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FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The FCC has officially opened proceedings investigating Comcast's use of Sandvine to send RST packets and 'throttle' P2P connections by disconnecting them. The petitioner, Vuze, Inc. is asking the FCC to rule that Comcast's measures do not constitute 'reasonable network management' per the FCC rules and to forbid Comcast from unreasonably discriminating against lawful Internet applications, content, and technologies. If you want to weigh in on these proceedings, you can use the Electronic Comment Filing System to comment on WC Docket no. 07-52 any time before February 13th."
Getting slashdot users to comment to the FCC, smartest idea EVER.
Well, it would have been, if Comcast weren't throttling my connections...
Posting the link to the public comment filing system was an excellent decision. The problem with these "Public" comment periods is that there are very minimal requirements for advertising the opportunity to comment, and too often the only people who know about it are the parties actually involved in the litigation. Slashdot users are (often) some of the most well-informed and affected members of the community with regards to technology issues, and Slashdot editors ought to ensure that they include information about opportunities to make public comments on ongoing regulatory issues whenever possible.
Oh, the trolls are going to have fun with this one.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
amirite
For those interested, Vuze Inc. is made up of the developers of Azureus, the open source bit torrent client. These guys obviously have a stake in what's going on because their newer app, Vuze, has deals with some media organizations to serve their content via P2P.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
My complaint turned into:
"I am a happy Comcast customer and I love P2P blocking! In fact, I wish they would block everything! Piracy is BAD!"
Think Comcast had something to do with it?
Apparently, these are some sort of "fancy" PDF's that can only be opened using Acrobat!
Seriously, though, just say they "can be displayed" not "can only be displayed" -- you think they could at least get that right.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Although Comcast has the right to throttle and manage their network connectivity, forging packets will probably get them in trouble. IANAL
When I though about this, though I got a sense of Deja Vu. I can't remember the particulars, but wasn't there a similar controversy back when people first started using modems over their phone lines? I seem to remember the telcos rasing a stink and saying something like "this was not what the phone lines were intended for, it's eating up too much of our resources" or something to that effect and threatening to sanction or even cut off heavy modem users. Of course, we know how that one turned out, but can you imagine what the world would look like today if they had followed through, cracking down on modem use and crippling the internet before it even got started?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
While you are at it, can you please deliver a nice deadly blow and announce that Public Airwaves like FM and Tv bands will not have any encryption nor "content control" allowed on them. Also announce that if you broadcast it for free, you give UP the right to sue anyone over that content as it was recorded over the air. I.E. if someone shares that episode recorded off their local TV station and it is intact with commercials, you cant do squat to even stop them from sharing it.
I'm hoping for some sanity, I know it will never happen.
I also want them to force cable tv to have their basic lineup as unencrypted QAM if they "must" switch from analog broadcasts. But Comcast wants to force cable boxes into every livingroom.
FCC Seeks Comment In Comcast P2P Investigation
Why, so they can ignore it again?
The public who understands it, opposes it. The rest of the public has no clue what they even asked (though would oppose it if they did). And the FCC will still side with the three comments from guys like Rupert Murdoch.
Now, let's be honest. We get some...insightful...commentary posted here on the site, so I can only imagine what comments submitted to the FCC are going to read like.
Slashdot users have been known to be confrontational at times, and I can't imagine that we will be doing our case any good by submitting nasty, derogatory comments to the FCC. I'm also with the conspiracy theorists that Comcast could just block the connections to that FCC page with some unfortunate "network packet loss" so keep people from submitting comments.
I guess we're screwed either way, since I doubt the FCC will do anything meaningful once Congress finishes neutering them after their "SuddenOutbreakOfCommonSense".
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
I actually looked up some of the comments filed so far and it looks like the FCC needs to employ a spam filter of some sort.
Apparently the FCC is in need of purchasing some new life insurance: Submitted Comment
They also need to buy some new cell phones from Hong Kong!: Submitted Comment
Luckily, there are a few good comments such as this set of form letters (read: petition) found here: Submitted Comment
Ok, there are a few good comments there at least, I like this Rome analogy here: Submitted Comment
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Why don't they just ask for one billion, gagillion, fafillion, shabolubalu million illion yillion...yen?
Like blocking port 25 on home connections? It seems to me that ISP's do a lot more service restriction just in general these days then they used to. I miss the good old days of having a shell account.
Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!
You would think that if that is one of their biggest complaints, so much so that they include it as an example of how to properly fill out a form, then they would at least consider getting rid of those pesky surcharges.
887321 = 337*2633
Piracy HAS to go back underground. It's not an invincible jedi skill people. As it stands, they OWN all the communication mediums we are using and they are going to be able to filter those as some point to pretty much any degree they like.
I guess at least you will have pushed the technology, but doesn't it stand that on a mass scale, the ISP, as decentralized hubs, have an extreme potential to be used against us ?
You know, if we were all rich, we probably wouldn't bother to pirate. That being the case, I think the whole public piracy concept is a bad idea. It suggests some forced socialism on any intellectual property maker or just some consumer anarchy. You know, most of the time, the public isn't exactly fair and balanced. I think we are more like children crying for attention, politician's interpret that how they what, and they impose laws to change our behavior/make things fair with corporate advice of course, ehm. It's a reaction based system. Supporting piracy openly is like declaring war on terrorism because there there is no logical victory. You can't give away people's property for them and expect that to work on a global scale without AT least watering down the quality of that product via lost profit and moral to the manufacturing market of that product.
You can't steal their shit without it hurting the industry... eventually. Unless you want to just embed advertising right into the CPU architecture and compilers you have to pay for products somehow. Right ?
That's why it's not WORTH the few resources the average p2per adds to the mix compared to the many resources and quality collection a more elite p2per brings. And that's why public p2p networks aren't worth the trouble.
You have to realize who your hurting the most. Your not simply stealing money from mega-corporations you're preventing new artists from getting opportunities and new films from getting made. Instead of new artists a similar elitism is practiced in Hollywood and record studios where they bet heavily on the best bets for profit pushing the same artists and ideas with little innovation and yes, even less than before.
Then you ground all that up and fed it to your children. Now sure, you download a lot of free games and apps for them, but your culture may be suffering from a disposable and convenience driven mentality. The same mentality than can so easily justify piracy and not realize the public was better off without knowing how to steal trillions in copyrighted shit.
I say, cut off the moochers ! I bet more than 50% of the shit that's downloaded on p2p networks gets deleted by the average user within a month and hardly used if used at all. It also has insane potential to spread hand made GOD KNOWS WHAT kind of malware and you can only hope that it's detectable. Cut em off. If you can't follow releases and such, you shouldn't download. If you don't know how to use IRC... fuck off your ruining it for people who have real uses for the software and can store and share them. Mainstream piracy sucks my ass.
Of course global warming isn't real, 9 trillion in debt doesn't matter, American will always rule the world and piracy can be LEGAL..
I think perhaps we have lost some reasonable degree of accountability for our actions. I agree that most piracy isn't lost revenue, but the amount that is has to be growing quite rapidly as people of all walks of life gain internet and p2p access.
America is the cultural center of the world, more than even money or technology. We export culture and we dominate the radios and tv's of the world more than any other culture by far. You simply cannot re-create cutting edge Hollywood technology anywhere else in the world. Our music is nearly equally as dominate and our music market is desirable too almost all music artists. Of course, they love us for our media, it's sensational mass appeal and sophisticated presentation is simply unrivaled.
So, we are rather stupid to support pirating our own exports, the few we have left. People complain about
Simply put, Comcast should not be charged for this. DuranBUT instead, all of their local monopolies should be declared NULL and VOID. IOW, allow real competition in. Right now, we have a gov. create oligopoly and it leads to horrible service and outlandish rates. I know. I am on comcast for TV/Net, and qwest for phone. There is a real reason why they are bottom rated!
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Big money/Corporations = Kevin Martin is all ears
Concerned citizens = Kevin Martin hears nothing
If Kevin Martin can ignore the public outrage about relaxing media ownership rules that he witnessed personally at several town hall meetings, he'll have no trouble ignoring a bunch of public comments on the internet. He's a corporate lapdog. This Comcast "investigation" is merely a formality and a complete joke.
OK, I give up. I've spent 10 minutes roaming the FCC's site. What is the actual URL that shows me the actual text of this proceeding? I'm not going to comment on something if I can't read the text first.
Cox is doing the same thing, sending out reset messages to kill the connection for seeders. According to DSL Reports, they starting doing this sometime in Mid-November. I haven't tried to use P2P in a while, but I just tried to download something over P2P yesterday and couldn't break 60kB/s on a well seeded torrent. I have been able to get up to 500kB/s in the past. I'm down in San Diego.
ISP's are NOT common carrier - that is really the heart of the problem. They don't want it, either, because then they could not cut people off for 'high bandwidth usage' (ie: using the service they paid for) or any other arbitrary reason, or filter content they don't like (ie: blocking websites critical of the ISP, union websites, political sites, etc)
Blocking port 25 outbound is OK if there is a way for users to override it (ie people who use 3rd party SMTP providers. Yes, we exist) Blocking inbound ports has no excuse. Blocking outbound DNS is even worse.
well that blows mule ass.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Does anybody find it odd that the FCC website recomends Netscape as their browser of choice and then sends you to a link which forwards to http://netscape.aol.com/ that has no means of downloading Netscape? Then when you dig further you find this article recomending migrating to Mozilla Firefox.
Really can we trust the FCC to get anything right? Also am I the only one who was confused by that page that is supposed to describe how to comment?