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Comcast Continues to Block Peer to Peer Traffic

Posted by Zonk on from the seems-to-have-a-hyperinflated-sense-of-self dept.

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.

2 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Archaic Cable shared node topology is to blame by toadlife · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Comcast Censoring YouTube also?? by pfbram · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/).