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BitTorrent and End to End Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "As ISPs like Shaw and Rogers throttle their bandwidth to counter the growth of BitTorrent, BitTorrent developers are fighting back with end to end encryption. Oddly enough, Bram Cohen, the original brains behind BitTorrent, doesn't support this direction. Is there really anything he can do about it?"
The bigger problem is customers paying their ISPs, many of whom hold a local monopoly, and then the ISPs go around and turn their backs on the customers, leaving them without services like bittorrent that have a clear and growing legal use. Perhaps a boycott of ISPs that do that would be in order... except for that whole monopoly thing.
No.
chown -R us ~you/base
The proper solution when your ISP is deliberately crippling your service is to get another ISP. You paid for that torrent traffic, and if they don't carry it that's as good as stealing. Let your ISP know how you feel, and don't do business with crooks.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Bram said he suspects that some developer has gotten rate limited by his ISP, and is more interested in trying to hack around his ISP's limitations than in the performance of the internet as a whole.
Isn't this what Open Source is about? The ability to make changes to a software to suit one's need? And if there are enough users, followers, developers and contributors (see Ubuntu from Debian), the new branch because a thing of its own.
So the day Bram opened his code, BT is subject to the same kind of treatment and only users can decide which way it will go.
Aren't there cases where someone compiled a BT client to act like a seeder with high ratio but is an ultimate leecher?
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
ISPs are happy to lose those customers.
"Well, I'm not sure it's such a good idea. Cheeseburgers are delicious, let's go get some."
A) no. B) Even if he's really for it, he can't come out and say so, because he's jumped into bed with Hollywood with both feet.
FTA:
"...a wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports."
Sounds like a call to camoflage the traffic as several pipes between peers. Not just one tcp/ip connection, but several, with a jitter function to pick which pipe is used at the moment so it does not look consistant
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW
My connection is severly throttled by my pathetic aDSL upload speed, but that's another bitch entirely.
Man, you really need that seminar!
ISPs shouldn't have the right to choose the methods we use the internet AFTER they contract us...Taking away after a deal is signed should be a breach of agreement but of course the documents dont go that specific so its basically lump it of leave them...
Bram may not like it, but one of the best things about sharing the source code, is that the 'market' so to speak will determine now where this protocol goes. If Bram doesn't like it, that's his right, but I expect the masses are going to use the program that best offers the features they want. And uTorrent and Azureus are the two 'big boys' on the block right now. And if someone can improve it further on down the road, the whole bittorrent history has shown that users will try it, especially if they aren't happy with the 'old' program they use.
Who is "End", and why are they partnering with BitTorrent to end encryption?
So when I buy an internet connection from an ISP, who says the connection is 4mb down and 256K up, and then I actually want to use all of the bandwidth I have been sold - then the ISP wants to crack down and limit my usage?
Someone should sue [insert favorite ISP here] for bait and switch. If what they're providing is 4mb/256K burst speed, with lower rates for continuous, then that's what they should say in their advertising. This is hardly a far cry from the shady camera outfits online (i.e. PriceRitePhoto). You pay every month for a service, and the service you're actually provided differs greatly from what you thought you purchased.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Don't forget part of the problem is that our connections are assymetric. 100+ kb/sec for downloads, but ~10 kb/sec for *any* uploading is the best you can hope for.
The article mentions some ISPs called "Shaw" and "Rogers".
Is this in the USA? I'm used to things like Comacst, MSN, Time Warner, Qwest, Pacbell, SBC, etc.
What regions do Shaw and Rogers serve? Does this BitTorrent discrimination affect many people?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
He released it as an open source project. He can't do anything about people modding it any more than Linus Torvalds could do anything about someone modding the Linux kernel--not that he would.
However, also like LT and most other major project figureheads, he holds a certain amount of political sway. His disapproval may be enough to keep some developers from pursuing certain paths. Of course, not everyone will care about what he thinks, but he does have SOME power.
BitTorrent's saving grace is its popular use for legal activities. It had a strong Good Thing quotient. Toss in encryption and you lose that "plausable deniability" veneer that the program is not intended for shady use. People on the outside take a What do you have to hide? response to encryption. If BT's image changes like this, it'll only lead to more throttling and blocking.
were typically handed to them by local governments, who shelled out seed money and access rights to encourage cable companies to lay cable, establish service, and generally get started.
:-(
Once the companies are entrenched, people forget about the handouts it took to get these companies started, and they start tooting their "free market" horns loudly when anyone even mentions the word "regulation". The fact is, these companies do and did not emerge in and of themselves from the free market: I know my small town shelled out a lot for the "priviledge" of having cable access for it's residents. My parents remember giving the same sort of handouts to the phone companies. But suddenly, once these companies are in the black, the residents are left with a monopoly situation, and no say in how the companies are run.
It's a silly situation; one where the only right answer appears to be "regulate the companies" (not going to happen, due to lack of power by the municipalities to make it happen), or "go back in time, and make sure your municipality doesn't shell out money to those would-be monopolists". Does anyone know where I can get a decent used FluxCapacitor? I've tried E-bay, but no luck so far...
I would like to say I am totally fucking furious that Rogers feels it can do this.
I appriciate that Bitorrent constitutes a gargantuan proportion of network traffic. I appriciate this is a problem.
However, the reason that I feel this is unfair, which nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that Rogers customers are limited to 60 GB of transfer total, both ways, each month. (Unless, of course, you upgrade to the $50 account + modem rental which is 100 GB). If you exceed this limit, it's not just a matter of waiting until next month -- it is a matter of having your account shut down.
I think it is fair to do one or the other, but not both. I once wasted three days trying to figure out why Bittorrent wasn't working, only to find out it was thanks to Rogers. This was just as they had started shaping network traffic so I had no furious posts on message boards to turn to for the origin of the problem.
Sadly, there is no alternative to Rogers for high speed access in my area. It's Rogers or dial up.
My kneejerk reaction was extremely critical of the ISP's actions. Upon further consideration however, the position of being asked to violate your clients confidentiality and hand over IPs to the RIAA or whoever certainly wouldn't be an appealing one.
> ... many of whom hold a local monopoly ... ...
:/
> Perhaps a boycott
I hope that these quotes help illustrate the problem here
I just wish ISPs would try to be more reasonable about bandwidth instead of expecting us all to do nothing but email and browsing a few websites.
>Most ISPs don't do such shaping
I wonder if he just pulled this out of his ass or something. Not only does my ISP traffic shape BT, they also block all the common ports that trackers use (you can change your client's ports easily, but the tracker owner has to change in this case).
There have been actual studies showing P2P traffic represents over 50% of consumer ISP traffic. An ISP would have to be stupid not to shape P2P.
Why don't the clients create a simple IPSEC connection between clients and tracker (Or client-client in a trackerless version). Granted, I'm not an IPSEC expert, but wouldn't this better accomplish their goals?
This would keep the connection and communication private, and they could run the standard BT protocol on top of IPSEC. On top of that, ISPs won't shape IPSEC down like Bit torrent traffic - because they would anger corporate VPN users.
ebob
If Bittorrent goes out of it's way to become unthrottleable and hard to detect, it will lead to it being outright banned in many places, and the ban enforced through more draconian means.
Like here on campus, we would prefer not to tell people what they can and can't do, however bandwidth is finite. We cannot afford to buy gigs and gigs of bandwidth just to allow people to P2P all the time, at least not without a tuition hike. The solution is to use a packet shaper, which puts P2P at a lower priority than other traffic. Usually, the line isn't maxed so P2P works as normal, however if the connection is slammed, non P2P traffic gets prefernce.
Works very well, P2P works and is generally very fast, and other traffic doesn't get bogged.
However, if it starts hiding from the packet shaper, things may be made a bit more compulsory like "You will make no use of Bittorrent unless it is for an approved research project. Failure to comply will result in a referal to the dean of students and possibly expulsion." Now I'd hate to see it go that way, but it will if it there's no reasonable way to keep P2P from clogging the network.
Oddly enough, Bram Cohen, the original brains behind BitTorrent, doesn't support this direction. .../i>
Oddly? As a submitter you ought to at least RTF you link to. Mr. Cohen gives rational reasons why he thinks it is a bad idea to try obfuscate BitTorrent traffic, namely that it is unlikely to avoid traffic shaping, just because you use encryption.
If you don't like that your ISP is traffic shaping, try another ISP. (yeah I know, some people only have one ISP in their area)
--
Regards
Peter H.S.
Torrent on the Rogers network averages about 3KB/s for me. I could get a dial up connection running far faster than that.
Fourth, when it comes to dealing with ISPs, obfuscation is some combination of hostile, unprofessional, and harmful. Software projects which value quality over featuritis generally steer clear of such things, especially when their potential effectiveness level is the equivalent of spitting in one's face than actual utility.
Of course, the ISPs that do traffic shaping where bittorrent is treated like something akin to a medieval plague ship are cooperative, professional, and beneficial?
Individuals pay ISPs to carry data. While I'm sympathetic to ISPs that limit the quantity of data that an individual can receive or transmit per period of time (face it, pay-for-use is not unfair), I'm not sympathetic to ISPs that decide what type of data that individual can receive or transmit (excluding clearly malicious traffic).
Cohen ignores that many of these ISPs have localized or regionalized monopolies and that they don't want to accommodate P2P users. The users are probably in the top 5% of traffic usage, so there's no incentive to accommodate their desires, but there's the obvious desire to keep their monthly ISP payments, hence draconian shaping policies.
Cohen also ignores that encrypting the traffic has merit. "[A] wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports. I can think of at least a few applications that look like this. It's called a remote desktop (whatever the protocol, but especially if it's not X Windows based) or remote office over VPN. People use it to telecommute. People would be VERY ANNOYED if that traffic was shaped like bittorrent traffic. Companies use it to connect branch offices. Companies would be VERY ANNOYED if that traffic was shaped like bittorrent traffic. Unless the shaping software is distributed widely enough and close enough to the end user to "see" that they have 20-40 VPN-like connections to the network, I fail to see how you definitively differentiate between the two.
In semi-related news, BitTorrent Inc. and Opera announced today that Opera 9 will offer BT capabilities. I do remember that a beta of Opera 8 had BitTorrent built in, but that hasn't been present in versions released since (i.e. since it went freeware).
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2006/02/06/
Add RCN to that list of crippled ISPs. They started "traffic shaping" bittorrent packets in December in some areas. Caveat emptor.
What matters is, is he right in that, at best, it won't make any difference, and at worst, it'll harm torrents overall? From the article:
His third point is that it'll screw ISP's that cache bittorrent packets to boost overall performance.
I don't take much truck with his 4th point but his other points sound like sensible objections.
Can't you just go with a different ISP then send a polite letter back to the person who was messing with you connection why you left. If it isn't possible to get a different one, then I think that this may be a serious problem. I wonder if I could start my own ISP...
I use Shaw so aparently I'm a "victim" of this traffic shaping. I can't figure out what everyone is so up in arms about his for. I'm not a heavy BT user but I use it to grab a couple TV shows evey week, it works fine, usually takes me a few hours to ge a BSG episode tops. I got the entire second season of the OC for my g/f in 2 days. It's not like BT doesn't work anymore, if nobody told me about this I wouldn't have noticed.
With cable you still share a certain ammount of bandwidth with the people on your trunk, espescially on the upstream. Unfortunately some people are bandwith hogs. I see this as protecting me from the guy down the street with the warez fetish more than anything else.
Has anyone found themselves unable to use BT because of this?
Torrents encrypt YOU!
"...leaving them without services like bittorrent that have a clear and growing legal use. "
If BT has a "clear and growing legal use"? Then the flip side is that it also has a "clear and growing illegal use" as well.
"Perhaps a boycott of ISPs that do that would be in order... except for that whole monopoly thing."
I'm certain all you geeks with your big brains will come up with a solution. You do it all the time here.
People seem to be confusing the 2 issues.
Encryption here is just a mean, they don't care if the ISP sees WHAT they're sharing, they only care that the ISP recognizes that they ARE sharing (and throttling their connection accordingly).
I find the argument agains the tracker taking care of it quite silly. The guy from uTorrent says that the ISP would simpy find or modify the packet saying that obfuscation is wanted.
I would guess the ISP would just throttle all encrypted traffic going to random ports before it starts identfiying specific packets. They're as justified to limit it to BT as they are to do it with all unrecognized traffic.
BT is costing them a large amount of money so they start to throttle it. That means that they're not going to sit idly and not respond if it becomes obfuscated/encrypted.
I don't think it's an arms race that BT can win at all. If the ISP wants to limit the amount of bandwidth you're using, they will limit it, one way or another. For example, the ISP might throttle everything after a threshold per month is exceeded.
That's the main point that Bram is making, and I find it difficult to disagree with him.
Maybe it means that you don't know the difference between ADHD and Asperger's?
cox.net straight up won't let you seed
once you get 100% of the torrent all incoming connections are closed
One thing I've done since I switched away from a packet shaping network is told all my non-geeky friends who are deciding what service to get to STAY AWAY from it [Eastlink] and switch to the good guys in my area [Aliant].
Maybe we can hurt these companies through word of mouth.
Hmm... I'm seeing more and more of stupid crap coming from North America, especially ISPs. Buying a connection and getting a limit? Bull. Buying a connection and getting throttled? Bull. Taking payment for mail? Bull. Breaking DNS? Bull. Subscumbing to crazy-people - no .xxx. Bull. Making content-providers pay for getting good thru-put? Bull.
This shit has to stop NOW.
I don't know much about the bittorent protocol, but I can't imagine that the 'infohash' would be that secret, couldn't anyone find out the infohash if they could snoop trafic?
Unless the infohash was sent over an already encrypted connection, it could be snooped, and if used for an encryption key could be found.
I don't know what the guy thinks about DH key exchange, but once per connection is not a very big deal. (Although I guess with BT you connect to a lot of different machines, hmm... Also I suppose if all you want to do is obfuscate the protocol.)
Finally, I disagree that it's easy to block 'stuff that looks like line nose'. The ISP will have no idea what it is, and there's lots of encrypted information out there, like SSH/SCP, etc. If they just put what they couldn't figure out at the lowest priority, it would piss a lot of people off.
Finally, why not mask the traffic as gziped HTTP, which probably gets the highest priority.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No.. No they're not. My ISP, TalkTalk, lied about the service they were providing me - even after I enquiered about p2p (GNUtella, Bittorrent) which they assured were totally unrestricted, they were quite happy to sign me up to a 12 month contract and totally restrict all traffic from the p2p clients. Don't worry, I've complained about a month ago and I'm intending to get out with out paying theur £70 cancellation fee. This is for users like me, who have been screwed over by greedy ISPs. And I welcome our new encripted overlords.
--
I hear that! In my area there are two broadband providers, the local cable company (Armstrong) and Sprint, which will provide DSL. However, nobody knows DSL is even available because the TV of course never runs commercials for it. So, the cable provider has a crazy monopoly and they abuse it horribly. Here's some of the stupid stuff they do:
They offer two "speeds" of their service, called Zoom 100 and Zoom 500. However, the numbers after the name don't have anything at all to do with the speed. Zoom 100 is a 128k connection that usually gives you more like 56k of actual throughput, whereas there are different "versions" of Zoom 500, going all the way up to 5Mb/s. In commercials they say Zoom 500 is 5Mb/s for like 40.00 a month, but the 40.00/month Zoom 500 is actually 1.5Mb/s I think.
If someone tries to brute force or break into your e-mail account they turn your internet off. This actually happened to my girlfriend. They turned her internet connection off and said they wouldn't turn it back on until she downloaded (...how?) a virus scanner and removed the virus from her computer. There was no virus. They said she was checking her mail 10 times a second.... her computer was not even on.
They block asbolutely all inbound connections to any port used by anything. You can't even transfer files using AIM unless you do it on an odd port.
They don't run enough cable runs around town, so most people don't even get half of the speed they pay for. Service goes out for about 1 hour a week; usually on Fridays. I've asked other people in town and they concur that it really does happen, so it's not just my observation. Of course, if you complain they will not give you a discount on your next bill. Oh, and they offer VOIP by the way, so that 1 hour a week on Friday get's old fast.
They will sell you a static IP and unblock connections to your IP. However, this costs over 100.00 a month extra. Yeah, that is in addition to what you pay for the connection. Oh, and do do that you have to give them a written reason why you need each port unblocked.
They offer a "deal" where you can use more than one computer on your internet connection. It costs something like 10.00 a month extra per computer, and they come put a router in your house, usually a wifi one. When they set these up they typically do not use WEP (they're supposed to). When they remember to use it they like to use the same default WEP-key...
They block the MAC addresses of Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link products.
If they know you use Linux they refuse to provide technical support for your internet connection.
So, yeah, needless to say, they abuse their monopoly like crazy. I don't have to deal with it anymore because switched to Sprint. Remarkably, I've had no problems with Sprint at all. They were even cool that I had my own DSL modem I wanted to use instead of their's, and they don't give a crap what you do with your connection.
I have Motorola Canopy Wireless internet through a local provider. Before last summer, every time I used the connection for BitTorrent it worked great. I could get about 1Mbps up and down give or take. Then something weird started happening on the ISP's network that they were blaming on my BT traffic. After this was resolved they told me to stop using BT or they would 'fine' me $250 bones or something. So, since then I have had to 'borrow' wireless bandwidth from other people around here until I move to a cable connection (probably with Comcast). I just hope ISP's don't start instilling bandwidth quotas, that will really kill the BT scene IMHO.
Why did muTorrent have to be closed source? :-(
I live in an area where the best I've got is dial-up (and 28.8k at that). Once an ISP gets out here, I'll be the first to switch to them. ON ONE CONDITION: They allow bittorrent traffic.
Seriously, everyone I know who has gotten broadband has done so for P2P. Warez kiddies ^W^WLinux distro hunters are the cable companies biggest subscribers.
They are shooting themselves in the foot by not supporting us.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Bram is in cahoots with the MPAA/RIAA, why on earth would they let him implement E2E?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANts_P2P
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/encryption.html
You can have safe, smart and easy to use options.
My only fear is that isp's will change from a "pipe" to the outside world to a sub set of http, ftp, news ect.
ie no more networking for end users at home.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'd say that a significant number of users use p2p type stuff. Everyone I know at work uses some type of p2p software... eventually it will be impossible to restrict users of p2p unless you cut off all your users.
just cancel the service and tell them you wont ever pay the fee since they broke the contract.
Obviously, this will work to a point. But, my school has taken this one step further. The admins block incomming access to every port. Thus, the only connections you can make a locally initiated connections. Net result: 2kb/s top speed, 0kb/s average speed. I've spent the last two years trying to get around this, to no avail.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
Sooner or later, pretty much all Internet traffic will be encrypted end-to-end--it's pretty much inevitable.
Yes, Minister.
So, yeah, needless to say, they abuse their monopoly like crazy. I don't have to deal with it anymore because switched to Sprint.
Monopoly...switched. The words don't quite mesh.
From what I've heard, some ISPs are shaping P2P traffic on their paid-for MCI uplinks, but otherwise can't be bothered to install shapers everywhere in their network. The problem arises when no-one in your ISP (or their peers) has the content you're looking for, and you end up with a slow download via their uplink. Once a few people in a particular ISP have it, however, the performance should pick back up.
For example, Bellsouth DSL provides plenty of description here:
Bellsouth FastAccess DSL - Legal Page
I'm not saying I'm happy with their provisions, but I'm also thinking that attempting to sue them over these particular greivances may be a bit optimistic.
It's not a market, it's a community. Capital doesn't control everything yet.
There have been actual studies showing P2P traffic represents over 50% of consumer ISP traffic. An ISP would have to be stupid not to shape P2P.
Excellent. Last time i heard some number thrown out, it was 90% of net traffic is SPAM.
I'd much rather that the net be 50% piracy than 90% SPAM.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You are correct, except that in the contract you agreed too, they have the right to change terms at any time as they feel fit. Your only permited recourse is to stop service.
Their lawyers are bigger then yours..
Unless of course you got business class service with a legally binding TOS contract attached. Then you might have a legal leg to stand on. ( until they just cancel the contract on you for being a PITA that is )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just thought i'd mention, the 3 main irish ISP's (Esat BT, UTV Internet and Eircom) are also capping bittorrent traffic. The only way around it is to use BitComet. I'm severely pissed off at their move, but yet again there is no bloody alternative.
STAY AWAY from it [Eastlink] and switch to the good guys in my area [Aliant].
I don't want to start a flamewar, but Aliant's traffic shaping (in New Brunswick, anyway) policies are what made me drop all of their services, including phone services, in favour of Rogers.
If your only concern is the traffic being noticeable as BitTorrent, then perhaps you only need to scramble the content. Encryption is going altogether too far, and FFS, Azureus already eats way too much CPU time without performing crypto at 50kB/s.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
This should have been part of the protocol from the beginning anyway.
Not due to some 'lets hide our traffic' thing, but just out of common sense in todays world. Nothing should be 'open' at this point.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...way back when the monthly b/w limit on Roger's was 1gb.
That's right, 1, as in uno.
Now people are whining about 60-100?
How much warez are you fools downloading anyway?
The fact is that at the end of the day ISPs pay for bandwidtch per byte. I say charge people that 'need' >100gb per byte more then the rest of us.
This isn't a new problem. As long there's been broadband there's been people that absolutely, positively, MUST saturate their entire bandwidth 24/7/365, and these people cry bloody murder when someone tells them they can't.
Bittorrent just happens to be the way that warez junkies do this today. Think about it. If you're shaw/rogers, and you see that 90% of your bandwidth usage is bitttorrent packets being sent by 1% of your customers, what would you do?
Well thankfully here in europe we have no monopolistic companies trying to throtle torrents or have plans for to tier up the internet (yes im aware of the pun)
Here in ireland im currently on 3mbit NTL cable (soon to be upgraded to 10) with 40GB cap which is not enforced, i download over 100gb monthly
so pack ur bags and move back to the old world!
Wow - didn't know that. Here in Nova Scotia, they've been behaving respectably (at least with broadband, can't speak for any of their other services). Sorry to hear that. Do you have an alternative over there?
Let your ISP rate limit you or else ...
ISPs rely on rate-limiting to keep their bandwidth usage in check. If they lose this ability they will have two options.
Charge you more for the service you are paying for.
Like electric companys, ISPs have to plan for peak usage. If they are unable to isolate P2P traffic and rate-limit it, their peek-usage will go up and they will be forced to charge you more.
Limit you in some other manner, like flows.
If ISPs lose the ability to classify and rate-limit your traffic they can still limit the number of flows (conections) you use. If your ISP determines an acceptable number of flows for an average home user and you reach that limit, your new connections will go nowhere. Doesn't matter if the are web or P2P traffic.
I agree with the people who say DON'T HIDE YOUR TRAFFIC. It will lead to more hostile tactics and will expediate the current movements to charge for bandwidth sent, not for capicity.
Someday we will look back and see we really don't have it that bad.
-ScottZ
Bla bla bla, typical ISP nonsense, particularly in tiny communities.
I just wanted to throw in that in the past, Earthlink support actually *knew* that Linux was unsupported but that it uses standard PPP settings for dialup and regular PPPOE settings for DSL. The tech I spoke to even had the balls to discuss the particulars with me. I explained that while I don't expect Earthlink to know anything about or even support Linux, if one were to put a Linux box on the connection, what settings would be needed. He enthusiastically ran down the list. Bam, a week later I was an Earthlink customer.
There are some ISP's that seem to care, then there are some that implicitly don't care. Plus, there's always the odd chance that you get a native english speaker on the phone that knows more than what's written on a script. While I'd love to paint all ISP's with the bad brush, I simply can't based on experience with a few good ones. In my area, Comcast is awesome. No blocking, insane bandwidth at a reasonable price and exceptional uptime. The only thing that blows is upstream but it beats the crap out of the upstream of a comparably priced DSL connection. Guess people like myself won't be happy until A. we get symmetrical bandwidth or B. we get upstream better than 40KB/sec when we're pulling down 5mbit.
"End is a relative of Alice, Bob, Charlie and Doug."
Now it's Ann, Bing, Carlos, and Dipak.
Vote for Pedro
Let's imagine a water company which has two types of customers: some who use water when they need it and some who leave the water running all day, the sprinklers on the lawn all night, etc.
If you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
Isn't this a sign of things to come if ISP's decide to go with a tiered Internet structure? Do you think we will be encrypting (or at least tunneling) more and more in the future?
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Bram Cohen was also originally against having an upload limiter in BT clients...but when everyone else had one, lo and behold, the official client gets one.
I wonder if this will turn out the same.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
That should be "BitTorrent and End-to-End Encryption".
Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dandy Dental Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice Dentrifice Dentrifice.
When I signed up for Rogers it was pretty wide open after all I had the 'Unlimited' Package - decent throughput, no blocked ports, no DL limits. They started blocking certain ports (HTTP, SMTP) a while ago, and now with packet shaping to strangle what services are left.
The problem with Rogers is that they are primarily a content provider - they offer cable television, pay per view tv, a chain of video rental stores, plus cell phone services, and now, VOIP. They also own the coax coming into your house and provide broadband access on it. Technology like BT, which is used primarily to traffic in movies and television shows impacts the demand for their traditional services while cutting into the profitability of their ISP services. Clearly the media monopoly side of the business is going to win out against the concept of providing unfettered Internet access.
I'm with a small isp (www.mesanetworks.net) and they seem to undersell my connection. It's supposed to have a 2.5Mb downstream but i rarely get less than 3 in speed tests. It also seems to burst up to about 8 Mb for a second or two when you start a download - makes the web very snappy.
i'm certainly not a excessive bandwidth user, but i do generate a fair amount of vpn and internet radio traffic.
If the problem is that ISP's can't afford the bandwidth they're using, isn't there another problem here all together? Bandwidth needs are going up--not down. How will the internet function in the future?
Wow - didn't know that. Here in Nova Scotia, they've been behaving respectably (at least with broadband, can't speak for any of their other services). Sorry to hear that. Do you have an alternative over there?
Rogers and Aliant is it. The final nail in the coffin for me with Aliant was when I was away on business for a few weeks and they decided to start filtering inbound SMTP traffic. I called and asked about it and they claimed they weren't doing any filtering. When I replied with tcpdump output proving my case, they forwarded me to their abuse department. A few weeks without mail, so I immediately switched to Rogers when I got back.
Not only do I have a faster service (5Mbit with Rogers at the time, when Aliant was offering 2 or 3Mbit IIRC), but they only filter outbound SMTP (not a problem), I have a relatively "static" IP address, and I don't have to deal with the hassles of PPPoE.
Also, bundling our cell phones, television, and internet is a huge win. The Vibe Vision service was shut down, and reborn as Aliant TV some years later.. but it hasn't been rolled out in any areas other than Nova Scotia.
By the way, In the late 90s, things were different. Fundy Cable (who was purchased by Shaw, then by Rogers) had a one-way cablemodem. NBTel (part of Aliant) was trialing 10Mbit/10Mbit HFC service in my neighbourhood. For $39.95/month! It was incredible. The ride lasted a few years before they sent out an email about a "service upgrade", which was going to be $2/more per month, and mandatory. The "upgrade", of course, was the switch to 1.5Mbit ADSL with PPPoE.
Shaw and Rogers are the two major cable providers in Canada.
licet differant, aequabitur
There is always class action suits.
... cable modem is only broadband available. DSL (Verizon's phone system) is too far. FiOS isn't here. Forget satellite services (too expensive and slow). I can use dial-up but it only maxs out at 3 KB/sec for compressed file transfers.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
No... I can't speak for the U.S., but in the U.K. you should not do this. Pay the bill to get away from the ISP and restore your service with another ISP -- this puts you firmly on the right side of the law. Then sue the original ISP in the small claims court... this is not the terrifying activity it sounds like. It's done locally and the small claims court is setup to deal with this sort of thing quickly (and hand hold newbies through the process), you don't need solicitors etc etc.
quick introduction. People do insist on stubborning it out, and often it's the worst mistake you can make.
I used the word "sue" in kind of a tongue-in-cheek context.
In any event, BellSouth talks about "excessive use." Let's say that they have advertised, and I have purchased, an always-on broadband connection with 4mb download and 256K upload. I would argue that my taking full advantage of the service they've advertised (provided that it is legal for me to Tx/Rx the data in question at any speed) cannot be considered excessive.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I think that the issue there is going to be that the 70 quid is on paper with the OP's signature on it, whilst the promise not to restrict P2P protocols is just sounds on the air.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
If you were the first type, you change to a supplier that charges based on usage.
o rk-performance clause or more likely we-will-do-whatever-is-necessary-to-control-our-co sts-you-bandwidth-whores clause) in the contract with their ISP that has not been read or comprehended by the complainers.
If your supplier offers no restrictions on usage, it is reasonable to expect no restrictions. Particularly if you have entered into a contract to that effect.
What I suspect, though, is that in cases where people are complaining about p2p limiting, there was a we-will-do-whatever-the-hell-we-like clause (or even a we-will-do-whatever-is-necessary-to-maintain-netw
what the?!? mod: troll?!? crazyness..
I think Sloppy's making some valid points. If users piss off their ISPs (eg. by making it harder for them to cache bittorrent), then why should the ISPs help them? Realistically, it's a small group of people using a large amount of bandwidth. No doubt the ISPs would be happy to lose heavy bittorrent users..
Well, except that in this case, you're not paying the ISP for the water but for the capacity of the pipes. The water is coming from sources outside of the ISP and thus isn't a scarce resource. In fact, when you signed up for your pipe-service, you understood that you were paying for the maintenance and capacity of the pipes, which is often claimed to be "unlimited", but upon having them installed, you notice that the same pipe is feeding both your home and your neighbor's home, and their neighbor's home.
you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
If the first type of customer gets upset at the second type of customer, then they should also get upset at buffets that charge the same amount of money to every customer regardless of the amount that they intend to eat. But then, that is the whole concept of a buffet, isn't it? You enter into an agreement with the provider knowing that you are getting a service that you value appropriately enough to pay for. If you think you should be getting a better deal because some people consume more per unit price than you do, then nothing stops you from trying to make your own arrangements, but if the business is not willing to enter into such an agreement with you, then you are free to find another who will. This is the market place at work, and how other people choose to spend their money has no impact on how you should choose to spend yours.
Those applications can be succesfully limited other ways and those "other ways" are the real cause for limitations. Unless people run bittorent&co on half (or less) throttle, ISPs will limit them any way they find.
That's funny since Rogers is doing that now. They introduced it in the Ottawa area a while back. Some days I get 100K but mostly it is are 10-40k. During Xmas it was as low as 1-3k.
I would get Bell (they aren't traffic shaping and have no immediate plans) but DSL isn't in my area and I live in Western Ottawa proper.
Encryption is the wrong tool for the job.
To get around ISPs throttling bt, the program should adapt it's ports and protocol negotiation so that it looks like other services (html, VOIP, etc).
Making bt fully protocol-adaptive would be take away all traffic shaping control from ISPs. Their response to this would likely be to look for high upload traffic from users and firewall off the users to stop all incoming connections.
There are counter-moves to this (client-mode bt), but an arms race between users and their service providers is going to be messy and one-sided (they write the T&Cs).
I think it's better that users should vote with their wallets.
If you have a _residential_ contract, you are distinctly _NOT_ being given an unlimited, dedicated 4.5Mb/s connection for $49. If you want to run a 24/7 hog like Bittorrent, purchase a business plan with guaranteed bandwidth and uptime, no port blocking and no QoS throttling--all stated clearly in the contract and available from all major ISPs.
They are well within their rights to ensure that everyone paying a certain price is given the same level of service. They're rolling out FIOS here. It can handle 622Mb/s and at $50/month, you get, basically, 1% of that. To not have to implement some kind of QoS throttling on your bandwidth-hogging butt, they'd have to run a separate backbone to every 100 houses and, guess what, that would cost a ton of money. So, voila, tiered pricing.
Deal with it.
The reason I stopped using them is because their routers were crashing at least once a week, resulting in at least a six hour outage each time, they had no provision for actual static IP addresses (no, a single PPPoE address is not the same thing), and they never provided anywhere close to the promised bandwidth.
Oddly enough, when I switched to Covad, all those problems went away. What makes this funny is that Earthlink was supposedly just reselling Covad DSL. Uh huh. Sure you are. Sure you are.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Bandwidth is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. ISP's providing caching (using a HTTP proxy) used to be a big deal in like the 1990's, these days nobody cares. Besides, BitTorrent probably by its very nature favours peers nearer to you, simply because peers nearer to you will be more responsive and will be able to exchange data at faster rates.
Keep in mind that in many areas, there are lots of ISPs that can provide you with DSL service. This service is provided by either 1) using the telco's DSLAMs and ATM networks to connect your home to the ISP (the most common method), or 2) using ISP-owned DSLAM equipment co-located at the central office (Speakeasy/Covad, various local ISPs). If you're just using the telco to move your bits across town to the ISP, I doubt the telco is going to bother traffic shaping your data.
I mention this because I think a lot of people don't realize there are more DSL options than just the local telco's internet service. When you go to the telco's home page, they certainly don't go out of their way to let you know about this. There are lots of small and regional ISPs that would love to have your business.
The biggest problem you might encounter with DSL is that many telcos require you to subscribe to phone service before they'll allow you to subscribe to DSL. I know this is definitely the case in BellSouth territory. I've heard that you used to be able to get a "dry copper" (i.e. "alarm circuit") DSL line to an ISP in BellSouth territory (a friend of mine used to have this sort of hookup in Oxford, Miss.), but they've since put an end to that. Where I live (Denver, Colorado), the telco (Qwest) does offer "Naked DSL" so you don't have to bother with a landline if you don't want one.
I have DSL with a local ISP who runs their own DSLAMs in my neighborhood, and it works out well.
David
heres the problem. you cost these companies more than non-geeks by using more bandwidth. if you and every other geek switches to a company, youre acually hurting it. i cant claim to know how isps do their pricing, but they very well may loose money on those of us residential users who use a lot of bandwidth. but take a look at business dsl pricing, it costs more for the same bandwidth because a business is more likely to use all of their bandwidth. moral of the story: a nerd boycott could be the best thing that ever happened to an isp.
What they (as in Rogers) is doing is setting bittorrent to least priority. Anything else will get higher priority. I guess theoretically if you were the only person behind the throttler you wouldn't see any difference. dslreports forum has a pretty good diary of how people have seen it roll out across Ontario.
If you advertised a 100gpm, always on plan, and sold it to both customers, then no, I would not. I'd say "I do not need 100gpm, I need 10gpm, do you have a cheaper 10gpm plan". In a free market, someone would pop up to answer the needs of the 10gpm customer if no plan existed. Or, alternatively you could buy the 100gpm plan and resell it in 10gpm chunks to 9 others maybe making a buck in the process. In a monopoly, this doesn't happen. Instead they advertise something they don't intend to deliver and only a small fraction of customers actually take them up on the offer. They then call these users "hogs" and start a smear campaign designed to blame their inability to deliver on promises on a few "bandwidth hogs" in the network. They call you a criminal if you resell their bandwidth and tell you that you "have no right" to do so.
Also in a free market, there would be competition between providers, holding prices of both plans in check. In a monopoly market, this force is not felt as it's just as easy to raise prices to the point where a small fraction of customers are hostile, but not so many as to change the position of their local elected official who you are simultaneously lying to and bribing by giving trumped up "operating expenses", misleading stories about bandwidth hogs, and money via lobbyists to encourage him to believe and propogate the lies.
Monopoly...switched. The words don't quite mesh.
Did you completely ignore what I said at the beginning of my post? They own the TV here so Sprint DSL is not advertised at all. It's not advertised on the TV or the radio. The only way I even found out I could get it was because a friend of mine who works for the phone company told me it was available in my town. He said that less than 20 people in my town have it.
So, you're right, it is not a complete monopoly in the broadband sense. However, they abuse their TV monopoly (they are the only cable provider) to make sure that the only DSL offerings advertised are ones which are not available in this area. Each commercial is also followed by a commercial for their own cable broadband.
For those who are interested, the people who supply Shaw (who happens to be my ISP) their traffic shaping software (or is it an appliance?) is Ellacoya Networks. This bit of info was from some forum that I found when I first noticed that my maximum BT upstream got cut by about 60%.
FWIW, for those who aren't traffic shaped yet, don't be surprised if you are next if you are on a cable ISP -- the nature of the shared network means that the throughput gets choked for everyone when the upstream traffic gets too high (and ACKs get delayed). DSL providers don't really care about upstream as much, they worry more about total traffic which they can throttle in other, cheaper, ways.
Look, you don't have to come up with a name for everything that's wrong with you.
The guy's a genius but a nerd. You don't need ADHD or assburger's syndrome as an excuse for being a nerd. The guy is a nerd. Big deal. It's not medical.
"Pay the bill to get away from the ISP and restore your service with another ISP -- this puts you firmly on the right side of the law. Then sue the original ISP in the small claims court... this is not the terrifying activity it sounds like. It's done locally and the small claims court is setup to deal with this sort of thing quickly (and hand hold newbies through the process), you don't need solicitors etc etc."
;)
Good tip. Our American friends, though, will want a laywer rather than a door-to-door salesman.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Sure small-time ISPs who get their feed from Rogers/Shaw pay per byte, but the big ass ones (Bell, Rogers, Shaw) don't pay jack, they own the networks and dont pay per byte, they pay only for the fibre they lay.. which they lay together to cutt costs and which has already been paid for.. so suck it with your ISP has to pay crap..
If you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
Yeah, sure. With Internet connections, though, you can get either a fast connection or a slow connection - in the analogy, the first type of customer would probably get narrow pipes, and the second type would get pipes as big as he could, and pay more for them.
Yes, I know, the end users pay up the snoot. The networks themselves, however, are NOT as expensive as all that; note Google buying up (cheap!) dark fiber that nobody bothers to operate 'cause there's no money in it. Also recall all those Skype users geting VERY cheap long distance with VOIP and threatening the telco business models 'cause bandwidth over IP is so much cheaper than bandwidth over telco phone networks.
These circumstances suggest to me that bits over the wire are not intrinsically all that expensive, IF a market exists that isn't an effective monopoly. (Which is NOT the case in many places; so perhaps "networks are expensive" is less the problem than "monopolized markets are overpriced.")
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
AFAIK, all DSL traffic in Ontario (and more) ends up going through Bell, but if you use a different DSL ISP, by then it's just considered traffic from another ISP, and your BitTorrent traffic won't be throttled.
Currently, I use MyCybernet.net. No worries, hassle-free, and it's always up. I don't work for them, I'm just a very happy customer.
Many people in Canada (and worse, outside Canada) assume that there is nothing else but Bell or Rogers. It's pretty sad. Do some due-diligence and you'll find that there are many other options out there.
Yet another feature that BitComet already has. Sadly, I expect Azureus and uTorrent to ignore this fact and implement their own standard. BitComet version 0.62 or 0.63 will probably conform to it. My point is, why doesn't anyone ever seem to know about BitComet's basic feature set? It's obviously a well known client. In fact, the last swarm I was in it was about equal in popularity to Azureus and BitTornado (only a couple people were using uTorrent, and someone was using the official client). If some feature has a possible exploit (like adding the DHT network as a backup in case the private tracker goes down) then everyone is up in arms about it. The useful features seem to go without notice, like UDP NAT bypass (great if you can't recieve incomming connections), an Intellegent Disk Cache (I WANT my torrent client to use more RAM so hard drive writing frequency is kept reasonable), Packet Header Encryption (the feature in question), the ability to share peer information even if the tracker goes down (implemented long before Azureus added DHT networks), sharing peer information between tracker updates (causes faster downloading), chatting with other BitComet users in the swarm, and others.
They are sometimes called solicitors in the US, too.
Needless to say, the poor restaurant owners were not real prepared for a dozen 250+lb college students to come in and eat many platefuls of food, and the owners were not very happy. They asked them to leave, and when they said "no, it's a buffet, we are just eating 'all-we-can-eat'", the owners called the cops on them.
Well, the cops showed up, and listened to the complaint, and talked to them. And decided against the owner! "If the sign says 'all-you-can-eat', you can't kick them out just because they can eat more than you want them to eat."
Not really applicable to the topic, but just seemed an appropriate anecdote. Not only internet companies want to cut off people who use over the average!
just call someone up using VoIP, and play them the tunes they wish to pirate over the phone.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
; )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Aliant NS is limiting the number of active connections to 250, or 400 (somewhere in that ballpack). It is to limit BT use. It has been reported on the forums in dslreports, broadbandforums (is that the site??), and other places.
As a Rogers customer I'm really ticked off at this as well. They continue to cut news services and block P2P. The result? We're forced to use VoIP ports in order to get around traffic shapers, and it's only a matter of time until those are closed.
The statement in the article couldn't be more right about how they shape. A 100MB torrent with 800 odd seeders and 100 leechers and a good swarm speed starts to trickle in at 1-2KB/s off and on... If it works at all. Isn't that a bit excessive? Fine- throttle down to 40KB/s. Fine, make a pool of a few tens of Mbit and share that amoungst all BitTorrent. Do something reasonable rather than cut people off entirely.
They would have never even been noticed if they brought the 385KB/s or so that I normally get on their basic service down to 150-200KB/s. Even 50KB/s... but they took it to the extreme and have no interest in fixing it.
Not only that, they LIE to customers. They tell customers nothing is wrong. No shaping is being done (meanwhile inside sources say that a nice order of those Cisco traffic shapers was purchased 8mo ago or so). With good PR, admiting what's happening and why, and maybe peopel wouldn't be pissed off.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Wasn't the appeal of 'broadband' advertised to be 'always on, high speed, and unlimited transfers'?
It sure seems like all you folks in North America are getting a seriousl wallet raping by the telcos/cablecos.
Here in Japan (and I'm sure it's the same in S. Korea), we don't have any such tranfer caps. Bandwidth is also a non-issue here with 50MB ADSL and 100MB (up and down) FTTH. Also, the pricing is quite reasonable and ususally comes bundled with VOIP services. Some providers even offer TV over IP (Softbank BB).
Japan and S.Korea are living the broadband pipedream that North America had dangled in front of it but never got (until GoogleNet shows up, seeing as they are buying all the remnants of that pipe dream - unused dark fiber).
Rogers here in St. John's, NL have somehow blocked Bittorrent all together, I think they are using some sort of high level filtering to block the connection to the tracker.
Aliant so far has been pretty fast with bittorrent, they now offer 5mbit as an upgrade from 1.5mbit for an extra $5 a month. Too bad they are keeping the upload capped at 512kbit, when I first signed up years ago it was 1mbit down, 768kbit up. My parents still had this service untill they had to "upgrade" when they switched to a bundled package a few months ago.
The difference in speed is more likely todo with other factors. Aliant's network is well over built to handle the load of their customers using Bittorrent. Bandwidth only really cost them money when it crosses over to the US. They are owned by bell, who also owns Group telecom... Here in St. John's that means their are only two choices Bell or Rogers.
When I was living in Halifax last fall I was maxing out my 5mbit connection on some well seeded torrents(private tracker). I also had no problem maxing out the 5mbit downloading over http from a colocated server I admin on rogers telecom's backbone in Alberta.
Last winter I had Rogers 5mbit here in St. John's, it was fast for the first few months, then it got slower and slower, then bittorrent just stopped working all together. In the end I was pretty fed up with Rogers, When I subscribed they told be their was no commitment, then when I went to cancel they said I needed to give them 30 day notice and their was going to be a cancelaltion fee. Also the monthly price went up 3 times, the first time was after the 3 month deal, it went from the really cheap $15 a month, to a reasonable $30 a month. A month or two later they started to charge me for basic cable(without removing the filter) so another $10 a month, then prices went up again and it was almost $50 a month.
My dealings with aliant were alot better, I signed up, got service as promissed after they had troble with shipping the modem to me and gave me free service for a month, the next month I paid and then canceled when I broke up eith my ex. No problem at all, no cancelation fees or anything. They did over charge me for the last month but when I called they wavied the fee for the last month because it was higher than it should of been.
Aliants network is always fast, reliable, and pretty cheap if you get their bundles. I had cell, landline, 5mbit adsl, unlimited atlantic canada longdistance and calling features for $85 a month. From rogers you would be luck to get cell and 5mbit internet for that.
God, root, what is the difference?
Not sure about them still supporting Unix/Linux, I haven't used Earthlink for years, but when I did, it was good.
:)
As for them reselling Covad..yeah, sometimes they do. Apparently they partner with whoever is in the area, and if Covad isn't on board with them in whatever city you want service in, you don't get resold Covad. Plus, Covad may just be the conduit for connectivity between your house, the nearest CO, and an Earthlink node.
Anyone who knows more about this, feel free to clue me in, this is about as far as I go on this subject.
We don't pay a flat monthly fee for "unlimited" water.
...is that there has to be *some* identifiable way for two end points to set up communication, a way for one side to understand what the other side is saying. And technology already exists to identify the protocols, regardless of how complex the protocol is, at multi-gigabit speeds. From what I've seen so far, the encrypted protocol referenced here isn't going to do squat against that. The traffic is still identifiable as bittorrent, and therefore can be filtered/shaped/whatever.
My ISP is Shaw, and I pay for a 7 down 1 up service with 50 gigs down and 10 gigs up a month. I should get that with no shaping or other crap. If I exceed my limits, I can be charged extra. This throttling is crap. It is like buying a Ferrari with a governor on the engine. If I don't get that service I am being ripped off.
They have recourse other than throttling the user who pays for that bandwidth - and I do pay for it. That is what my bill says. Frankly it has more to do with the fact they are rolling out phone service over the same infrastructure and they are asking me to subsidise it by throttling my bandwidth.
So, yes, I will use encryption and guilt-free until they give me the premium back I pay over regular service.
Why don't you people stop uploading/downloading illegaly obtained copyrighted material for good?
So yes, they are their "biggest" subscribers in terms of service usage, but in terms of profitability, they are actually the smallest, which is why they aren't doing things to support you unless one of their competitors is, in which case they don't have a choice.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Maybe when the incentive is to not bite thy neighbor's head off, but to actually cooperate - you can get things done that are best done with a good deal of cooperation.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
But don't geeks generally cost very little in customer service? They're very unlikely to call for anything other than a real problem. Bandwidth has been dropping like a rock in cost, but the amount you get hasn't gone up much (particularly upband), so I doubt it costs all that much to service a heavy user.
I used to live in the sticks. We had dial-up. Sure, it was crappy and 40kbps was smokin' fast (28.8 was the norm) but about every hole in the ground in the ten-county area around where I lived had a local dial-up number. You have to be REALLY far out there to not even get a local dial-up connection. I have yet to see any place like that this side of Montana.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
is happy customers, and a good profit.
And customers want to do P2P.
But... traffic flowing OUTSIDE of the ISP costs the ISP more money. Even if a file is available WITHIN the ISP, the P2P application may well decide to do something silly -- like download it from Russia. Which ends up costing the ISP a LOT more money.
The problem is current P2P applications. They do not (generally) discriminate peers based on IP network addresses. Just "ping time" or somesuch measure. The ISP then uses a shaping appliance: NOT to "throttle" P2P traffic, but to connect up P2P users and keep them INSIDE the ISP network as much as possible.
This has the result of (1) possibly improving the users speed, and (2) saving the ISP money.
"Encrypting" the connection would be a very BAD idea, as the traffic can no longer be controlled this way. A better approach would be to create a "P2P Mesh Discovery Protocol" as an official RFC.
As long as the ISP doesn't have to look at the data, they will be happy to provide such "P2P" acceleration services.
(As usual, I may be completely full of it, and YMMV, etc.)
Ratboy
PS. Rogers didn't block BitTorrent -- not for me, anyway. And eMule also works just fine.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I pay a lot of extra money ($99/month) for my Speakeasy 6Mbit/768Kbit DSL - but they offer a fast connection and specifically state - "you can what ever you want". I like that. They allow sharing of the connection, servers, whatever.
They have never throttled BitTorrent or blocked ANY ports. Their support staff are local and well-trained. I've had one unplanned outage in 2.5 years and it lasted 15 minutes.
It's not illegal everywhere.
And buffets are certainly great things.
If one customer makes a non-exclusive consumer-oriented deal with a company, and then that same customer gets upset that other customers are making the same deal with the company, then that first customer has got some kind of attitude problem. I advise a visit to the doctor or to see a councillor.
On a second note, BitTorrent was designed for the distribution of files. I use it often to share my groups of photos that I and my friends have taken (Yes, they are copyrighted! - By me and my friends respectively), and for downloading Linux etc. (Which is copyrighted by the programmers of Linux and freely distributable under the terms of the GPL2).
If a Service providing is limiting Internet services and stopping the sharing of files then that Service 'semi'-provider is pretty nasty and has no respect for their customers. Their customers should drop their ISP.
From my experience (and I could remember this wrong, as I haven't touched IPSEC for over 5 years), the IPSEC protocol in the way as-is wouldn't work well with BitTorrent because it requires a PKI infrastructure so that the two ends can authenticate and exchange keys before the actual communications. And a PKI isn't easy to setup, and will require a central CA to handle all the certs.
Furthermore, IPSEC, by its old protocol has NAT transversal problems as in it cannot do NAT. And even the IPSEC with the NAT option, I think it is called IPSEC NAT-T, still requires the encrypting certificate to have a name matching the IP of the computer. Hence, requiring a static IP on the computer and/or the public interface on the router. Furthermore, it would cause problems if the two computers on both ends have the exact same IP in the private network (192.168.0.5 or something) as that would lead to interesting conflicts.
IPSEC isn't design for such a use like BitTorrent, it is more for securing the communications on a MANAGED local network, or a VPN, or a tunnel through the internet between networks, so that no one can sniff your data or spoof the destination/source computer. I believe in this case, IPSEC is the wrench while BitTorrent is the phillips screw; wrong tool for the wrong problem.
My ISP is rogers and I specifically payed for Extreme edition for 500KB/sec down and 80KB/sec down with 100gigs of monthly transfer but it really became anoying when they limited downloads to 1-2KB/sec. Since I payed for the bandwidth and speed I should be able to use it, if I go over then they can disconnect me.
Things like throteling is their plan to cut costs, they recently disabled access to new groups and now this. Fortunetly there are easy ways around it like used reserved ports like 1090 and bitcomets encryption.
Visit my site @ http://www.madtorrent.com
which is often claimed to be "unlimited"
Pretty dumb that you are still dredging up six year old commercials to make this point.
Anyway, what do you want to have? P2P limiting or outright transfer caps written into your contract. Don't be all high-and-mighty, you might get what you asked for.
If its smart enough to shape traffic "per flow" why can't it shape something based on a port or an ip address? I would think it would be easier to analyze all the traffic traveling on a particular port.
As my ISP's bandwidth currently sits at 40% bittorrent and 20% eDonkey traffic, I can see how they would want to get rid of these users. However, their solution has been to downgrade that traffic. A solution I am perfectly happy with.
/. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
Considering it may not be illegal somewhere in Africa, would this topic be so broadly come up on slashdot and any other news site? Stop making no point. People from first world countries with good connections where it's illegal make this thing the news, and all they say is their right about privacy and quit their ISP because they stop spreading those copies, some people...
Part of the issue is caused by the fact that in most of the existing network is asymmetric in capacity, which in turn is because it's mostly been cobbled together on top of existing infrastructure rather than investing in new infrastructure, which in turn is because that's what the majority of consumers have voted for with their wallets.
They wanted high download speeds at a cheap price point, which could be achieved using ADSL, rather than the full two-way networking that would have caused an infrastructure change. There's nothing unclear about this in most ISP contracts, but most consumers just see '8Mb Connection'. I expect as it becomes more important to people, and becomes something an ISP can distinguish itself on, we'll start seeing both rates being quoted - but I'd be intrigued to see if people are really willing to pay the price differential. Or maybe Google will do it for free, subsidised by advertising, as appears to be the solution to most problems.
Using the buffet comparison, people are entering into the all-you-can-eat buffet, then wondering why they can't have the items on the a la carte menu. On the other hand, the restaurants aren't being wholly honest in their advertising.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
If bittorrent weights high bandwidth, high availability peers higher, that would seem to suggest that what you need is more access, not less, to make it viable. Maybe there is a hump. Instead of connecting to random locations all over the world you need a full copy distributed within your ISP's LAN. Thereafter, all traffic is within the LAN. So if bittorrent clients could prioritize peers from the same domain that would help things.
ISPs should realize that this is the thin edge of the wedge, they just haven't gotten around to launching their own high bandwidth for pay services yet. They need to have a minimum amount of pipe and then some multicasting or bittorrent caches internally.
They should keep their hands off bittorrent and start a few on demand movie, television, radio etc. channels of their own. If they had imagination they'd give radio stations free high upload accounts and cameras so their users could watch DJs while they are on the air, and then syndicate to other cable companies.
Well actually in my eyes if you pay for a product you want to have the product.
Imagine you rent a car... flatrate... no distance charges... youd pay more a month than without distance charges...
now if someone goes and throttles the car to 50 its a different product with alot less value.
Encrypt WHAT?
Let's say that the data is encrypted. To be secure, keys must be negotiated with EACH of the sending machines. The crypto had better be simple... and useless.
Let's say a single key is used... the key has to be exchanged with the server. Either the complete list of servers is known, or a key exchange can be initiated. If the complete list of servers is known, and they all go away, the transfer cannot complete. Useless.
So, a key exchange can be initiated. Which means that the keys themselves are insecure. Useless.
So. encrypting the data is useless. A similar argument can be made for the exchanges of the machines in the mesh.
Remember P2P in the BitTorrent context means many sources of the same content.
Now, the "encryption" has to be (only) good enough to make it better (cheaper) to actually route the packets rather than figure out that they should be "throttled". And this must hold assuming that the "man in the middle" (aka ISP), has a record of the ENTIRE set of transactions.
Very VERY difficult.
(and all of this assumes that the ISP wants to "throttle" and not just control this kind of traffic -- see my other post on this topic).
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Sheesh, that is NOT how things are done in the UK. Phone Trading Standards, specifically mention that you asked about p2p beforehand and the contract is null and void there and then. If you inform a saleperson of a specific need when purchacing goods or services, you are entitled to a refund if the goods don't meet your specified needs.
Small claims court is a last resort and would be madness in this case. The law is fully on your side if you were mis-sold the service.
Seeing as you linked BBC, here's their take on this. (Ctrl-f, "fit for purpose")
Sheesh,
Funny, "Sheesh" is an American-ism. Why didn't also post "Gee whiz"?
that is NOT how things are done in the UK.
Correct... it's is very often not done like that, since lots of people don't know about the SCC. Instead, they sit around feuding with an ISP and refusing to pay, and as as a result don't have any service. Meanwhile, their names may end up on bad credit lists and they get angrier and angrier because they can't get any redress or hearing for their grievance.
Phone Trading Standards,
You should do that too just ensure that you register your problem with the authorities -- trading standards collect complaints, they rarely do anything to redress the balance unless they get enough of them. As a matter of completeness you should also complain to the credit card company if you used one.
Small claims court is *not* a last resort. It is designed to sort out exactly the kind of contract disputes described.
Realistically, you, sir, are a communist and a troll to boot. People are paying for something and not receiving it. That is illegal and I'm surprised so few have pointed this facet of the question out. Oh, and I'm calling you a communist because you would reduce everyone to a lowest common denominator, without regard for idividuals' needs, and also because I am feeling agressive today.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
People have been happily predicting ubiquitous crypto for many years, but recently they don't so much, because they noticed that things haven't made any progress in that direction for the last decade or so. See Where has all the crypto gone?, a Usenix paper from five years ago, and ask yourself what progress has been made since then.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it, but I'm not optimistic that it'll "just happen".
Xenu loves you!
If done responsibly by the ISP.
I'm fortunate to have a 10MBit symmetrical connection from my ISP, soon to be beefed to 100Mbit. I also know that the ISP is shaping some P2P protocol traffic of which bittorrent is one. However this ISP realizes who it's customers are and that someone ordering 10MBit internet access is probably going to use it to some extent since they didn't go with another provider offering less capacity. So, the ISP has a pretty good infrastructure in place with good peer agreements with other ISPs. Now, even though they have a fairly well developed infrastructure they will run into extreme peaks and must be able to manage dataflows so that the main internet services are available to their customers (telnet, SMTP, VOIP, HTTP/S, SSH etc.). So they use traffic shaping to simply assign lower priority to P2P traffic.
This behavior is totally OK with me and I wouldn't have it any other way. Certain services are more time critical than others and I wouldn't like them to be affected by the huge P2P clogs in the network. On the other hand, since they just re-prioritize the packets I know that my P2P transfer rate will be good enough (the remaining capacity of the network when the essential services are cared for).
This solution works great when you have an ISP which continually beefs up their backbone, but would pose a problem if you have a cheap *ss ISP which models their backbone capacity only for the (by them considered) essential services.
So, in short, if you have an ISP which do cater for your specific customer type, then traffic shaping can be a good thing for you as well as your fellow ISP customers. Traffic shaping isn't all evil, that's all.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Part of the issue is caused by the fact that in most of the existing network is asymmetric in capacity,
Is that correct? Apart from the 'last mile' (ADSL or 56K dial-up) is not most of the internet (including that in the ISP's datacentres) made up of routers/switches/links etc that have the same rate in both directions?
Been in use in Scotland for a long time, at least in my family. I can't imagine it being said in anything other than a thick Glaswegian accent.
trading standards collect complaints, they rarely do anything to redress the balance unless they get enough of them.
Not true. You're maybe thinking of the "office of" people e.g. Oftel. Trading Standards work on a per-case basis and will phone the other party on your behalf. I've used this service before and a friend's wife used to work for them. Check their website for more info, they are a nice, helpful bunch of people, I was seriously shocked to get that level of attention from a free government service. I'd have been happy with a useful leaflet, instead they phoned the shop, the manufacturer then got the shop to pay 50% of the costs to repair a three-year-old TV with no extended warranty.
Small claims court is *not* a last resort. It is designed to sort out exactly the kind of contract disputes described.
Only when the written law doesn't already make a clear judgement. If you took this case to court, the key phrase to win it for the customer would be "Sale of Goods Act". Then the company will be blasted by the judge for being so stupid in bringing such an obvious losing case to court. I'm not saying SCC aren't useful, but when there are clear laws on your side and people well versed in them also willing to fight your corner, going for a SCC case is just nuts. It's an open and shut case; a mis-sold service. Inform them of your intentions, cancel the payments and that's it, end of story. Any hastle, Trading Standards will tell them where to go. Just make sure they know why you are cancelling; you can save some time by quoting the law in the first message so they won't send you the "you can't do that!!" message to try and scare you off.
> Stop making no point.
Stop making no sense.
Seriously post you Slashdot unenglish understandably hard!
Terms and conditions may say all kinds of things. However, try selling a product for $20 a month, and putting in the small print of the contract "* Actual price is $49.95 a month", and see how far you get in court.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Either way, small claims court doesn't require (maybe not even allow?) cartoonies in the US.
Huh, that's funny. Where is your proof of this? I would argue that geeks utilize bandwidth in a much more efficient way. Having done three years of technical support for a university, it was always the non-geeks that were generating the most traffic. When we did traffic reports, those generating the most traffic (a consistently high amount) in the dorms would have their network ports deactivated, and I would have to go figure out why. I only remember going into one geek's room to find out why. He was sharing out a whole lot of music. The rest of them? Malware, zombies, worms/viruses, etc. from unpatched, unprotected machines that are sitting wide open on the Internet. Most geeks downloaded locally available files (ala programs like Direct Connect), or used BitTorrent but had their upload throttled back a bit. Non-geeks just setup KaZaa or Limewire, and share out their whole C:\
So I would have to disagree with you from an ISP perspective.
Actually, some people do. Its called a well. Most rural people have them. (I'm thinking of the amoritzed cost of drilling the well and ignoring the cost of electricity because it must be nearly neglible per gallon pumped. I just did some quick figurin' and came up with a cost of 0.0000497133248 US cents per gallon pumped. )
My fault - I was only thinking about the 'last mile', but that's the step they've avoided tackling due to expense.
'Capitalists of the world, unite! Oh
Open letter to Bram (this would have gone in his Livejournal comments but Anonymous postings are disabled).
Ignoring the encryption issue for the moment, the primary problem with your argument is that you're assuming a rationality and a level of technical expertise from the ISPs that simply doesn't exist.
1) The simple fact is that "end-users" cannot work with ISPs, period. Rogers & Shaw are both shaping bittorrent traffic, they've received many complaints about this, lost clients & gotten lots of bad press but their stance has not changed. The shaping is there to stay & this means that for users of their networks your protocol is useless for ANY purpose. Bittorrent is dead, deceased, pushing up the daisies. If this spreads then any and all bittorrent-related technologies are useless so you'd best find another line of work.
2) These traffic shapers are stand-alone hardware boxes the the ISPs purchase from Cisco & stick into their network configurations. They're not simple tech & they aren't easily configured, if at all, by the ISPs themselves. They're also buggy as hell. Rogers' collection of shaping-boxes decided that iTunes Music Store traffic was peer-to-peer and as such killed it. So to presume that the ISPs will be able to analyze 'random traffic' and shape it dynamically is a little far-fetched.
My point is simply that though you may now think that encryption and & obfuscating packets is pointless, you have yet to provide a functional alternative other then 'work with the ISPs'. The death knell of bittorrent has sounded & you might want to worry about that a little bit.
cjm
Plus, there's always the odd chance that you get a native english speaker on the phone that knows more than what's written on a script.
They have been cracking down on this. Why pay somebody $12/hr. who can fix 98% of issues when you can get Elbonians for $3/hr. who can fix 48%?
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Well, sometimes they just pretend there isn't anybody but Covad even when you can see not only the ILEC's remote DSLAM out your window, but also the ILEC's sole DSL provisioning center.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The phrases you need in dealing with BellSouth are: "please connect me with presidential escalations", "I am considering filing a complaint with the PSC" and perhaps "the State and Federal tariffs* require you to treat traffic equally in order for your company to keep its common carrier status".
*It's law, not regulation, actually, but the words "tariffs" and "PSC" (Public Services Commission) strike terror in the hearts of Bellheads.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Only when the written law doesn't already make a clear judgement.
Which, in many cases with ISPs and their bullshit online contracts that change all the time, is exactly the situation.
Not true
Absolutely true, unless you happen to have friends working there. Trading Standards are exactly as described above: useless tossers who need more than a thousand complaints before getting out of bed to investigate -- and who won't listen when you try to explain that the terms of an ISPs "broadband bandwidth provision" has changed in subtle ways.
I thought the idea behind it was to cut down on bandwidth...
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
My friends wife no longer worked there, and she never worked in the office I contacted. Nor did I mention that I knew any of their former colleagues.
Trading Standards are exactly as described above: useless tossers who need more than a thousand complaints before getting out of bed to investigate
Bullshit. That's nowhere near my experience, they could not have been more helpful for my one single, isolated complaint.
and who won't listen when you try to explain that the terms of an ISPs "broadband bandwidth provision" has changed in subtle ways.
Maybe they aren't all that up on technology, and you did not explain it very well. All you had to do was say the service did not resemble what you originally signed up for. Sure, the ISP can change the contract all they want, but that does not change the law. Ever wonder where the phrase "your statatory rights are not affected" comes from? Do you think they put that up in adverts/contracts through their own choice?