Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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!
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
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
Why isn't this illegal? It sounds like they are impersonating one of the sides of a conversation.
Are they allowed to do the same thing with Skype (or anything else they want) and tell the other side I want to disconnect? Where is the legal line?
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.
I know that people are always bitching about how long (45 minutes+ for some people I know) it took them to download a patch... While at the same time I've been able to download patches over my non-Comcast connection at over 2MBytes/second... I don't know that all of those people have comcast, but I know that some of them do.
</anecdote>
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!
The simplest solution, and one that I think the web sites will eventually support (once they get over the cost for HW encryption support) is to use SSL / TLS. This is the easiest way that they can protect their advertising revenue from middleman parasites.
P2P environments are going to have to go to encryption as well. Note that Diffie-Helleman key agreement is not safe against an active man in the middle, so the crypto will have to be done with some care and great care will have to be taken to deal with a large number of malicious proxies of the various hostile middlemen.
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/
unfortunately, it's not a misconception.
Also the original forum post from DSLreports user funchords = Robb. Notice the stuff said. I helped him investigate and can verify that comcast has been and still does this, via Wireshark. They send RST packets to you and the people you're uploading to on a random 1-18 second timer if the user is not a comcast user themselves. (It used to be an automatic 8 second timer but now they added a small degree of "randomization"...they seem to be exploring it, there was a week where it would block 35% of incoming requests in this fashion instead of 100%, 50% the next week, etc.) Also I know how to monitor but not how to make my router ignore RST flags, so it's not like I had a way to get around it.
However, sandvine doesn't seem to work over encrypted connections so if you force encryption it appears that they can't insert a RST flag.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
I only learned what I know thanks to Robb explaining as I tested with his advice, so I have no idea what the ICMP spoof thing is. Do you have a link of some stuff I could read to understand how that works/how to prevent that? Or does that even happen often, anyway? Also sounds like they might be doing it to FTP and SSC (I don't know what SSC is but it was mentioned on the forums) as well.
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
You probably need to prioritize TCP ACKs across saturated asymmetric connections. Otherwise outstanding upstream ACKs will slow the downstream side. My el-cheapo router does this, once I reverse-engineered what the marketing department named it ("TurboTCP"). You can probably do it in software if you look hard enough.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
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
but that can be done by the user at their end, if they want to. it doesnt have to be a universal policy enforced by the ISP. what if, today, i dont care if my calls get dropped because i really want this torrent to finish ASAP?
Mac or Windows? Back a few months ago, I had both a Mac and a Windows box, and the Mac always downloaded the patches MUCH faster (as in, more than 10 times faster) than the Windows box, even though port forwarding on the router was configured for the Windows machine,
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
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'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.
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....
Different ISPs have handled the idea of users using thier bandwidth differently since ISP became a common term. It also varies per customer in some cases. Parts of our network here use traffic shaping, some do not. Do we advertise this? Of course not. We don't deny it either however if asked. What makes comcast in a bad light here, seems to be that they lied about having the technology in place. Not so much what it is doing. This is of course my opinion, if you choose to take the things I have said as fact and attack my inaccuracies too, so be it.
"And the heathens with their ways of trickery and deceit shall not prevail over the will of the righteous"