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.
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
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!
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?"
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