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Comcast Confirmed as Discriminating Against FileSharing Traffic
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has been singled out as discriminating against filesharing traffic in quantitative tests conducted by the Associated Press. MSNBC's coverage of the discovery is quite even-handed. The site notes that while illegal content trading is a common use of the technology, Bittorrent is emerging as an effective medium for transferring 'weighty' legal content as well. 'Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user. Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer -- it comes from Comcast.'" This is confirmation of anecdotal evidence presented by Comcast users back in August.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As we all know, BitTorrent is only used in illegal activity.
...noticing problems downloading the patches on Comcast?
Just wondering since WoW uses Bittorrent to distribute its patches (one example of a very legitimate use).
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
That's a violation of common carrier status isn't it? To say what information can and can not travel along the lines?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Isn't Comcast a common carrier, which makes it illegal for them to spoof things on their network? Or am I just confused...
They're basically doing this with a "man in the middle" attack by sending false messages to both parties in the communication, pretending to be the other. This is why all net traffic needs to be encrypted and signed.
Now maybe the "net neutrality isn't important because we can trust giant corporations not to screw their customers crowd" will shut up. Of course, the people getting paid to lobby or keep those bills out of Congress won't change their mind, but maybe regular people will. And that's a step in the right direction.
This story does make me wish I was not boycotting Comcast already though, so I could boycott it for this.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
If one wishes to find a legitimate example of bittorrent sharing of legitimate files, one need look no further than the largest MMORPG on the market - World of Warcraft. Patches are automatically (assuming the user doesn't disable the feature) downloaded using bittorrent. And Blizzard is more than aware of and approving of this, given that they programmed the feature. Needless to say, I think any internet service provider who disrupts a consumer's legitimate use of their internet connection is a service provider that doesn't deserve the consumer's money...
This is a very common misconception.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
In my experience, bittorrent transfers are much faster on my Comcast connection when I choose to encrypt them. That suggests to me that Comcast is indeed throttling normal bittorrent traffic.
I've posted this before, but it's pertinent and bears repeating, it's not just P2P traffic that Comcast is filtering. A sysadmin I know has been blogging on Comcast filtering corporate e-mail traffic as well.
http://kkanarski.blogspot.com/2007/09/comcast-filtering-lotus-notes-update.html
After Comcast loses all their customers to DSL, will they complain about [whatever DSL company]'s unfair monopoly advantage?
if the provider of a service can be charged with Denial of Service, even though they are the providers of the service...
When I read the words "discriminating against" I assumed that Comcast was simply giving higher priority to non-bittorrent traffic. Given what they are doing, I think "interfering with" would be better language. This isn't just a passive downgrading. This is active blocking.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Set your bittorrent client to only use encrypted traffic. It fixes comcast's little red wagon fast.
Almost all up to date bittorrent clients support this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Comcast is the Devil.
make them somewhat responsible for what content is on their network?
"Hello, RIAA. I have reason to believe Comcast is allowing illegal music trafficking to occur."
It's Comcastic!
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
But we now have the "Hammer" method. Boycott the bastards, no matter what the cost.
Then when the people we use as an alternative to Comcast start to mess with us, just
DROP them too.
Simple market response.
Comcast is in many different cities - each office running independently of all others. Which offices are blocking bittorrent? I use it all the time, on Comcast, without any trouble. I have more issues at work (with traffic shaping junk) than Comcast. So, I do not see how this is a company-wide problem. It may be something only used in problematic areas.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
This is the worst Internet injustice since the last thing that had Slashdot's panties in a wad. And that one was so horrible that everyone forgot about it.
When people were first talking about issues, I setup Azureus again to help seed some of the site projects over at OCRemix. However, in the last two weeks I've noticed that I'm getting NAT Ok? and Firewalled status messages on Azureus, despite it still allowing me to push through at 20kb/s upload (which seemed like a fairly good upload seeing as I could barely muster 5 kb/s on Charter at my previous residence). I know for a fact I haven't been monkeying with my firewall or NAT Router since I got everything working so I'm willing to say something's changed on the ISP's end. I'm not entirely surprised though.
Insert Sig Here
Really.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Good ole money hungry, cheating as much as they can to save or make a buck corporations to the rescue once again.
Their commercials make sense on a whole new level now.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Actually two of them:
1. What hardware/software would carriers have to use to do this?
2. Can it be defeated?
Fwiw, Rogers cable in Canada is rumored to be doing the same thing (and perhaps more). Michael Geist talks about this on his blog: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I wonder if they just subjected themselves to exposure by altering the way torrent works? Anyone with a law background know by chance?
Comcast would be well within their rights to drop or deprioritize bittorrent packets, but it's not at all clear that sending TCP reset segments with forged source IP addresses is kosher.
If all traffic flowed through a Comcast-controlled proxy that was disclosed, there probably wouldn't be a problem, but Comcast is actually forging source addresses on both sides with the effect of concealing their actions and fooling the parties on each end into terminating their connections at (what they believe to be) each other's legitimate request.
I imagine this method of traffic limiting could be litigated sooner or later since it affects customers who are not party to the RST-inserting carrier's TOS.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
... and they'll come out with a "BitTorrent enhanced" package as part of a "quadruple play".
...are people surprised?
if enough people complain or walk then they will change their practices.
By the way - well spotted.
It likely is illegal.
Just because it is their network DOES not give them the right to FORGE IP packets to look as if they come from elsewhere.
That would be like a courier service forging documents from 2 people wanting to communicate saying "Stop sending documents" if they didn't want them to talk. They'd never do something that stupid, and if they did, they couldn't get out of charges by saying they were only forging documents through their service.
Forgery is illegal. Someone who had a forged RST packet sent in their name should have forgery charges pressed and sue for impersonation.
A technical defense is to block RST packets. Probably not hard to do under Linux, and likely trivial.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Turn encryption on within your bit torrent client, problem fixed.
In practice, it would require that everyone that gets a moderate amount of traffic to probably upgrade hardware to handle all the extra overhead of cipher processing. Also, since most users are clueless as to how it works, they will accept any old certificate and click "Yes" to everything.
What is surprising is that they RST on anything going over TCP from any of their customers to another of their customers. It is not just P2P. Lotus notes gets whacked in a similar manner and so on. Cable Internet Engineering at its best.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The issue of traffic shaping should be kept separate from the issue of:
--Comcast using forgery or masquerading
--Comcast deceiving customers about its true terms of service
--Comcast hiding what it is doing, thereby giving no means to complain or give them feedback about technical problems
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If I remember correctly, Comcast says that something like 1% of the user base causes 15% of the bandwidth, etc. Therefore, they throttle the thing that takes up the most bandwidth (torrents), in the name of helping out all the other users.
However, I would love to see stats on what percentage of their users actually use bittorrent. Until someone can prove that more than 1% use it, they can use that argument and 85% of people will shout"Yeah, more bandwidth for me, screw those pirates", without realizing the legitimate torrent uses (such as linux distro rollouts, patches as mentioned before, media defender email leaks, etc).
At leas the media is finally catching on, but until we get people to realizing that it is a slippery slope that affects them, there will not be enough uproar to stop them.
So, if we could only get our hands on how many people use it... we might be able to make some noise. Until then, the average joe will say "So What?"
They will either have to back away from this policy, challenge the rules themselves, or start filtering traffic even more agressively than the Chinese.
When I try to access the third page of the article, labeled CONTINUED: "Net Neutrality" debate, the server says Page not found. Is Comcast (or MSNBC's carrier) somehow interfering here, too, just to keep me from reading about the debate?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
OK, now, let's suppose that I live in the U.S. (thank God I don't), that I've never illegally downloaded music (just for the sake of the argument), and that by the vicissitudes of fate, I happen to live in a zone monopolized by Comcast (again, thank God I don't).
Now, let's say I got sick tired of Windows (because just yesterday my legitimate-but-illegally-cracked due-to-legalized-limit-of-3-reinstalls-max copy of Windows, downloaded an update without notifying me! Only when I was about to shut down it told me), and I want to try out Gutsy Gibbon.
How am I supposed to download it, if Comcast thinks I'm stealing (and who the heck do they think they are, judge dredd?) pirated music? Oh, right, I'll mask my communications and encrypt all traffic, which is seen as evil and pro-terrorist by the current administration. What's next, sending me to Guantanamo for encrypting my LEGITIMATE traffic and demanding some LEGITIMATE privacy?
Sometimes I read the RIAA's arguments and I think I can figure out what they're saying behind us: "Oh, yeah, 'downloading Linux' (nudge) yeah, right... (smirk) 'legitimate traffic' (nudge), heh heh."
The problem with this thinking is that: a) Linux userbase (and those curious to download) has increased tremendously since Ubuntu came out. It's not the 1% it was a few years ago. At last I'm starting to believe that Linux is arriving to the Desktop. b) they do NOT respect the minorities. Even if it's only 1% of the population, ISPs should ensure that they get the traffic they PAID FOR. c) Where do I file for authorization to use bittorrent? Do I need a Linux certificate to demonstrate I'm not a music pirate, now? d) And what about free independent music? e) If they're only going to allow HTTP usage, I'd appreciate if at least they were F***ING SINCERE about it, k?
<rant>
That said, I wonder how they put their noses in bittorrent communication and at the same time they DON'T SHUT THE DAMN SMTP PORT used by the millions of zombified computers sending me spam! At least we have proved that they can, now!
</rant>
Whew, that felt good.
If you run bittorrent, your PC acts as both a client and a server. Running a server on your residential comcast account is a violation of the terms of service. Cutting that connection is neither discrimination nor abandonment of network neutrality; its simple contract enforcement.
This is not new. The prohibition against running servers on residential accounts has been around since the dialup days. What is new is that they're targetting the application instead of cancelling or forcibly upgrading the account.
If you don't like it, pay the extra bucks and upgrade to the hobbyist / small business account. If you pay for an account which permits you to run a server and they still interfere, then you have a real complaint.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Could Comcast be found guilty of fraud law or violating some computer usage law because of this?
On one hand, they're deliberately pretending to be the person you're communicating with (fraud?). On the other they're deliberately degrading performance of a person's internet connection (vaguely DOS-ish), a person one who isn't necessarily their customer.
Thoughts?
Question everything
I work for a VoIP provider and of all our customers, only the people using Comcast have voice brake-up. All other broadband including myself (charter) have perfect quality. It's sad when we get blamed for this when in fact its not our problem. I was on the phone with Comcast many times over just to get them to clear the problem up so my sister could have good VoIP quality. It still has problems here and there but at least its good now for the most part.
BTW, This has gotten worse ever since Comcast started offering VoIP.
ipfw add deny tcp from any to any 6890 in tcpflags rst
. . .
It's been 9 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
One copy of a Linux distro requires at least 700MB. Which is equivalent to 150 downloaded MP3's. This traffic is definitely NOT a minority.
Comcast hit it on the head! Filesharing technology is only used for pirating! But this is only the tip of the iceberg!
There's this whole infrastructure that's being used to pirate material every day! It's this insidious thing called "the internet". Comcast better hurry up and block everyone from trying to access that as well, least they be tempted to violate copyright laws!
Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer -- it comes from Comcast.'"
Isn't that called a smurf attack? Or something similar? Basically when you send a fake TCP/IP packet with faked headers that basically says "cancel this connection" over and over again?
Having said that, wouldn't it be somewhat easy to work around? Just filter those messages out during Bittorrent? Or extend the protocol to include a "Hi, we just got disconnected, want to try again from where we left off" step after the initial disconnect?
Does this affect people running encryption?
I have two choices for broadband: Comcast and Quest.
They both suck.
Simply "diching the ones that suck" is not an option for someone who wants/needs broadband.
So we must instead pass laws to force them to do what we want.
I hate litigation as much as the next slashdotter, but it's the only option left.
So, since, as it appears, they are sending spoofed packets ... Couldn't you claim unauthorized access to your PC, impersonation of another person, and forgery of information ... or something along those lines. Its certainly illegal to pretend to be someone else as a person, maybe not in and of itself, but as soon as you do something to harm one of the parties involved (thinking identity theft).
I just can't believe that somewhere along the lines there hasn't been a law made that makes spoofing illegal, they are claiming to be someone/something else to which you have agreed to communicate with.
Of course, if its not actually sending packets as if they came from the peer, then its a different story.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Just an FYI, I don't have a single problem with my VoIP (Vonage) over Comcast. And I just moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, so I've now used it in two different regions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Comcast fan
- Roach
It's not in their best interest for Comcast to interfere with BitTorrent activity, nor is it within their rights.
As a Comcast BitTorrent user, Comcast is impersonating me by sending RST (reset packets) as me.
They are deceiving the computers I am connected to by forging the source of the RST packets, saying they come from me.
I have suffered damages where I can't share files via BitTorrent, though I've paid for the privilege of exchanging data on the internet. Shouldn't I be entitled to relief and punitive damages? Indeed, shouldn't all Comcast BitTorrent users?
Isn't disruption of computer use and/or services and/or networks criminal in the US? My communication with non-Comcast networks is being disrupted!
Computers on the internet aren't just clients, they must also be servers. Today's internet could not exist without this model; Blizzard could't distribute WoW patches, Joost couldn't work, video games couldn't work.
I imagine Comcast would say that the ToS would prohibit server activities, but as the reader sees, if server activities were prohibited, Comcast would eliminate most of the reasons for internet use and they'd lose their internet service revenue stream.
I'm on an internship for school in CT and the only thing around here is Comcast. I was used to Time Warner from where I used to live in NY. If I weren't moving back in a few weeks I'd drop Comcast for more than just this. Their Digital Cable interface is so horrible. It's slow, it's filled with ads, and barely user friendly.
However, DSL isn't exactly worth getting rid of comcast. I'd rather use gimped Comcast service (as there is a way around it if you encrypt your traffic) than DSL. If there were another Cable provider in my area I'd definitely switch.
-SaNo
The problem is that it is not illegal for Comcast to do this. This is part of a broader problem with the Internet in general. The Internet is like the Wild West. Just like you could shoot someone in the Wild West and get away with it, you can pretty much do anything you want on the Internet and get away with it. The problem is two fold, we don't have lawmakers with the technological savvy to create the proper laws, nor the proper agencies to enforce them. For now, the Internet remains the Wild West of the 21st century. Comcast can block whatever they darn well please, albeit questionable and immoral, in my opinion.
what goes around, comes around as a hammer.
Read radical news here
Everytime I try to use BT, my useful DSL thruput slowly drops to a trickle, and becomes unusable by any computer on my WiFi network. The only way to restore service is to reset both my DSL modem and my Airport.
And if I want to play WoW, I have to disable background downloading of patches, or I get disconnected within moments of logging into the game.
And now I'm hooked on Miro, thanks to the /. story last month. I've been getting by with using my MacBook on the LAN at work to d/l The Daily Show and PBS Kids programming, and to get WoW patches, but sooner or later the IT guys are going to get wise to that.
I sure would like to be able to use BT at home.
I can see the fnords!
I'm downloading:
7.10 server
7.10 i386 desktop
7.10 i386 alternate
7.10 amd64 desktop
7.10 amd64 alternate
7.10 Kubuntu
7.10 Xubuntu
All via bittorrent. And all being shared back. That's a LOT of LEGITIMATE bits.
Are you encrypting your VoIP?
Do you love freedom??? Do you love freedom!!! DO YOU LOVE FREEDOM!!!!!!!!
There are other problems surrounding VoIP. It's more likely that Comcast doesn't support QoS on their routers which means that VoIP competes with all the other packets passing through the system. Neither DSL or cable are particularly suited for VoIP because of the amount of contention on the average connection, although this will vary from area to area, so your clients may have problems in some POPs but not in others.
I'd love to. Problem is, my only other two choices for broadband out here are by two other equally evil, greedy, deceptive, and totalitarian corporate entities: Verizon (who has a nasty habit of ripping out all your copper when you get FIOS) and Qwest (Google for "Qwest UTOPIA" and see what you get).
Comcast is simply the lesser of three evils where I'm at. A pity, too... I used to use Sprint Wireless Broadband when I lived in Utah, and they were friggin' awesome (sure, I had a bit of lag in FPS gaming, but the bandwidth was guaranteed, all mine, and no one gave a damn how much I used a month).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
However I wouldn't say people are confusing it, I'd say that a large number of net neutrality supporters believe that it should dictate that all packets are treated equal, no matter type or source. That indeed would kill off any QoS.
So would be sending email, which uses SMTP. So would a whole host of other applications.
The problems are Servers as a service (Thunderbird) or servers as a Service (Gmail).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Other AC's linked article makes interesting comments on the possibility of Attorney Generals of various states going after Comcast on the basis of impersonation and fraud laws. Comcast customers should contact their AGs. Can probably get some evidence from WoW and IBM. Mod Parent Up for discussion please.
How does something like AT&T's "Elite" DSL (alleged 6MB/S download, ~700k/s upload) compare in practice to Comcast's cable internet? For me DSL is the only alternative, and I'm getting sick and tired of Comcast's bullshit (I don't use their TV or VOIP, just internet).
Anybody have experience with how much difference there is in DSL and Cable for bittorrent? for other access?
This is exactly what the Authentication Header (AH) is suppoed to do - preventing "man in the middle" attacks. Use of the ESP feature of IPSEC can prevent snoopers from learning what TCP ports are being used.Nope. This has been discussed ad nauseum already, but Comcast (and Sandvine, which they are in all likelihood using) isn't looking at the actual data, it's looking at the overall pattern of traffic. It is still going to send RST packets, regardless of whether or not your connections are encrypted.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Here is a better solution (tweak it all you want) .....
....
Add a more formal disconnect protocol to the session.
H)Please Disconnect 1234
C)I heard a Please Disconnect, is this correct ABCD
H)Yes, I said Disconnect 5CD8 (hash-answer)
C)Thank You I'm hanging up now 90FA (hash-reply)
--
Any other answer than one that properly handles the challenge / response drop is ignored.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Except for the fact that vast tracts of the good ol' US are exactly like he's describing. As soon as you move out of a major metropolitan area, your options start to get extremely limited.
I hate to break up the Comcast hate fest, but I've been running Comcast since I left the dorms in '03 and I have a very different experience... during that time I've been a fairly active bandwidth use, mostly through regular apt-get dist-upgrades of the debian/unstable. That's a healthy bought of downloading every night, on top of the lots of browsing and SFTP traffic for posting webpages for clients. I am also the occasional bitTorrent user... mostly ISOs for installing, but I will not deny that I have downloaded a TV episode from time to time in situations where I missed the airing.
In all of this time I have never, not once, noticed throttling. In fact, the my available bandwidth has been increasing every year and is now a full three times faster than when I first started in '03. Although upload rates remains pretty pathetic. My point here is that Comcast isn't stopping bitTorrent traffic is its entirety, it is targeting those who are pillaging a common resource. The nature of the network is as a shared commodity, and every idiot who leaves 20 seeds running on their server in some vein attempt to "stick it to the man" degrades the common experience. I remember there was a quote from a Comcast rep a few weeks back saying the current bandwidth usage at which you'll be cut off would require you to download a full song like every 30 seconds for 24 hours a day. Come on people?! It's just not possible to consume that much downloaded media.
I agree, Comcast says unlimited when it is not, in fact, unlimited... but as a user with legitimate and legal bandwidth needs, I don't want to switch to a pay/per-use plan. So, if that means Comcast has to clean out those who abuse the system, then that's okay by me.
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
Even a Terms of Service agreement would only allow them to discontinue the service of a person in violation, not authorize them to launch an attack to the machine, no?
I only wonder how this would affect legitimate TCP resets...
... if Comcast is essentially attempting to disable Bitorrent, are they by any chance either violating or subverting one or more RFCs? Substitute the proper term for 'violating', that was the strongest word I could come up with quickly.
I recall that in the Early Days of the Internet, not abiding by the RFCs would get you in hot water. Especially screwing up with SMTP would do it, but even bad behaviour due to your incompetence would get your T-1 unclocked, and it would take a few calls to the powers that be to assure them that you found someone who knew what they were doing and that problem wouldn't occur again. At least not for a while.
My point is, perhaps it's time for the other Internet providers to consider requiring Comcast to not mess with traffic in this way, or sanction Comcast.
Sanctions could be as graduated as throttling at the NAPs, degrading Comcast traffic, even disconnects.
Some providers have a stake in this. If the legal Bitorrent users (WoW for instance) get a crossed hair over this, why would they not ask their providers to pressure Comcast into stopping this?
Ultimately, this may be Comcast clinging to their ToS and 'server' restrictions, and that would mean Comcast users won't be sharing out Bitorrent files. Bummer.
Another wrinkle, I wonder if Comcast sends forged RSTs to Comcast users sharing with *other* Comcast users. Intranetwork traffic shouldn't 'cost' so much for Comcast.
My theory is simple - Imagine if ISPs started throttling or denying traffic from Akamai, because of the volume... What a mess. And while Bitorrent is used for all sorts of purposes, so is SMTP. So if they think the illegal use of Bitorrent is sufficient excuse for them to deny it, why don't they throttle/deny SMTP, since simple spam is bad enough, but the emails of worms/trojans/scams also are objectionable. even arguably illegal. And certainly harmful, to users and the Internet. Maybe even Comcast.
Of course, that's not the point. Comcast is trying to avoid costs due to the volume of Bitorrent traffic that leaves them paying for NAP ports, lines to other ISPs, and routers/switches to manage all this.
In other words, they are trying to control costs by controlling usage.
One of the reasons I got out of the business pre-2000. Couldn't make a profit with my business model. Network costs were too high.
Well, another option is to surcharge high-volume users. Or charge more to afford to provide the service ostensibly advertised.
It's not often I can be happy to have Cox Cable. My Qwest DSL before just sucked, but the traffic got through.
Good luck. My bet is the best avenue is a class-action over either false advertising or Magnuson-Moss.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I am a crapcast customer--I have no other choice. Qwest DSL actually performs *SLOWER* than dialup where I am. That stated, I can confirm--They provided me with no terms of service, and I was particularly careful to pay attention to this detail when signing up.
I looked up their number in the yellow pages, placed a phone call requesting installation of a cable modem, and two weeks later their crew damaged my apartment and installed the cable and the modem I provided. I was up and running with a single phone call that gave their techs a MAC address--and received my first bill within a week.
At no point and time did I agree to any terms of service, although I do have a record of their salesperson telling me I would have "unlimited internet access with powerboost" with a date and timestamp. Their bills have simply indicated an amount due and at no point and time have they indicated I agree to anything by utilizing or paying for the service they have offered. I have seen references to terms of service on their webpage--but the only time I saw those was when examining their email, which I decided not to use.
So no, they can't do this. It is a violation of the contract offered to me by their authorized sales agent.
The "Comcast" from which you'd get Internet access is an "Information Service", and they remain as such. The "Comcast" from which you get "Comcast Digital Voice", on the other hand, is not the same "Comcast" as the other "Comcast".
For example, take the following excerpt from some Comcast Digital Voice residential Terms of Service that I found somewhere out there on the Net: "We," "our," and "us" mean Comcast Phone of Maryland, Inc. and Comcast Phone of Michigan, LLC (doing business as Comcast Digital Phone), Comcast Phone of Northern Virginia, Inc. (doing business as Comcast Digital Phone of Northern Virginia), as well as any affiliates of those companies authorized to provide Comcast Digital Phone to customers located in Maryland, Michigan, and Northern Virginia. It turns out it's the *name* that's important. Just like the Dread Pirate Roberts, there are many who go by the name "Comcast", but they are not all truly the same entity.
I'm well within the Chicago metropolitan area, and have exactly his options.
AT&T has tried to sneak in some fiber into the area (Project Lightspeed), but continues to run into problems with deals local governments sign with Comcast. Namely, a $300k fee that villages charge new service providers and the requirement that telecom companies provide some sort of local service (i.e., local government access channels). AT&T says they're a utility and shouldn't have to pay that fee.
If Motorola's WiMAX manages to do something, they may be an option in the mid-term future. I'm not holding my breath.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Yep. I live in an upper middle class chicago suburb with 450K people in about a 3.5 mile area. Probably 9 out of 10 residents have comcast (formerly AT&T Broadband Internet) because we're in the exact situation the GP had mentioned. RCN says they do chicago but they can't even offer in my area (flat out no, they won't even specify how many people need to be willing to sign, its just a flat "we can't"), dialup is ridiculous, satellite not even capable (line of sight/HOA), and DSL is not available as we are too far as well as too far from independent providers as well.
you really should consider moving out of bumfuk egypt.
LOL telco breakup logic at it's best. It's not a monopoly anymore: if you don't like the service you can move to the other side of the country and try something different!
It is discrimination, abandonment of network neutrality and policy enforcement.
Excuses and justification for discrimination, do not change the existence of discrimination.
An interesting distinction you make.
However...it seems to me that when you leave the realm of noble ideals and get down to grubby details, there's going to be trouble.
I mean, suppose a "Net Neutrality" law were passed that says an ISP can't discriminate against packets based on their source or destination IP addresses, but can do so based on the port number (25 = email, 80 = web, et cetera). The problem I'd see is, first, that port number is a pretty crude and arbitrary classification of type of traffic. Plenty of folks distribute files via either http (port 80) or ftp (ports 20/21). Other people use tunnels to send all kinds of stuff over SSH (port 22). Gigantic amounts of stuff goes over port 80 (http) and 25 (email), and surely it's unreasonable to classify all of it as "like" traffic. Should an ISP not be legally allowed to discriminate against spam from a known spammer, just because it uses the same port (25) as real personal e-mail? That seems silly.
Now, I understand that clever network engineers can do more subtle analysis of packets than just looking at the port number, and take a crack at figuring out what application sent them, et cetera.
But I figure the fathead doddering lawyers in Congress are just barely smart enough to understand a law forcing ISPs to treat all traffic with the same port number the same way. You think they are capable of drafting a law that works for any and all more subtle and complex methods of traffic analysis, both those now extant and any anyone dreams up in the future, and neatly forbids that which is "evil, unfair" discrimination (e.g. against Democratic activists) while allowing "good" discrimination (e.g. against spammers)? And then your local prosecutor and judge are also going to be able to interpret that law correctly, every time, so that they burn the people they should and spare those they should?
Mmmm....that doesn't pass the laugh test with me.
There are plenty of things in life -- good relations with the boss and wife, having parents who properly raise their children, picking the right career, having good health and good luck -- which are clearly desirable but for which, alas, the law is a hopelessly crude instrument with which to try to compel their existence. Perhaps "net neutrality" is one of them. Personally, I'd say the folks who want Congress to jump in and start setting rules left and right about IP traffic should sit down and think long and hard about what happens when lawyers start meddling in their affairs. I've never known the intervention of lawyers and PR people (i.e. politicians) to be something I welcomed. Frankly, I'd think a semi-anarchist community which hates being overseen by incompetent egoistic under-educated managers primarily interested in self-promotion (which aptly describes Congress) would recoil in horror from such a prospect.
Dupe!
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/2014236&from=rss
untrue. How is your PC acting like a server in BitTorrent? Because it's sending out data? Sending data is a required function of connecting to the internet. It's not against the TOS to send an email. Nor is it against the TOS to send an email with an attachment. It is certainly not against the TOS to send a file through AIM or GoogleTalk. Where is the line that BitTorrent crosses that turns your PC into a server?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh, yeah, I'm a whole thirty miles out of downtown Chicago. Holy cow, I must be plowin' fields n' chawin' tobbacky! GIT ON THE TRACTOR, MA! WE'S A-GOIN' TO SEE THEM THAR CITY FOLK!
What *would* be nice is if, with comcast, I actually got what I paid for. They advertise that I can pay them $xx for 24/7 internet connection at yyMbit down and zzMbit up. As long as I'm not going beyond that bandwidth, there shouldn't be any issues. If they have a problem with monthly bandwidth accumulations, they should make that clear to their customers. Beyond that, it shouldn't matter what I use my bandwidth for as long as I'm not breaking the down/up/monthly limits they have (it doesn't cost them more for me to send 2megs of a picture or 2megs of a legal .iso over bitTorrent). Maybe other stuff is in the TOS but that thing needs to be re-written, in my opinion.
And that's why I don't have comcast. My DSL provider doesn't care if I regularly go through hundreds of gigs of downstream bandwidth every month. I pay for 24/7 of a bandwidth speed, and that's what I should be able to use.
Is it at the "last mile" or is it the backbone?
If it's the backbone, then they would be better served by deploying web caches. P2P was always a dumb idea for speeding up downloads, anyway. If ISPs would cache, then no one would need it.
I also suspect some bad strategy. How much does forging packets really help Comcast encourage their customers to stop using their network? If a download aborts, a user is just going to retry the download, so at least in the short term, it's not going to relieve traffic (it'll actually increase it). The only purpose must be to frustrate users into choosing to not renew their contracts, because of frustration and inconvenience. But if the tools were to automatically retry, would customers even notice Comcast's unreliability?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A protocol based on UDP, with every packet encrypted (or at least signed!) so the endpoints can ignore packets which have been inserted/tampered with by any middle-men.
"It is still going to send RST packets"
You could probably configure a linux firewall to simply drop any RST packets on the port in question tho.
Way to turn the internet into an internot. Blatant protocol disruptions like this should be considered equal to system intrusions, and the responsible people at Comcast prosecuted for sabotage. These people cannot be trusted with important infrastructure, and the company should be prohibited from claiming they in any way connect you to, or provide internet access.
Fact is that they are providing a service to you, and you are paying for that service. There is no language in the TOS that says they can restrict what you see on said internet, or where you can go and what you can upload or download, otherwise you'd likely go elsewhere because of it being too restrictive.
When you signed up for your Comcast service; did they disclose to you that there were restrictions on what you could do with your internet access?? It does not matter if you didn't ask or not. If this was not disclosed to you both verbally and contractually when you signed up, they legally cannot do it.
That said; this is the equivalent of restricting or filtering your access to the internet in contradiction to the TOS and their own agreements with you for that service you are paying for.
This speaks volumes of a lawsuit of large proportion if anyone can exactly pin any of these "filters" on Comcast's lines. If this is happening to enough people, it can easily go class-action.
IMHO
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Before I get started, please don't take it as siding with Comcast, not even in a "playing the devil's advocate" kind of way. I'm just going to explain how it works. The morality of it, or of acting against it, well, you can decide for yourself. I'm not going to tell you what to think.
1. The pricing model for ISP's was based on the idea that the provider of that content paid for the bandwidth. That's why you can get a flat rate, in a nutshell. If someone put a 1 MB file on their site and you downloaded it, the site would pay for that MB. Each and every single MB you downloaded, would be an MB that someone else paid for.
Then the ISPs and backbone would split the loot according to who pushed what over whose lines.
And that worked remarkably well, while the Internet meant mostly HTTP. (Well, except emails, but those too used to be smaller and fewer.)
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. If I download a WoW patch from Tom, Dick and Harry -- the WoW patch downloader being a modified BitTorrent client -- we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for. Worse yet, it's actually a bit more data transferred than 1 MB coming over HTTP.
"Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it.
Simply put, that price model is breaking down. And all the king's horses and all the king's men... err, I mean the ISPs, can't figure out how to put it back together again.
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Let's say you're a really small ISP and have a 1 Gbit/s connection to the backbone and 1000 users. You sold each a 6 mbit/s connection. Now as long as most of them aren't downloading full time, they might even actually get 6 MBit/s. But in the worst case scenario, if each has one download going at the same time, they end up splitting your backbone connection evenly and getting 1 Mbit each. They'll grumble, but live with it.
What BitTorrent does, though, is best described as "not playing nice" in that sense. It will keep opening more and more and more connections until it fully saturates those 6 Mbit/s, everyone else be damned.
In the same scenario, just 150 users with BitTorrent are enough to gobble up almost 900 MBit/s out of your total 1000 MBit/s, and squeeze everyone else in the remaining 100. That's 15% of the users, using 90% of the bandwidth. And if you get 20% of them on BitTorrent, God help you, because those alone are already trying to use more bandwidth than you have total, and if bandwidth was air everyone else would be blue in the face like a Smurf.
Now again, I'm not saying that Comcast and the gang are doing the right thing there. I'm just saying what their problem is. You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was wondering if there is any way for me to log these TCP reset requests.
Can anyone suggest a method to do so or show me what a TCP reset request packet looks like?
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
For the average user, the ports are open automatically by UPnP, which they didn't disable right after they didn't enable WPA.
Regardless, the closed ports prevent the sending of data, not the receiving. Unless they are using throttling on users who aren't uploading the downloads should proceed just as quickly with the ports closed as open.
I'm in Comcast's Memphis market and haven't yet had any problems with BitTorrent. I don't doubt that the filter will probably be rolled out to all service areas, though, if it proves reliable and doesn't get them sued.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
That, or what we'll start seeing is Bittorrent clients that simply start ignoring those packets. Many of them are open source, so you can figure somebody will make the change and start distributing copies.
It would be interesting to see if Comcast's implementation of technology to spoof the addresses of filesharing clients come up in a **AA defense trial.
#Replace 6883 with you BT port
BT_PORT=6883
#Flush the filters
iptables -F
#Apply new filters
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited IPFW #Replace bt port with your actual port number
ipfw add deny tcp from any to any {bt port} in tcpflags rst
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
The RST is handled at the OS level. Functionality would need to be added to turn off acceptance of RST packets on particular ports.
This is all because Comcast is over subscribed in various areas (including mine) and they can't or won't upgrade thier infrastructure. It's bad when you cable modem's traffic is slowed to a crawl around 8PM because of over subscription and is useless on holidays. Comcast would rather punish any user that users thier connection for things other than reading email or visiting websites.
Blizards client sucks. Just use wowtorrentex to get a torrent file and feed it to any bittorrent client you like. http://capnbry.net/wow/downloads/WoWTorrentEx-3.zip
"That, or what we'll start seeing is Bittorrent clients that simply start ignoring those packets."
That might be a bit harder to do tho; been a while since I did socket programming, but iirc, the RST gets dealt with on the os layer so the client just gets the connection terminated/EOF'ed. So you'd have to filter the forged packets before they can interact with the IP stack and do what they were intended to do.
Of course, if this becomes common practice (iirc, it's used by China in their firewalls too) we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
If you live in an apartment comples, you still have problems with cable, since there's typically only one provider. Thankfully my provider is Astound (formerly RCN), which is about a hojillion times better than Comcast. Plus there's always DSL, though the speeds on it for any decent price are just awful.
I wish the US had a Competition Bureau! Who are we to contact? The FCC? The DOJ? Man...I'm all for fighting, but lately it feels like we need to get out of dodge before we're not allowed to anymore.
So you'd not have a problem with your monthly fee going up a bit, say to about $2000-3000/month or so? That's the kind of dollars you'd have to pay for a fractional DS-3 with an absolute guarantee of bandwidth at that level. However even that line could potentially face a situation where its upstream is overloaded and you don't get your full bandwidth.
It is EXPENSIVE to deliver guaranteed bandwidth. Take an internal situation: Suppose you have 100mbit links to your desktop computers. Now suppose you want it guaranteed that in all cases internally, they get that full 100mbits. So you have 3 24-port access switches that computers are hooked to. You need to uplink those back to your floor switches with 3 gigabit links, channeled together, to be able to guarantee them the bandwidth. So you do that to your floor switch. Now each floor switch on your 5 floors has to go back to your central building switch. However to maintain the bandwidth you want you need 7.2gbps of uplink per switch. So you have to get switches with 10 gig capability, and a central switch with the fabric that can handle those links. Now you have three buildings, that all need to hook to your primary switch. That means those links either have to be 4 channeled 10gig links, or a non-Ethernet standard because you need 36gbps of bandwidth to that switch per link. Then you have to connect that to your file server. I don't even know of a card for a computer of sufficient speed, never mind the internal bus limitations.
If you run the math on that setup, you'll discover it gets real expensive real fast. 10 gig switches are NOT cheap, even gig switches with 10 gig uplinks command a significant premium.
So what do you do in the real world? You don't dedicate the bandwidth. The access switches have gig uplinks, the floor switches are just gig, and so are the central switches except maybe the inter-building links. Does it mean there can be bottlenecks? Sure, but they are acceptable with regards to the cost, especially since people aren't going to be using their whole bandwidth all the time.
Same is true for ISPs on a larger scale. If you want to demand that you have 100% guaranteed bandwidth 24/7, well then either expect to pay a lot more, get a lot less, or both. However most people would rather not. I'd prefer to have a large maximum potential speed that's essentially a burstable limit. I can get it, but not necessarily all the time. That way I still get fast speeds most of the time, but I don't have to pay an arm and a leg.
I'm not supporting what Comcast is doing specifically, but Slashdotters need to get realistic about this "They should only sell bandwidth if they are willing to let me slam it 24/7." No, screw you. Some of us want fast cheap links, and to have that we have to accept we can't have 100% all the time. If you want a link like that, get a DS-1. They'll never bitch, no matter how much you use, and they'll ensure that there's sufficient upstream as per your SLA that other's usage won't interfere in most cases. However, you will pay for it.
we'll probably see a reengineering of the protocol stack in operating systems to add cryptographically signed RST's or something to restore the functionality without leaving it vulnerable to this kind of interference.
You could require RST packets to carry a secure sequence number that's valid within the current window. This might require a bit of extra state in the TCP layer (but it's stateful anyway, so no big loss), or I suppose the sequence generator algorithm could be made to run in reverse. The trick is how you detect such extended functionality in the first place -- TCP was never designed with capability negotiations in mind.
I guess at that point, comcast will just start dropping packets or fuck around with ICMP messages.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Forging the sender, you say? Sounds like wire fraud Not to mention the false advertising... they say "unlimited Internet". "Unlimited" but there's a secret limit; they should be estopped from booting users for using their connection. They say "Internet" but they offer access to only a subset of the Internet and deliberately tamper with protocols they dislike.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
and while its FTTN architecture is severely inferior to Verizon FIOS's FTTH, it might expand the territory AT&T is able to provide high-speed Internet service to. AT&T is sending in techs from Michigan to help deal with the 200,000+ installations already on order. If you see any big new metal boxes sitting on concrete pads in your neighborhood, they might be U-verse nodes.
U-verse's "Elite" Internet tier is 6M/1M. Slower downloads than Comcrap but faster uploads and only $40/mo, or $30/mo if you also subscribe to TV.
U-verse TV is problematic though, and they try to force you to sign up for it (you can drop it later, I did). Standard def TV looks great but HDTV is the most craptastic transcode I've ever seen, and you can only tune 1 HDTV channel at a time. Comcast looks dramatically better, let alone over-the-air.
It's a crying shame AT&T won't let me use the entire 27Mbps pipe for Internet. My RG is syncing with my node at 70Mbps+ but AT&T wants a "consistent" marketing message so they won't let me use it.
Anyhow, Bittorrent is working great here while people still on Comcast are complaining.
Rumor has it that the real reason AT&T isn't building FTTH is because local governments are demanding bribes such as the one you describe. I thought that they were just making up excuses but now I'm not so sure.
I moved an ssh port on one of my servers to 1214, which is used by a filesharing program. It cosat me quite a bit of time to figure out why my connection to work was borked. Several hours out of my life I'll never get back.
nmap -O came back with a linux nox filtering many ports.
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. ... we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for.
But somebody somewhere is uploading that data that's being downloaded. It's not magically coming from nowhere. If the trick is that the cost of bandwidth is supposed to be shouldered by the uploaders, then it's shouldered by the uploaders, and it doesn't matter if it's being downloaded by p2pers or anything.
Which you vaguely get at later in your reply, but this sort of comment is nonsense: "Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it. Nobody posting legal files thinks anything like they're "cheating"! Even if your theory is true, nobody out there knows it, so how could they think they're cheating? They think they're 'spreading the load' somehow. They're using 'available bandwidth' that's not being used for anything.
Then you say:
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Ok then. If all download bandwidth requires corresponding upload bandwidth, and p2p uses "average users'" upload bandwidth, and upload bandwidth for "average users" was oversold... then that means your argument ends up being "broadband vendors oversold bandwidth"! (Just that it's upload bandwidth, not download bandwidth like everyone thinks.)
But this all hinges on a rather bizarre claim about how bandwidth is sold (by upload bandwidth only) that does things like ignore people in the middle... it may be true but your presentation is so sloppy that it doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
Yeah, gee, I think I'll do that, since that's what your argument boils down to.
I upload 3 shows a week. Each is about 25..50MB.
I start my uploads and the speed is about 187..210KB/s...
At the start.
At the finish its down to 51KB/s.
I tick downwards by 1..3KB/s.
They're NOT discriminating against anybody, they're discriminating against EVERYBODY who's not SUCKING at their pipe but who's UPLOADING anything instead.
If they weren't protected from competition, there'd be riots and mass desertion.
But its cable and they're taking every advantage of the legislation on their cable company turf protection.
When FiOS gets here, I am so gone from their customer rolls.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm sorry if this has already been posted elsewhere, but I've looked through the comments and not seen anything about my area. Feel free to flame, post links to comments where it was answered, or whatever. Does anyone know if this has been spotted in the Houston, TX, USA area? Especially the suburbs on the north side, like Spring? If you've heard anything about us down south, I'd love to find out so I can deal with it.
Gwok.
What is voice brake-up ?
I look at the situation as follows. When you take, say, shared office space in business centers they also offer shared communal services such as printers, faxes, etc. It is reasonable to assume they did NOT put in a refrigerator that would accommodate every tenants needs. It is in fact understood that not every tenant will want to use it and it makes no sense to initially put in 100 fridges.
:(
However, if that fridge then gets overloaded with food making it difficult for tenants to use, cleaning crews to deal with, etc. they can't go in there and start clandestine fridge raids where food is thrown out because dairy spoils faster and wouldn't last anyway, junk food isn't good for you so it's in your best interest, etc. Unfortunately in that scenario tenants can leave but for you folks stuck with only Comcast I'm sorry to read this latest development
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
Here's a fairly impractical idea to give an example of what i mean.
Figure out what the pattern is they are detecting that initiates the RST packets. Create software that spoofs this action. Distribute software, and run all the time either DOS'ing them or overloading it so they can't deal affectively with valid bittorrent traffic.
I can see a lot of problems with that approach. ie, their system might not automatically respond to any set pattern, it may be 1 every millionth time or something. They probably are hard to DoS, and it might be problematic getting people to run the software.
But - Does anyone else have other similiar ideas in the same vein?
I've had people get into arguments saying it's MTU or someother issue with P2P, but I've been just going on emperical data and personal observations. My internet connection to Cox ONLY becomes spotty (at best) when I fire up ANY version of a P2P software. I can go months without rebooting my PC, Router, and Cable modem, but the moment I fire up LimeWire it drops to slow performance and often locks up within 5 minutes. Rebooting the cable mode can instantly fix it. Dont run Limewire? It'll go back to normal. Run Limewire after rebooting? Back to slow performance and a reboot it right around the corner. Again, I've tried different types of P2P, so I'm not buying any breakdown in the TCP/IP stack (MTU problems, etc). It's almost as if they drop my IP lease because I still see traffic but nothing works. Their "stop communicating" message would also make sense.
Hammer Time! http://youtube.com/watch?v=b9nptjUs9FM
Start a WISP! Band together with the rest of the pissed off userbase in your area, and go in together for a T1 or better and some equipment. No, it's not easy, but it would be worth the effort to be free and clear of Comcast, and give others an opportunity to break away as well.
;-)
Just as long as you don't get your upstream bandwidth from Comcast...
It isn't just VOIP. There's been a recent thread on Macintouch regarding Comcast not playing nice with iChat's audio and video.
Some background: I regularly have video chats with my father, normally once a week on Sunday morning. Over the last few months, I've noticed that my dad's video will start macroblocking and/or stuttering after the first 2-5 minutes of the conversation; audio will be similarly affected. We finally figured out that Comcast was packet shaping; they notice that X amount of bandwidth is being used, and they allow it for a few minutes before throttling you back.
The work-around is to have my dad set his video bandwidth cap at 200 kbps. This seems to be adequate for our needs, though it really is noticeable whenever there's a lot of motion on his end.
Some of the fault lies with iChat, which determines connection speed during initial handshake but doesn't periodically re-check the speed.
Why isn't your life planned more appropriately around it?
Wow, and here I thought I didn't have a life. Let me guess, your philosophy extends to other things too, right? If food is so important to me, I should be a farmer? If shelter is so important to me, I should be an architect? If clothing is so important to me I should be a weaver? People in post-industrialization societies specialize for a reason.
It's not his fault Comcast sucks donkey dong, claiming he wants to have his cake and eat it too is meaningless.
Somebody used the word "fraud". That word is not a synonym for "lying". For there to be fraud, you have to be causing somebody a material loss. Do undelivered packets count as a "material loss"? IANAL, but I'm sceptical.
It might still be true that Comcast is breaking the law somehow. There might be some communications law or regulation that forbids providers from this kind of manipulation of their customers' traffic. But it's not as obvious as you're claiming.And it's certainly stupid. But only because there are easier ways to tell your customers that you can't carry their shipment. If, for example, FedEx caught you shipping plant seeds or pornography or human body parts (all on their forbidden list), they'd probably just return the shipment to you. But if they did deliver a nasty note to your recipient, what law would they be breaking?
Of course, if they refused to return your property, they'd be committing theft. But is an IP packet "property"? Well, if it is, they can always email you back all the IP packets it didn't deliver....
Push the BTNS standard. Once this is
available, your ISP will have a very
hard time injecting bad packets.
And Nazis. Don't forget Nazis.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Closed ports block incoming connections, but outgoing connections are unaffected. It doesn't have any direct effect on data, either sending or receiving, just who you can and can't connect to (which in turn affects data transfer). And yes, BitTorrent is designed to favor those who share more over people who are leeching, so those who don't upload are inherently throttled down.
You are probably experiencing Comcast's "Powerboost" technology. Which for large transfers doubles your bandwidth for the first X megabytes then goes back to your normal speed. Since iChat figures out it's max bandwidth at the beginning it assumes you have twice the bandwidth you actually have.
I solved this by simply shaping my connection to be my normal speed and never allowing it to go over.
Do you understand how networks actually operate? Its very rare to find a program that doesnt "return content when queried" which would be my definition of a server.
And only the gay ISPs block web pop and ftp "servers". Its hardly par the course.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
That may all be true, but your example assumes that the telecoms are suffering as a result of the oversell. Boo hoo for comcast, their business is being damaged by the freeloading p2p pirates, so we should just look the other way when they retaliate and breach their contracts...
But if that was the case, Comcast would be in financial dire straits. They'd be cutting back, negotiating with unions, looking for a buyer, fighting bankruptcy, etc etc etc. That ain't happening.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
I wouldn't want to be an investor in Comcast right now. It is likely they are going to get hit with some law suits for obviously breaking the law.
1) If you or I carried out a Denial of Service attack, or a "Man in the Middle" attack on someone else we'd most likely have the FBI knocking on our door. The same thing applies here.
2) Advertising and selling "high speed" Internet access and then pulling that access from your customer is illegal. It is at a minimum "bait and switch". Possibly even fraud. And guess what Comcast, in this case legally it doesn't matter what your customer contract says if you ADVERTISED "high speed" access and sold service as that then that is YOUR commitment. It is better than a verbal contract, because you did it PUBLICLY!
Have fun in court Comcast! Verizon FIOS is looking better every day!
With QOS, why not let the *user* decide which services they want to get priority, instead of mommy ISP deciding? What are they, professional psychics? How about they just provide a pipe, and that's it, and let the customers decide if they want email to get priority, or VOIP, or bit torrent, or a shoutcast stream, or surfing web pages or running their online gaming session or whatever? The freeking gas station doesn't pick where I drive or how fast or down which streets at some random time just because I get a tank of gas from them.
If someone perpetrated a crime --let's say, mugging university students who walk through the campus alone at night-- you wouldn't say, "Well, clearly this is a case-by-case thing, because he didn't mug me when I walked there alone at night."
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
So, under those rules, ANY software that "phones home" is a server, right?
I mean, if it's just listening - then it's a client, waiting for data. However, if it's actively SENDING data (from an outside request), then it's a server.
That sucks. Zudeo had a really neat public section onthe New York Film Festival and I saw a bunch of trailers very quickly at resolutions too big for my screen even and great sound. Paprika was very cool. Since I'm planning a film festival and a low-cost distribution outlet for independent directors I thought something like Zudeo might be perfect. But the net cafe I go to just said they aren't going to allow p2p (seems to me their upstream shuts them off for an hour!) which is the only net cafe in the world to say that, and now comcast is being a jerk-off. I could understand throttling users so each gets an average bandwith, if you really are hurting them, but it makes no sense. All they have to do is put a mirror inside their network and everyone can enjoy service without bunching up their upstream. They don't get that legal uses are increasing and p2p is the only way (besides hard to configure multicast) to do cheap delivery. It's almost like they don't want anyone else but them to deliver you your video. I want to be able to have a high quality scaling video service, and am thinking of zudeo or something like it, but we need more tools to help ISPs support these services before usage goes through the roof and they freak and turn it off before it gets settled. They could get a whole new revenue stream too, though technically it should be unnecessary I'd consider giving them a cut if they would manage downloads to a million users by setting up fast torrent servers and cutting the crap. These companies should use some of that $200 billion to fund software development instead of becoming all pointy.
The quasi-monopoly power that data service providers have across the US is indisputable. Sure, you have your avenues of protest. If a rep from the service provider has to speak before, say, the city council, their message will be delivered in such a way as to paint "power users" as a nuisance or degraders of service for the more typical user, who has every right to fast service when s/he needs it.
I see the day coming when Comcast and their ilk will fearlessly boot heavy-duty users unless they are interested in tiers of service similar to what my local water authority imposes. Once my usage passes a certain gallonage provided in the base service, an additional charge is applied for any portion of the next tier I consume. In other words, one gallon of usage beyond the base and I pay for an additional several thousand gallons whether I use them or not. It would seem to encourage either conservation or increased consumption, depending on what your average usage really is. Evidently, though, someone is crunching the numbers and finding that this achieves the desired result for the regional service. One can easily see how this would be attractive to ISPs, who will likely not have a hard time selling it to the local officials who award exclusive contracts. I'm sure this is being done somewhere already. Can you say "IP accounting?" and "pay to play?"
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
I fired off a nastygram to Comcast with a link to that MSNBC article and asked them flat out if it was true or not
I got the following response
"I understand you have some concerns over recent web gossip that has
suggested Comcast is blocking or hindering customer access to
BitTorrent. My name is Armin and I will be glad to assist you.
Mark, we do not block access to any P2P (Peer To Peer) applications,
including BitTorrent. We respect our customers' privacy and don't
monitor specific customer activities on the Internet, or track
individual online behavior, such as which websites are visited.
Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting
BitTorrent or any other site.
Additionally, Comcast does not "throttle" bandwidth (limit throughput on
the network). Comcast also is not traffic shaping or packet shaping.
We have a responsibility to manage our network to ensure that our
customers have the best broadband experience possible. That means we
use the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality
experience for all Comcast subscribers. This is standard practice for
network operators around the world. I do not have specific information
to provide to you regarding the details of how we manage our network, or
vendors that may be used.
I hope that I was able to effectively address your concerns. If you
have any further questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact
us back."
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I'll put Minneapolis and Saint Paul in the categories where you don't really have choice either, in 3 out of the four places I've lived, Comcast was the only provider available. I bike to work often, and at my apartment can practically coast into downtown Minneapolis, but DSL still isn't available...
The television will not be revolutionized.
My own experience with Vonage and Comcast in the Atlanta area was mixed. From my side of the conversation, everything was almost always great, not significantly worse than wireline in any way that I could identify. But my outbound voice would sometimes drop out for up to 30 seconds at a time. This was for a business line where I frequently conducted 1-hour conference calls; some of my co-workers got accustomed to telling me when the drop-outs occurred. Then I'd just natter non-stop until they told me I was back. It was ok in some company-only calls, but at least one group insisted that I not use that line while their client was present. I tried every fix that Vonage recommended, but nothing made any difference. Although the drop-outs were basically random (and I very seldom had more than one in an hour, and it might be several days between occurrences) they did seem more frequent after school was out in the afternoon.
If Comcast's solution fakes communication from one torrent client to another, wouldn't a straightforward workaround be to add authenticated messaging to torrent clients?
If my client would only respond to a "shut-off" directive if it could be authenticated against the credentials negotiated at the beginning of the session, it'd be a lot more difficult for Comcast to spoof it.
Ron
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I pay over $200 a month on my cable and net bill and I will drop Comcast and get satellite TV and DSL. I live in the Bay Area and have many options for broadband.
This is similar to what the Great Firewall of China does to "censor" the Internet.
Love your sig! Check out #40 on my pet peeves list. Defend the spaces!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
(2) Any person commits computer crime who knowingly accesses, attempts to access or uses, or attempts to use, any computer, computer system, computer network or any part thereof for the purpose of:
(a) Devising or executing any scheme or artifice to defraud;
(b) Obtaining money, property or services by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations or promises; or
(c) Committing theft, including, but not limited to, theft of proprietary information.
(3) Any person who knowingly and without authorization alters, damages or destroys any computer, computer system, computer network, or any computer software, program, documentation or data contained in such computer, computer system or computer network, commits computer crime.
(4) Any person who knowingly and without authorization uses, accesses or attempts to access any computer, computer system, computer network, or any computer software, program, documentation or data contained in such computer, computer system or computer network, commits computer crime.
(5)(a) A violation of the provisions of subsection (2) or (3) of this section shall be a Class C felony. Except as provided in paragraph (b) of this subsection, a violation of the provisions of subsection (4) of this section shall be a Class A misdemeanor.
(b) Any violation of this section relating to a computer, computer network, computer program, computer software, computer system or data owned or operated by the Oregon State Lottery or rented, owned or operated by another person or entity under contract to or at the direction of the Oregon State Lottery Commission shall be a Class C felony. [1985 c.537 8; 1989 c.737 1; 1991 c.962 17; 2001 c.870 18]
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
I would wager you were / are experiencing the usual lousy network performance found with Comcast in many areas, and that it's not VOIP specific.
In the DC Metro area they over-sell and mis-manage their networks so badly that 10% - 15% sustained packet loss and random drop-outs are fairly common conditions when trying to use your connection. You won't notice it unless you're actually trying to do something other than surf the web or send email (SSH/telnet sessions, VOIP, or games for example).
- Roach
Unless the packet header was encrypted or authenticated watching for a bad TCP sequence number will not help in this case. Comcast is already in the position of being the man in the middle so they can forge the correct TCP sequence number easily.
Specifically, section 3 and destroying a computer network. It may be a virtual network, but it is a network.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
So, i've been reading comments and hear RST packets are tcp/ip.
My client (azureus) has been using UDP for some time and I've never noticed any problems seeding on comcast's network.
I assume all BT clients will go UDP from now on then : )
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I have it on fairly good authority that Comcast uses the Cisco SCE product line for their traffic shaping. The SCE used to be called the PCube which is a Israel based company specializing in traffic shaping / deep packet inspection technology. Having work with the SCE platform myself I can tell you it is capable of blocking / throttling / modifying any P2P protocol out there (amongst many others) When meeting with the CiscoSCE people I ask for examples of large ISP customers. They said (I am paraphrasing) "Comcast is one of our largest customers for the SCE product line". It is an extremely powerful platform. I fully admit they could have been feeding my a line of bulls**t, so take this with a grain of salt.
I've torrented gigs of it so far with little or no problems :-)
All this just goes to show why Internet Service Providers should never have been allowed to weasel out of being considered Common Carriers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Maybe. One thing I am certain about however is that Comcast is courting a tragedy of the commons. As more high volume internet traffic has to resort to obfuscation, it will become more difficult to apply accurate traffic shaping where it is really useful. What do you do when everything looks like IPSEC and SSL or - God forbid - streaming video?
It's time to get the RIAA to sue them into the ground.
some tidbits from that linked wall of text; they are provided safe harbor if:
Going back to the "summary" section in that page.. they know the "means" by which the bulk of infringement is going on in their networks and are capable of fully blocking it, they do not. Let's not mention the means by which they partially block it is, from my last read, a violation of the computer fraud and security act.
GO GET EM RIAA and MPAA!
Nothing more poetic than using turning two evil corporations on one another, then watching the fun as either one losing is a win for you!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Your message will get there when it gets there.
That is all Western Union promised your great-granddad in the days when telegrams cost ten cents a word. Traffic shaping, load balancing, whatever you chose to call it, isn't new, it just takes different forms in different eras.
There can be only one response to this! Senior citizens, start your hammers!
The AP quotes a network security engineer at Google, Paul "Tony" Watson who says of Comcast, "It's their network and they can do what they want".
Well "their" network runs on the public right-of-way. This private interest tore up our streets and yards in order to make money hand over fist. In exchange for use of the public right-of-way Comcast agreed to certain conditions set by the relevant local governments. Unless the local government officials involved were hopelessly corrupt or stupid they extracted concessions like public access facilities and channels, and an annual franchise fee.
In return Comcast also got the exclusive right to provide cable services to an area. No competition. You'll never find two cable companies operating in the same area. It just doesn't make economic sense to have two separate entities digging two separate trenches down the same street to provide the same service - it's redundant and wasteful. That's also why in each city block there is only one entity stringing electrical wires, telephone lines and laying pipe for water mains.
According to anti-trust law and non-religious economic theory, monopolies should not be tolerated because they rob the public of the benefits of competition. But certain industries - like electricity, water, roads, telecoms - are called "natural monopolies" in standard economics texts. They recognize that it is impractical to try to introduce competition into these areas. So they recommend that monopoly in these areas be allowed to exist so long as they are either publicly owned or closely regulated to prevent them from abusing their sanctioned monopolies to shaft the public with high prices, shoddy service or other abusive practices.
I think impersonating the customer to prevent communications of which the company doesn't approve, while lying to the customer about it, falls under "abusive practices".
Comcast is a state-sanctioned monopoly, operating a network on the public right-of-way. As are the telecom companies that provide DSL. We bloody well can tell them what they can and cannot do with "their network". Congress should mandate network neutrality through explicit laws. Mere administrative regulations from the FCC can be too easily ignored or waived by lazy or corrupt officials (who then retire to take cushy jobs with Comcast).
If Comcast doesn't like it, local governments can turn the cable franchise over to another company who will abide by their rules and conditions or run it as a public service as the town of Ashland, Oregon has done for years.
If you go with a server as being something that listens for incoming connections, then Bittorrent is running a server. Or to put it another way, if you have to open ports on your firewall to make it work, it's probably a server.
Verizon's DSL modem seems to have a minor ourbreak of "resets" when I try to d/l any torrents. It was also happening for a short while when doing some vid conf nonsense, but at least that seems to have stopped.
I should have realized I've listed far too many pet peeves for any other being on the planet to really agree with any of it :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I don't think this link will survive the test of time, but there is currently a thread on Nanog about this with a lot of juicy details (and opinions of course).
I love how you try to overstate things, which does indeed show your uptightedness. You seem to be accusing me of actually smoking in the house of someone who told me not to. Quite uptight. In reality, I simply would not visit such a place, especially during cold months. It's quite simple. If I don't like a product, I don't need to buy it. Same goes for houses I choose to visit. Besides, everyone always comes to MY house because I'm not uptight and am a permissive person.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
True, but Comcast would require keeping a lot more state to do a sequence number attack.
In the end, it's just about making it harder. They route your packets, so they're the ultimate MITM.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
My understanding is that they are already tracking the sequence number and forging a separate packet instead of just flipping the RST flag in the existing connection.
I had to review how IPSEC AH mode works and found that the flags are considered mutable and are not authenticated by IPSEC unless you use tunnel mode which provides full packet encapsulation. In that case, Comcast would only be able to conduct traffic analysis and could only use their RST attack on the tunnel itself which could be made resistant. TCP/IP does not have to make use of the RST flag. It just provides for more efficient connection management.
Leeches are a oozing pustule on society and should be sent back in time to when a 300 baud modem was a luxury.
/. at 400-500 kB/s, and east coast sites at around 600 kB/s with low latency.
I like the fact when I get home, I can access
If P2P users did more legal sharing and it helped reduce overall traffic so everyone benefits, then great. But instead, we have spotty anti-social retards thinking that this is about censorship or infringing their rights whilst in fact they are infringing massive quantities copyrighted works, so much so, they'll only ever view or listen to a tiny fraction of the crap they leech.
It has nothing to do with censorship, it's all about Comcast managing their network - which has a finite bandwidth for their level of profitability - for the good of all the commons, not just those 1-5% who are abusing relatively cheap bandwidth. If they had paid for a dedicated 1 Gbps fibre link to their home and can only manage a small fraction of that, I can sympathize. But they're paying SFA for access to best efforts shared networking. And they're sharing it with me.
They can get stuffed. There are other networks who don't "manage" (block) P2P. Go there, see if I care. I just wish Comcast would block port 25 outbound.
Andrew van der Stock
So No email other then web based? well i hope you love Comcast.net!
I think you need to read "The Princess And The Pea". Also: Go start your own pet peeve list.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Hehe, well defended! Look, a distraction! =D
If your friends tolerate it, more power to them.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Or, you go, but then you have to go outside in the freezing cold to smoke this and that, (ten times more annoying when coupled with "no shoes inside", which I usually do disregard.. I'm very conscious about actually using a welcome mat to ensure shoes are clean before continuing past the threshold)... But anyway, I don't consider that to be actual hospitality, as in, I generally wont return a 2nd time if I find out about that, unless they are people I really like. Actual hospitality is letting someone do the things that make them comfortable.
Imagine a vegetarian throwing a party, and not allowing the guests to eat meat. Not the same as smell? Smell is subjective. The smell of something burning isn't a "Bad" smell, like the smell of a rotting corpse or feces. It's a neutral aesthetic which some people choose to associate with their own pathological neurosis (i.e. inability to not be annoyed by certain smells). It's like banning the color yellow because you don't like having to look at it. To stretch another bad metaphor even further, imagine if when people wore yellow, it turned your couch yellow for 3 days later. So you ban the color yellow from your house. That is precisely how I see it -- controlling others aesthetics.
P.S. Only smoke when around others smoking (once a week), don't buy cigarettes, have an excellent sense of smell. When approaching a campsite in the woods, I smelled a glass of red wine from 10 feet away and kind of freaked out the girl holding it. (She probably thought I was all Hannibal Lechter "I can smell your c**t"). I can't identify food by smell, but I can definitely tell if someone used the elevator to take a smoke break. But I am also capable of recognizing that simply sensing a particular sensation is not actually causing me grievous harm. As for asthmatics, they are handicapped. I don't go hiking with quadriplegics, I don't play strategy games with the mentally retarded, and I don't smoke with asthmatics.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
nope. it would have to alter, damage, or destroy.
since the packet being sent is merely temporarily telling the network adaptor to stop, then its not altering, damaging, or destroying a network.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
In the poor voice quality cases I have looked at, most if not all were with outbound voice quality. This was the case with my sister.
Also it was not with ever Comcast customer but a hit and miss with them, Every time someone would complain about voice quality the first thing I would ask is, "Do you have Comcast cable internet?" and they said yes.