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."

Comments

He compares it to a phone call....

[OctoberSky]

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.

Re:He compares it to a phone call....

[rtb61]

I see it more like a courier. You call a courier, put you package in the van and away it goes travelling down a Comcast owned toll way. Along they way a bunch of Comcast hijackers jump out from behind a bush, pull the van over, grab your package and throw it into a ditch. The van driver informs you your package has been dumped, doesn't tell you exactly why, and you have to call another courier a hope this time the package makes it.

By the way, you get charged each and every time the courier drives on the Comcast toll way, even when the additional traffic is as a result of their, fraudulent actions. The actions are fraudulent because, it is costing you in additional computer time, in additional energy usage, in your lost time and of course additional traffic charges (all traffic counts especially when unlimited, ain't really unlimited).

Makes me wonder

[The-Ixian]

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.

Re:Makes me wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

SSL isn't going to protect against a man-in-the-middle attack unless you're verifying certificates. That means web pages are likely safe from manipulation by some intelligent equipment in the middle, but it seems unlikely that bittorrent nodes have certificates signed by a CA (otherwise, the device in the middle can just make its own self-signed cert as needed and you'll never know).

I'm pretty sure that equipment already exists which can do that for encrypted bittorrent traffic.

Merely delaying the packets - beyond the TTL

[GuyverDH]

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....

Just shy of the bullseye...

[glindsey]

He compared it to making a phone call and getting a busy signal, then trying again and getting through Hey, good phone analogy, but you're not quite right, Mr. Comcast Executive. Let me try to lend you a hand: it's like already being on a phone call and having it dropped in the middle of your conversation. Over and over and over. And it makes you so angry you vow you're going to cancel your service and switch to a competitor, except you can't, because they're the Phone Company, the only game in town.

At least, that's the way it works for a huge portion of Comcast's service area, including large swaths of Chicagoland.