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

Sure, Comcast.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

On that note, I'm not "cancelling" my service with you. I'm merely "delaying" signing back up with your company (indefinitely).

Re:Sure, Comcast.

[Mille Mots]

I think a more apt analogy would be something like, "I'm not refusing to pay my bill. Think of it as having the check returned for NSF and then having to resubmit it and it goes through." I'm sure that they wouldn't have a problem with that, considering all the Nigerian scammers out there trying to get your routing information.

"Postponing..."

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

So they're not actually stopping the transfers, they're postponing them indefinitely.

*Sigh of relief*

Re:"Postponing..."

[dunkelfalke]

it's not dead, it's resting ;-)

Re:"Postponing..."

[Adambomb]

It is an Ex-Packet!

I'm not delinquent in paying my bill

[mandark1967]

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....

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....

[Anonymous Coward]

what is this "gym" you speak of?

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.

Re:Makes me wonder

[walt-sjc]

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.

Re:Makes me wonder

[norton_I]

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.

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....

False advertising?

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

Comcast is still lying -- and not just about this

[Arrogant-Bastard]

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.

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.

Re:Interesting (...speaking of FIOS)

[Arrogant-Bastard]

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.

Re:Laughable concept, post-dating

[Hellkitten]

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.

That's because they both work for the phone companies