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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.
Never ascribe to skulduggery that which can be adequately explained by asshattery.
I think the problem may be due to their new cable modem hookup diagram.
Here is the official load of crap you get if you bitch about it to them .....
-- begin bunch of shit ---
Thank you for contacting Comcast Cable Mark.
Thank you for writing to us in response to reports about Comcast's
efforts to manage peer-to-peer traffic on our networks.
Mark, we have posted new FAQs on our Web site making clear to our
customers the steps we are taking to protect the customer experience for
all of our customers. You may access content related to this issue in
the FAQ section of http://www.comcast.net/
First, and most importantly, you should know that Comcast does not block
access to any Web site or application, including peer-to-peer services
like BitTorrent. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and
uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing
digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications
like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online.
Mark, we have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a
good Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage
our network so that you can continue to enjoy these applications.
Peer-to-peer activity consumes a disproportionately large amount of
network resources, and therefore poses the biggest challenge to
maintaining a good broadband experience for all users, including the
overwhelming majority of our customers who don't use P2P applications.
It is important to note, however, that we never prevent P2P activity, or
block access to any P2P applications, but rather manage the network in
such a way that this activity does not degrade the broadband experience
for other users.
Mark, network management is absolutely essential to provide a good
Internet experience for our customers. All major ISPs manage their
traffic in some way and many use similar tools.
Comcast believes we have a responsibility to our customers to provide
this service. Network management helps us perform critical work that
protects our customers from things like spam, viruses, the negative
effects of network congestion, or attacks to their PCs. As threats on
the Internet continue to grow, our network management tools will
continue to evolve and keep pace so that we can maintain a good,
reliable online experience for all of our customers.
I understand you have some questions about Comcast's policies. You can
view all of the Comcast Subscriber Agreements and Policies by visiting
the Comcast Online Customer Support Center at http://www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber.jsp
On this site you will find the Subscriber Agreement, the Acceptable Use
Policy, and other policies relating to your Comcast Service. You can
also view our Privacy Policy Statement at http://www.comcast.net/privacy/index.jsp
Links to the Privacy Statement and Terms of Service are located at the
bottom of every page at www.comcast.
-- end bunch of shit --
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
It's far more sinister. They are spoofing packets by impersonating a p2p node. They are illegally interfering with their customers' service and don't have the guts to do it outright themselves.
I got a catholic block.
People who inject fake RSTs into network streams should be shot.
This will lead to non-compliant network stacks which attempt to detect "bogus" RSTs and ignore them. And that cannot be allowed to happen at any cost.
It is fine for them to drop packets. It is a dick move, of course, when they sold people the bandwidth and don't let them use it, but TCP/IP is designed to deal with packet loss, and treat it as congestion. Fragrantly violating the network standards that allow communication between different networks to interoperate is literally trying to destroy the internet, and cannot be tolerated.
How is it a silver lining that Congress may reconsider Congressionally mandated Federal control over the internet in the United States?
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
If you're in favor of Ted "Series-of-Tubes" Stevens and his band of merry men handing over control of the internet to the F "OMFG A DECISECOND FLASH OF BREAST!" CC, then I have to ask, why do you hate the internet?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Define "net neutrality". I don't want high-level goal oriented stuff. I want to know exactly what such a law would look like because frankly I'm skeptical that any net-neutrality law wouldn't just be full of vagueness, unintended consequences or be so limited as to be useless.
Just saying "make the networks fair" doesn't make a good law, but that is all I've heard from the NN people. I want to be behind NN, but I can't as long as it is so ambiguous.
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.
Comcast continues to deny they are blocking or discriminating with traffic. (See "Hot Topics" in the middle of the page.)
See this nonsense linked from that page:
Question: "Do you discriminate against particular types of online content?"
Answer: "No. There is no discrimination based on the type of content. Our customers enjoy unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer. We respect our customers' privacy and we don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior such as which Web sites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site."
I guess that is called "plausible deniability". Comcast management apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks BitTorrent is only a web site, and clearly doesn't understand the issues. I suppose that later Comcast management can blame the denial on a confused lower level employee.
I was talking to a Comcast repair technician yesterday who came to replace a poor quality, non-functional cable modem. He was very uncaring. I suppose that is the Comcast culture. It must be miserable to work there.
You can't see it with Slashdot's HTML rendering, but whoever typed that reply for Comcast is back in the days of the typewriter. He or she used two spaces after every period. That made sense when all type was monospaced. I wonder if I visited Comcast headquarters, would I see horses tied outside?
I wonder if Comcast can deliver this on time...
This can be done in virtually all clients..for example, in uTorrent, set Encryption to "Forced" in your preferences. This isn't 100% foolproof but it seems to help a lot of Comcast users, among others with throttling and other P2P blocking measures forced on them from their ISP.
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/).
I'm not sure comcast is *that* sad to see you go. Their entire business model is based on overselling their bandwidth. Their favorite customers are those that pay $50/mo for internet access, and then only check their email.
People like you and I, who actually use most of the bandwidth advertised, make Comcast little, if any profit. If all the heavy bittorrent users followed your example, comcast may well be able to cut their costs enough (with all the bandwidth savings, etc.) that they could stay just as profitable, if not more so.
Think about it. They're already *cutting off* subscriptions of the heaviest users -- they're obviously not concerned about losing that business.
Use IPsec. Not only can they not tell what your packets mean (only where they are going and came from), but they cannot forge an RST since that also needs to be encrypted with the association key.
So they could do a man-in-the-middle attack on a simplistic key exchange done over IPsec. But that would require far more resources (they have to get in the middle of each connection) than they appear to be willing to use (RST forgery is about the cheapest form of net interference there is). So I think even minimal IPsec would bring this blocking to and end until such time as they want to invest in whatever it takes to mount an attack on IPsec. Then we just use a strong key infrastructure and end that.
If the protocol involved understood the work to be done (e.g. how many bytes to be transferred), it could also re-establish a new connection if the existing one got dropped, and resume the transfer ... until done or one end decides to not do this anymore.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
All one has to do is look at the main competitor to Comcast, which is Verizon, and look at how they do the same type of stuff. They block outbound SMTP traffic except to their smtp servers...
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.
ISPs and cable TV providers in the US are not common carriers, Comcast doesn't have common carrier status. If ISPs were common carriers there would be no net neutrality issues.
I think capitalism will be Comcast's undoing, assuming that consumers start to get annoyed with the diminished results, and begin to express their discontent.
Other DSL providers will naturally begin try and use the fact they don't interfere with the internet as a selling point. Assuming this happens, the only places that may be affected are any in which Comcast has a monopoly by being the only source for DSL.
My only fear is other DSL providers will see that Comcast is getting away with tactics like this, and try to pull the same stunt. For that reason, I honestly hope Comcast gets sued bigtime over this. Comcast needs to be made an example out of.
A person is guilty of criminal impersonation in the second degree when
he:
1. Impersonates another and does an act in such assumed character with
intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another; Not a real stretch. If they just enforced QoS, then it wouldn't be an issue, the issue is pretending to be the end user's system.
Although you're marked as a troll, you're stating the honest opinion of lots of people and the opinion that shapes policy of many companies. So I'll bite. I think your characterization of BitTorrent users, looked at by the numbers, is probably true. While there are people using torrents to distribute content that's both legal and non-commercial (Free Software, for example), it probably makes for a pretty small percentage of the total. But that doesn't matter. The Internet is a network of peers. That's how it was designed, and I believe that's how it ought to stay. The more rights to communicate are gated by money and elitist policies the fewer voices contribute. You need to pay big bucks to get a fat pipe, but you shouldn't need to pay big bucks to get all the protocols. That's what the Internet means on a technical level. If you're not selling me that, you're not selling me Internet access, you're selling me "Web and Email access". If you want to offer that as a product, go ahead. But it's *not* true Internet access.
Blocking-by-default services which are abused by robots and which provide no value except to those who should know enough to ask for them makes a lot of sense.
These days, that's outbound mail, outbound SMB/Windows-networking, and all inbound ports other than DHCP-related ports. However, any customer who needs to should be able to log into their ISP account and say "I run IRC, turn on relevant ports," "I run eDonkey, turn on relevant ports," or "I run XYZ, turn on relevant ports" or even "I'm an expert and I'll take responsibility for my own security, remove all protection and feel free to suspend my account at the first sign that any of my computers sends more than ___ messages in ___ period of time or is otherwise causing harm."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.