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Comcast Admits Delaying, Not Blocking, P2P Traffic

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the oh-yeah-thats-fine-then-nevermind dept.

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."

3 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. False advertising? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Makes me wonder by walt-sjc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From what I understand, they are forging packets that make your BT client think that peers have hung up on you. Since they (comcast) are the man-in-the-middle, they can easily perform these types of attacks.

    And that's what this is. An attack. QOS would just slow things down, this kills. I don't mind QOS. I do mind active damage.

    It's time to take p2p to the next level - implementing some of the concepts of the old freenet (the encryption part) and make the traffic unidentifiable. Maybe move it to UDP and make it look like DNS. Or Skype.

  3. Re:Makes me wonder by norton_I · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Technically that is certainly true. You could make the legal argument that presenting a certificate as belonging to another organization if fraud.

    Not that it matters for the moment. Comcast can't currently afford to intercept all SSL connections, inspect the certificate to see if they can forge it, and proxy the connection just to do packet inspection.

    Furthermore, I think you can prevent that. Essentially, create a new "CA" key whenever you create a .torrent file, and include the public key in the .torrent. Then, on-the-fly build a chain of authority stemming from that key. Then, whenever you get directed to a new peer, the message includes a public key for that peer, signed by your current peer, and so forth. Even if comcast tries to join the network to disrupt it, they can't disrupt communication between nodes when the chain-of-authority does not use their keys, and if tampering is detected, their keys can be revoked, un-authenticating any bogus keys they have generated and signed.

    Sounds like a fun project, actually, assuming it doesn't already exist.