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.

Comments

skul what?

[seanadams.com]

Never ascribe to skulduggery that which can be adequately explained by asshattery.

Re:skul what?

[QRDeNameland]

Never ascribe to skulduggery that which can be adequately explained by asshattery.

I believe that's known as "Shitcock's Razor".

Maybe it's their new hookup instructions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem may be due to their new cable modem hookup diagram.

Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths

[X0563511]

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.

So, they are not even coming close to telling you the truth!

How exactly sending RST packets to peers doesn't fall under "prevent P2P activity" I don't understand.

Should be shot

[norton_I]

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.

Archaic Cable shared node topology is to blame

[toadlife]

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.

Comcast Censoring YouTube also??

[pfbram]

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/).

Re:Good for them

[Al Dimond]

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.