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

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???

[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.

"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"

[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"

[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"

[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"

[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"

[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: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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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: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: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.

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.

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!