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Comcast Sued Over P2P Blocking
CRISTAROL writes "Comcast has been sued by a California resident for blocking BitTorrent and other traffic. 'John Hart describes himself as a Comcast customer who has seen performance hits when using "Blocked Applications" targeted by Comcast's traffic management application, Sandvine. In his complaint, Hart says that Comcast severely limits "the speed of certain internet applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing and lotus notes [sic]." Comcast accomplishes this by "transmitting unauthorized hidden messages" to the PCs of those using the applications.' The lawsuit comes on the heels of an FCC complaint over the same issue."
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
The article was blocked just a few seconds ago. COINCIDENCE? hmm?
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Maybe comcast will start delivering what people paid for.
the title sez it all, fuckers. PENIS!
The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering. Who knows -- maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt). But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative.
I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation.
I'm not suggesting that this is the correct solution to the problem, but the thing you are describing is a "telecommunications common carrier", and extending that status to Internet access seems to be what you want.
-Peter
Fuck every single one of you.
You'd be correct in doubting it. IANAL, but:
It would seem to be that 1) Comcast has a scheme to make money (by having less in bandwidth costs), and 2) they fraudulently transmit interrupt signals to accomplish this.
Really, they should be prosecuted in criminal court, not sued in civil court.
Instead of blocking those apps that use more bandwidth, those Comcast fascists need to spend some of the money we customers pay to improve the network. Fuck it if the shareholders only make $13,490.00 per hour instead of $17,436.00. We're more important than their salaries or dividends.
Class Acion law suit? Would love to hop on that bandwagon if I could. Comcast used to be good but its stopped caring about its customers here in the Chicago area. The only alternative is DSL and we all know what thats like...
This is great news - I hope this will be an open and shut case. After all, it can be easily argued that comcast's injecting of RST packets as a way of throttling bandwith is a means to their own economic gain.
As much as I hated comcast's terrible idea and horrible implementation, I hated even more their being so cavalier about such a blatantly obvious violation of consumer rights. Fortunately, however, it's the same attitude that led up to this case.
Hopefully the judgment against Comcast will be severe enough to deal a crippling blow or at the very least serve as a stern warning to other companies that plan to mess with our bandwidth.
Normally I wouldn't put in a comment about P2P and legality, except that the past 3 times I used bittorrent it was legal use and I paid for the downloads. If thats getting throttled, and I'm still paying $55 a month for my comcast cable internets....I'm a little miffed.
Seriously. I mean, I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Comcast fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to download a 17 Meg file from one website on the internet to another internet. 20 minutes. At home, on my verizon wireless, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this comcast, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Youtube will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Slashdot is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered with various comcast accounts, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a comcast site that has loads faster than its verizon counterpart, despite comcasts' faster tube infrastructure. My cable modem with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this WIFI modem at times. From a web 2.0 standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the comcast is a superior service.
Comcast addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use comcast over other faster, cheaper, more stable service providers.
Nice try on the troll. I give it a 4/10, only because you actually had me asking myself, "hmm should download speed be affected by how old this computer is?" You totally blew it with the AOL reference though.
Nobody really wants ISPs to be common carriers. Part of being a common carrier is that you are required to be content-agnostic. Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc.
The big question is: Why doesn't the government treat them as a "telecommunications common carrier" in some cases? Thanks to Comcast's expansion into telephony (not as a backup carrier, but as a primary carrier) and their residential ISP monopoly, in some locations, they seem to be acting more like a common carrier than another service provider.
Was it the possibility of being treated as a common carrier that made them launch politically motivated ads for the "Modernization of the Telecommunications Laws" for the last few years?
This story was broken by the Wired blog Threat Level, then re-written by Ars Technica hours later with no real attribution as to where it found the story. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/comcast-sued-ov.html Please reward good journalism with attribution and traffic, instead of giving it to sites that make a habit of following on other outlets' stories without adding to the story.
"The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering."
Yeah, but isn't Comcast contracting them? It's not like they don't know what's going on with their own networks.
Going through legal channels is important, but until this makes its way through the courts (which could take a while), I don't think Comcast users are completely helpless.
What we really need is some clever client-side programming. A p2p client (or standard) that does some clever encryption, sends data hidden through other streams, etc. I'm not a network programming guru, but it seems like these programs can (or should) keep a step ahead of whatever recognition software that gets through the approval process for comcast servers.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
I'll endevour to try harder in the future. I'm giving your bite a 9/10, only because you smugly pointed out the link to AOL while completely missing the fact you're responding to a rehashed version of the (admittedly classic) 17 meg troll. You totally blew it by posting anonymously though.
Chin up, EFG!
EULA is overridden by California law and FCC regulations.
AT&T and others signed a net neutrality agreement for merging.
The same applies to comcast.
If they block any protocol, they get sued.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Last night I was uploading a file to mediafire.com at about 450kbps and 3 minutes into the upload session my internet connection was cut off. So I had to restart my cable modem. Then I reconnected and went back on mediafire, tried again... same thing happened. I reconnected the modem, then I tried one last time; my internet was cut off till the next day (today). I can only express disgust for Comcast if I was disconnected for uploading a file I needed for work. I didn't call Comcast because I hate being put on hold, but I probably should have verified if it was really them that cut me off. It's just weird that it happened 3 times during an upload session which used some bandwidth.
with Comcast representing a large part of their revenue - keep a look out for Douchebag Dave pulling out a few more million in stock before it nosedives...
they don't do any of that now, whats your point?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Do the users of comcast have a limited amount of bandwidth usage per account and do these 'hidden' messages count towards this bandwidth usuage? I think these are important questions as it would result in the customer being charged for a service they did not receive.
The funny thing about the Mac comment is that it was so true. Modern Macs are better, but I remember in the late 90s when every Mac was supposedly faster than its PC counterpart but in real life took longer to do damn near everything. I actually like the newer Macs but my God why did anyone buy them before about 2004?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
...just about a minute ago, the Boston Comcast cable TV service, during the Family Guy episode on [adult swim], did their monthly EBS test.
Stupid little fuckmonkeys!
I can't wait for Verizon to lay fiber here in Boston. Then it's "Screw Off, Comcast!"
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Good luck throwing a corporation in prison. ;-)
While not directly affected by Comcast's filtering policy, I for one hope this guy wins and sets a legal precedent on which other lawsuits against ISPs/OSPs can be based. As a student currently attending The University of Akron who resides on campus, I look forward to the day when EFF or ACLU pursues action against The University of Akron for violating student's rights in the same manner that Comcast has violated the rights of their customers. Shown here are some logs highlighted to show some of the filtering that is being done to students residing on campus. Not only is The University of Akron filtering Bittorrent traffic but also HTTPS, SSH, VPN, IMAP, NTP, and as well as many others that I may have missed. This filtering is not only intrusive to students that require secure access to remote resources, but is also counter productive to new innovation. I am appalled by the actions this, and many other, public institutions have taken towards the treatment of students and their rights online. For reference, the 130.101.239.250 address shown in the logs is that of my server. It is on 24 hours a day so feel free port scan it if you like. I suspect you won't be able to determine which ports are open due to all inbound traffic being blocked by the University as well.
IT'S COMCAST-IC!
We're all going to die. i intend to deserve it.
"Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc."
We don't have to think about it, buddy...we live it.
"Blocking customers" is a useless exercise that only gives the appearance of doing anything. It's easy for spammers to get new accounts, or activate more zombie PCs.
It's slow enough already!
P2P = stealing
There's no Robin Hood here. Downloaders hurt people: law abiding customers who have there own products degraded by the action of a few, and obviously, all the people who have the rug stolen from under their feet (the artists amongst others).
I think that Comcast is acting in good faith here and in the interests of its best customers.
Let's stop cheering for criminals, please.
Linux violates 235 Microsoft patents.
If I use my home phone in an abusive manner, I can lose my service. A simple example would be if I bought a home phone line and send out robo-calls advertising.
Also, phone companies offer restricted numbers, unlisted numbers, and the like. It's possible to set up an account that only accepts calls from specific numbers. This doesn't interefer with their common carrier status. Presumably ISP's could work in exactly the same way.
I am Canadian though, so things could be different south of the border.
First is exactly what is Comcast agreeing to provide? I seriously doubt they make any claims of unfiltered, unlimited access. They may not be disclosing all of the limitations on their service to customers, but have they in any way advertised services they are not providing?
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly to Comcast since there is no such thing as "common carrier" for an ISP, do they have any legal liability if it can be proven they are assisting users in gathering materials to which they are not legally entitled? Can Comcast (or Cox, Verizon, etc.) be sued for providing access and not blocking BitTorrent to the best of their ability?
My guess is that ISPs cannot be sued for providing access but that may change soon. The battle for music is over - it is freely available today. The battle over the value of movies and video is just beginning and is worth far more than music. Nobody is going to stand by and allow movies to be devalued to the extent that music has been. Nor is anyone with a high-speed internet connection going to pay for movies when they can be downloaded for free. Especially when they are high-quality DVD rips rather than silly camcorder copies.
Really amazes me the b*llshit people spew in their comments. Like they know anything other than what they read on another post. FYI Comcast does not oversell their bandwidth; in fact the company standard to not be over 70% capacity. If they are, they fix it. The network technicians are judged off of this metric and it drives the site bonus's. I have never had a problem with Comcast internet service. I am a heavy BT user and I have NEVER seen my speeds drop below those advertised on a torrent with a strong bandwidth pool nor received warning for using too much bandwidth even tho I might download 70gb and upload 30 in a month. The majority of these people complaining probably don't have their firewall open or some other retarded reason. I bet their torrents have 10 seeds and 2000 leechers and because they have Comcast and the speed is slow and they read an article....than it must be Comcast fault. Yea Comcast internet is pricey compared to DSL...but comparing DSL vs Cable internet isn't even comparable in most area's (DSL is slower and requires you pay for phone service or a premium with out). FIOS; I haven't looked into as it's not available in my complex but Comcast is testing 16/1 connections on the east coast and its working fine. Sure FIOS is offering 15/15 in some areas but really....Who needs 15 up for a legit reason. On a residential connection you are not authorized to run a server....and yes...seeding for BT is technically serving files so it still falls under "business" use which has completely differant speed tiers for business customers and prices. /endrant
There is no reason a corporation could not be locked up. It is simply a matter of judges and juries being willing. They are certainly able.
Blocking illegal activities and blocking specific protocols because they tend to use up more bandwidth than the ISPs like are two totally different things, don't confuse the issue.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sandvine is a local company here in Waterloo, Ontario. It has been a high flyer and a media/investor darling of late.
The local newspaper had an article , which I blogged about a few days ago, on Sandvine's technology and how it is involved in the Comcast debacle.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I am curious what law you might think assures you that Comcast cannot block stuff? I cannot imagine any legislation at any level that would do this.
What this comes down to is what an ordinary person would believe they are supposed to get vs. what is actually being provided. Arguing that you want to download movies from Eastern European servers is a non-starter. Perhaps downloading a Linux distribution might be a starting point, but I think that falls vastly outside of the knowledge of "an ordinary person".
I don't see any possible argument for Comcast not providing 100% of the service they are claiming to.
Can Comcast block spam? I mean, I'm just wondering. Because it seems like the end result of this line of argument is to give spammers a precedent that says "You must deliver our spam."
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
They want to know how much they can get away with. Stopping them now will be much better than fighting with them later!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Well, when they get 100% of the money for all the services they claim to provide, they better back it up by providing 100% service for all the services they contracted to provide me.
Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
Its simple and legal. Use the same arguments they use to make you pay.
Non-Emotional, robotic motions to legal recourse.
What it does it matter to them, if i use torrent to download SG-Atlantis or a Linux distro.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
I bet Comcast would settle before going to court.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Phone companies can still stop telemarketers, phone threats, war dialers, fraudulent marketing, and other forms of phone abuse. They don't really want to, but they can. Especially if they are using obscene amounts of resources like spammers and DOSers do. I don't think being a common carrier would present a problem for this type of stuff. Worst-case it would require some laws to clarify (or some dumb spammer to actually sue an ISP).
And BTW, judging from most Slashdot posters, everyone does want ISPs to be common carriers.
I use comcast as well, and I get disconnected for uploading things too. I usually try about three or four times before either giving up or somehow finishing my upload.
Apparently its all encrypted traffic, Notes just encrypts by default.
Please, explain further this wondrous idea of yours. My imagination has not yet figured it out.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Please, call it what it is: forgery. They aren't just filtering packets; they are sending extra packets to trick one of the two parties into thinking the other said something he didn't.
Just ask Zak!
Because phreaking is legal on common carrier phone companies?
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Ahhhh... i hope to see the day when a corporation is criminally convicted, and its registered office sealed as in house-arrest with its board inside.
Unfortunately, by a quirk of fate, the corporate veil (am studying Banking law), cannot be pierced except when government dues/taxes are due or in times of War.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I do not think that word means what they think it means.
I think he means shutting down the company. Seize all its assets, etc.
could Sink 7our
How is this modded "interesting"!? It's a stupid statement. They should be required to be content-agnostic on LEGAL content. Spam, worms, and DoS attacks are illegal, and thus should be blocked wherever possible. Miscellaneous P2P content (which is a really generic term anyway, they are actually blocking BitTorrent, but the same principle applies) is NOT illegal, so there is no good reason beyond their own business rules to interfere. And if they have not specifically stated in their TOS that they don't allow that traffic (and is THAT even legal for a supposedly "unlimited bandwidth" service?) I don't see how they can get away with what they are doing...
Actually, I don't want any rules outside a standard RFC implementation. I want nothing of mine blocked, filtered, scanned, or anything.
I don't know how many times I had had an application break or a server stop responding properly because SBC or TimeWarner decided to block some port in an effort to slow some worm or virus. They then give you the run around when asking what happened to the port. Nobody knows and claims it must be something wrong with your equipment so you end up checking everything again to finally find out that they blocked something and it took a day or two for them to get the memo to the people that answer the damn phones. That or they incorrectly flag some traffic as malicious with their filtering software and "clean" it, resulting in a corrupt DBF file set or incomplete transactions.
It would be a different story if they gave you the ability to opt out first but historically we haven't found out about anything until something is down for half a work day or corrupt or some other situation that causes a bunch of headaches. We pay for the internet, not some cut up representation of it. We should get everything we pay for.
I'm not sure if Northland is a subsidiary of Comcast or not, but here in Starkville, MS, we started noticing that whenever we start a Bit-Torrent transfer, our connect bogs down and we get "Connection Reset"s on every address visited until the Torrent is closed. Note: this was observed while running low transfer rates, so its not just a bandwidth issue. This just started happening within the past week. So, torrents for patch updates and legal downloads are now nixed. I wonder what sort of content companies like Comcast and Northland will decide is worth forging reset packets next.
Most ISP's put you behind a NAT anyway. You have to pay *extra* to get a routable IP address and accept incoming traffic without your specifically reaching out for content (such as Bittorrent does).
It's usually done to a specific office of a corporation. I've actually seen a store closed and its assets seized as part of a lawsuit, where the corporate headquarters refused to pay the fines they'd had levied against them.
I doubt the slowness of Lotus Notes is Comcast's fault -- more like Lotus' fault. If anything, Comcast blocking or sending "fraudulent" packets could only make Lotus software run faster (yes, seriously, they are _that_ slow). Comcast is really doing Lotus users a favor. Can't say the same thing for their anti-p2p efforts though.
Ok, those in the know feel free to point out errors and omissions in this BUT:
Wouldn't it be in Comcast's better interest to allow p2p on their own controlled network? As opposed to the apparent blanket "slowdown" that they've effected, it seems to me that it would make much more sense to only bottleneck at the routers that are at the fringe and connecting to other networks. It seem to me that every byte they can keep "in house" is significantly cheaper than the bytes that have to be passed off. And this applies to the entire speed limiting bit.
Think of it like this. If Comcast subscribers can share amongst themselves the latest Fedora 8 distro between each other, with no speed restrictions, isn't it cheaper than having us all pulling that same multi-gig image across multiple networks?
Seriously?
What kind of an backward and closed minded country do you live in, china?
Such things are completely unheard of in most civilized countries i thought
I see a few problems with this post. First off moderations top out at +5, and this is clearly a +500 post. Secondly there is a limited selection of categories, "Insightful" is just the best choice available: there's no "absofreakinlutely!" There's no visible "clone user and place clones in high government office" button. Once these things are rectified, I think this post would be the event favorite for the "best post ever" award. It would definitely be in the running for the Miss SlashdotPost Universe competition.
This is one of those posts that they should make copies of, freeze a few of them in carbonite as backups for future generations, broadcast several into space in all directions under various encodings and frequencies, make into posters, and finally amend to the constitution in several places, just to make sure it's noticed...
The Internet is the Internet. It's not my internet, it's not your internet, and it definitely isn't Comcast's internet.
Then you don't get out much. I take it you've never used AOL as a primary ISP?
Port 1352 does notes db replication (both client and server) and validation, if my memory serves me
I know notes sucks and people hate it here but its not that popular.
Comcast surprise me or is this a way to get people on to more expensive connections ?
the veil of incorporation can be pierced at any time if it is believed that a member or members of the board have personally acted illegally.
It is only when it is the company itself has behaved illegally that it cannot be, no one board member can be singled out and imprisoned.
What pisses me off the most is that they will lie to you over and over, a simple yes or no question and they lie. They could say yes, they could say no or they could say I don't know or even I'm not allowed to say, and I'd at least feel they have some respect; and I'm not talking just about Comcast.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
they are actually blocking BitTorrent well no I just fired up ktorrent at 0645 local time it connected to a lot of peers, send one or two packets to each then the connection closed wash rinse repeat. It's really pathetic, 0645 isn't prime-time or anything so why not let the traffic pass unmolested, but right know If I leave my peer seeding, the initial handshaking over and over is probably eating as much bandwidth as send the real traffic would. I could cut them some slack if they were doing the 8-10 AM and PM to save some bandwidth for prime-times, but they are just wholesale blocking now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
ISP's do (probably) work the same way, but in this case it's not the same thing.
The phone companies can stop particular numbers connecting as you say, but they don't stop different types of calls (telesales, work calls, prank calls, wrong number phone sex etc etc). To do that they'd have to listen in to check, which goes against that common carrier status and, I imagine, a whole bunch of other laws.
An ISP can do the same. I understand they can block connections and data based on where it was sent to/from quite easily. If they want to filter out one particular type then they're going to have to listen in and check every connection, which goes against that common carrier status and, I imagine, a whole bunch of other laws.
I don't see any possible argument for Comcast not providing 100% of the service they are claiming to.
Their commercials plastered all over the cable channels repeat things like "Unlimited", "faster downloads", "download music faster", "download video faster" and what I'm finding is invisible caps and my music and videos all but blocked; hell my grass-roots political brochures are being blocked by the same software as the despotic communistic Chinese government uses to suppress politics in their country.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
My torrents are completely legal because they're posted with the permission of the copyright holder - me.
When I was using an Eastlink cable modem in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ISP blocked me from downloading my own torrents, so I wasn't able to verify that they were working!
I think everyone who offers legal torrents, especially non-profit Open Source and Free Software organizations who provide installation isos via BitTorrent, should band together to defeat the blocking of BitTorrent downloads.
Is there a way we could file a class-action lawsuit?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
"I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column [livejournal.com] in our local weekly"
Sorry I cant view that my isp blocks blog access.
Of course we sued over the blocking, it was a tough fight but they finally agreed to the block.
Ohboy...I think this is going to be a case of a guy with one legitimate complaint, into which he builds other things that have no basis at all. Lotus Notes...slow over a remote link? Yeah...it is. But it has nothing to do with Comcast. Where I work now, we have Notes, and the problem is that the Notes needs to talk back to the Notes server whenever you do ANYTHING. I mean, when you're scheduling a meeting, and you go from the "description" field to the "start time" field, it chats with the server. Obviously, in client-server terms, this is a bag of , and I personally think that whoever architected Notes should go , with a broomstick. But it's not Comcast's fault; the same exact behavior happens whether I'm at home (using Comcast) or at the remote office (over a Verizon DSL link). It's equally slow, either time.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I thought only AOL did that!
The only NAT I have is in my house and i have total controll over what it does and dosent do.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Isn't the point to this lawsuit (like the FCC ruling) that Comcast's tactics for controlling traffic illegal rather than controlling traffic in the first place?
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
Unfortunately, by a quirk of fate, the corporate veil (am studying Banking law), cannot be pierced except when government dues/taxes are due or in times of War.
Does the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror" qualify?
the veil of incorporation can be pierced at any time if it is believed that a member or members of the board have personally acted illegally.
If this were not the case anyone planning a crime would incorporate...
Namely, the Actiontec router they use. It's not just a router, it also demultiplexes the TV stream from the fiber, so you can't just substitute your own.
Problem is, the firmware in the router doesn't work very well. Those who have done more experiments than I, claim the NAT address mapping table is *way* too small. The symptoms are that you have intermittent connection loss...my experience was with a wireless link, and we lost the connection at random, 2-3 times a day...no problem, just restart the interface, but the point is, Verizon's not perfect either
I think Time Warner/Road Runner is doing something like this well. Fire up bit torrent and the transfer speed starts fast then drops off within a few minutes and it will get to zero. The cable modem will show a connection but I wont be able to get online. Its frustrating.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
this happens to me too.
only when i start up azereus tho, doesn't matter what i'm downloading, open office, ubuntu 7.10 or a south park episode (matt and trey have openly said they don't mind)
it will run fine for a solid week, and i've replaced my router twice, with two different brands. (two cable modems too.
I also get 5 second drops in service every 90 min or so, sometimes more frequent.
So what happens if I decide to be a moron for a moment and accidentally rate your comment down instead of up, like I intended?
Do I have to buy you a pizza or something?
Oh, I see...I just post this comment and undo my mistake. That's nice.
If you would still like a pizza, just let me know.
Blocking a port is definitely not a neutral thing to do. It isn't part of any spam filtering, security, or traffic rule. Blocking a port is like saying you can't dial a "7" because someone with a "7" in their phone number did something bad. That is definitely not included by any of the examples listed in the parent posts.
We are actually talking about people being improsined, not assetts being seized. Assetts being taken happens all the time. But actually seeing members of the board, you know the people who made the decision to do something illegal, being carted of to prison is very rare.
"But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative."
Not to mention arguably may be complicit to further their business schemes:
Comcast in my area often has crappy or poor TV signal. You don't have much choice except to bittorrent to see an episode before the next one shows. I find this bad enough (you're using bandwidth of a service you pay for other purposes (internet) to make up for the same company's incompetency at providng the primary service (TV)), but I have broadband for other reasons, so I don't mind so much.
But if you think of it from the standpoint of a TV signal only buyer, the only legal manner to get that farked episode often is to pay for their "on demand" and digital service. Or hope it's one of the shows that goes up on itunes or a few days on one of the networks. In any case, you have to have additional Comcast services in order to get around their "poor signal quality" or screen lockups--digital service to get on-demand or broadband to download (legal or not) internet available stuff. Which means more money for Comcast.
So that TV monopoly coupled with copyright law often benefits the business that is incompetenet. (Note that in Pennsylvania due to reworking of the huge (billions of dollars) tax benefits Verizon got when they were supposed to be supplying high speed internet to underserved areas, Comcast is the only provider of broadband, and many broadband providers were pushed out because of the anti-competitive tax benefits that went to Verizon at a time when those smaller companies were trying to get off the ground. And that's overlooking the PUC guidelines which locks up telephone lines so that non-Verizon ISPs can't run lines without exorbitant costs passed onto the customer. I so hope WiMax might be an answer to all this BS, like cell service and VOIP allowed me to kick Verizon's ass to the curb.)
"Wow, are you bought and paid for? Looking at the homepage and sig.., Bill.. is that you?"
Yes I find that those who don't agree with me are bought and paid for. Nice to know the "If you're not with me, you're against me" argument is alive and well in political America.
"P2P != stealing in such a broad sense."
Well while P2P usage isn't stealing. Anyone who tells you that the majority of it's usage isn't illegal likewise has their head in a dark place. I know that no one here wants to admit that because you all fear your tool will be taken away from you. But this just shows what happens when you all remain silent on the abuse of P2P, and even worse you actively denounce anyone who points out this fact.
"Go crawl back into your perfect little hole."
Apparently manners is the other thing to go in a failing nation.
I think a lot of people need to be educated to the fact that not all file sharing involves copyrighted files! Of course, the Slashdot community realizes this, but everyone from ISPs to lawmakers to record labels need to realize that file sharing is used for many legitimate purposes. My company's GigaTribe (http://www.gigatribe.com) software, for example, allows people to share picture folders on their harddrive with family members on the other side of the world, thereby eliminating endless email attachments or mailing DVDs. We have users that use the application to back up dozens of gigabytes of stuff to another computer, and many of our users are professionals (teachers, photographers, webdesigners, etc...). In that sense, it's like other tools, guns and automobiles don't break laws, people do. Many tools have both legitimate and illegal usages.
Personally I would prefer it. I dont want my feed to determine what I should get. I rely on my firewall, machines, and other things at my house that can control whether I get spam, DoS, worms, etc. I'd much rather blame myself for getting a virus, than lose email because my ISP deemed it spam or have my connection throttled. I had a problem recently where I kept getting connection resets because I was uploading about 40 gigs of data to my website (chess endgame tablesbases). Guess whatever my ISP uses for throttling keeps seeing it as a large continuous upload and assumes it must be illegal when in fact the data is 100% public domain.
Uhh, not in a LONG time (read: over a decade ago), but when I did use them I was using IRC. I had a globally valid IP address that could accept incoming (DCC chat/DCC send/IM file transfers/etc) connections.
Did that change?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I guess this means no more World of Warcraft updates, since they use torrents.
He made this same argument in another story about Comcast and stopped replying to posts when people asked him to name a few ISPs that do this.
While I'm sure there are small remote ISPs that NAT their customers by default (and by remote I mean remote... think Alaskan wilderness), it's not even close to being a standard practice in the United States and the number of people affected by it are so small that it hardly bears mentioning.
A few people have claimed that AOL does it. They didn't used to (over a decade ago I had them... always had globally valid IPs when I went outside of AOL and used internet apps), but it might have changed for all I know. In any case, I'd hardly call AOL an "ISP".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No restrictions on running a server? Not according to my Bellsouth/AT&T contract - that's specifically forbidden.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I debugged some friends' and relatives' setups. It was certainly the case 4 years ago for at least some of their network. It's also common in PPP or PPPoE setups, that share an upstream IP address this way.
Yeah, you said this in the last Comcast discussion, but you couldn't name a single ISP that actually does it as I recall.
It's also common in PPP or PPPoE setupsWith whom? I've used PPPoE on two different DSL providers (Frontier and Verizon) and neither of them did it. As far as AOL goes, can anybody actually confirm it? My last experiences with them they gave out globally valid IPs for internet activities. Does anybody even use AOL anymore? ;)
Name me a halfway mainstream ISP that does this. Until then I'm calling bullshit.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
welp, it was only a matter of time. let this be a lesson to the rest of you BOFH ISPs
Well, when they get 100% of the money for all the services they claim to provide, they better back it up by providing 100% service for all the services they contracted to provide me.
:D
Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
The problem is they believe they can get away with it. If it's in their TOS/AUP (no matter how grey it might be), they are willing to push and see if they can get away with it. They won't actually break the law. Heaven forbid. But they will push it to the edge. They've been doing stuff like that for years apparently.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
They did that once and was slapped hard in court in 2002 I believe. I did a google for "Comcast" and "1984 privacy act" and found they were monitoring what you did but it's ok they told the court, it was only in specific areas. they claim they have since stopped.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
I bet Comcast would settle before going to court.
Perhaps. They have it in the TOS/AUP however that you can't run a server and since uploading it considered a server activity....
I guess nobody taught Comcast that POST operations in a browser is also uploading... but I digress
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
No kidding. A lot of games are starting to use Bittorrent for patches now. In particular, World of Warcraft does this. The latest patch clocks in at around 220mb. Granted, there are mirrors available if you can't download the patch for some reason, but those who are not knowledgeable enough to look for this and just know "the Blizzard downloader gave an error" aren't going to know what to do. I'm on Comcast in Portland, OR, and I haven't seen any issues with torrents being shut down. In fact, my upload speed for torrents (even as recently as this week) have always basically stayed at whatever I tell the torrent application to cap the upload speed at. It's possible that Comcast isn't doing this in all areas. I have to agree though...traffic shaping for QoS reasons is perfectly fine. Prioritizing packets by protocol is fine, by source is not. However, doing a man-in-the-middle attack and using spoofed packets to shut down torrents is NOT fine, and is actually illegal, and this needs to be stopped now before other ISP's get ideas.
Regardless of EULA this is not typically legal. It's not for the vendor to determine the usage of their product typically, and generally the customer is paying for the right to make that decision within limits. I've never dealt with another business isp that had done this or even thought they could get away with it. When your network infrastructure cannot handle the load it's time to build more infrastructure so that you can support the bandwidth requirements that you have already sold your customers. Basically, it's NMFP. You cannot "project" bandwidth usage without sampling it over time and you cannot expect your ideal of traffic to match the reality at all times. Frankly if I was a business customer I'd never use Comcast simply for this fact. More and more large sets of files (operating systems, patches, etc) are being bittorrented.. thugging torrents just keeps us techies from being able to do our work.
If this guy sues and wins great for them maybe someone will figure out that you cannot promise someone a full 8 meg connect and not really give them one where it counts (downloading ridiculously large items).
- Mind
End of Line.
So, we might see the next ad spin this like: "Comcast protects web users from those nasty file sharers that are so frequently overloading the internet".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The reasonable clause in the section you quoted is "... that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN..." They give some examples, but it would only seem to preclude it if you are providing services or content to the public or non-residents.
If you interpret the clause any other way, you are basically prohibited from running email at all, since every email program receives, sends, and stores email.
There is also a prohibition against running "proxy servers", but the intent is *public access* proxy servers, not proxy servers that keep your kids from getting into porn sites, which a lot of people do.
Your interpretation of that AUP basically makes their service completely worthless.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Corporations are not people. You can't "lock them up". In fact, that is the very reason the corporation exists (among many others...)
You can fine them. You can punish them. You can even put them out of business. But you can not "lock up the corporation". You might be able to lockup the officers of said corporation and we've already seen examples of that (Enron) but those are much more specific cases of fraud than what you are alluding to.
Corporations are legal entities. But they are different legal entities than people.
Well, the one I'm using now does it. Some of the ISP's that Comcast bought up in their swath of purchasing 4 years ago did it.
The whole point of limited liability is to avoid accountability. That is the sole reason corporations exist: we as a society, at some point, decided it was desirable to reward certain types of risk-taking by limiting the possible downside of the risk.
Somehow we got lost, though. We started granting this favor automatically, instead of evaluating each situation and thinking about whether it was desirable or not.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
And the one your using now is called, what, exactly?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
i do not see how a corporation could be "locked up". an equivalent of a death penalty (via revoking the corporate charter) would be quite possible though.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I've actually run into this in the Chicago suburbs.
:)
www.foxvalley.net does it, unless you pay an extra 5 or 10$/mo (I forget, had them for a while, they have a traffic cap somewhere around 150-300gb/mo). They're hardly in the boonies, unless you're from the Chicago area... then yes, they're considered REMOTE.
Does anyone know how to join this class action?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I understand that there is no alternative to the overpriced and underpowered service here in the states so I can't recommend a good alternative to Comcast. They are all horrible. That being said this is no time to praise Comcast. Before I came back to the states I was paying about $40 for a 100mb connection and my uploads speeds were many times that of Comcasts. Plus I didn't need to pay for basic cable or a lan line. When confronted with this information our dear providers reply that we don't need those kind of speeds right now and that the services in Japan etc aren't actually as fast as advertised. What they don't tell you is that at 100mb they could be 1/5th of the speeds advertised and still blow Comcast's services away. Also if we didn't need those higher speeds they would not be throttling P2P traffic in the first place.
You could just freeze the assets for the duration of the punishment. You could require the doors of the corporation to be... Well locked. Putting all assets inside of a building with locked doors where they cannot interact with entities outside of the building would be very much like putting a person inside of a building with locked doors where they cannot interact with entities outside of the building.
Although, I do believe that if the crime is serious enough, it should warrent the 'death penalty'.
I wonder if it's the same person? Maybe it's an inside job? :-) Wierd!
I use Slashdot with an alias for good reasons, and don't wish to give out that level of detail.
Or would you care to post your mother's maiden name, your credit card number, and your date of birth?
TW does that to me when I use IRC, though it seems related to data transmission amount (Aka reach 5 MB through X and it gets cut). Not sure why they do it, but they do...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
After all, if this technology is censoring an entire communist nation, how might this be used against OUR public in the future, if the structure is already in place? Though a little far fetched, could this be a paid project my Microsoft as a burden on distributing Linux to the public, seen as Comcast as a win-win due to the reduced overhead on their network? I know that's an extreme example, but who's to say an agreement like that COULDN'T be struck if not for antitrust legislature?
If I could switch to another provider as a statement of my displeasure, I certainly would. That's just not really an option.
You're not paranoid if they really ARE out to get you...
Actually, the GP mentions his post in responce to his parent saying something along the lines of "Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc." His reply was "Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider." His entire posts seems to be a "we don't mind if they do stuff as long as there is good reason". This isn't the case at all. I don't want any of my traffic messed with, none of my ports blocked and I don't need you to protect me from virus activity or anything of the likes.
I signed up for the Internet and ever last piece of traffic I generate or that is intended for my connection should go and come without restrictions, manipulation, filtering, or anything else happening to it. If they want to kick people off for infected computers, let them notify them and terminate their service. Don't throttle a protocol, block a port or any type of communication that I might be using. I purchased the Internet, not some rendition of it. I don't want rules. I can handle the bad more reliably then they can do it for me.
Anyone that wants rules should just go ahead and sign up for AOL. AOL has plenty of rules.
pirate puts tiny ding in hull of nuclear submarine
Ktorrent is just a BitTorrent client that uses KDE. Comcast blocks the BitTorrent PROTOCOL, who cares what UI you are using.
yeah that would be how I know that comcast aren't blocking, sealing off the ports the bittorrent protocal communicates blocking, what they are really doing is far more nefarious.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds