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

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...

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.

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:"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: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??