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Senators Call For Hearing On Carrier Content Blocking
HangingChad writes "Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones. Now that the Senate is getting into the act, Comcast will probably want to come up with some new talking points as their old ones were leaked."
Comcast doesn't filter Bittorrent--they FALSIFY RST packets in order to terminate connections, which is wire fraud and therefore completely illegal.
You're kidding, right?
Look at the history of the world. The entirety of China has never lived under anything other than a totalitarian form of government (the specific form of totalitarianism has changed over time but the fact that the form has been totalitarian has not). The entirety of Russia has similarly done so except for the relatively brief period of time after the Berlin Wall fell. Those two countries alone are probably enough to make my case, but there's a lot more. India was totalitarian for its entire history until 1950. The entirety of Europe was totalitarian until the mid to late 1700s. The Roman Republic and the lands it represented were briefly nontotalitarian (for about 450 years) but were totalitarian otherwise -- the Republic lasted until the advent of the Roman Empire, which itself lasted about the same amount of time. After that, it was ruled by one empire or monarchy or another until about 1950. After that, it's been democratic (the specific time that any given territory of the Roman Empire went with democracy depends, but very few appear to have done so earlier than about 1800). And then, of course, you have the Egyptian Empire, which lasted longer than any other government ever.
See a pattern here? Throughout history and throughout the world, totalitarianism is the norm. Freedom and self-determination are very much the exception. Real democracy as a form of government (where the people have a real say in their government) isn't new at all, but it's rare.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I hear this mantra repeated again and again on Slashdot.
Public investment in telecommunications in the U.S. has - historically - been negligible.
When the moon and stars have been properly aligned you just might you get funding from Congress for a demonstration project like the first Atlantic cable or an Appalachian Co-Op during the New Deal.
But, with these modest qualifications, it's fair to say that the privately financed American telco has always owned and built the lines. Western Union had a transcontinental telegraph service up and running in 1861.
My business has 2 SMTP servers out on the net, but Comcast blocks outbound port 25 under the guise of limiting spammers. They encourage usage of their SMTP servers, but we routinely send pictures with our emails because we are in the construction business. Comcast simply times out sending large files (5-10Mb). Thus, my business is adversely affected. Complaints have been met with silence.
I'm guessing since you have your own mail server, you can configure it to accept mail on the submission port, 587. Just a thought...
I know in this case, they'd be completely against censorship of any form.
Freedom of Speech to the Founders meant "unconstrained" political debate among responsible adults --- but they could be prickly about the libels and slanders of their opposition.
It goes without saying that women and blacks were not invited to the party.
In those times, Freedom of Speech did not mean that Boston had to provide a stage for the sexual farces that entertained audiences in France.
Public investment in telecommunications in the U.S. has - historically - been negligible.
True when taken literally, however Verizon and others have received millions in tax breaks (if not outright investment) for fiber over the last decade.
Not true. They use public rights of way all the time. Can you just wander out into the street and start tearing into it with construction equipment? The telcos can, why do you think they are allowed to tear up public property, often for free? Why are they allowed to dig trenches through private property where they find it necessary? Not all "subsidies" are money. For instance, the coal industry gets a huge subsidy, they get to kill people for free. Can you do that? Do you think it maybe makes their business model a little more profitable?
Bullshit. Public investment doesn't have to come directly from congress http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2006/05/12/telcos-lay-billion-goose-egg. When congress allows the telecoms to charge more, to build on public easements, or to screw their competitors and offer more services than they should fairly be allowed to, it's the public paying the tab. We've let them have more than enough leeway with what is rightfully the public's infrastructure.
I'm posting at score 0 because this is post is redundant (see my other post here), but what you want is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act paragraph (a)(5)(A)(i) prohibiting the sending of these sorts of computer commands and paragraph (e)(8) defining 'damage' to include denial of data access. If you want to reply, reply at the linked post.
I think the bittorrent folks need to come up with a revision to their software that includes, in the datastream, a peer-to-peer message, properly encrypted, that tells the other peer, in effect: "this stream IS continuing, it has NOT been terminated, regardless of what you may receive to the contrary - any status message you receive that is NOT properly authenticated through encryption is bogus, so continue the transfer".
;-)
Since the very early days of computer communiciation, the security guys have been telling us "Secure communication is only possible if the entire conversation is encrypted end-to-end by the high-level software." They've usually been talking about keeping the conversation private, but this applies equally well to cases where an opponent is trying to sabotage the conversation, as Comcast is doing.
To my knowledge, there's nothing in the IP (or TCP or UDP) headers that would identify a conversation as bittorrent. If the packets' contents are all encrypted, it's not likely that an ISP could sabotage the conversation, other than by sabotaging all your traffic. Anyone know a way to identify a fully-encrypted bittorent packet stream?
More generally, this sort of thing should encourage us to move toward encrypting everything. This has already happened with a lot of major apps. Thus, telnet and rsh are all but gone on unix/linux systems, replaced by ssh. Similarly, file-transfer packages like ftp and rcp have been supplanted by scp, and rsync routinely uses ssl to encrypt its traffic. Most browsers and web servers support "https"; we just have to persuade people to use it more. VoIP can be encrypted by many of the packages that use it. (Can it be identified as VoIP if encrypted?)
We have reached a rather sad state, in which major corporations feel that it's OK for them to knowingly sabotage their customers who are using the product as it was designed to be used. But it does seem that we have a lot of renegade telecom corporations who do engage in such sabotage against their customers. So we should be working on defenses.
It does seem fairly obvious that we can't expect much help from any government here, since most governments (including the US) actively cooperate with the renegade telecom companies. So it looks like a situation where we should be calling on the "hacker" population to work on the universal encryption that we need.
Of course, we could just go to IPv6, right? Nah; that'll never happen.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Good show of this was the Enron California power outages when "market forces" decided they needed to make a profit off of old grannies. Ironically the governor who let the market forces work got recalled and the rest is history. So much for the free market.