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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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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