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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."
If you build a better mousetrap someone will fling a couger at you.
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.
many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy.
- Game Demos
- Software updates / upgrades
- Free / Legal Videos
"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
Wow, stunning efficiency, or bad statistics.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Easy. All traffic is slowed down by default. If the traffic is digitally signed by a Microsoft trusted computing device then it's allowed to travel faster through the pipes. All other traffic is slow pr0n.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
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.
Isnt it illegal to read any part of encrypted data accross the internet? (with certain exceptions, ie: NSA actions/warrants, etc)
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.
This is funny...last month, I downloaded one linux distro via torrent, it was a dvd iso, can't remember the file size, let's say 4.5GB for argument. The other squillion terabytes I grabbed all came from my ISP's own news server, about a zillion hours of not-so-legal content, all provided at full speed by the guys who'd like to throttle my legal torrent traffic? If ISPs were that concerned about traffic, they'd close some of the zombie hosts on their own networks sending out billions of spam emails a day.
Look, I use Bittorrent and it's great. But I also run an ISP.
The thing is, bandwidth isn't cheap. People bitch that ISPs "oversubscribe", and that we can't really deliver our advertised bandwidth to everyone all of the time. This is true, but how do you think we manage to sell people 5Mb connections for $40/month? Do you know how much 5Mb of bandwidth costs and ISP? It's a lot more than $40. In the market I'm in, we pay THOUSANDS of dollars for that much bandwidth.
The real problem is that bandwidth is too expensive in this country, thanks to the likes of AT&T and MCI and all the other big players. They've got tons of unused fiber lying around, and it costs them next-to-nothing to use it, but it still costs the end-user (in this case, the ISP) a hell of a lot of cash.
Not "first".
"Fist".
Up you ass.
About elbow deep.
(let's see, will this one be modded: Troll? Flamebait? Off-Topic? The suspense is KILLING ME!)
I have noticed that once the upload stats get to about 10 gig or so my dynamic ip expires about every 2 hours. Before I started using btdownloadcurses my ip would change about once every two weeks. Remote access in terms of my dynamic ip address was rarely a problem. Granted this is only an observation, yet I still assume categories of customers are made by upload stats. This caused me to script ipshow. ATT, go screw yourself and your "sticky ips", I am not running ebay here, I just want access to my computers.
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."
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.
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.
This is actually a common feature in many cryptosystems which serves to prevent a successful cryptanalysis via "cribs" or short passages of known plaintext within the cipher text, especially at known location such as the start of the message (the Germans made this mistake with their Enigma traffic during WWII for example with standard message headers on their daily weather reports to the U-Boat flotillas). If the protocol were modified to introduce random segments of padding (i.e. junk) into the packets then cryptanalysis via cribbing would most probably be rendered impractical.
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!
Competition? Surely, you jest. Unless, of course, you mean "Competition between two subsidized monopolies," namely the local cable company and the local telco. Some choice.
As Lily Tomlin's telephone operator character liked to say, "We're the telephone company. We don't care. We don't have to."
I don't get why ISP don't apply this to their customers, it would be perfect, or am I missing something?
ISPs oversell bandwidth to consumers: If they sell you 1 MB/s then they might have 1 MB/s for every 50 customers they serve. Now with a token bucket that fills at a rate of 10 to 30 KB/s, depending on demand, and has a capacity of perhaps 1 GB normal users would generally have full speed almost all the time, while heavy users would be limited to the bucket fill rate, unless they save up some tokens.
Furthermore it's a standaard traffic shaping algorithm, so I would guess the ISP's equipment could easily handle this.
What am I missing?
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.
uh... how about we ban analogies completely from /. Who's with me?!!
In the meantime, I will point out that the flaw with this particular analogy is comparing a service (broadband) to a physical object (an acre of land). You can oversell a service, but it doesn't work with physical objects. People tend to want to get their hands on a physical object and it becomes apparent very quickly that it's been oversold. Most of the time, users will be surfing the web or checking email. They won't be using their full bandwidth. When they do occasionally use their full bandwidth, most likely it will be available.
...seriously, who's with me?!!
Finding other idiots on
It may be abstract and not quite as apt, but clearly the pipes and the elctrons being served are discrete units that can be measured for each user. So yes, there is a physical object here - it's just not as easy to see as an acre of land.
A better analogy (and a car-related one at that) is an actual highway.
You build a 4 lane private tollway between two specific points. You promise high speeds for toll access. Then you oversell access.
The thing in question here is sentence 2: "promise high speeds." What does that mean? Clearly we can quantify that.
And guess what? In our ISP service contracts, we've quantified it, too. It's fairly simple; either
a)charge me bit-for-bit and quit throttling
b) up everyone's price until you're not overselling any more because of lower demand
c) offer tiered pricing for higher bandwidth users. That's great for me; I don't mind slower speeds, so I can save me some dough.
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
That's a pretty atrocious analogy.
Hmm. Can I find one.
It's about sharing something.
Okay.. here we go. I'll use a riding lawnmower analogy.
The ISP's leases use of a riding lawnmower for a year $1,000. The leasing company agrees that up to 5 days a year, they can use two lawnmowers without extra charge and three lawnmowers for $10 per day.
They sell 50 people the right to use a lawnmower for $25 each (pocketing a nice $250 profit).
They reasonably expect that people are going to mow about 2 hours a day once every 2 weeks- some will mow for 2 hours a day every week and some will mow for 2 hours a day once a month. Given 365 days a year, there should rarely be a line for the lawnmower. And when there is they have a bit of extra capacity.
Now- someone figures out that the lawnmower can be used to drive to work with while their car is in the shop.
Someone else figures out that they can run a small busines mowing people's lawns with it.
Another person borrows it and then loans it out to his 5 best friends to mow their lawns with too.
The business model that was going to work doesn't work any more. Because every day people are using 7 lawnmowers all day. The ISP is now paying $60 per day over what they thought they would pay. The rules have changed.
---
Don't get me wrong- I torrent things too. I know at some point they are going to charge per megabyte (or gigabyte) downloaded. This is a very temporary window where they did not know how people would use their services. Server accounts have always taken bandwidth into account.
I expect in the next few years that we will see things like "4 gigs a month and then $1.00 per 10 gigs a month" and then the ISP's will compete on price. These will get higher as bandwidth grows (USA is pathetic at 9mbps when Japan/korea/etc. have something like 100mpbs).
Smarter caching could prevent a lot of this.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That does not alter the validity of parent's analogy. Consider a car mechanic, who being a similar jackass, sells you a coupon for "tire change in 10 minutes - guaranteed!" (clearly a "service"), obviously hoping that all of his customers ... err ... marks, will not show up at the same time. But if they do, he is in the same boat the ISP is: he sold something he could not deliver, i.e. he lied, cheated, and ripped the consumer off.
Sometimes analogies do work, because Internet is not some new magical, never before experienced thing from the perspective of mercantile trade. It simply fits into the ages old criterion of "service", rules of which have been long established as are all the different ways thieves and con-men have tried to abuse those rules.
If an ISP wants to sell a 3 Mbps service but wants to oversubscribe it by 10x, that's fine. But then they should advertise it as 3 Mbps at 10% saturation. Instead they advertise and sell it as 3 Mbps, then use secret criteria to determine who they try to kick off their service for "overusing" it. Lately they've started adding (very, very) fine print stating you're not supposed to use all that bandwidth 24/7. But the whole thing would sit better with the public if they were just up-front about it.
Perhaps a better analogy can be found in the airline industry (also a service). Historically airlines have routinely oversold seating because more often than not it works out for them. Some people will cancel the fight, some people won't show up for the flight, and sometimes they won't be able to sell all the seats in first class and can bump overbooked coach passengers to first class. In the event that they can't put you on your purchased flight, they will put you on the next one, or refund your ticket. Either way generally sucks for you, but you're at their mercy. So there is at least one industry that has been overselling a service for a very long time.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
This made me realize that there is even a better way of visualisng the problem: think traditional telephone companies. They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network. If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other. Furthermore, if their response to the problem was like that of the ISPs, you would see people's calls being monitored and those made by teenagers would be terminated prematurely, because they make the system too busy for Grandma to call her grandkids. In other words: total nonsense. Instead the telcos of old did the only sane thing: expanded the switching capability until the odds of the system reaching its capacity were so small as not to impede its normal use.
ISPs simply believe that no sane rules apply to them because they operate in this magical, fantastic, cosmic, new wonder medium of Internet. Its time someone hit them with a sizeable clue bat and made their noses contact the firm ground of common sense, violently.
The key word being refund. Also, airlines have many other reasons for bumping flights, such as weather and what not. In other words, while they can be sleazy, the level of their machinations is insignificant to what the crooks, otherwise known as the ISPs, are up to.
You're right... it was missing a car.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
The main problem with this second analogy is that the service is not advertised this way. It's more like they rent you the lawnmower for a year. You take it home and start cutting your lawn, which happens to be a rather large lawn. An hour later, Guido shows up to take your lawnmower and bring it to another customer, because they figure an hour should be plenty of time to cut your lawn. But you didn't sign up for an hour a week, you signed up for a lawnmower for a year!
I had the same idea a while back when I was reading about how bad the folks in Australia get hit for broadband. If you think the situation sucks here in the U.S., they really get screwed -- it's almost impossile to get an uncapped (transfer) account there at all. In a situation like that, it seems to me like it would make sense to have two distinct tiers of traffic: local traffic that wasn't going to leave the country (and thus wouldn't have to go through expensive undersea cables and be subject to peering agreements), and international traffic. The latter is what's expensive, the former ought to be free or close to free.
Rather than fighting bittorrent, an ISP like Comcast could just put a cap on the traffic that you could send through to other networks (and publish what the limits are, in terms of burst versus constant throughput, etc.), and then give you your full unthrottled connection to other Comcast subscribers, because this really doesn't cost them anything. Their network ought to be capable of letting someone basically saturate their connection from one node to another node on the same subnet, and with some intelligent caching, they could keep a lot of the BT traffic here.
If they set up the incentive structure correctly, they could probably reduce the load at critical points on their network due to BT traffic, while giving end-users (both heavy downloaders and "burst" users) a better overall experience. They would also eliminate the incentive to obfuscute BT traffic and end the cat-and-mouse game that seems inevitable under the current system.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If I buy 25 cars and charge 50 people for the ability to come by and use a car at any time, how long do I have before I go to jail? And how much of a jackass am I for counting on the fact that there will never be more than 25 people wanting to use a car at any one time?
think traditional telephone companies.
Okay...
They also provide, for a fixed monthly fee, unlimited access to the telephone network.
Hardly. They offer very limited access to the telephone network--you can make and receive phone calls with a limited finite set of optional features such as caller-id and voicemail. They offer unlimited use of that application within, well, limits, including geographical toll boundries and pay-per-use products such as directory assistance and three-way calling.
IP networks offer an ever-expanding variety of access, limited only by the contractual terms of service that each customer agrees to at the time of purchase. In practice, those terms are most often loosely enforced, if at all, and usually only in response to some operational problem caused by a violation. New network applications are developed and widely adopted as time passes.
If they operated on the same principle as the ISPs, you would get nothing but busy signals if more then 0.1% of people decided to call each other.
Actually, telephony capacity is engineered to some threshold of dropped calls per 100 at the network's "busy hour". This threshold is either dictated by regulatory bodies or is left to the telco. Either way, few--if any--telcos build to "zero drops per 100 at busy hour".
Telephony networks are a smidge easier to engineer from a capacity perspective because there's fewer variables to address. A PSTN/TDM phone call takes a discrete unit of bandwidth per call, either 56K or 64K depending on the underlying transport technology. The only variables are start time and duration. Erlang modeling, based on queue theory, addresses this quite well; it isolates start time by normalizing duration to 3600 seconds/call and provides useful, realistic measurements.
IP networks, though, have difficult to model traffic flows with packets of varying size, varying latency from node to node--and from packet to packet within the flow all transmitted at different start times and with different durations. This is only exacerbated by the variety of applications on the network. Variables are nearly impossible to isolate (practically) and capacity planning is more reliant on utilization trend analysis rather than proactive modeling.
As an example, the network I help operate sells ISP service over DSL lines provided by a local carrier. We have a meager 300 or so customers that have DSL products that range from 384K down to 3M down. Let's normalize all of them to 1M to make the math straightforward. We pay our upstream providers about $30/M each month for connectivity. So you would have me pay ($30/M x 300M)==$9000 per month to support those customers. That's more than I currently charge agreggated across the whole group for DSL service.
Now, in reality, what is the actual average utilization for those 300 customers? Three megabits per second on average for the whole group. And that's just the amount on the direct circuit from the local carrier--not the amount from those customers that use my upstreams. Around 14% of their traffic goes to other customers on my network, so only 2.6M or so actually goes upstream. That's around $75/M monthly on average for upstream. Now I can afford to charge what I do, and still provide email, personal webpages, news, DNS, etc, plus staff 3 tiers of support. BTW, peak utilization for these customers doesn't exceed 5M 99.999% of the time.
Also in reality, I also have thousands of T1 (1.5 Mbps), dozens of DS3 (45 Mbps), six OC3 (155 Mbps) customers and 14 GigE (1000 Mbps) customers. My peak daily upstream utilization is around 800 Mbps for all customers combined. It's never spiked above 924 Mbps, including DoS attacks.
I price and operate my services according to that reality, not magic or fantasy. If you feel that means I lack common sense, then I submit that common sense...isn't.
The unlimited access is for the bulk, most common, practical part of the service. All of the other features are optional and non-essential to the basic function of the telephone network. The "limits" are such that they do not interfere in any conceivable practical use of the system, even going as far as including many 24/7 dialup connections to Internet.
The geographical area restrictions are for the far less common usage, and historically originate from the fact that various telephone companies used to be restricted only to the sets of wires within their corresponding geographical areas, thus nessecitating peering agreements and fees/contracts associated with those. At least that was the original excuse.
And this mumbo-jumbo has any bearing on the topic of discussion how precisely?
And despite of all these mighty efforts at obfuscation, you still did not manage to hide the fact that the telephone networks are required to sustain a reasonable level of service, even at a peak hour, sufficent to allow a vast majority of calls to be serviced, and the remainder merely with a small delay. And all of that without the need of snooping on conversations and terminating those deemed "unfairly" using the system.
Total hogwash. They are both packet switching networks. The only unit of capacity that has any bearing on both is full-size data packets switched per second. Additionally, PSTN systems suffer from added complexities of having to sample, encode, and decode analog voice data, which pure data networks do not have to deal with.
Right, and a broadband connection takes a discrete unit of bandwith per connection, either 1mb/s, 5mb/s or 100mb/s depending on the underlying transport technology. The fact that it can take less is as relevant to the discussion as the fact that the PSTN connection can take less then 56k when silence is being transmitted. According to your genius reasoning, the PSTN network should be designed to handle mostly silence and croak when all of the people start "unfairly" chit-chatting at the same time.
All of which meant dick when people use faxes, dial-up connections, and what not. Face it, the only analysis feasible is practical masurement of the network usage and expanding it to meet capacity. Demanding that people start calling