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.
...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
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.
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...
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?
From wikipedia: "Internet Service Providers generally wish to avoid being classified as a "common carrier" and, so far, have managed to do so. Before 1996, such classification could be helpful in defending a monopolistic position, but the main focus of policy has been on competition, so "common carrier" status has little value for ISPs, while carrying obligations they would rather avoid. The key FCC Order on this point is: IN RE FEDERAL-STATE JOINT BOARD ON UNIVERSAL SERVICE, 13 FCC Rcd. 11501 (1998), which holds that ISP service (both "retail" and backbone) is an "information service" (not subject to common carrier obligations) rather than a "telecommunications service" (which might be classified as "common carriage")."
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's not the legality that Comcast takes issue with, it's the use of bandwidth. You're not supposed to actually use the bandwidth you buy, you see.
Actually, this will hurt net neutrality because everyone is getting QoS confused with Net Neutrality!
QoS is legal, and it should exist. Prioritizing classes of traffic is OK, provided the classes are generic classes of traffic (e.g., email, web, ftp, p2p, voip, etc).
Net Neutrality is compatible with QoS. What Net Neutrality proponents want isn't avoidance of QoS, but to prevent deals where if you use Windows Live Search, it comes up instantly, while if you use Google, you'll find yourself waiting a good minute for the frontpage to load up. I.e., both use the same class of traffic (web), but service is differentiated based on who can pay.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Basically, like traffic should be treated alike. But unlike traffic may be treated differently. So if Comcast charged an extra $10 for enhanced VoIP QoS, that's OK, as long as it's for all VoIP, not just say, Vonage only, or Skype.
Net Neutrality opponents like to bleat the Anti-QoS line because it's the easiest way to spread FUD, when they really mean "Google, pay us, or we'll make your page take ages to load, while making Windows Live Search load instantly".
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 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.
Source quench is an ICMP message, similar to destination unreachable but less severe. It's a way for a host to tell another host (or router) that it's sending data too fast for it to process and should back off. It was an early attempt at preemptive traffic control to throttle back before something has to start dropping packets.
There's not a whole lot of equipment that sends them, but pretty much every OS I've come across honors the messages to some extent. I don't know if the cheap NAT routers that many people use pass them along or not, though NAT in general tends to be fairly broken when it comes to ICMP.
If a man in the middle were to spoof ICMP source quench packets that looked like they came from either of the p2p nodes that were communicating, the effect would be that they would start sending data more slowly to each other. The connection would still be open, they just wouldn't transmit as fast as they could.
After reading the article it became clear that what Comcast is doing is much more evil. They're setting RST flags on packets (or maybe spoofing new packets in the right segment range with it set), which causes the entire connection to abort rather than just be slowed down. It could cause a lot of grief if their filter misidentifies something as p2p and starts shutting down the connections, as apparently happens to Lotus Notes traffic.
That last link has some good packet dumps of it happening.
Then when the people we use as an alternative to Comcast start to mess with us, just
DROP them too. What a great idea! Okay, let me see, what's my alternative to Comcast? I know, DSL! Oh, wait, my house is too far from the CO, and AT&T isn't interested in expanding service in our location. Okay then, I'll go to FiOS! Oh, wait, it isn't available in my state. Alright, how about a satellite service? What's that? Half-second lag times? Well, that just about destroys any gaming or VoIP links, and costs a ridiculous amount in both startup and monthly costs, so that's out... Wireless? Nope, nothing in our area.
My choices are literally dial-up, Comcast, or nothing. And dial-up and nothing aren't really options because I often have to VPN into my office from home.
Ah yes, simple market response. I can choose any broadband provider I want, as long as it's Comcast.
In their (partial) defense, their business model is probably something like:
- Offer a huge bandwidth that most people won't use
- Some will use it, costing us more than we charge, but that's overwhelmed by increased business by people who want the bandwidth from the ad while not actually using it
But then this happens:
- Whoops! File sharing is a Killer App that many people are using.
- On average we are now losing money.
Of course, the proper course of action is to alter their contracts (after the current ones expire) to charge more money for more use, perhaps in various rates. Yes, that will drive people to other companies who don't do this...who will also lose money.
Let the market figure it out.
Anyway, wouldn't generating fake signals to alter the operation of your applications be illegal? That's above and beyond throttling or blocking (gray enough as it is.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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."
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.
You could relocate, that'll show em!!
Nothing says you hate a service more than if you were to rip up the foundation of your life, career, and family just to avoid them.
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
See if Earthlink offers cable Internet through your cable system. They do where I am. Earthlink has it's own gateways, etc. They have better policies. They allow low-bandwidth servers on a residential connection. And no, I don't work for them.
Or in cases like this, when there is no one else to go to.
Comcast thrives in broadband because in many regions it is your only choice. You can't get alternative cable modem ISPs and DLS is not always available. Market forces are unlikly to effect them much.
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!
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 appreciate your effort to view all sides of this issue and bring balance to the discussion. Unfortunately your points are utter hogwash.
It's based on the users of bandwidth paying for that bandwidth. How do you explain consumer-only ISPs that don't host content? How do they stay afloat?
Tell me how "flat rate" equates to "noone[sic] pays". ISPs charge the cost of their bandwidth divided by the number of customers, plus a little on top for their operations.
Keep in mind that all connections have bandwidth limits, and most have monthly transfer limits. (The latter should be treated as fraud by the courts; ISPs love to shout "unlimited!" in their advertisements. But that's a separate discussion.) If you start transferring a lot, uploading or downloading, you have to get a higher-priced account or pay for the extra data transferred a la carte.
Please. If I am a thoughtless user and I create a giant 10MB dancing hamster video and mail it to my friends, and they start forwarding it around, am I "cheating the ISPs"? (Collectively, by the way... since when does everyone have to start considering the welfare of every business out there? What happened to capitalism?) The ISPs absolutely can figure out how to bill for it: charge by connection time or by quantity of data transferred. Look at business accounts; they have detailed billing for "burst" and "sustained" transfers, transfer limits, and more. What they can't figure out is how to avoid getting hoist by their own petard, after they made fun of AOL for those practices, and then repeated AOL's mistakes.
So what are those "max connections" and "max bandwidth" settings I've seen in every BitTorrent client I've ever used?
We're in agreement there. But why does your unbiased simple explanation contain numerous factual inaccuracies which all back up the terrible business practices and fraud of the ISPs?
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.