Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Comcast Sued Over P2P Blocking

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-us-pirate-music-at-a-reasonable-speed dept.

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."

8 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. About time by proudfoot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Maybe comcast will start delivering what people paid for.

    1. Re:About time by mtmra70 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While I agree that it sucks they are blocking P2P apps, I will have to admit their service is pretty darn good. A few case examples:

      1) My cable went out at 12am. At 1am I dedcided to give their tech support a ring. I called the number, selected the broadband option, entered my phone number and within 30 seconds I was connected to an AMERICAN technician. I told him I thought our entire cable system went out. He logged into our local node and confirmed our entire area was out.

      This being a Saturday night I asked him if it would be fixed over the weekend. To my suprise he said it would be fixed in a couple hours after rolling a truck. Sure enough, I wake up at 8am and all was better.

      This is about the 6 call to Comcast and every call has been answered promptly by an American and handled in the upmost professional manner. The same cant be said for SBC/ATT 1st level phone support.

      2) I subscribe to their 8Mb/768Kb plan and consistantly receive 8Mb plus transfer rates. The Speedboost to 16Mb is AMAZING! I purchased TF2 over Steam and started the 7GB download. To my suprise I was receiving it at 1.5MB-2.0MB/sec and it was completed in 60min!!!! The same couldn't be said for ATT's DSL.

      Sadly, I may be moving soon and out of the Comcast area. At least AT&T's DSL is cheaper than what it used to be (and hopefully the same reliability).

  2. Comcast shouldnt stand in our way by cynicsreport · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:A good precedent by Dr.+Donuts · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually no, it's not that simple.

    If Comcast were simply prioritizing packets, that would be one thing. However, the contention is they are spoofing packets back to the clients. Think of it this way, you type in a web address and get back an error message saying the host wasn't available and that error was being generated *by the carrier*, and not the actual website. In that case, the carrier is impersonating the destination and returning false information.

    Comcast claims they are not doing this, although some critics have claimed they have irrefutable proof that they are in fact doing that.

    As always, the devil is in the details.

  4. Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS by PhxBlue · · Score: 5, Funny

    Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc.
    They do that now? I hadn't noticed.
    --
    !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
  5. Can Comcast block spam? by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  6. Re:Pay to steal by blackdew · · Score: 5, Funny

    We all know that only terorists use linux, and only pirates use p2p. If you download linux via bittorent you must be a terorist-pirate. Allahu-Akbar-Yarr!

  7. Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS by sumdumass · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.