I can tell you that it is certain death for any company that does that. It has to be the most hated way of limiting use of bandwidth known to man. I something that's for sure -- if my provider moved from limiting by total usage to incremental speed decreases I'd quit them that hour.

Next thing you know they'll add remote controlled governors to trucks and force them to go slower and slower depending on how many miles they put on them. Blech! You can keep those heavy handed tactics off my network connection, TYVM.

Re:Horrible Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, you slashdotted google. At least the mirror is up. Be more careful next time.

Re:Horrible Idea

[pythorlh]

You're truck may not go slower the farther you go, but it does stop completely if you don't refill the tank. Given the choice between per-minute use and slow-down on highbandwidth months, I'd go for the slowdown.

Re:Horrible Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

And the reason it's hated, likely, is that it works so well. If people use a ton of bandwidth, they get to use less. And less. So they stop using up so much, at which point their bandwidth speed begins to go back up. The -only- reason anyone would hate this is that it's stopping them from freeloading, which is exactly what it's supposed to stop in the first place. Big deal.

Re:Horrible Idea

[tonywong]

That truck thing is going to happen in one way or another.

The DirecPC FAP seems way too low. My idea of high bandwidth hogs would be in the range of 60-100GB down per month, moderate under 20 GB and anything under 5 GB would be low usage. Figure about 1/10 those amounts for upstream.

Re:Horrible Idea

[evilempireinc]

freeloading?? How is it freeloading if I sign a contract with an ISP for a specified amount of bandwidth per month? If I find out that I was thrown back to dial up speeds for using the service at the level of performance that it was advertised at, I would be pissed off. At least if they switch to that kind of plan I would be expecting it to be cheaper, because they kicked all those 'freeloaders' off the network... yeah right. Like that would happen.

and a spike of HTTP traffic will happen in a month

[wuchang]

This is why everyone is tunneling their application protocols within HTTP. HTTP is quickly becoming the bearer protocol for all new Internet services just for the fact that it can get through filters and firewalls.

kazaa usage graph

[millette]

I've been collecting kazaa usage data for about 45 days now, and it does show a little impact. I haven't looked at the numbers, but you can see the graphs for yourselves right here:

http://tools.waglo.com:8888/kazaa.php

How to get their attention...

[sfgoth]

If you think this is obnoxious, and as a RoadRunner customer, you want to complain in the loudest possible fashion, call them.

Call their tech support number. Tie up their customer service people for as long as you can stand to be on the phone.

They don't care if you post in their forums. Bits. Easily ignored, nearly free.

When you call their 800 number, you are costing them money. They keep track of how many calls they get to tech support. They keep track of them by issue, and how much that issue is costing them. Customer support is where most companies see their profit margin evaporate, and consequently it's the one interaction with the customer that they watch closely to make sure they make the customer happy, because support costs money.

They don't care about your silly "rights". If 30% of their customers called to complain about their underfed cats, they'd probably send everyone cat food with the next bill. They don't listen, but they do react.

Make them pay. :-)

-pmb

VPN

[BagMan2]

If you have an office machine or a friend with good bandwidth, just setup a VPN with 3DES and they will never have any idea what you are doing.

Shame if I am sharing rpms

[anonymous cupboard]

There are some files that are 100% legal to share, for example Linux rpms and isos. Also, armyopsrecon was a computer game where normal distribution channels could not cope with people d/ling a free but 208MB game. For many, P2P was the answer.

These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong

If that is the excuse (apart from moneygrubbing), why not block Porn, Hate Sites, Online Gambling etc as well?

All fine until...

[Joe U]

The biggest problem is that this will be considered fine to many people. After all, they say it's only pirates that use these programs.

Then RR can simply apply this to other things that will use 'excessive' bandwidth.

Oh, your Everquest client uses too much bandwidth. But our new AOL game doesn't.

The chat server you connect to is eating up too much bandwidth, you should use AOL's chat rooms.

Complain now and complain loudly.

Re:What does -1 have to offer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or is it time to add a -2 rating?

it begins..

[snoozebutton]

worse and worse...

this really isn't that big of a deal to me right now, as I don't use Kazaa (and I'm not mentioning what I use!!) or RoadRunner,

but if / WHEN this were to happen here,
in Canada,
with other software's ports,
and Roger's and/or Bell net service,
we'll all be screwed, royally screwed.

_______________________

The kids are bored,
at home
on a computer they can't afford,

A first post will not be had
in these coming weeks.
and it's sad.

"I give you me, I give you nothing" - Bad Religion

More catchy tunes (CARP-free music!!!)

Re:It doesn't have to be blocked - just QoSed down

[Mordant]

Right - and even dynamically, finding an IP spewing files via Kazaa, adding that IP to the ToS-setting ACL, then taking it off if/when the offending behavior ceases.

Fag.

[Anonymous Coward]

You like taking it up the ass from corporations, don't you? Moron.

ISPs should not make service dependant on content

[AlastairBurt]

I think there is a case for mentioning the basic principles at stake here, even if they have been discussed on Slashdot before. They are anyway so important that they should be repeated as often as possible. Communications providers should not be liable for content and should not be able to control it. Anything else is dangerous folly.

Horrible crimes are committed using the road and telephone system -- crimes almost as bad as file-swapping, such as murder and rape. But the people responsible for the roads and telephone system are not liable for these crimes. To some extent this a question of practicality -- the telephone operators cannot listen in to all conversations -- but more importantly it hard to see how vetting telephone conversations according to there content is compatible with a democratic society.

But somehow, for some greater good, such as the protecting the five major labels' total control of music distribution, this principle is being abandoned for ISPs. I think this is a slippery slope. In a land such as the US, with so many lawyers and politicians susceptible to lobbyists with big cheque books, is hard to believe that other bodies will not want to tell the ISP's what they can deliver to their customers. I am sure there are other forms of content that could conceivably hurt some company's profit margins.

Even if Americans feel they have to violate the principle of non-liability of communications providers for some overriding greater good then they must surely build in some accountability into the system. Internet communication is becoming so important that the terms of service should be regulated. In particular, they should written in such a way that that ISP service can only be denied when the ISP can prove beyond reasonable doubt that some heinous crime, such mailing a friend a MP3 file, has been committed. Just blocking a port because you think that someone might do something illegal on that port should not be permissible.

In general, however, the principle should be defended that communications providers are in no way liable for what is being communicated and they should not be allowed to tailor their service based on the content. If file-swappers hog bandwidth, use traffic shaping to limit their bandwidth (and put this in the terms of service). ISP's should not be snooping on what private parties communicate amongst themselves or otherwise be making guesses about the use of bandwidth -- at least in a democratic society, which the US makes some pretense of being.

The BIG picture

[Anonymous Coward]

Port blocking is just putting a band-aid on the problem. For the end-user there will ALWAYS be ways around this - someone creates a p2p app that uses port 80 as the transport. The cable/DSL companies goofed on this one and now they are struggling to come up with these half-assed temporary fixes that really don't provide a good long-term solution. Sometimes good solutions to these problems can be found in other areas that have nothing to do with the internet. One area that comes to mind that might provide a solution for this problem is the concept of a toll road. Typically toll roads are built as an alternative for people to use rather than the slower and longer public routes. Its a win/win situation - the drivers are happy because they get a faster and more convenient route and the owner of the toll road is happy because he gets money that helps pay for keeping the road operational. Keeping that win/win concept in mind we can apply it to this bandwidth problem. Users who want to use extra bandwidth (faster download/upload speeds) will have to pay a little extra for it and Cable/DSL companies will use the extra money to provide circuits that can accommodate the "high bandwidth" users. This solution is similar to what Giganews does. As most of us know, Giganews is a news service that provides access to USENET newsgroups (including most of the popular warez and pr0n groups). The pricing plan is based on how many bytes the user downloads - the more you download the more you pay. Bottom line is that p2p and other high bandwidth application networks aren't going away. As more and more new p2p users are added to the network the Cable/DSL companies need "widen their roads" to support them - and if that means that I have to pay a few more bucks a month to have a reliable network then sign me up.

The BIG picture

[Anonymous Coward]

(sorry for the repost, clicked HTML Formatted by mistake)

Port blocking is just putting a band-aid on the problem. For the end-user there will ALWAYS be ways around this - someone creates a p2p app that uses port 80 as the transport.

The cable/DSL companies goofed on this one and now they are struggling to come up with these half-assed temporary fixes that really don't provide a good long-term solution.

Sometimes good solutions to these problems can be found in other areas that have nothing to do with the internet. One area that comes to mind that might provide a solution for this problem is the concept of a toll road.

Typically toll roads are built as an alternative for people to use rather than the slower and longer public routes. Its a win/win situation - the drivers are happy because they get a faster and more convenient route and the owner of the toll road is happy because he gets money that helps pay for keeping the road operational.

Keeping that win/win concept in mind we can apply it to this bandwidth problem. Users who want to use extra bandwidth (faster download/upload speeds) will have to pay a little extra for it and Cable/DSL companies will use the extra money to provide circuits that can accommodate the "high bandwidth" users.

This solution is similar to what Giganews does. As most of us know, Giganews is a news service that provides access to USENET newsgroups (including most of the popular warez and pr0n groups). The pricing plan is based on how many bytes the user downloads - the more you download the more you pay.

Bottom line is that p2p and other high bandwidth application networks aren't going away. As more and more new p2p users are added to the network the Cable/DSL companies need "widen their roads" to support them - and if that means that I have to pay a few more bucks a month to have a reliable network then sign me up.

Legal for Cable, illegal for DSL.

[Valen0]

IANAL...However...I remember watching a TechTV special with Lawrence Lessig talking about copyright and the Internet. In the program, he said that cable can regulate what they can and can not carry. Phone companies, however, because they are a "common carrier", have to allow any type of transmission on their network without bias and discrimination.

Re:Legal for Cable, illegal for DSL.

[Anonymous Coward]

They can however disallow servers via their TOS.

iMesh does not use fasttrack

[jark]

iMesh is not fasttrack and therefore should not be affected. it uses "The patent-pending iMesh technology," which "allows you to download files from up to seven users at the same time."

This sucks!!!

[Dave Hojak]

Damn!!! The only reason I use RR is so I can download high quality gay pr0n MPEG's off Kazaa!!! Now they're blocking it? Fuck, I'm gonna get all my gay file swapping friends from sherdog.net together, and we'll fight this thing as *hard* as we can! Those peter puffing, cock rockers at RR really need some clue sticks shoved up their asses... Hey, that sounds like fun!

GigaNews got it right

[seligman]

While GigaNews isn't an ISP, they got this whole bandwidth problem right. First off, they don't claim to give you unlimited bandwidth, but have different levels you can buy into. The thing they really do well, imo, is they offer a recycling option. If you want, they'll automatically send you an email when you get near your limit. Go over the limit, and they'll kick off into another month's billing cycle. So, you can intelligently plan your bandwidth usage, and if you want, you can pay to go over easily, without even doing anything. And best of all, changing plans is easy and painless to do. If ISPs are going to start capping user's bandwidth usage, I hope they do something like this.

Re:GigaNews got it right

[acceleriter]

Of course, their entire business model is based on warez, porn, and mp3's being available with that bandwidth. Not that I have a problem with that, but it does make paying by the GB a bit more compelling than for, say, web surfing.

Don't forget that if the cable companies charged that way, after the customer gets done paying Giganews, he gets to pay his cable company, too.

RE: You're Sig.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but now that you mention it, yes.

Limited bandwidth

[Mika_Lindman]

I am well aware of this problem. I know, that p2p software consume all bandwidth (even mine) quite efficiently. But still, I run such software on my computer.
But I quess I'm a little bit odd, 'cause this is what I do :
During the daytime, I limit my upload transfer to only 10kbit/s, and download is limited to 20k/s. This leaves a lot bandwidth for all those surfers and game players. And during the nighttime, I limit all transfers to about 50% of total bandwidth (we have 1mbit/s connection divided for all users). Haven't had any complaints yet, so I quess this works well.

I just hope that p2p software developers would make automatic bandwidth controller, which would change limitations according to clock. Would ease my filesharing a lot.

Awww

[Anonymous Coward]

Awww, Kazza go bye bye. We're just gonna have to write something new.

Here's My Guess

[gabeman-o]

I dont know if this could be it, but the file sharing program for Mac OS X called Neo scans ip ranges for KaZaa/Morpheus clients and can connect directly to the clients without use of the official fast track network. Its predefined for ranges in Charter Communications, Road Runner (Austin, CFL, Maine, MS, Neo, New, NYC, NYC2, NYCAP, NYCAP2, Rochester, STNY, TWCNY, CABLE), and Rogers.com. This and other "ghost" clients could be the reason that RR is blocking ports.

Comcast already blocks VPN

[niola]

In some markets Comcast already blocks VPN which for those who use it to work from home, it really sucks. Their reasoning for blocking a legitimate service? They want people to pay double for a "Pro" account of some sort.

Broadband might be the only service I receive that not only has been going up in price, but has been becoming more and more restrictive with less features.

I am just glad I moved. In the town where my brother-in-law lives Comcast has already begun routing all port 80 traffic through proxy servers. I hope they don't do that in my town.

--Jon

Re:Comcast already blocks VPN

[Kamel Jockey]

Comcast has already begun routing all port 80 traffic through proxy servers.

Comcast does that here. Although its not supposed to be for monitoring reasons, its strictly for performance. By keeping locally cached copies of websites, it reduces the need for many individual users to run outside of the network to get content, they can simply retrieve the locally cached copy instead, which results in much faster download speeds. Even if you are worried about monitoring, a proxy server isn't the only means by which they could monitor you, so to me, the use of proxies for monitoring purposes is a non-issue.

Re:What does -1 have to offer?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is just you. So, the people at -1 would post at -2. Would that be enough, or would it soon be time to add a -3 rating?

At the cafeteria last Monday...

[vidnet]

...they had a bowl of chokolate allsorts with a sign saying "Have some chokolate with your coffee, courtesy of the staff :)". Mmmh, delicious chokolate. I took a plate and scooped up half the bowl on it. Oddly enough, the people standing behind me were highly disgruntled (I blame it on Monday). But it was wonderful chokolate, I nibbled it all day long.

The next day, there was the same bowl of chokolate with the same sign. Woohoo! Another plate full for me! Also, I had no idea people would be so cranky on Tuesdays, it must have been the bad weather.

The third day, there was a new sign by the chokolate bowl. It said "Two pieces pr person!" What a god damn ripoff! I pay my $15 pr month for a subsidized cafeteria, so I have the right to eat chokolates! I paid for them!! GIVE ME MY CHOKOLATE, OR I WILL QUIT!

Re:At the cafeteria last Monday...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking twat.

Bandwidth

[RickHunter]

As other posters have pointed out, this is very probably a few users with technical problems blaming it on their ISP.

However, this entire issue is a red herring. Roadrunner, as with most cable ISPs, caps upstream and downstream bandwidth. I'm not going to be able to transfer enough over my cable connection, even if I saturate it, to make much of a difference for others nearby. Now, if everyone on my block did this, then we'd notice a problem. But at that point, demand for bandwidth has exceeded the available infrastructure, which obviously did not anticipate people actually using the bandwidth they were told they had.

As for cost, this is also a bad argument. Yes, you can buy a large pipe for some incredible sum-plus-usage-costs for "business use". You seriously think major ISPs pay the same incredible sum for bandwidth? Many have peering arrangements, and for those, more traffic is better - you get more other providers wanting to peer with you. Even if you don't, your bandwidth is so cheap that a sizable percentage of your customer base saturating their connections 24/7 probably wouldn't cost you more than $500 a month.

(To say nothing of the rediculousness of charging for bandwidth usage anyway. Bandwith isn't a non-renewable resource. Any bandwidth not used in a given time interval is wasted and unrecoverable.)

No, to see why this is happening, follow the money. Who gains by preventing citizens from having an easy avenue for sharing music and video? The media cartels. Who's hurt by preventing it? Their indie competition. Wow, what an astonishing coincidence!

Re:Bandwidth

[rebelcool]

I live in austin. Here's what I've discovered through trial and error and trying to cut through rr's stonewalling support.

I first noticed the problem in early february, when morpheus was still fasttrack. I would type in a search for anything (to test, I tried something really common, like our friends Metallica), and after a few moments it would return 'no results found'. This was frustrating so I went to morpheus's tech chat room (which was full of kids who didnt know their ass from a mouse but were supposedly 'volunteers') and asked around. Though everyone of them had had numerous people from texas coming in and complaining.

I went and downloaded an online port checker which connects to a server, which then tries to connect to you to test and see if your ISP is blocking a specific port. It reported that the usual suspects like 80, 21 and SMTP were blocked - but also the port that fasttrack uses.

I did some more digging and found others who had reported the problem. One guy said he had good luck by disabling file sharing. I tried this, and yes, it did work most of the time.

I called RR's support and got the run around, passed between different departments. When I told them I had gotten a port scan that told me they were blocking, I was given the usual spiel about how port scans were against the TOS, blah blah blah... idiots. I gave up on them.

Nowadays I use kazaa lite with file sharing disabled. Usually I can download 1 to 5 files before searches and downloads stop functioning. If you wait a while it seems to release the block.

Re:Bandwidth

[Tetrad69]

(To say nothing of the rediculousness of charging for bandwidth usage anyway. Bandwith isn't a non-renewable resource. Any bandwidth not used in a given time interval is wasted and unrecoverable.)

I've been toying around with this idea for a while: how about the government own the cable system? I'm talking last-mile coax and the fiber from hub to hub. Currently, different companies own different sections here and there, and they have to pay each other to use them (hence the reason why there are charges per Xbps, it's all about leasing). That way you'd get broadband to as many people as possible (with it being a public service), and have a monopoly business running on top of it with federally imposed price restrictions. Think AT&T before it was broken up.

If the Internet is really important to the future of business and entertainment, I see no reason why it shouldn't be like the phone/power/road systems. Granted, the first two were decentralized, and there were some problems with that, but it works now, and the prices are (for the most part, ignoring the Enron fiasco) cheap.

But for some reason I think nobody wants this. Individual companies don't want to give up the money makers they already have, and the White House probably doesn't want to go about shelling out huge amounts of taxpayers money for something that was actually being considered relabled as an 'information service' as opposed to a 'telecommunication service'.

Of course my perceptions on the could be wrong. Please enlighten me if I am.

blah blah blah

[gelfling]

Look at me I'm a Libertarian I think I know something about contract law but I just talk out me ass, weeeeeeeee !!!!!!

DirectTV DSL is good ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is another vote for DirectTvDsl. I've been a customer with directtvdsl for two months now. We have had 0 downtime, and good speeds. I am in the south east though... I've heard thats the best place for DirectTvDsl.

Their customer services has been pretty darn good too. The modem they sent us can be used either with USB or ethernet... at first we used it for USB because of a networking issue, once that issue wsa resolved we had to call them up and get it changed over to use Ethernet... which took about 10 minutes on the phone.

Re:How ironic. I'm using roadrunner. Cannot downlo

[68030]

Or until you get something fixed, come to the
chatroom as listed on the page. Several of the
patrons run fileservers with all of the remixes.
Granted it's not the easiest way to get the
music you want, but it's better than going
without.

Earthlink, anyone?

[JonToycrafter]

I'm amazed that no one seemed to mention that TW/AOL, as a condition of merging, had to OPEN THEIR CABLE MODEM NETWORK! Competing ISPs, in theory, are able to give you cable modem service in TW/AOL-serviced areas. Right now, your three choices are Road Runner, AOL, and Earthlink. Which really means two choices. However, I'm posting this from an Earthlink cable modem account which runs over TWC-installed lines. There's the added bonus that I pay $42 a month for service, all-inclusive, rather than $60, as when I had cable modem service without cable TV.

You DO have a choice...for now.

Roadrunner stinks anyway

[mooneyguy]

I dumped Roadrunner months ago. Their service is bad even for a consumer ISP. Port blocking? Peanuts compared to complete service outages that would last for days. Not to mention a service department that never answers the phone. I'm much happier with DSL. Still not completely satisfied, but at least they answer their phone (usually).

Don't you people get it?

[Gannoc]

Bandwidth hogs, etc is a load of crap.

Of COURSE, if you cut down on the 10% most expensive customers, you'll make more money. You could do that in ANY business or organization.

Its just in most businesses, you can't tell who's doing that, or kicking off customers would cost you additional ones. Schools can't kick out the 10% of students that need the most help. Technical support can't say "You're so dumb, you're in the top 10% of time we waste per-customer. Never call back."

Here, they were brilliant. Start with "news" articles explaining how those people are costing YOU money!!! What a crock of shit. Stores will charge as MUCH AS THEY CAN, AT ALL TIMES. Call them gluttons, hogs, hackers, theives.

Then, kick 'em off or charge them a LOT more!

Of course, once you've set that precident, now you can start on the NEXT 10%. Then the NEXT 10%. Then the NEXT 10%. Soon, you have a wonderful pay-per-byte system in place, and people only using it sparingly because they can't afford it. Of course, thats great for you, because:

-You still make your $50/month
-Since internet advertising didn't really work out, there's no longer any financial motivation for the ISPs who can really suck out of people when they use the internet anyway

TW Austin does not require the use of Road Runner

[Anonymous Coward]

And I thought my Kazaa was busted. Once again, Slashdot provides clue where there wasn't once before. I have RR Austin and I've seen the same symptoms as the others ... searches work immediately upon connect (sometimes), then fail requiring reconnect.

Fortunately, somebody somewhere made enough noise about monopolizing the coax jack that TW Austin had to provide us with the option of using any one of a half-dozen ISPs. One is RR, another AOL, another Earthlink and another some Texas ISP. I think I'll look into changing mine.

Fine print probably covers it but still unethical

[WCMI92]

Fine print in a contract and in advertisements can only cover RoadRunner so far. Clearly, they are aware this is an unethical practice, or else they'd be a little more forthcoming (like NOTIFYING their customers that something was being cut off).

Even though AOLTW is one of the RIAA 5 labels, they probably have as much, if not more, at stake on the OTHER END to get broadband in as many people's homes as they can.

P2P sharing is one reason why I used to have RR, before I left NC and moved back to one of the last broadband free areas of the USA, NE KY :(

They should have notified customers. I've not read their EULA completely, but I'm sure like most they are totally one sided contracts and they allow AOLTW to change terms at will.

Even IF the EULA covers it though, PRUDENCE tells me that customers who have it cut off suddenly, without notice, are going to be a LOT more pissed off and likely to drop the service than would be customers told in advance.

Now that it's on /. it's no longer a secret, and their offices better brace for a FIRESTORM on Monday. I wouldn't want to be one of their helpdesk drones!

Not days, more like months

[freeweed]

This would not take DAYS, as you suggested.

Actually, it's been several weeks since I've used Kazaa(lite), and I wasn't running as a supernode or anything... and yet, my firewall is STILL seeing a continual stream of traffic coming from Kazaa users.

I don't think their system really filters out inactive nodes all that efficiently.

That wonderful 10%

[freeweed]

If I ever see another person thinking they're being somehow insightful by claiming "10% consume 90%", I think I'll puke. Hint: in the business world, the old maxim was 20/80, and this goes back a lot more years than any ISP, or the internet itself.

Virtually every business or service in history sees unequal use from its customers. ISPs are no different. Saying "fuck you" to the 20(or as you say, 10)% of your customers is called suicide to most businesses.

Hell, just imagine if we ran our medical system this way: "well, we eliminated the 10% of our customers who use 90% of our services, and wow! are hospitals ever efficient now!". And in this case it's more like 5/95%.

Re:That wonderful 10%

[kubrick]

Hell, just imagine if we ran our medical system this way: "well, we eliminated the 10% of our customers who use 90% of our services, and wow! are hospitals ever efficient now!". And in this case it's more like 5/95%.

However, only in a socialist health care system are those 5% paying 5% of the costs -- in a more capitalist situation those 5% using 95% of resources will be paying something more commensurate with what they use, or their insurers will, which is much the same thing for these purposes.

The assumption with, e.g., cable ISPs is that every customer pays the same amount and expects a similar amount of service -- if 10% of your customers use 90% of the bandwidth, and if half of that 10% are actually using, say, 75% of the bandwidth, at what point is the ISP justified in saying 'Screw it' and dropping those customers? If they're losing money on them anyway, and decide not to renew their contracts, it must be a win-win situation for them -- or they could raise charges to those customers until it was economic to carry them again.

Choose your words

[Snaller]

I think he was simply stating that, file sharing apps are almost always used for immoral activities.

Beware of the word "immoral" - Most would probably agree that a lot of filesharing trafic is against the law, but that's not the same as it being immoral.

Most ISPs can track users by collecting NetFlow

[dangermen]

A lot of ISPs use hardware that is NetFlow capable.

NetFlow records the source IP, source port, destination IP, and dest port, bytes sent, start and stop times of the transaction. Using packages such as FlowScan, admins can profile users traffic.

This makes it very easy to look at what your users are doing.

RR Blocking Kazaa????

[tiomapengineer]

I am a RR customer in Houston, TX and have been using Kazaa for the past six months with no problems whatsoever.

Re:Speak out, now with more buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he should of used the word 'architecture' a few more times. And maybe squeezed in a few paragraphs about synergistic vision.

That'd leave their execs drooling.

Just like that Goddamn RoadRunner

[dbretton]

To sneak up on you while you are secretly planning to download the latest LOTR Divx using the ACME Kazaa client, and then

Beep! Beep!

Scares the shit out of you, causing you to fall out of your chair, out the door, down the street, and over a cliff where you freefall for 25 seconds, ending up making a little while poof of smoke.

Damn you, RoadRunner! Damn you to Hell!

Road Runner's response to port-blocking claims

[dh003i]

I sent a letter to the Rochester division of Road Runner regarding the blocked ports for Fast-track in Texas. Their response:

Thank you for contacting Road Runner Technical Support.

The only ports that are blocked are 25, 137,138,and 139. These ports have been blocked since inception.

Seems like a straight-shooting answer to me. They're making no special effort to block particular ports. The blocked ports were always blocked.

Re:Road Runner's response to port-blocking claims

[jelle]

"The blocked ports were always blocked."

According to my logs, I get incoming port 137 and 139 connections on roadrunner (denied on my firewall, of course).

Q.E.D.

Re:Road Runner's response to port-blocking claims

[alyandon]

Strange. When I had RR about a year ago in Austin, TX I ran an SMTP server all the time. The only thing they did was scan it and test it to make sure it wasn't an open relay. Even though the TOS/AUP specifically forbids running servers they never sent any nasty or threatening emails.

The only time I've known them to block a port was when Code Red hit and they started blocking port 80 in order to get a handle on the situation. Eventually, that port restriction was lifted.

However, back when Napster was in full swing I do remember getting a blanket email (I didn't use Napster) from RR asking people not to run the Napster client 24/7 as the surge in upstream traffic was causing problems in certain areas. The email also kindly reminded everyone that it is a violation of AUP/TOS to distribute copyrighted materials that you don't have permission the author's/copyright holder's written permission to distribute. Notice that they didn't say not to run Napster at all -- just don't keep it running if you aren't using it.

All in all, RR has been a pretty tolerant broadband ISP... at least in Austin.

Re:How ironic. I'm using roadrunner. Cannot downlo

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to disable your content advisor on internet explorer. that should allow you to use the save target as option

bouncing email

[SHEENmaster]

At work monday, I had to route an email through my private smtp server to get it through to a roadrunner customer. Unlike the customers, we don't have the option of simply boycotting roadrunner.

(We are AOL/Time Warner/Charter Cable/RoadRunner/Microsoft/US Government. The distinctiveness of your bank accounts will be added to our own. Resistance is futile. You will be Assimilated. disclaimer: The US Government is merely a supporter of AOL/Time Warner/Charter Cable/RoadRunner/Microsoft/US Government and not a core member. This is subject to change the instant that tax-payers look away.)

TWC Is getting worse every day.

[photon317]

I paid for "Internet Access". Since I don't live in China, I expect that to mean uncensored, unabridged access to the global internetwork of IP-connected machines, using *any* IP protocol and/or port number that I see fit, within the limit of the bandwidth agreement we have.

I have tried to explain this to TWC multiple times by email when complaining of technical issues that they are cuasing, but they don't give a damn and still refuse to inform their customers.

They block inbound port 80, so that even with a DynDNS setup you can't run a home webserver without resorting to a non-default port. They state in their contract that you're not allowed to run any "server" services, enumerating several like smtp servers, news, www, etc.

The problem is that they see certain things (KaZaa, home web server, etc...) as eating up disproportionate amounts of their bandwidth, so they try to block the protocols to save themselves bandwidth.

IMHO - I paid for unlimited access at Cable's advertised speeds (shared with my neighborhood loop of course), and that's that. If they don't me using so much, don't sell me so much. If they *must*, they should implement monthly xfer limits in the up and down directions and charge for going over (e.g. 10GB down and 1GB up permonth for the usual low monthly fee, larger packages available).

I would much rather be limited in GB/mo that be limited in which ports/protocols I can use. I don't want (nor did I purchase) a Web/Email-only service. I want my IP access.

Re: You're Sig.

[Anonymous Coward]

What is downright disgusting is that either of you two have any clue as to what guys that like laying naked in a tub while other guys piss even look like. Where have you seen that?? Do you enjoy seeing something like that? It sounds like you two are the sick fucks.

Out of Control

[Anonymous Coward]

is EXACTLY what I want to be -- out of anyone's control; which is to say, a free man.

It's not about the money, it's about the freedom.

This is MPAA at work

[Antity]

After reading the newsgroup postings, I strongly think that this is MPAA at work. There was this story of MPAA contacting ISPs to shut down customers that offer files using filesharing software just yesterday.

According to the reports, people see RoadRunner scan their port 1214 and some time after this the port becomes blocked.

I think it works like this: MPAA informs RoadRunner of an "insult", RoadRunner staff checks this customer's port and if there is filesharing software active, they silently block it. It seems to be done manually.

Nothing magical here. But seems like RoadRunner is in bed with MPAA, or they wouldn't do it without noticing their users (and at least ASK them if the MPAA insult is true at all).

There could be other reasons...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised noone has yet mentioned the fact that there's a virus running around the Kazaa network. Back when Code Red was a big problem RoadRunner blocked port 80, but it appears they've dropped that block in the Austin area now that it's not such a big problem.

I agree that they're doing a poor job of informing their customers about what services they're blocking, but they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't block ports on risky services that have a serious risk of compromising customer machines.

Re:What does -1 have to offer?

[Anonymous Coward]

-2 for total 10yr old crap (FIRST POST) etc..

-1 for the typical OT rants.

Maybe we just need a new rating instead of offtopic or flamebait, such as "pointless crap" and let us filter on that.

Re:It doesn't have to be blocked - just QoSed down

[LinuxOnHal]

Part of the problem with this is, many ISP's do not recieve an unlimited amount of bandwidth from their upstream. Metered T-1 and DS-3 lines are available from most Tier 1 ISP's, and at the end of the month, the ISP pays for the average bandwidth utilization on that line, whether the utilization was in the day or at night.

comcast isn't any better

[cball2k]

In the Kansas City Missouri (misery to those that live here) Comcast is bulleting routers. If it was just mine that had the problem, and it was happening at random, it would be my thoughts that it was my equipment, but when it happens to several locations at the same time, it is a clear attack on the use of routers by coNcast. I agree with the idea of getting the most utility for your dollar and have notified coNcast of the cancellation, and am waiting for DirectDSL to test my phone lines (not a worry, I used to have dsl until the use of PPPoe was enacted by SWB).

While it is slower, it allows the use of servers and one can run their own DNS, at only an increase of $5 dollars a month then what I pay for coNcast shitty service. Speed only helps if one can use the high speed, if it is not usable for more then pop-up adds and looking at what the provider deems PROPER usage (censorship) then to hell with that service, less speed for quality is my motivation. CoNcast habit of lies, using third party customer support in another country, and a complete disregard for providing a quality survive, is the trend. All we can do as consumers is NOT pay or use such a business and then the quality services will survive. The shitty provider's will then either practice quality or go out of business.

Why is the term so damn long?

[yerricde]

without copyright protections a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place.

Assuming life after publication is 50 years, and copyright gives the author's estate the monopoly for 70 years after the death of the author, how do you justify giving one author a monopoly over a work for 120 years?

With copyright protections, a lot of things wouldn't get made in the first place because 1. some authors, publishers, and estates refuse to license a work at any price, and 2. some authors, publishers, and estates have a reputation of filing frivolous lawsuits accusing plagiarism, discouraging people from creating new works for fear of the cost of a legal defense.

I live in austin, there is blocking.

[rebelcool]

I'll copy and paste what I wrote in another post...

I first noticed the problem in early february, when morpheus was still fasttrack. I would type in a search for anything (to test, I tried something really common, like our friends Metallica), and after a few moments it would return 'no results found'. This was frustrating so I went to morpheus's tech chat room (which was full of kids who didnt know their ass from a mouse but were supposedly 'volunteers') and asked around. Though everyone of them had had numerous people from texas coming in and complaining.

I went and downloaded an online port checker which connects to a server, which then tries to connect to you to test and see if your ISP is blocking a specific port. It reported that the usual suspects like 80, 21 and SMTP were blocked - but also the port that fasttrack uses.

I did some more digging and found others who had reported the problem. One guy said he had good luck by disabling file sharing. I tried this, and yes, it did work most of the time.

I called RR's support and got the run around, passed between different departments. When I told them I had gotten a port scan that told me they were blocking, I was given the usual spiel about how port scans were against the TOS, blah blah blah... idiots. I gave up on them.

Nowadays I use kazaa lite with file sharing disabled. Usually I can download 1 to 5 files before searches and downloads stop functioning. If you wait a while it seems to release the block.

Re:I live in austin, there is blocking.

[joFFeman]

i have a friend who lives in houston- for the past few weeks he's complained constantly about his problems with fasttrack programs- i've gotten him to try them all. he's reporting the same problems with kazaa lite as with kazaa, and he has the same exact problem. he has a clean system, i got him to check everything. it's not an isolated incident, but publicity of it (until now) has been basically nil. the problem is, most of these people are either too afraid of Big Brother to ask RR for tech-support or answers about it, or they think the problem is the fault of fasttrack.

Comcast Possibly Scanning too?

[Splat]

This is just speculation, but I've noticed Comcast's DNS Servers (68.80.0.5 and 68.80.0.6) trying to connect to port 1214 on my machine once or twice.

Screwed up misdirected traffic, or KaZaa scanning. Any comments? Anyone else notice this?

tampabay.rr.com is doing this

[moorewr]

I'm a Clearwater, FL customer. My kazaa and morpheus have not worked for some time. This article confirms what I suspected. So you can add the Tampa Bay market to the list of locations they have locked down.

Big surprise for part of a media giant. It bugs me but I'll live I guess -- so long as I can use ssh & get out to UNIX Empire games I'm happy (usallly port 1617), I'm happy.

if you're in Tennessee...

[Zebaulon]

You may want to look into ISDN. Where I'm at, there's no decent broadband. DSL isn't available (well, I had someone tell me the stuff was in, but FastAccess site says its not, and their reps are too lazy to check with the local CO), cable is one-way (not taking new customers) and they are pushing the two-way back more and more ... last I heard it's Sep 1st before that's in. Satellite has too much latency (I do Slashdot with Mozilla, and mail/irc over an SSH connection to my co-located box.)

So, I'm using ISDN. It's 128Kbit, not the fastest, but it beats dialup majorly. And here in Tennessee it's about $40/mo. for the ISDN line (mine's $45, cause I get call waiting, forwarding, and all that jazz) plus your ISP charges (mine is $35/mo. for 400 hours.) There is one ISP that offers unlimited ISDN but they seem to have alot of upload problems, and a static IP costs you an extra $15/mo. with them! :/

The ISDN line comes with two channels and phone numbers, so you can be online at 64K and talk on the phone, or do multilink and run 128K using both channels. I have had very few problems with my ISDN, other than the fact it's ended up disconnected by Bell because they mess up our bills..but that's been straightened out now.

I've heard alot of other places, ISDN costs a lot more.. and that alot of places (even here in the US?) bill per minute or hour. I was told down in Huntsville, Alabama (a few hours from here) they get hours per month and then its a charge per hour after that ... not that way here in Tennessee. So if you're in Tennessee, it might be a way to go (especially if you don't have any type of broadband available ... ISDN is supposed to be avilable everywhere, its basically a regular line in digital mode of sorts.) If you're outside the state, check with your telco, it might be more expensive..

ISPs should be common carriers

[DoctorFrog]

This is exactly why I feel ISPs should be "common carriers" under the law, like the phone companies and package delivery services.

When a primary means of communication is left to private enterprise, the most politically (NOT technologically or even monetarily, though superiority in those modes would certainly help) efficient ends up owning the customers' means of speech. It's happening more and more rapidly now, too.

The end result is that whoever owns your means of communications effectively controls your speech.

Sure, even if all ISPs end up in the hands of an oligopoly of two or three huge companies people can still use letters, word of mouth and other nonelectronic means of communication. People can still stand on a soapbox in Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, UK last time I checked, but it's not terribly effective unless you can get the TV cameras in.

It's all too possible, in a time of rapid change in the media of communication and rapid mergers in business, for free speech to be shut out of a primary channel. Leaving ISPs to the control of market forces won't kill free speech, no, but making them common carriers would do yeoman work toward increasing it.

I block KaZaA too.

[jonadab]

I block it on my LAN. (Rather than blocking ports, I just
make sure the domain resolves to an IP address that doesn't
have a web server, but the result is the same.)

Why? First, I'll tell you what's *not* the reason. This
has _nothing_ to do with DRM. I don't care about that.
It's not about bandwidth either; I can run half a dozen
simultaneous instances of wget, no problem. (Okay, that
makes things take longer, but eventually it all gets done.)
So, why then do I block KaZaA? Because of what it does
to the TCP/IP over PPP that connects me to the internet.
Something about the way it forms its traffic causes very
significant issues. Let it run on one workstation for just
a few minutes, and my link up to my ISP eats flaming death.
I can't even ping the upstream gateway then. I have to take
networking down and back up to get things going again. And
they don't _stay_ going until I kill KaZaA. My conclusion
is that KaZaA does something invalid with its packets. I
don't know the details. Perhaps if KaZaA were open source
we could find out. But I'm fairly certain my ISP isn't
doing anything to KaZaA deliberately; I have a medium-sized
regional ISP (bright.net), and while it _is_ dialup, I've
been more than pleased with the service they provide. Their
nntp server is reliable and gets a full feed of everything,
even free.* The phone support is good. The bandwidth is
limited by the phone lines in the area, not by caps. Pretty
much the only things they don't provide are shell access and
cgi -- for security reasons. They know I'm using IP Masq to
share my connection, and they don't care (though they don't
provide support for that). This is a good ISP. But
something about their configuration goes haywire when KaZaA
runs over it. Maybe it's the type of system they use for
their dialup servers; maybe it's even a bug in some vendor's
IP stack, I don't know. It doesn't really matter; regular
traffic doesn't trigger it, and KaZaA does. So if I want
to share files, I do it some other way. I can run proftpd
on my IP Masq gateway if I want, post binaries to usenet,
whatever... this is not about bandwidth consumption or DRM.
It's about what KaZaA's traffic does to a network. Not
because of the amount of traffic, but because of _how_
it's done. (Again, I don't know the details; wish I did.)

Now, I blocked it months ago, and it's possible that
it doesn't have these problems anymore, but I didn't
feel the need to expose my network to the issue again.
Especially after I did a web search and found out about
the known ties with spyware and who knows what. There
are other ways to share files that don't have these
problems.

coward's new net

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! Broadband providers complain about providing bandwidth while secretively delete the ports that people use to make use of that bandwidth. This is typical of capitalism. They are in the business to make money, not provide you with bandwidth.
The solution is simple. Don't complain when you don't get the service you paid for from a commercial company. Do it yourself. Linux is the result of thousands of people deciding that capitalism doesn't work. Commercial Unixs or other OSs did not have the features, source code, bug fixes or standards compliance that people needed, so they made their own. If we all got together and did the same thing with wireless networks we'd be routing through an internet that could handle the bandwidth we all use. The internet as it is today has a few routes. A few years ago it was routing through a few fddi rings running 100Mbps. Today we can buy a wireless router that runs at 54Mbps for $300. Next year we'll have twice the bandwidth at half the cost. The only thing missing from this puzzle is a modern P2P routing protocol written at the low level. I doubt anything like BGP or OSPF would work for a network of several million routers, dynamicly reconfiguring the network to move data where it needs to go while routes and nodes are constantly appearing and disappearing. But when the software is written that can route through an ever changing network of wireless equipment there wouldn't be a need for an ISP and you wouldn't be limitted to 128Kbps of upload on a pipe that would easily push several Mbps. Plus you'd have a one-time-fee of $300 or whatever the cost of your wireless router. Or maybe a one-time-fee that lasts until the next generation of hardware is available. What this needs is a bunch of technically proficient people who love eachother enough to give their time and provide EVERYONE with all the bandwidth they'd ever want for free. Requirement: Love.

possible alternative?

[brad3378]

How about this scheme:
Instead of completely eliminating port traffic,
why not have rules for bandwidth?

Maybe limit port bandwidth rates to Peer2Peer ports and give priority to other ports. better yet, uncap (at least partially) all ports during low consumption hours (i.e. 2-6:00 AM)

Wouldn't everybody be happy then?
Web Surfers would have a fast connection, and the Warez crowd still download their favorite boy-bands by morning?

Now what?

[lew3004]

Regardless of the T&C, people who pay for a service at any given rate are within their rights to expect that service. If I pay $40.00 per month for broadband service, then I expect broadband service; not limiting factors by the service provider because they did not think of the other users out there. If it costs more to run the service--so be it, blame the p2p people for driving up costs to the provider, but don't expect me to subscribe then either. What the T&C SHOULD read is: "We reserve the right to limit your access as we see fit; regardless of what you pay."

It's nidlink.com in Idaho

[Anonymous Coward]

aka Imbris

Windowed averages

[yerricde]

If I'm leeching at top speed, and the connection goes down, it's going to take a while for the client to report "0 kps" as it will perform an average over time of how fast my download is going.

Not necessarily. WinMX (my favorite file sharing program) uses a 10-second window to compute these averages. I'd think the types of users who submit stories to Slashdot would be able to distinguish a gradual fadeoff from a true dropped conn.

Why I still use FTP

[yerricde]

How many people use ftp for something other then mp3 trading and warez?

I use FTP to upload files to my web site because for one thing, my current provider doesn't support HTTP form uploading, and for another, I prefer the drag-and-drop interface of my FTP client to the dialog-box interface of most web browsers' file upload widgets.

For web hosting, try BinaryBlocks

[yerricde]

A decent amount of webspace with almost unlimited bandwidth can be had for next to NOTHING!

And I'd like to recommend BinaryBlocks. You get 100 megabytes of space, with unmetered data transfer, Perl and PHP support, and a MySQL database, for only $7 per month.

No time to rip a cd I already own?

When I first started out on the MP3 scene, good ripping and encoding tools were hard to come by. My Lite-On 32x CD-ROM had a bug that would corrupt the last two seconds of any ripped CD Digital Audio track no matter which tool I used. (Then I bought a Plextor burner, which rips audio perfectly.) In addition, it was tough to find Windows binaries of a free(beer) MP3 encoder that went above 96 kbps (RealJukebox's limit) until the developers of the LAME encoder replaced the last of the ISO example code.

I buy many cd's and I leech many too.

$32 for an album? I'll pay $15 for an album at Best Buy, but this is ridiculous.

FTP pushes files to the client

[yerricde]

Mozilla is a browser after all; why should it serve the intranet?

In some versions of FTP, when you request a file, your client program opens a random port, and then the server pushes the file to you. Some firewalls confuse such traffic with running a server.

Re:FTP pushes files to the client

[bagofbeans]

Thanks!

TW will NEVER block Mozilla

[yerricde]

What's next, is TW going to use its power over architecture to mandate that its users connect to RR with Windows/Mac through Internet explorer, and not on alternate OS' such as Linux, BeOS, etc, nor through alternate browsers like Mozilla (which I'm using now)?

Time Warner Cable's parent is AOL Time Warner Inc (hereinafter "AOL(tw)"). AOL(tw) owns Netscape Communications Corp., which provides most of the labor and funding for The Mozilla Organization, the group responsible for the Mozilla browser technology used in the Netscape 6 browser and the forthcoming Netscape 7 browser. I don't see any AOL(tw) subsidiary blocking use of Mozilla in the foreseeable future.

Wrong

[Qwaniton]

Now here's the difference. A 427 Cobra roadster is a physical object. An MP3 file is a virtual arrangement of already-existing magnetic charges (or something). The space occupying an MP3 file I might download next week is already there. I am just changing the magnetic charges on this pre-existing space to re-construct the data of an MP3. This does not cost money or hold any value in the traditional sense. That's because this data simply does not exist as a physical entity. I am not stealing from anyone. I am copying and duplicating a set of data I am retrieving from another computer and rearranging bits on my hard drive to resemble this data.

Now however, if I were to steal a 427 Cobra roadster, I would be taking a physical object from someone else. I would not be duplicating it using already existing matter, I would be literally taking this physical object. This is not a virtual arrangement and pattern of bits. This is an actual physical object, made out of metal, rubber, paint, oil, upholstery, seat belts, etc. I am not duplicating it by already-existing resources. I am taking some schmo's car. He doesn't have a copy of it. It's gone. Bye bye.

It is a sad thing for someone to seriously equate stealing a very expensive car to duplicating a virtual arrangement or pattern of bits.

Re:Wrong

[thales]

So I'll just take it for a joyride while the owner is on vaction or asleep!

A Service is NOT a physical object. So if I hire someone to perform a service, and refuse to pay them, haven't I stolen from them? Guess what, the RIAA labels are selling a service, the distrubition of a copyrighted song. When you take that service without paying for it, you are just as much a thief as an employeer who hires someone to do a job and refuses to pay them when the job is finished. If you can't afford to pay someone for a service don't hire them.

A Kid I grew up with hated rich people with a passion. Said they were all thieves. He took to breaking into upscale homes to "show the theives what it feels like". "Hey they have more than they need". "They have more than their fair share" Haven't seen him since he got shipped off to prison, but most arguments I hear attempting to justify copyright infringement remind me of his attempts to justify his thefts.

Re:Wrong

[k0hlrabi]

So if I hire someone to perform a service, and refuse to pay them, haven't I stolen from them? Guess what, the RIAA labels are selling a service, the distribution of a copyrighted song.

Absolutely. The key is, however, that no one has hired the record industry to provide this service. Just like any other service in a free market, a company offers it at a certain price and hopes that consumers will buy their service at that price.

If Bill Jones starts up Bill's Carpet Cleaners, invests $20K on cleaning equipment, chemicals, trucks, etc., charges $4000 per clean, and gets no customers, have those customers stolen from Bill? No way. They simply refused the service at his outrageous price.

The distribution of copyrighted material is similar. Let's first imagine a world with no commercially available technology for reproducing copyrighted music. No filesharing, no copying from a friend or the radio. Now Britney Spears puts out a new record for $15, and it sells only one copy. Has she been robbed? Has anyone stolen from her? No. They refused to pay that price for her service.

In our world (with technology for reproducing copyrighted music), the fundamental argument has not changed. Let's say, again, that Britney Spears releases a record, and it sells one copy. However, 2000 digital reproductions of the record are downloaded for free over KazaA. Let's say that 1800 out of the 2000 people who downloaded the album would NOT have bought it had it not been available online for free. They have not stolen from Britney Spears, because reproduction of digital music is FREE. If they hadn't downloaded the album, she wouldn't have gotten any more money.

The remaining 200 people, however, have stolen from Britney. They would have bought the record for $15 but chose not to.

Re:Wrong

[thales]

I Have never disputed that the RIAA "Losses to piracy" figures are wildly inflated. When you are on a P2P network you think nothing of saying I'll get that one and that one and that one, etc, and downloading 25 songs in a setting. However at the record store few people will walk down the aisles tossing any CD that catches their eye into the shopping cart. Behaviour is considerably different on the P2P, because you don't have to pull your wallet out at the end of a downloading secession.

I Think Cable TV provides the best model for what is occuring. Some people modify equipment to recieve cable services without paying for them, for example getting HBO when they are only paying for basic cable service. There isn't any way to determine how many people who are "pirating" HBO would have paid for it if they couldn't get it for free. Some cable companies bring charges against these people and the charge is theft of services. Telling the judge "I wasn't stealing HBO because I wouldn't have bought it if I didn't have that modified CATV box, so HBO didn't lose anything" might be true, but it won't keep you from being found guilty of theft of services. All that is required to constitute theft of services is having the service without paying for it. This would apply to people who just grabbed a MP3 that they didn't want bad enough to actually pay for it. It's still theft of services regardless of the degree you actually wanted that service.

90% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of people

[PhreakOfTime]

A few points to be made here.

First, I used to subscribe to Cable internet in the Chicagoland area. I say used to because even though I never experienced any 'problems' related to port blocking. I noticed in the agreement that I can not run any 'servers'. This bothered my greatly because I have recently began providing (legitimate) web hosting to people. After explaining this to a rep of the cable company I was told "All we do is provide web browser access and mail access. Nothing more is gauranteed. And servers are against the agreement altogether." At this point I quickly changed my service to DSL where the response was "All we do is provide the pipe, any network services are your responsibility". Now, those two attitudes are GREATLY divergent. And its no wonder I am currently a DSL subscriber, in fact have bumped up to biz class after an expansion. So cable wants to just continue to shove 'their paid for' content down your throat where DSL continues to look at itself as just a transport media.

SECOND - this rediculous banter about bandwidth metering is an absolute joke. I pay for T1 speeds whether I use it or not, and if you find me an ISP who doesnt, it is at (what I would hope) are greatly discounted prices for fractional usage.

Last but not least, am I to understand those up at thecorporate level who daily widen the pay gap between worker and executive are actually complaining that 10% of 'column a' are using 90% of 'column b'. These actions better be though over a little more completely, after all 10% of the people 'use' 90% of the money....

just some fat to chew on.

What customers?

[Erris]

And probably an even larger number of happier customers who suddenly notice that they have bandwidth again.

What new customers? I tell people that cable is not worth it, and have undone all sorts of silly adverts that way. As long as the cable people continue to suck, I'm going to tell people that they suck and NOT recomend it to anyone. Not many people think an extra $40/month in ISP charges are justified by an ever suckier web experience. "Pirates" want this? Why bother? You can download all the $20 albums you want over a $20/month dial up. Cable modems really only apeal to people that want to run real servers, and the stable ones don't really care about Kazaa. At some point, their customer base is going to contract. They will then go bankrupt and the equipment will be taken over by someone competent.

So they cable fools invite their end faster than ever.

How about the ultimate punishment....

[Anonymous Coward]

I am tired of people simply giving in to fascism under the banner of 'morality'. the logic goes somewhat like this:

-p2p service provides avenue for sharing of copyrighted goods.
-sharing of copyrighted goods is illegal(napster bad!).
-thus, all else no matter, p2p get what it deserve!(bad grammar on purpose here to accentuate stupidity of logic)

freedom comes at a price, something that ALL Americans seem to have forgotten(or never learned)...something that I had hoped we might learn from 9/11(boy was I wrong there!)

That is all p2p apps provide-freedom. Freedom to share an application with your friends, to share a novel with the world, to share a mathematical treatise with the community, or to illegally acquire music files. if the latter seems to account for 99% of the activity, do NOT blame the medium, blame the people. P2P apps dont pirate music. People pirate music. Thus. people should be punished(i.e.- individuals), not p2p apps. PERIOD. I think that the approach the MPAA and RIAA has taken of sending letters is the only reasonable course of action to take. Its fair, and it is consistent with constitutional rights and liberties. (dont get me wrong, i would hate to receive one of these).
As far as the rest of you go, stop whining about it and take some action. If you truly want to punish these assholes, and if you really want to make a stand against this impending fascism, then i challenge you to punish these bastards with the ultimate punishment that a consumer can hurl at a business(and gov- for that matter)- BOYCOTT
DO NOT WATCH MOVIES
DO NOT BUY ANY CDS
DO NOT USE A MICROSOFT OS
DO NOT USE A PROVIDER WHO CURTAILS YOUR RIGHTS

This is what i have prepared to do, and I will do if things continue to deteriorate. Eventually, I will run nothing but Linux on a Cyrix chip with a dial-up provider if i have to. What is that you say? what if fascism creeps into these things as well? then I am prepared to not purchase hardware/software/services ever again.

You forgot C:

[Anonymous Coward]

C: you are a troll, and we have been had.

I would not be suprised if the poster was. What better way is there to get people pissed off and repy to you?

Re:What to do? How about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out that RR has a server to sniff out people running personal servers like ftp/news/etc. Perhaps they use this computer to block users from connecting to kazaa. I logged incomming connections and found that the sniffing server connects to me on port 80. I have since blocked 24.30.218.54:80. Does anyone in the know think that this may help users regain the right to download illegal music/software from fasttrack? It is our God given right!

wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times must this be said on Slashdot?

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THE GPL IN ORDER TO US GPL'd SOFTWARE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THE GPL IN ORDER TO US GPL'd SOFTWARE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THE GPL IN ORDER TO US GPL'd SOFTWARE. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT THE GPL IN ORDER TO US GPL'd SOFTWARE.

The GPL is a licence that *ALLOWS* you to redistribute copyrighted information, because nothing else grants you that right. However, it does *NOT* (repeat: NOT) allow you to USE or MODIFY the code. The reason that it does NOT allow you to do that is because it doesn't need to: US copyright law already grants you that right.

The GPL is *NOT* a EULA. You do NOT need to accept it. You can legally use boatloads of GNU software without ever knowing about the GPL. You are *NOT* bound by the conditions of the GPL.

The only time you have to be aware of the GPL is if you do something that US copyright law doesn't let you do otherwise, i.e. redistribute the code and/or distribute derivative works.

Has anybody got

[Rogerborg]

A link to, or a copy of their T&C's? I can't find one on their website, and without reading the T&C's, we're just mouthing off.

I can't see the problem.

[seanyboy]

If this meant that I could get a good internet connection without the knowledge that a load of kids were stealing my bandwidth, then it'd be a good selling point to me. Let road runner put the breaks on Kazaa, etc. If I wasn't interested in using / paying for p2p traffic, then surely I should be allowed to choose a service provider that provided a service that didn't include it. (And Vice Versa) This isn't a freedom of speech issue; this is an issue about a consumers right to choose the service they want.

From RR employee

[TibbonZero]

Whoa!!!
I work for RR Business Class in Greensboro NC, and we don't do anything like that- however, we have a full time (well will be soon) abuse coordinator, that constantly gets calls from Microsoft, Adobe, etc... to stop people from sharing out their software illegally on servers. It's plain illegal to share Win2K on a server. No two ways about it.
We also get calls from Sony and others about people sharing MP3s of their artists, we just normally call and tell them to turn off file sharing I think (but it's not my job so I don't know what they really do.)

I haven't heard anything about this port blocking here. Kazaa will probably go to dynamic port switching soon...
Going to tell my boss that I dont like this...

Two points

[Anonymous Coward]

After tinkering with Kazaa a while, I noticed my firewall had caught a port 1214 scan from an IP which resolved to the domain "jam.rr.com". Interesting name, right? If you go to www.jam.rr.com, you get nothing. But http://jam.rr.com/ takes you to the "select a city" page. Very interesting.

Also, as someone else posted, there actually is a way around any type of roadrunner blocking of this type. HTTP-Tunnel will utilize the SOCKS option in Kazaa to route your data over HTTP, which roadrunner cannot block. You can download the program for free to test it out. Setting it up is simple. But to get access to high-bandwidth transfers, you must pay them $5/month. If you do so, speeds are quite high, though maybe not quite as high as they would be otherwise. And HTTP-Tunnel suggests you disable filesharing in Kazaa.

The BIG problem with this...

[evilviper]

Hmm... I'm a couple days late... Wonder if anyone will even read this...

The problem with this solution... More and more services will steal ports. That mean Kazza and Gnutella running on port 80. This method of limiting access is a bad one!

It's already been pointed out that the best way to regulate users is to have a bandwidth and traffic quota.

Each user gets a certain ammount of traffic. As they hit their cap, their bandwidth slows down to modem speeds. The cool thing about that, they can still surf and download without costing the ISP. Of course you could always make a call and say you're willing to pay extra this month to get back to your full-speed.

That's a good system! Or at least it would be if each user's quota was reset on different days (preventing a single bandwidth surge).

On modems, speed limits are just fine. There's just no way to make it any faster! On broadband connections, the limit should not be speed, but over-all traffic.

Re:What NOT to do???

[lazerus]

It is interesting to me to see how this is begining to pan out. Seems only a few years ago I was trying all sorts of ways to get a cleaner phoneline so my dial up conenction would get above 26.4k. Now I am on bellsouth dsl and haven't the slightest complaint about the service. $30 more per month than dial up and I get 150 k for download and 25 for upload "UNLIMITED" is what the contract says! I use alot of bandwidth! I keep current on 4 opensource distros and mirror a few ftps with my own public ftp limited to 1 user of course. I also run SETI on each of the 7 pcs on my home network. I had Direcpc before DSL was available and discontinued my service as soon as I realized I was not getting the product as advertized. My current isp hasn't had a problem supplying me with what they offered. I do not see why other isp's should be allowed to block users in any way shape or form. I feel that would be false advertisment and a breech of contract in my case. If thier infastructure cannot support the product they sell then they need to stop overselling it. I don't need my isp to protect me that should be up to me. I don't see master lock coming out and blocking the keyhole to my front door cause I ordered to many replacement keys. Granted as it seems to be missed the trojan like spyware embeded in kazaa was activated recently. (a search on GOOGLE for "kazaa spyware" will reveal all) but isn't it up to me to worry about that? Back when I had dial up I really enjoyed comming to work to use my companies 14 T1 lines to surf the web. Now my company has decided to make thier lan as secure as possible wich has resulted in all traffic being routed through proxies. The priority being cost and security ended up as it is now on our 14 T1's I get a whopping 60kbits/sec. But we still pay for our 14 t1's. As a consumer I would rather have my isp worried about how to get me more bandwidth than securing me or capping me. If we as consumers refuse to accept service we do not want the isp's who do not have a monopoly in the area will fail when they give us low end dishonest services.

Better Idea

[CarrionBird]

Stop selling product they don't have.

They want to do what the airlines do: sell more tickets than seats on the plane. The airlines get away with it by just using unutilized space on other flights (offer you the next ride out & a freebe ticket voucher).

They sell access at X up / Y down, knowing they don't have anywhere near that much bandwith to give out. Most users don't notice/bitch, because just about anything is better than dial-up.

This is exactly why you don't see many people ripping out thier T*s for a cable modem, that much reliable bandwidth just isn't that cheap.