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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."
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.
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?
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.
At least, that's the way it works for a huge portion of Comcast's service area, including large swaths of Chicagoland.
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.
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
The major problem is this is a classic man in the middle attack right out of the textbook. If I did this to a bank I would be going to jail. Who cares if it's traffic shaping or whatever? There are legitmate ways to shape traffic without manipulating the data path. This is a recipe for disaster when one of these transparent mediators decides to fail and inject garbage into the streams. Comcast is playing with fire here and they're gonna get burnt up with it. First it will be this, then it will be your World of Warcraft, http streaming videos from google or whatever. It doesn't just stop with bittorrent.
That's clever. What you really want is a router/NAT in front of your home net that held incoming RST packets for, say, 250ms, and then dropped rather than forwarding them if they were followed by data packets. (Any of the current traffic-shaping modules easily capable of this?)
Comcast could still *block* the connection, but then they'd have to be using some kind of statefull firewall, which is much more expensive and doubtful to be worth the bother.
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.
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* 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.
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.