Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Admits Delaying, Not Blocking, P2P Traffic
haibijon writes "The executive declined to talk in detail about the technology, citing spammers or other miscreants who might exploit that knowledge. But he insisted the company was not stopping file transfers from happening, only postponing them in certain cases. He compared it to making a phone call and getting a busy signal, then trying again and getting through."
On that note, I'm not "cancelling" my service with you. I'm merely "delaying" signing back up with your company (indefinitely).
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
/. reading too :-/
Gah, Comcast is delaying my
So they're not actually stopping the transfers, they're postponing them indefinitely.
*Sigh of relief*
I'm just delaying it...I tried to put my payment in the mailbox and there were other letters there so I waited until it was less congested....
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
That'll please everyone trying to download the latest version of Ubuntu. Just to make sure this doesn't happen in the future I'll hammer the server directly.
But enough of my whining, Prison Break was on last night...
Summation 2
I compare it to paying a gym membership, heading towards the treadmill only to be stopped by a trainer and told there is someone on it already. You look, see no one is on it, ask again and are allowed to use it. Sometimes the trainer comes over and tells you that you have to get off for someone else. Everytime you get off, no one else gets on. So you have to restart your workout whenever the trainer asks.
if they are simply port blocking or doing deep packet inspection. If it is the former I would think it would be pretty easy to circumnavigate...if it is the latter....then I suppose SSL would be the solution.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Replace justice with internet.
Sorry about that - oh, did your precious cargo expire?
What, you were transporting critical medical records via Torrent? and someone died? Too bad - we were preventing you from pirating movies / music / software.
See, the problem here is that they cannot know what is being transported. The protocol by itself is not bad. If that were the case, they'd have to block TCP/IP - as all bad things over the net come through via TCP/IP - of course - all good things come that way too....
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
So I should be able to delay, but not block, my payment check to them?
Ok, I'm sufficiently braced for the "You're a bloody pirate!" comments.
"Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
This sounds a lot like getting the camel's nose into the tent. Once it's established that there are two or more "classes" of information, and those classes can be treated differently, there's endless opportunities to make some customers "a little more equal" than others. And charge them a premium, of course.
I'm thinking of an airline that's planning to ensure that if you fly coach, your bags will be the last ones off the plane.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I like to leave my Slackware downloads seeding just for the hell of it, and I've noticed that Comcast doesn't exactly block the traffic but does something similar to what this article describes. During certain hours (typically mid-morning and evening, roughly), all torrent activity will cease for a minute or two and then resume normally. This only happens at certain "peak" times and usually rather infrequently. Torrent speeds are generally quite good later on at night and on the weekends.
Not that I agree with Comcast screwing around with traffic and killing off connections, but they at least appear to be telling the truth here.
Does Comcast advertise very high transfer speeds? Because if they advertise that, knowing that they intentionally force lower speeds for some kinds of traffic, that sounds like fraud.
As has been noted in numerous places, Comcast isn't just forging RST packets to disrupt P2P traffic -- they're also doing it to disrupt Lotus Notes traffic...which makes the "we're doing it to stop the bad guys" excuse a transparent lie.
Moreover, disrupting P2P traffic will have no effect on "spammers and other miscreants", as they have far more sophisticated, self-organizing C&C methods already deployed. (No doubt having anticipated that use of traditional P2P would leave them vulnerable to such countermeaures.)
But the truly galling part is that Comcast continues to repeat the same big lie they trotted out years ago: "We take the spam problem seriously". This is utter nonsense, of course; spam emission levels from their network continue to steadily increase, as they have for half a decade, to the point where their only serious rival for the #1 spot on the world's list of top spam-sending network is Verizon.
So what this episode tells us is that Comcast has the capability to monitor and modify traffic, but only chooses to do so when it might affect their profits -- not when it might could the unceasing flow of abuse outbound from their network.
AT&T rolls out their FIOS and suddenly all these anti-Comcast articles start showing up.
Actualy, ATT roll out is not important for most of the US as it hasn't hit our state, city, neighborhood, street, house yet. It's about as important to this as the rain in New Orleans or the fires in LA. It just happened to be near the same time frame.
The real issue is the new version of Ubuntu came out. The server mirror overloaded. My download died at 80%. I used the mirror because Bit-torrent would have taken days.... The following day I downloaded Gutsy in about 3 hours from the mirror. The speed test on Bit Torent was slower than dial-up.
If you are looking for a conspiracy, check this one out... MS investes in cable TV. Ubuntu Gutsy is due out. They recommend using a torrent to ease the load off the servers and mirrors. Comcast throttles Bit-Torrent.
Possible, Yes.. Plausable, no.
The truth shall set you free!
You don't like it leave. Its that simple. Maybe if Comcast customers started leaving in drones, Comcast would re-think their insane policy. Anything else is akin to whining like a child because you can't have the toy you wanted. If your phone company DID decide to pretend they were you and pick up and hang up your call what would you do. 1) Sue 2) Find new phone company. For those in a place where you're trapped in with solely one provider, I feel your pain. Maybe people need to start calling their local political representatives. Surely if anyone can take two to three minutes responding to this article or even my post, surely you can shoot off an email to a congressman or political dipshit to complain. Anything else, is whining.
Infiltrated dot Net
At least, that's the way it works for a huge portion of Comcast's service area, including large swaths of Chicagoland.
If they terminate a connection from happening they are blocking it. It may be OK to them to call it 'delaying' but technically the connection is blocked initially.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Comparing with a phone service is correct, if they did this to a commercial customer and deliberately stopped a certain percentage of calls that had to then be re-dialled they would be accused of blocking calls.
He should have said "its like a set of tubes its just that P2P traffic is heavier so it sinks to the bottom, and as everyone knows with rivers they flow slower at the bottom so we aren't delaying them its just that P2P traffic is like a Pike, its a heavier fish that swims at the bottom while the normal internet stuff is like a salmon at the surface. Pike also eat cute little ducklings so P2P is evil"
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Last friday they had a large layoff in their Ad sales division. I know of several people that lost their job there and many said they did this country wide, gutting lots of jobs.
Funny though, they did not trim the fat. Lots of middle management still there that really are not needed.
Me thinks Comcast is circling the toilet bowl. still on the outer edge but we all know the spiral is a logarithmic one.
I'm waiting for the next round on the CableTV side (oh yea it's coming!). I have a bunch of friends there as well and they give the heads up after the axe starts swinging.
cool part is my company can hire some incredibly talented people that comcast cast aside in their ignorance.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
First they had no idea what would prompt accusations of traffic shaping or blocking torrent traffic. Then they "remembered" that policy after speaking with their PR people. In particular, they remembered that they don't "stop" traffic so much as "delay" traffic, although I'm not sure there's much of a difference there. Finally, that's totally justified since the people being affected are a minority of users who are monopolizing the bandwidth and preventing Gramma and the rest of the "average" internet users from checking their email.
Now, compare that to this:
[Government policy A] isn't a policy, we don't do that. Lemme think for a minute! No, yeah, okay, we don't do that, we do [Government Policy A sub 1]. But that's totally justified since we only do it to bad people, not any of you good folks.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
I actually hate to say this for a superstitious fear that it will come back to bite me in the ass... but I've had nothing but good experiences with Comcast. I'm lucky because they are the only game in my town besides DSL. Anyhow, I've never experienced an outage in the nearly two years I've had them, and they recently sent us a flier telling us about channel changes and that we would be not receiving a couple of channels that we currently get (due to the need to provide more bandwidth to hi-def channels or something). Get this, they updated our cable box and gave us $20 off for a year! Then next year the bill only goes up $1 over our current plan. All it took was a little phone wrangling and they were very understanding and helpful.
The only thing I don't get from them is phone service because Vonage is still cheaper. Hopefully it stays that way but I fear for Vonage's future.
In any case, I haven't noticed any real slowdown in my BT traffic but I'm not a really heavy user. I download about 8-10 hours worth of TV shows per week and the odd distro now and then. I also find that it helps to know which seeds to pick--yes that might be a no-brainer to us but not necessarily to the average Joe Schmoe who reads about this in the newspaper.
There is simply too much glass..
Rogers does that in Canada on a regular basis. When I called them up, they admitted they block bit torrent. I asked them why don't they do this AFTER i use all my "unlimited" 60GB/month ($50)? No answer. Go figure.
Halaloula-halaloula
I get that feeling too. When you call them nowadays to report a problem or change service, their call center's automated system has no problem with directing you to comcast.net (which is odd if you have a major problem) or simply hanging up on you. To add insult to injury, they have been advertising for more workers in my state for their call centers. I'm guessing that due to crappy service and horrible pay, nobody is taking them up on their offer. Comcast is circling the bowl. I wonder how long it'll take before they go bankrupt and hand over their operations to a decent provider. As it stands, AT&T DSL around here is a better bargain and without throttled connections.
Sounds like a low tech form of load balancing... Dont these guys have the money to buy a good traffic shaping device? :-)
I do understand that many people might have bad experiences with the Comcast broadban, but I really like Comcast where I am. I have several VPN tunnels setup across multiple offices which is very nice and stable. Also, most of the time there speed is outstanding as long as my traffic shaping is good on the outbound side.
I have an OpenVPN endpoint on my home system, so I can get access to my IMAP server wherever I am.
From my desk at work, it continues to work flawlessly.
From my mother's house it has worked flawlessly in the past, but on the last visit it didn't. It seemed to have MTU problems, in that I could do simple DNS lookups, and I could SSH into one of my home systems over the VPN. But the moment I go to move any quantity of data, it freezes up. I tried the suggested OpenVPN MTU fixes and they didn't work, though I don't know if they have to be applied at both ends. At the time, obviously I couldn't change the server endpoint settings.
Now I'm beginning to wonder if it's really this new filtering that's hitting me.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Comcast's TOS explicitly disallow running any form of public server or P2P services, so I really don't see why people are complaining about it. If you want to run P2P, subscribe to a plan or provider that permits it.
Or, if you think that people should be permitted to run any service they like, then stand up for government regulations that force all providers to let them do this.
But I'm tired of this pseudo-libertarian bullshit where people complain about evil big business writing restrictive contracts on the one hand, and whine about big bad government on the other.
Was trying to grab the Gobuntu alternate--and the sad thing that the straight download was going faster than the torrent, at least for a while (mirror servers are hit hard.)
Either way I've never had this much trouble with the service. Comcast is really putting the squeeze on.
Excuse me while I go find a goatse link to get that image un-etched from my brain.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
It's possible to track FIOS rollouts merely by noting spam sources whose rDNS matches it, e.g., "*.fios.verizon.net". To date, this has been a 100.00% indicator of spam. For example, in the last few minutes, one of my mail servers has observed the following:
pool-70-104-193-136.nrflva.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-170-157-58.dllstx.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-178-175-162.washdc.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-180-67-156.tampfl.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-187-176-23.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-227-130.bstnma.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-247-31.nycmny.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-74-238.prvdri.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-251-69-183.tampfl.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-64-87-227.dllstx.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-66-1-223.washdc.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-75-227-248.bflony.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-90-121-2.ptldor.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-94-19-223.phlapa.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-95-136-185.pitbpa.fios.verizon.net
pool-96-229-80-50.lsanca.fios.verizon.net
That's a mail server with one user. Production mail servers with tens of thousands of users typically note 5000-10000 such systems every day.
So from here, it appears that new FIOS rollouts are being 0wned nearly as quickly as they're connected, and that they're staying 0wned. I'm sure the spammers are quite pleased with the quality service provided by Verizon et.al.
Okay...so I lied, I wont miss them at all. I wont miss the packet shaping, the adaptive analysis, the Bangalore tech support...having to call repeatedly to get competent tech service. (BTW, any issues with Comcrap's HS internet service, ask to be transferred to the canadian NOC....it works, they're intelligent.) (Amusing story there, but I'll save that for a journal entry) Remember: for all issues, blame reality, for anything royally f***ed up, blame comcast! :)
kill -9 kdawson. :)
Remember, it's not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you...
If I was Comcast I'd be mirroring everything under the sun, proxying almost as much, and have my own servers dishing out the most popular torrents, well I would if there really was anything to all the whining about bandwidth being expensive. If the operating methods were the proxy and mirror servers gets the fast-expensive backbone, and the non-proxy gets the slower-cheaper, they'd save tons on bandwidth expenses and users would be better served.
MS investes in cable TV. Ubuntu Gutsy is due out. They recommend using a torrent to ease the load off the servers and mirrors. Comcast throttles Bit-Torrent. MS has had a woody about getting into content provision for a decade or so, so it seems that MS and Comcast are as likely to be competitors as to be business partners. Look at it this way 10 years ago they bought an encyclopedia, next they started MSN, after that MsNBC, they are slowly working their up the food chain in typical Microsoft random hit or miss until something works fashion. If I were Comcast I'd figure what is bad for Microsoft would be good for me.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I disagree with comcasts analogy. Its not like getting a busy signal, its like an operator coming on the line mid conversation and tell both partys please try again later and disconnecting them. The busy signal occurs when you initiate the call and the receiving end is busy an unable to answer. What they are doing is at a certain threshold (that no one knows of course), getting into the middle of the connection, pretending to be each other, and disconnecting the connection.
:) (okay the last paragraph is sorta absurd.. but still it amused me when I read that back to myself so it stays)
A better analogy for comcast to use would be something along the lines of we are promoting identify theft by pretending to be the recipient and closing your connection so we can redirect the traffic and steal whatever you are downloading
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Intriguing. A friend of mine wanted to upgrade to Gutsy, and downloaded the iso in 2 hours using Bittorrent. Mainly due to all the people using BT to download it, it was coming down at breakneck speed.
I, on the other hand, am behind a college firewall... I would STILL not be running Gutsy, if I didn't already have the beta installed.
I'm waiting for a "-1 somepeoplejustshouldn'tgetmodprivileges" meta-moderation.
Intriguing. A friend of mine wanted to upgrade to Gutsy, and downloaded the iso in 2 hours using Bittorrent. Mainly due to all the people using BT to download it, it was coming down at breakneck speed.
My Bit-Torrent test was clocking at 0.3k. Dial-up is faster on a modem. Using a mirror was 2 orders of magnitude faster.
The truth shall set you free!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
what possibly could anything do to harm that they tell each people what the bandwidth is? how can they not be held liable for people exceeding the limit but have no idea what the limit is because for some reason, it's a government secret.
In line with your new network policies, I'm going to send all future payments in packets of $5 USD. You are hereby notified that some of these packets may be delayed. Since you control the network they are transmitted on, perhaps you can ensure that they arrive. I'm sending the authorization for payment of each of these packets via a p2p protocol. You may be familiar with it: bittorrent.
If you would, please help ensure the prompt delivery of these packets to ensure prompt payment.
Thank you
J.Q. Public
member: Citizens for Internet equality
ISP QoS Review Department
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Well obviously if this is affecting you should drop Comcast and chose from the 3 or 4 other major broadband providers that can provide megabit service to your home.
Oh..that's right...there aren't any other major providers in your area....
I am not blocking forged RST packets from Comcast IP addresses. I am just placing them into a very long delay queue in my traffic shaper.
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 and isn't necessarily doing anything illegal. (WoW patches, Linux distros etc)
Question everything
...He just let it sit in a drawer in his desk for 10 days.
This is just utter bullshit. If you postpone traffic for a long enough time, it's going to time out. Just like not signing a bill within 10 days kills the bill, but without the official veto. A pocket veto is a pocket veto, regardless of who is doing it.
My Bit-Torrent test was clocking at 0.3k. Dial-up is faster on a modem. Using a mirror was 2 orders of magnitude faster. So that would be what, 1.2k? Break-neck speeds. I find it hard to believe that if you actually downloaded the torrent that your speed would only be 0.3k
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
Hey, Comcast. If you take a few simple steps to prevent the propagation of worms and viruses on your network, you will reduce your total traffic volume by at least 50%. Do something clever (like hire a COMPETENT STAFF) and reduce traffic volume by 80% through elimination of all but the zero-day worms.
Then you will be able to provide your customers with enough bandwidth to satisfy the market demand, including bandwidth optimizing file sharing technologies like Bitorrent.
What's that you say? You can't comprehend what I'm describing? You think it can't possibly be simple to do this? Yeah, I know. We've had this conversation before. You need to HIRE SOMEONE CAPABLE of reading this and explaining it to you! Stop being so CHEAP and you'll make more money.
But the truly galling part is that Comcast continues to repeat the same big lie they trotted out years ago: "We take the spam problem seriously". This is utter nonsense, of course; spam emission levels from their network continue to steadily increase, as they have for half a decade, to the point where their only serious rival for the #1 spot on the world's list of top spam-sending network is Verizon.
I'll admit that while I can set up an email server, I don't really know the ins and outs of the technical side of spam. Would port filtering (i.e. no outbound traffic on port 25) essentially fix the botnet spam problem? Don't get me wrong, I think port filtering is one of the most deplorable acts that my ISP, Cox, is guilty of, but for users that don't care about hosting a simple web, email, or ftp server, isn't it (technically) a good thing? Do the spam botnets already account for this type of filtering and employ a workaround?
[rant]
Of course, rather than enforcing these incredibly restrictive filters, you should be able to make a call to your ISP and ask that they be removed at no charge (instead you have to upgrade to a business package). While I sympathize with ISP's that users who wish to do more business grade activity on a line should probably pay for a line that facilitates such actions, running a "Server" and running a "Business web site" are two completely different things. Meanwhile, if you drop the word "Server" when speaking with a rep from an ISP (because they're too freaking stupid to know what the difference between eBay and your personal web site with a couple utilities on it for direct download is) they shit a brick and tell you that you need a business line.
[/rant]
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
me thinks they are using gear supplied by Zeugma Systems of Vancouver to do a per-subscriber-flow throttle/queue-priority manipulation.
So for each failed attempt it's more traffic that you generate that goes against the mystery cap before getting your service cut off for the month for over usage of failed attempts due to their software.
IANAL, but don't Comcast's actions jeopardize their common carrier status because they are monitoring traffic on their network in detail? So if Global Media Company A wants to sue them because of illegal Bit Torrent movie traffic, Comcast can hardly claim not to know what they are talking about. Perhaps this is why they have been so reluctant to admit that they were doing blocking and "shaping" of various kinds of traffic. Now that the cat's out of the bag, I expect some law suits to follow, from media companies. Comcast has demonstrated an interest in, and detailed knowledge of what traffic is on their network. So if they aren't blocking all of that illegal movie distribution, then they're liable too. There are plenty of lawyers out there who would be happy to make that argument.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Oh, I don't know about that. A couple of years ago, I had a run-in with Comcast's abuse dept.
I run a mailing list (opt-in, relating to security issues on IRC networks). One of the users on the list signed up from a spamcop email address. I sent an email to the list, which spamcop erroneously flagged as spam for this user. The spamcop user had spamcop send complaints about his 'spam' to the relevant ISPs, rather than verify they were actually spam first (a violation of spamcop's TOS, iirc).
That shouldn't have been much of a problem - Comcast gets the complaint, they look at the message being complained about, determine it's not spam, and that's the end of it, right? Nope.
Abuse cut off my ability to send email. Took damn near a week to get a hold of them (no direct # - all you can do is leave voicemail. As they're only open during business hours, and I'm at work during those same business hours, I asked them to call me back on my cellphone, as I wasn't home to answer my landline. Comcast Abuse, of course, calls the # associated with my account (landline) - the same # they failed to call when cutting off my ability to send email. This went on for several days (with a weekend stuck in between), until I left a voicemail repeating my cellphone # no less than 7 times - yes, it really took doing that for them to get the hint to call my cellphone!). When I finally saw a copy of the message that I had sent to the mailing list that triggered the abuse complaint, I asked the tech on the phone if that looked like spam. His reply? 'Uh, no...'. No answer for why I was cut off, though...
Apparently, Comcast Abuse *does* cut off legitimate customers, but when it comes to compromised machines and spamming scum actively using Comcast accounts to spam, they'll happily let them stay on their network...
Go fig.
Web traffic, too. A couple nights ago, I was getting a persistent "unexpected reset" failure trying to get to - of all places - google.com. The same failure happened from multiple machines running multiple browsers and operating systems; the only common thread was that they were all using the same Comcast connection as one machine running a BT client. I stopped the BT client and a few minutes later, Google started replying normally again.
Get fine internet service with comcast? Philadelphia btw.
The storm worm uses the eDonkey protocol for C&C. You were saying?Moreover, disrupting P2P traffic will have no effect on "spammers and other miscreants", as they have far more sophisticated, self-organizing C&C methods already deployed. (No doubt having anticipated that use of traditional P2P would leave them vulnerable to such countermeaures.)
> But he insisted the company was not stopping file transfers from happening,
> only postponing them in certain cases.
ZOMG! He should call the FBI because somebody in-between is generating fake packets to disable, not just delay, the transfer. And if it ain't Comcast, it must be god only knows who!
Holy cow! Somebody do something!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
When the Comcast guy says they won't tell exactly what's going on because "spammers and other miscreants" might exploit that knowledge, that's the point he flushed his credibility down the drain.
This is exactly like the cynical use of the fear of terrorism to game our political system. (And that appears to work over and over again.)
As for the "it was in your contract arguement". Well it is in every contract that I've seen for internet services, but that doesn't make it right. P2P is not illegial here (as ruled by the supreme court), they have no proof that I'm downloading copyrighted material (actually I'm downloading different OS's, and public domain stuff), but still it is a clause. It isn't a matter of take it or leave it for me are most people, the fact is the internet is a major part of society now, people are trying to use the service they paid for (don't sell me 6Mb if there is no way you'll let me use it).
In my case as well, I bought the highest speed available, because I often work from home, I didn't want to be billing my employer for time I waited for my slow connection. Will guess what? My ISP thinks all encrypted packets are a p2p agent in disguise, so I get throttled way down as soon as I start my VPN connection. Yet another clause in my contract says if I cancel my service within 2 years, I get slapped with a nice penalty, so I'm stuck for another year or so. At any rate, the it is in the contract, doesn't make the clause ethical, if your choice is to stay off the internet, or accept the clause (as I contend it is, as everyone has that clause), then your saying in affect "don't do this behaviour because we decided it is too hard to provide sufficient bandwidth to give you the level of service you paid for, and if you don't like it then don't use the internet". This is unfair, for the first part it is a business standard practice trying to enforce a law that doesn't exist, secondly it is limiting access to information to people that agree with you, with the added consequences of the people that don't agree with you having limited ability to work from home, or gain technical expertise.
Anyone know of any companies that make revenue by selling products or services that are transferred via BitTorrent? If so maybe they should file a lawsuit against Comcast to recover damages. I went back and forth from Comcast to Verizon and then tried Cavtel for a while. I'm currently using Comcast but am going to leave them and go back to Cavtel. I do not want anyone screwing around with my packets.
btw, "busy signal" = TCP-RESET
What if they're causing damage to a "protected computer" engaged in interstate commerce -- say, torrenting a new Linux distro ISO for use in their business or distributing their own published work their users -- by hijacking the session and thereby exceeding their authorization on your system?
IANAL, but this is straight out of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as amended (18 USC Section 1030).
Anyone who:
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
or who:
(5)(A)(i) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
(ii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, recklessly causes damage; or
(iii) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage; and
(B) by conduct described in clause (i), (ii), or (iii) of subparagraph (A), caused (or, in the case of an attempted offense, would, if completed, have caused)--
(i) loss to 1 or more persons during any 1-year period (and, for purposes of an investigation, prosecution, or other proceeding brought by the United States only, loss resulting from a related course of conduct affecting 1 or more other protected computers) aggregating at least $5,000 in value;
(ii) the modification or impairment, or potential modification or impairment, of the medical examination, diagnosis, treatment, or care of 1 or more individuals;
(iii) physical injury to any person;
(iv) a threat to public health or safety; or
(v) damage affecting a computer system used by or for a government entity in furtherance of the administration of justice, national defense, or national security;
or who:
(6) knowingly and with intent to defraud traffics (as defined in section 1029) in any password or similar information through which a computer may be accessed without authorization, if--
(A) such trafficking affects interstate or foreign commerce;
in which "protected computer" can mean:
2) the term "protected computer" means a computer--
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial institution or the United States Government and the conduct constituting the offense affects that use by or for the financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States;
and
(6) the term "exceeds authorized access" means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter;
and
(8) the term "damage" means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information;
and
(11) the term "loss" means any reasonable cost to any victim, including the cost of responding to an offense, conducting a damage assessment, and restoring the data, program, system, or information to its condition prior to the offense, and any revenue lost, cost incurred, or other consequential damages incurred because of interruption of service;
I find it hard to believe that if you actually downloaded the torrent that your speed would only be 0.3k
--
I'm on Comcast. That's what the gripe is all about. A single CD of stuff such as a CD distro can take over a day to transfer. As soon as you get the entire thing, the upload speed drops to zero and stays there. I use mirrors for distro's now. It's much faster.
Just for grins, I'll check the speed now...
Wow... they must have cut back on the filter this week!!! I hit 180Kbps.. I can get Gutsy on torrent in under 2 hours.. Their filter must be broken.. WooHoo... Anybody else notice this?
The truth shall set you free!
Like someone at Comcast takes a check to a "teller"?
It's not illegal to postdate a check, but the check will either go through regardless of else it will bounce and you will just get socked with a returned-check charge from both Comcast and your bank as thanks for your smart-assedness.
Back in the olden days, when people used to write checks, a friend of mine used to make his phone bills payable to "Adolf Hitler" and "Ayatollah Khomenei" and they all went through, every one of them.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Wow, I just got the alternate Gutsy ISO off Bit Torrent an got 500KB/s. The DL took just under 25 minutes for the 693 meg download. I hope this change on Comcast is permanent! Sweet!
It might be the OSDL labs mirror doesn't provide a penalty for those who leach only and are letting me DL at full speed. I'll check the other Torrent sites for speed later.
My upload on the other hand is currently at 0.1 meg uploaded at a rate of 0.0KB/s with no upload caps checked. I guess I'm stuck being a leach at this point. What is the point of Peer to Peer if there are no bandwidth hosts? I hope Comcast runs Bit Torrent servers to make up for the uploads I can't provide the peers. Being forced to leach only sucks.
The truth shall set you free!
Using a mirror was 2 orders of magnitude faster. So that would be what, 1.2k? Break-neck speeds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
In short, moving the decimal place two places is changing from 0.3 to 3 to 30 which is break neck speeds for dial-up with many ISP's who often provide much less than 15 on a 56K modem.
The truth shall set you free!
John (over a Comcast line): Mom, is that you?
Mom: John, yes is me, can you hear me?
John: Yes, Mom, I need to tell you something about Comcast.
Mom: What is it?
John: Well, have you ever..
Mom: Hold on a second, I left some Lima beans on the oven. I'll be back.
(10 seconds later)
Mom: John?
John: Did you turn off the oven?
Mom: What oven?
John: Did you read about Comcast?
Mom: Hold on a second, I left some Lima beans on the oven. I'll be back.
(10 seconds later)
John: Mom?
Mom: What?
John: Is that you talking, what's going on?
Mom: John please!....Hold on a second, I left some Lima beans on the oven. I'll be back.
So, lemme get this straight...
Comcast charges you to send bits and bytes. And they have a finite limit on how much you're allowed to send.
And now they're engaging in an activity that actively makes you send MORE bits and bytes... thereby getting to your limit quicker, and/or letting them charge you more (I don't use Comcast, but I know some providers will charge you extra $$ for buying more blocks of bandwidth. Or maybe they just cut you off...)
So, sorry, I'm not versed on american law. How is this legal?
"You can only use X amount of Y. But we're going to surreptitiously make you use more Y. And then we're going to get mad at you for going over X."
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
But, no, far more likely that it's some grand conspiracy by Verizon to saturate the internet with spam delivered at 100 megabit + speeds to as to completely shut the internet down. Then they can charge all of us extra money for access to the "V-net" (Verizon net)...
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
KTorrent refuses to even start here on Comcrap, and I was just trying to download the latest Suse.
As a futher aside, isn't Windows update a P2P app? If that get screwed up enough, the maybe Joe Blow will finally complain.
They allow the connection. Then after 30 seconds they cut it, which delays it. Infinitely. Unless you reconnect, then it does the same thing. If you're willing to force a reconnect every 30 seconds (or have a client that can auto-reconnect -- client authors take note) you can complete a download.
I checked the "delay" after the 30 seconds on then cutoff, and after 2.5 hours it hadn't reconnected itself, so the "infinitely" is an assumption. But 30 seconds on and then more than 2.5 hours off makes even a small transfer take so long as to make it untenable to attempt, and thus equal to infinite.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Off topic:
I understand having to pay taxes, but the "fees" that Vonage charges are nothing more than a thinly veiled way of getting you to pay more, while they continue to advertise a deceptively lower monthly rate.
I left Vonage after they added taxes and more than doubled their fees, and unfortunately moved to Sunrocket, who went out of business a few months later. I've yet to find another company that delivers that level of service for the price...
Please note as well that if the descriptions of traffic disruption caused by
Comcast that we've seen so far are accurate, they're insufficient to stop
communication channels using UDP, spread-spectrum techniques, burst
transmissions, and so on. Moreover, it's not clear (at least not to me) whether
Comcast has deployed this at the borders of their network -- or internally
as well. If it's only the former, then clearly P2P communications within
Comcast's own network (currently populated with millions of 0wned systems)
aren't affected at all.
Thank you for correcting me. I always thought that orders of magnitude (Earthquakes and the like) were double, not 10x. Now I know.
Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. This comment may not be copied in any way including, but not limited to caching.
In the case of getting a busy signal, the party you are trying to reach is already on the phone, thereby denying you the ability to reach them.* This is more like you try to call someone and get the "all circuits are busy" message, then try again and get through. The point is in the example he used, the reason you can't connect is because of the answering party, not your phone company. Which closer to what is happening. And getting the "all circuits is busy" message is a sign of too little capacity, and considered poor service. Which is really what's going on at Comcast, too.
------
* We'll ignore CallWaiting, and the fact most phone companies let you have two calls running at the same time, alternating between them. Heck on some can combine them into a conference call on the fly.
That's great, but what can you do for the other end of the connection? And don't they forge the IPs as well?
Here is the one statement that will make me believe their motives:
CEO: And because we want to make sure everyone is equally able to use our service, we made a radical decision to move to a 5,000,000 client Token Ring!
Otherwise, that whole release was pure BS
But clearly you have something better to say...
Maybe they're not so bad after all...
The believe was that by rubbing the check on a magnet (a big speaker magnet seemed always to be handy in those days) it would make the check harder to read with the automatic readers and could delay the transaction by a day or two.
I have no idea if it actually worked, if the ink even contained metal or a magnetic substance, or if we were just wasting our time.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Like the subject says, intermittent blocking is still blocking which is what Comcast is doing. Should they be allowed to do so? I don't know. Should they be allowed to lie about it? I don't think so.
Request Timeout. Request Timeout. Request Timeout. Request Timeout. 100% loss. That's basically the effect of postponing. You don't *need* to postpone it indefinitely, you can delay it until it times out... and send bogus data to everyone that fails in the checksum so it looks like they aren't actually modifying your transmission speed.
World of Warcraft uses a full bittorrent implementation for the delivery of their patches and content updates. So technically, you running World of Warcraft on a Comcast connection forces you to violate their ToS, or you just can't get the patch automatically.
Now. I can see where Comcast comes in with the 'no servers' allowed, but that would also mean that any (very) badly installed windows installation that keeps advertising its NetBios shares would get you into serious problems (assuming your firewall/nat/etc is 'accidentilly' off)
It seems to be that their ToS is needlessly constricting, but then again, I'm quite used to that from ISPs and related companies by now.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Comcast delays P2P traffic of a minority of users to avoid snail speeds for the majority. I don't think this merits a call to man the barricades.
Insensitive clod. I pay $70/mo for my 3M! Cockbag.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
You know, all of this is so lame. We have the technology to solve the bandwidth problem: IP multicast (not the TV digital multicast for multiple stations in the same channel space, but the computer network ip multicast - the one opposite unicast). One stream going out, whoever wants to listen does (and requests getting a copy of the stream). You could even do multicast at different bit rates for things like OS distribution and loop it as long as folks are requesting it. Whereever you start "listening", say at 30%, you just keep listening until it loops again and gets to 30% again.
The problem is that ISPs don't impliment decent multicast support. Multicast doens't work well with non-live distribution (in TV/radio terms), but I bet it would solve a large amount of complaints.
Especially for "legitmate" use, where you're going to have different download starting times and speeds, and anyone doing things professionally will just have 4 or 5 different rates that they transmit at.
This works great for things like Music on Hold on VoIP systems, or imaging software like Ghost, etc. You can send it to one or thousands and it costs nothing more for the sender and the network only has to bear it once along each path. At the end-node level, it costs only once per feed that is being requested.
In VoIP terms (which is where I have a lot of multicast support knowledge), at remote office that puts a hold on call gets a MoH stream sent because the local VoIP/PSTN gateway or an internal which is put on hold requests it, sends the request to the switch, the switch sends it to the local router, which forwards it over the WAN, the router on the far end sends it to the remote switch which forwards it to the MoH source. The source is always sending, but now the remote switch starts to transmit it up to the remote router, which forwards it to the local router, the local router to the local switch, the local switch to the VoIP/PSTN gateway and/or internal phone which was put on hold.
Ok, that's pretty basic, but the beauty of it is that when a second internal phone or VoIP/PSTN gateway at the same site wants the same MoH feed, it tells the local switch, but since it already has a stream coming in, there is no additional bandwidth required anywhere. So long as there is one device requesting the MoH feed it keeps coming. Once the last device stops requesting, then the whole process goes backwards with the local switch telling the local router, the local router tells the remote router, the remote router tells the remote switch and it all prunes back nicely.
If Comcast had multicast support, and they distribute was set to use this, it would means when I go to download a CentOS 5 i386 DVD, it only takes whatever the bandwidth of the stream that I'm requesting - for me, and for everyone in my neighborhood who wants to download it. It costs the Comcast network nothing additional for 1 or 1000 people requesting it.
Missed packets can be dealt with the same as missed unicast packets - you just re-request those specific packets.
If ISPs would think smarter and use the tech already there to solve problems, we wouldn't have this issue in the first place. The same is true of IPv6. People want static addresses, they want to be able to get to their home PCs to access info while on a school PC, work PC or their cell phone - IPv6 essentially gives that to you as the addresses are based on your MAC address (one form of assigning them, anyway). So long as your network address doesn't change (and with proper planning there is no reason it should), you always have the same IPv6 address, forever.
Even enterprise service providers are stupid regarding multicast as well. For customers who want multicast support over MPLS or private IP based networks, one ISP wants to charge something crazy like $1000 per site per month to add multicast support. Utterly retarded. The solution in that enviroment is just the tunnel multicast over GRE. This
No, you can send it out on any port, and you'd have to examine the l7 data to see if it was spam, and thats only if it's not encrypted, or else it looks like any other SSL session.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!