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Comcast Continues to Block Peer to Peer Traffic
narramissic writes "A report released Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finds that Comcast continues to use hacker-like techniques to slow down customers' connections to some P-to-P (peer-to-peer) applications. The EFF said that Comcast appears to be injecting RST, or reset, packets into customers' connections, causing connections to close. 'The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online. Comcast has said that it doesn't block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.'" If you're the type that always looks for a silver lining, Comcast's skulduggery may be pushing Congress to reconsider Net Neutrality.
Check out this article posted by George Ou at ZDNet a couple of weeks ago.
The reason Comcast is doing this is because the shared node topology of Cable can't handle all of the connection requests. Similar to a bunch of Windows 95 boxes running NETBUI on a large non-switched network, bittorrent causes a a ton of contention. The result are packet storms which end up taking everyone out.
Of course Comcast won't say, "The reason we do this is because our entire infrastructure is shit and needs to be replaced." The stockholders wouldn't like that.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'm a fan of YouTube (who isn't), but hadn't logged into my account for awhile and forgot the password when I tried commenting on a video. I had a reminder sent to my comcast e-mail account a day or two ago -- and it's been about 36 hours, and it never arrived! Assuming something was hosed with my YouTube account, I decided to create a new account, still no activation e-mail sent.
I then changed my YouTube preferences to my GMail account, and the confirmation e-mail arrived within like 2 minutes. No surprise, since Google owns both GMail and YouTube. But my curiosity was now aroused, so I changed the e-mail preferences on YouTube to my work account (I'm an open source programmer at a Big-10 university). Again, the YouTube confirmation came within like 2 minutes or so.
I logged into comcast.net under my main subscriber e-mail account today -- and deactivated ALL spam/filtering on that account. I then went back to YouTube and switched preferences back to my comcast account. It's been about 4 hours and, of course, there's been no e-mail from YouTube.
Anyone else notice this oddness between YouTube / Comcast? It irked me enough to create a little web site of it this afternoon, and post it on my blog as well (http://paulbramscher.blogspot.com/).
Well, one way to do it:
1. No ISP shall give preferential handling to, modify, fail to deliver, or alter the content of traffic based on either its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content.
Exception: If a quality-of-service mechanism becomes widely used over the Internet, such as setting a time-critical flag on certain traffic (online gaming, VoIP, etc.), ISP's may give preferential handling to traffic so flagged, as long as:
a) the mechanism for requesting a higher QoS for certain traffic is widely known and available, such that anyone can use it;
b) the preferential treatment given to time-critical content is given equally to all traffic claiming to need a higher QoS without regard for its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content;
Exception: Traffic which is clearly and unambiguously malicious may be dropped. "Malicious", in this case, means either:
a) It is intended to interfere with the correct operation and control of the recipient's equipment, if the recipient of the traffic is a customer of the ISP. This includes, but is not limited to, denial-of-service traffic and exploit attempts. However, an ISP must honor a request in writing by a customer to cease filtering inbound malicious traffic to them.
b) It is generated by a program running without the consent of, and against the wishes of, the owner of the sending computer, if the sender is a customer of the ISP.
c) Such traffic consists of unsolicited commercial email, and the customer has requested that the ISP filter inbound email to remove spam.
Can't you just write a iptables rule to drop RST packets destined for your bittorrent port? You could even get clever about it and drop RST packets that come out of the blue, but allow repeated RST packets to pass, so that connections that have really be reset on the far end can be closed.
While it is popular to claim something is illegal when the statement should be more like It should be illegal, I would be more along the belief that something like fraud or something along those lines.
I looked but couldn't find the a law on a federal level but saw a few state laws in passing that include using the Internet to commit fraud and causing the interruption of Internet services in that act. Now suppose that their interference can be considered defrauding you of services they sold you and suppose that interfering with the data streams was the method for doing this, even though it is on their network, I imagine something could be twisted enough to apply.
I look at it this way, Suppose you purchased a printer that printed 20 pages per minute. Says so right on the box and on the printer itself. Now, when you get home, you find that you have to buy the turbo module at a cost more then the printer in order to get that advertised performance. And when you complain, they tell you that it is done this way to protect their supply network. What sort of laws apply? Suppose that you have to feed the paper manually one sheet at a time and push a button after it is started without the turbo module which could be similar to having to monitor and restart your torrent or whatever.
Now, what sort of laws would apply, would they be criminal or civil in nature, and seeing how comcast is a regulated entity, is there a state oversight organization that fields complaints already. In ohio, the public utilities commission has some oversight of time warner I think. I have used them in the past to help get complaints again Cell phone providers taken care of. I think it probably is illegal in some way under some laws. I just don't know the specific ones or if I am correct in that assumption. But the oversight necessary might already be there.
Comcast sells the Internet, not some Internet like service. Their willful failure to deliver reliably might not sit well with local regulators either. At minimum, they should be forced to be honest and up front about their tampering with P2P applications before you purchase their service. and where there are no other options because of Comcasts government granted monopoly, there should be a way around it.
They don't interfere with your downloading, they interfere with your uploading. You can download to your heart's content at full speed - I've seen my 7Mbit Comcast cable connection spike as high as 20Mbit for more than 30 seconds, while downloading particular things with 500+ seeders online. This is difficult with Windows due to the built-in connection limit, but it's very easy on Linux or Mac. I can download folders larger than 6GB in less than three hours, with an avg. speed roughly being around 700 - 750KB/s.
It's when you go to make an upload connection to another peer. BitTorrent wouldn't work at all (uploading or downloading) if Comcast just shot your upload connections down from the start; instead, they kill it after 30 seconds. I've timed it hundreds of times, from the time I announced to the tracker - it's always almost exactly 30 seconds. Unless you hammer the tracker with manual announcements or have a client that's smart enough to reconnect the peer "just to see" if it "really wanted to reset", you can't upload more than for 30 seconds at a time without either hammering the tracker, or taking excessive measures (it's been discovered that reconnecting the client as if it were just announced, upon being dropped, while causing somewhat odd client behavior, will work around the problem).
This is a serious issue if you're a member of invite-only torrent sites where you don't get to download unless you've uploaded enough; it's also a serious issue if a lot of Comcast customers happen to use your BitTorrent-distributed product.
The "quality assurance" cover is completely bogus - that's not what's going on. First of all, they're not hampering my upload speeds, they're dropping the connection completely after a set amount of time. How, exactly, does my uploading stuff on BitTorrent affect other customers' experience? Increase the bandwidth bill maybe, but that's not what's going on... they could easily throttle the speed down, but that's not what they're doing.
I used to work for an ISP. Uploading doesn't hamper other customers' experience - downloading does. I think it's more plausible that they're being paid to screw up private BitTorrent trackers.