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ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads
oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
You don't want your customers actually using the stuff they're paying you for, after all.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
"in order to ensure connectivity for everyone"
No, that's in order to continue selling people bandwidth they couldn't deliver, known to ISPs as "statistical oversubscription". Then when we want to get what we paid for, they take it away entirely. Unless you're watching the telco's own IPTV, which somehow has as much bandwidth as they need to sell it to you, for an additional charge.
Blocking competitive services to support ripoff monopoly business models is the reason telcos and other big ISPs hate Net Neutrality.
--
make install -not war
with teh Telephone System, returning the advantage to the communication providers
by filtering the words Cocaine , Heroin, Ganja, LSD, Skunk, PCP, Speed, Crystal Meth
as they are used by people using the telephone system to conduct illegal conversations
filter my torrents and i will sue you for NOT filtering childporn
if you want to give up common carrier thats fine, but be aware YOU WILL be held to account for anything illegal i find on YOUR network
Well, to their defense, if they didn't oversell their prices would be quite higher.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
They shouldn't be allowed to advertise (and charge a premium for) 3-5+ mbps service if they're going to actively prevent their customers from using it.
If car manufacturers operated like ISPs, they would sell 300 horsepower cars with shoddy transmissions, then limit them to 150hp so they wouldn't have to deal with the warranty repairs.
80% of email traffic. I hate newspaper reporters who drop crucial adjectives. Of course, email is the internet according to Ted Stevens. And since he's the commite head, he knows what he is talking about.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
"However, those who feel this all amounts to an imminent war between the users and the ISPs over BitTorrent... "
A war? You gotta be crazy. If my ISP doesn't provide me what I'm paying for then I'm either dumping them or suing. It's that simple. There's not going to be an "war" over my ISP usage at my home or my business. I'm going to get what I pay for, or they can speak with my attorney (and yes, I do use my attorney for little stuff like this).
To the people who just have a home ISP and may not have much choice, I say: don't worry about it. Somebody will come in to provide the service eventually. Competition ensures that it'll happen. With wireless getting a little bit more useful every day, I think that we'll soon have some competition amongst ISP's again, soon.
What happens when the States get 'real' broadband with fiber to the home. Torrent activity would more than double in my opinion.
I suppose the only way they can really do this is by analyzing the high level protocol transactions and by keeping tabs on particular IPs and their behaviors. Pretty flimsy.
All of this could probably be pretty easily foiled by having Bittorrent mask what it's doing by sending noise once in a while to throw these tools off.
Execute? [Y/N] _
Why don't ISPs that worry about their net usage outside their network just mirror shit?
Would it be really hard to throw together a 1TB file store with the latest patches, demos, ISOs and the like?
That way the customers can get stuff inside the network and the ISP doesn't have to worry about upstream net usage.
OMG it's like I'm smart and all.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Isnt it illegal to read any part of encrypted data accross the internet?
Probably not, but they aren't "reading" data in any case. They're just looking at the encrypted streams and figuring out, based upon the way the traffic flows, the ports, etc. that it is bittorrent traffic. Of course engineers can just make bittorrent traffic mimic other, legitimate traffic more closely to make it impossible to distinguish between them.
Ever notice that whole lot of crap runs on port 80 these days? The reason is that ISPs and maintainers of firewalls have turned off the rest of the internet under the assumption that it will stop the traffic they don't like. Really it just squished everything into one place and made it harder to properly administer.
I remember when Knoppix 5 came out. The official mirrors weren't carrying it yet, it was offloaded to other sites to try and get the feeding frenzy over with. So I downloaded it at the request of my boss and then left my computer to seed for the weekend. I served out 1.2TB in 48 hours. Would have been higher too, but I was capping my upstream. And I was only one of hundreds of seeders (though in fairness I was the top seeder).
I just don't see how else a not-for-profit group is going to get fast distribution of something that big for cheap. If you look at web hosting you find that bandwidth of that order is not at all cheap. However, BT let us all share the load a little.
I'm sure people do sue it for illegal purposes but I tell ya what, it has made getting free legal software so much easier. Gone are the days of waiting around on a slow ass FTP that seems like it's being run out of some guy's broom closet (which is probably where it is being run). I find on most Linux torrents I can get 30+mbits/sec no problem.
2: Sue them under the DMCA for reverse-engineering and breaking the technological protection method used to protect your content.
Use either, or both, as appropriate.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No, it doesn't "have to be done". You could just advertise what you can actually deliver, and anything a customer happens to get above that is gravy. Right now, you "manage to sell" people 5Mb connections for $40 a month in the same way that the guy at the corner "manages to sell" Rolex watches for ten dollars a shot.
You also have to consider that consumers want things real cheap, often cheaper than is affordable. Big lines (like OC lines) cost a lot of money. So you need to have a good number of subscribers per line to make it work, if you are to charge those people a low amount. That means that bandwidth can be scarce.
One option people have is to just get better service. I personally went with Speakeasy. They don't block or throttle your connection in any way (they claim they don't, and I haven't detected any). You can host servers, whatever you like. However, it's more pricey than lower grade service. I drop about $130/month to get 6m/768k DSL with 8 static IPs. But, I've never had it fail to work at the highest speeds, and they are true to their word, I do a TON of upstream with those servers and I've never heard a peep out of them or seen my connection throttled at all.
Net access is just another area where you get what you pay for. Sure, I could offer people 100mbit net access for $20/month and just lay ethernet to their houses (we are assuming I had the permits here). However at that price, I couldn't guarantee 100mbits of upstream for each subscriber. Hell I'd be lucky to get 10mbits of upstream for all subscribers.
You don't. Like you just said, you lie about how much bandwidth you have available. You don't thikn people will be interested in paying for what you can really provide them with for $40, so you pretend you can provide more than you can afford to. You're a conman. A fraudster. A common crook. HTH.
You are assuming that the DSL ISPs aren't throttling traffic at the higher level of their network. You are wrong in that assumption. DSL is no panacea to cable oversubscription and traffic-shaping.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Customers getting what they paid for? Are you nuts?! That's communism! You pay for 6mbps per second, you should be happy with 768kbps. People having the freedom to use bit torrent and the privacy of encryption, what kind of collectivi-er, confiscationli-er, what are you, one of those SWARTHY PEOPLE?!!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I signed up for unlimited bandwidth. That is the deal we made. There was nothing in the contract about not using what I paid for. How is it an "honor system" that I should know not to use what I contract for? If they had even mentioned such a system in their ads or contract, I could see your point. Why are they allowed an implied "honor" system to sell the same bandwidth over and over, and the claim I "ruin" it when I use what I pay for?
I saw other posts saying the same thing about ISP's hoping that you don't use all of your available bandwidth, and overselling the service, and my question is this:
If I buy say 25 acres of land, and I sell 1 acre parcels of this land, normally valued at 1,000 dollars per acre to 50 people at 750 dollars per acre (to give a good deal and sell my land), in the hope that they don't use it all, how long do I have before I go to jail, and how much of a jackass am I for counting on the fact that no one will try to use thier full acre?
I got nuthin
I know it sounds insenitive, but it really needs to be said: "It's not my job to make sure your business model turns a profit."
Your the one in control. You write-up the contract any way you wish, and the customers' only choice is to accept or refuse. If you aren't able to provide 5Mbit connections, then clearly make it a point in your contract that you're limiting them to a maximum ammount of throughput, or something similar.
Honor your contracts, don't complain that you can't. Making contracts "on the margin," so to speak, gets lots of people thrown in prison all the time, when things don't go their way.
What's more... singling out bittorrent, or P2P in general, is insane. The same things can be done with http, ftp, etc. If you're going to restrict traffic, at least do it in a sane way, which applies to ALL the bits, and doesn't unfairly penalize one protocol/technology over another.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
OK, here you go:
Dear customer/potential customer,
At present, you pay a flat rate for your broadband, but the costs we incur in supplying your service increase with usage. If you are up/downloading 10x as much as most customers because of your heavy broadband use, then you are costing us more than those others. With a flat pricing model, that cost is being passed on to all of our customers equally. We don't believe this is fair to the vast majority of our customers, most of whom don't make such heavy use and simply want an always-on connection with a reasonable download speed.
In recognition of this, we are giving our customers the option to decide between two alternative pricing schemes. One of these will be introduced within the next six months, at which point we will stop offering our existing flat-rate service.
For option (a), we have a tiered approach. Light users can have a max 512Kb/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 1GB, for $5/month. This package is suitable for most people who use the Internet primarily for e-mail, web browsing/e-shopping, and Usenet newsgroups. Medium users can have a max 2MB/s connection and a monthly bandwidth cap of 4GB, for $15/month. This package is suitable for most people who make somewhat heavier use, such as on-line gamers or those who download occasional multimedia content. Heavy users can have a max 8MB/s connection and no monthly bandwidth cap, for $200/month. This is the only appropriate standard home user package suitable for those who run continuous, high-traffic services such as peer-to-peer file sharing or web servers linked from Slashdot articles.
For option (b), we will simply charge a fixed fee per megabyte up/downloaded, keeping the total income we receive across our entire customer base constant. We expect this to result in a cost reduction for light users of up to 90%, little change for medium users, and a tenfold increase in charges to heavy users.
Please select the option you prefer and we will go with the majority vote. For those who require guaranteed download speeds and no bandwidth cap, the same leased line services we offer to businesses are also available to private customers, with prices starting at only $1,000/month (installation charges apply).
Kind regards,
Your ISP
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
when IPTV becomes more ubiqutous, or when more people start watching news, music videos, etc. online. Yahoo! music streaming, anyone? iTunes, anyone?
IPTV is set to evolve soon, too, to where a Comcast user in Los Angeles can subscribe to a provider streaming from Texas. Episodes of TV shows can be seen online now, and whole libraries are going to be coming online.
Bittorrent's just a big shark in a really really big ocean of bandwidth problems about to hit you like a tsunami.
The backbone will get stronger or new markets won't emerge. Apparently in this day and age, the market has right of way.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Waitaminute, you're saying this like it's a bad thing or ironic or something. This is the way it should be. If the ISPs would store things on their own network (whether it's a Squid cache or a Usenet spool doesn't matter) that would be fucking awesome. Then they only pay once to move it over their expensive pipes (and likewise, only slow down the backbones once), and it doesn't matter how many of their customers download it, because that part is essentially "free." The internet as a whole would benefit.
Every ISP should have a news server and web cache, and encourage their users to use them. It's not like disk space is expensive. It doesn't need to be reliable, either. Use a bunch of the cheapest Maxtors you can find, and RAID0 'em. Or just make it all swap and serve out of a 64-bit-address-space tmpfs. ;-)
Likewise, it would be neat if bittorrent or Gnutella or something like it, would peer with users on earby networks first, instead of just anyone. If a bunch of an ISP's users are all passing lots of packets to each other the the ISP has little reason to throttle. I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard of ISPs working on this, because they (moreso than the users) are the ones who would most benefit from it.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have a hard time believing that you run an ISP. "Free riders", as you well know, make your business model not only feasible, but richly profitable. "Free riders" are your best customers.
Switch to a "pay per play" model ($X / byte) if you want to get rid of the 20% of your customers who consume 80% of your bandwitdh.
Guess why you'll NEVER do it? Under the new system, the average "non-abusing" customer pays $10 / month, while the average "abuser" pays $160 / month.
($10 * 80%) + ($160 * 20%) = ($40 * 100%)
Abusing the network becomes cost prohibitive, so you'll quickly lose those customers. In the end, you're left with:
($10 * 80%) + ($0 * 20%) = ($40 * 20%)
20% of your original revenues. You don't make margin on bandwidth that isn't being used.
Exactly. And of course the ISP apologists chime in with the "bad analogy--you can get in trouble for overselling goods, but not services" nonsense. Of course, what they are overlooking is that it isn't somehow "less of a crime" to oversell a service, it's just harder to get caught.
The hollowed principle that the ISPs were relying on was the ancient "but I didn't think I'd get caught" defense.
If somebody takes money from people for X, be it a good or a service, and then blocks them from getting what they paid for in order to resell it to others, they are committing fraud. Period.
--MarkusQ
You know it's time to sell stock in a company when you see the company in a technical arms raise against the customer to deny the customer service. Great thinking, ISPs!
So.....you are limiting an unlimited service?
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
"However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."
Yeah. Too bad those "important" uses only account for 5% of the total traffic.
Okay, now a while back when ISPs first started throttling traffic the big workaround was encryption. Now it seems that encryption isn't a silver bullet either. Other sources have indicated that pattern analysis would catch attempts to emulate other protocols, such as secure VPN connections.
So is the war over? Or is everyone going to focus on other ways to outsmart the system?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I think you're looking in the wrong place for the cost.
The cost of you saturating your pipe would really not be in the upgrades necessary to the local infrastructure (at the subnet level), it would be in the additional cost to their ISP (assumedly one of the Tier-1 providers).
The switches at the head-ends of the local cable "exchanges" (whatever they call exchanges in cable parlance) are probably more than capable of pushing 5-6 Mb/s per customer, continuously. Where it gets problematic is as you start aggregating that kind of traffic through the network. If an exchange serves 500 customers, and each of them want to pull 5 Mb continuously, then you're talking about a 2.5 Gb backhaul; if you have an actual connection to the Internet for every 5 local exchanges, that means you'd need to buy a 12.5 Gb/s x 24/7 pipe from the Tier 1 provider. To do that, you're talking Real Money.
What I suspect the problem is, and why you can't use all the bandwidth that Comcast advertises to you, is because Comcast only itself buys a fraction of the connection to the global net that it would need, in order to provide that level of service.
The bottleneck probably isn't down at the local level, it's up where Comcast's network meets the rest of the Internet; they're not peering, they have to buy transit from another provider, thus they have an incentive to try and discourage people from using too much traffic.
The best solution to this, IMO, would be to have two separate limits on traffic, one limit (say, 128kb/s continuously, or an equivalent amount of burst traffic, maxed at 6Mb/s) for packets that actually need to transit to the global net, and another limit for packets that never leave Comcast's copper (6Mb/s continuously). This could be expressed either as a distinct amount of transfer per month, or as rates.
Using those figures just for an example (128kb/s continuous global, 6Mb/s continuous local), you'd be able to push approximately 40GB per month onto the public net, and 1.9TB per month on the Comcast network. (I think I did my math correctly...)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't really care, yanno? If they say "3 MB/s!!!!" then as far as I care, blocking anything form having that is nothing other then false advertising. If they don't want you to use your full advertised speed, then they need to stop saying they are providing it.
Great Intellect...
Does this imply that if you had not used this unthrottled service, then they would act as a barrier and protect you from civil proceedings? Somehow, I doubt it...
(IANAL)