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P2P Fans Pound Comcast In FCC Comments
Not Comcastic writes "Two weeks after officially opening proceedings on Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, angry users are bombarding the FCC with comments critical of the cable provider's practices. 'On numerous occasions, my access to legal BitTorrent files was cut off by Comcast,' a systems administrator based in Indianapolis wrote to the FCC shortly after the proceeding began. 'During this period, I managed to troubleshoot all other possible causes of this issue, and it was my conclusion (speaking as a competent IT administrator) that this could only be occurring due to direct action at the ISP (Comcast) level.' Another commenter writes 'I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.'"
In the end, it looks like it will take separate physical plants to stir up some real competition. These people should switch to FIOS when it gets rolled out.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Well, whatever. It's not like their throttling has affec@G#TG%2yv24*SA$FNO CARRIER
Hmm, perhaps if you ssh tunneled out on port 80 to a proxy or destination server... in that way, the ISP at the most: 1) Couldn't read your traffic 2) Wouldn't be able to tell what application you were using (IE 21 = ftp, etc) Just a thought..
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Fortunately, after reading the scathing criticism, Comcast executives were able to comfort themselves with their huge sacks of money.
As for myself, I plan to dump Comcast right away and switch to... oh wait, Comcast is my only option for Internet access. Well.
Perhaps I'll go dig out the ol' 2400 baud modem, maybe I can find a BBS to call.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Go to this page and put "07-52" into the "Proceeding" field.
Comments are in PDF form, so turn off "View in Browser" in Acrobat.
You it's really bad when you have to flee TO Verizon. Trust me, these people are horribly incompetent and have horrible customer service. Nevermind that their various departments just cannot talk to each other. If you have phone service and Internet through them good luck getting either taken care of even though they are on the same damn bill. Still moving to Verizon might actually be the only option left (shudders).
open your eyes, everything uses torrents these days, game demo's/patches for everything and they are as big as a gig each.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The one from Verizon. Nice money to bash their competition, eh?
You make it sound as though anyone who's ever used bittorrent has shared at least one thing they weren't supposed to. That would be an interesting claim to prove.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
I heard that when you switch to FIOS they remove your POTS lines.
Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.
IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
For example, my local cable ISP has marked ALL encrypted traffic as having a lower priority over non-encrypted content in their "war on P2P filesharing" (this means, amongst other obvious drawbacks, downgraded performance using ssh and sftp) reference. I am not sure on the specifics or legality of this kind of "filtering" but it would seem that nobody has made such a big fuss yet up here. Their practice is grey-zone at best I would think and it will be interesting to see what happens with the issue.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
If the ISPs didnt oversell their bandwidth there would be an overload in the first place.
I don't play WoW, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it uses Torrents for updates and patching. GP is pretty naive to assume that just because you've had to use a torrent it means you're a big pirate. It's a legitimate way of moving huge files around the 'net. That's like saying all truck drivers are smugglers just because a few people use semi-trucks to smuggle drugs into the country.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.
No, they aren't. Sandvine's technology is only used based on deep packet inspection of BitTorrent traffic. It certainly opens the doors to anything and everything being blamed on it, as shown.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
This might be a little off-topic, but the common wisdom is that Comcast and other cable companies have monopolies on providing high-speed internet access in many areas. I realize they have competition from DirectTV (Satellite TV) and Broadcast Television for providing varying quality in Cable/TV entertainment, and that there is up-and-coming competition from Verizon to provide high-speed internet.
Is there any way to extend the "Public Broadcast TV" metaphor into the internet space? I could live with whatever downstream connection is required to watch YouTube videos... and upload streams that would pale in comparison to anybody running P2P services. Seriously, though, "light" internet users like me to subsidizing it for everybody else.
As for as throttling, Comcast is behaving unethically by stopping legitimate uses of P2P networks (sharing F/OSS distributions) and they should be heavily fined (I'm going to pull a RIAA-style gross sum of money from my ass), how about $500,000 per unethical P2P blockage? So divide the number of FCC complains in half, and then add the words "Millions" after it, and hand Comcast the bill.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fuck developers that release game demos and patches via BitTorrent.
Why the fuck should I pay for their bandwidth? Why don't they just release it via plain old HTTP? Too simple for them? Because it works for those of us behind firewalls? Because it doesn't involve opening ports to the public Internet? Because it doesn't require "Allowing" through twenty or so firewall alerts for who-knows-what to get server rights?
HTTP is almost 20 years old. It works. It should be used.
If you want to distribute content, pay for the costs yourself. Don't force me to because you're too cheap to pay for adequate hosting.
Although FCC comments are all well and good, talking to Comcast's CSR (customer service reps) will have more impact. If every balky P2P connection results in a $5-$10 in call-center time, then Comcast will think differently about it's filtering policy.
The key to solving this is to make unfettered P2P connections the least cost option for Comcast. That means increasing the costs of not providing those connections. FCC fines might do it (assuming the FCC acts), but high customer service cost certainly will.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
If ISP's didn't oversell bandwidth you would be paying $300/month for internet access.
Overselling isn't the problem. Way, way overselling is. Some things can be oversold without a problem, including bandwidth.
Gone!
Is parent post AC because he's astroturfing for Comcast?
Read the item - one user claims proof that Comcast is throttling ftp as well. I suppose ftp "illegal" in your view as well then? Comcast is throttling bandwidth intensive traffic without regard to the legality of the content. This is wrong.
Comcast thought they could get away with advertising unlimited broadband service but only actually providing limted service. It is this deception of customers that brought on this investigation, not the content traveling over Comcast's network.
In the US, this is how AT&T got broken, and POTS is now better and cheaper than before. (Yes, VOIP may be even better and cheaper, but the telephone benefits predated that.)
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Can't stop the signal, Mal. ;-)
Throttling is IMHO only a problem when the customer doesn't know about it.
I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.
Most of my family does not use P2P in any way, and rarely download anything at all. For them, a low price is more important. And lets face it: this kind of bandwidth throttling was only invented because 5% of the customers consume 90% of the ISPs backbone resources. If this wasn't an issue, nobody would have invented the damn thing.
I don't think throttling should be illegal. It should only be illegal to use throttling and not tell customers about it. Throttling keeps the price down for ISPs, and they should be perfectly allowed to implemented - as long as all their customers are aware of it. In that way, if you don't want an ISP/product with throttling you can simply choose another ISP/product.
Bandwidth costs money. Free competition dictates that all ISPs will be seeking ways to lower their costs and in that way offer the consumers lower prices. This is a good thing, as long as customers know what they are buying.
Therefore: Allow throttling, but force ISPs to clearly state which products are subject to throttling. In that way, customers can buy the product they find suitable for their needs, and the "heavy users" can pay a higher price for their actual usage.
It is no different than your (cell)phone bill: if you call people 24/7, of if you buy a true flatrate product, it will cost more than just calling your mom for 5 minutes twice a month. Just as it should.
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
They typically convert your copper POTS line to a fiber based one. From the point of view of your telephone service, there is no difference. You can't have DSL over it though. You can however request that they leave your copper phone line alone if you desire DSL from an CLEC. There is no sunset date for existing Verizon copper but one day eventually Verizon wants will turn off all copper and at that point you will be SOL.
The process will work wonderfully and it goes something like this:
1. ALL kinds of complaints come in and someone who has no expertise in the matter sifts through them and draw up some kind of summary.
2. Some kind of complaint summary report is generated. Who knows what, if any basis in fact it will have other than "lots of complaints."
3. Report is vetted and voided of all possible meaningful content.
4. Report is distributed to low-level types who summarize the summary to their rep/congress-critter.
5. Comcast works the pay-to-play system, gives a mea-culpa in front of the committee.
6. Committee agrees to author stern letter to comcast.
7. Comcast execs holiday with committee members and share the good times.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
It seems that a TORRENT of complaints to the FCC is the result
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I am not serviced by comcast but by NTC communications in blacksburg, va. the worst thing here is that if I try to use bit torrent or some other p2p application, all my web traffic is stopped (yes STOPPED) as long as I let p2p application run. Then, when I close bit torrent, it take few minutes for normal web access to resume. this is really frustrating. I usually VPN to my school and access every thing from there then.
Well with the Warcraft updates, Blizz DOES have a server which you can download from. If you are behind a firewall the blizz client will sometimes connect to their own server to download the content from, it's just slow as hell. The nice thing is that with the supposed 10mil customers they now have, it makes it a lot quicker to get EVERYBODY patched then it would be if everybody was having to connect to the same choke-point to download the latest 300meg patch to be able to connect to the server.
You can also download the patches from other 3rd party websites. The link if I recall is located within their support site.
Cary Sherman? Is that you?
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I think the only real escape from our land-line monopolists might be for wide-area high-speed wireless routers with automatic meshing capabilities in the consumer's cost range to be developed. There are problems with this of course, and a 100% switchover is unlikely, but if it can make competition then it might help everyone.
You're right! In order to stop this smuggling, I move that all truck traffic must observe a maximum speed of 45 mph.
There! That'll fix it.
Now they want to have a war on filesharing! A WAR ON FILESHARING! We ought to have a war on war, suckers! We ought to have a war on this senseless...
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Your phone service travels over fiber instead of copper. Isn't that better? The FIOS line can carry multiple phone lines so say good-bye to the old copper lines.
Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.
And, that's they way all ISPs want it. Verizon is trying to have Massachusetts remove the need to get permission from each city and town and instead, go through one state agency for authorization to carry television signals. What do ya think - will the citizens of MA have any leverage once that goes through?
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Yeah, but who uses a POTS line anyway?
My cellphone acts like a modem--I've used it like one in the past where I needed to fax something for some reason or another. That is the only time I could have used a POTS line. But now I hear that you can fax through your VOIP if they have it set up correctly.
If there is a power outage, I just light some candles and sit tight.
Please enlighten me on what other uses a POTS line has, if I have a cellphone and the Internet.
Asbestos worked as insulation, so we should continue using that. Oh, wait, what? I was just going by this guy's logic.
Plain and simple, torrents help move big files faster. If you can't configure your firewall to get around issues that is your fault. It's called progress.
If you'd just do what we tell you and quit yer gripin' everything would be chocolate sprinkles and rainbows! -AC
I'm not calling you a liar, just asking if you've actually made sure that they are your only high speed option. I've had people here tell me that the cable company is the only option, and I know for a fact that is false, it is just that they haven't done any research.
The alternative would likely be some kind of DSL, but there are lots of different people to deliver that. First check to see if you local phone company does it. If they do, you can probably get another local ISP. Our local telco offers DSL, but you are free to use them just for transport and get another ISP.
Regardless of if they offer it or not, then check with Covad. They lease space from phone companies and provide DSL transport. Sometimes they compete with the telco, sometimes they are the only game around. They also will do ISP service, or they'll do transport to another ISP, generally a larger national one (like Speakeasy).
Similar to Covad is then Newedge. I'd probably check in to them only if the telco and Covad are out since they tend to be more focused on higher grade (and thus higher priced) SDSL and IDSL lines, but they are still an option. Yet again you can either get your access directly from them, or have them switch it over to another of their many partners (Speakeasy again, they work with both).
So if you have one or more of those DSL transport providers, you will discover that you have a lot of different ISP possibilities in the high speed market. You may be in a situation where you don't, however don't say that until you've checked. It annoys me when someone who lives down the street from me says Cox is the only option (the fact aside that I think Cox is a good ISP) when I know for a fact Qwest, Covad, AND Newedge all offer DSL in our area and between them there's probably 50 different ISP choices.
I occasionally consult for a wireless ISP, and we've become friends. In order for him to avoid ppl saturating his network, he's implemented a burst feature. Shaw (here in Alberta, anyway) has something similar. So a constant stream might yield15 kb/s, whereas web surfing seems fast. That's because the network will burst (in Shaw's case) up to 25 MB/s. Let that baby stream though, regardless if it's FTP, .torrent, HTTP, and it'll slow down to 50 kb/s or so.
I seriously doubt Comcast (although I don't know anything about them) is identifying and throttling any particular protocol or P2P stream...they've just done what Shaw, and my friend has; I'd bet.
Come on. Only 28356 complaints are listed? /. can take down entire servers but only come up with 28k complaints? Where is everyone?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
The game.
I'm trying to understand the logic here. You want high-speed internet so bad you'd have the government force somebody to rent their property to others? Where does it stop?
Besides, if you're really afraid of a big bad monopoly, coming up with a way for them to remain at the center of *any* high-speed internet service in your area is not the way to beat them.
If you really want to go down the "government forced rental" path, I suggest starting by forcing people with large houses to rent their spare bedrooms to the homeless. Homelessness is a much worse problem than slow internets.
As someone who, up until recently, worked for a CLEC, let me just say that this is not the case. It's too expensive to physically remove the copper. Usually the techs simply disconnect it from the NID, though in rare cases they may cut it at ground level. Also, consider that the fiber is typically run close to the copper so that they can use the copper line to find the fiber if they have to.
I live in the city, but I'm pretty sure not everyone does.
Quack, quack.
Of course. That's also why World of Warcraft should be illegal, being the piracy toolkit that it is.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Enjoy the bandwidth that Sandvine frees up for you. That is all. :)
I know someone with FiOS, and the equipment they installed in his basement is impressive, as in, looks so expensive I'm impressed they don't charge for it. They installed a huge switchboard cabinet, with a backup battery and some sort of conversion electronics to feed into standard coax TV cables and Ethernet.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Would ISPs blocking port 80 fall under the same violations/issue as this? I have had two high-speed ISPs in the past five years, Cox and Verizon, and both have blocked port 80 for me.
Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.
IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly. One of my friends use to work for Cox Cable, and they'd get calls after Verizon would turn on FIOS at a site due to Verizon cutting all of the copper cables - including Cox's coax - when they installed it. Not sure if they did it also when they ran FIOS past a house or not, but they were not being ethical in their practices on its roll-out at least at one stage.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The quality of these comments is horrendous. Every once in a while you find a reasonably-professional one, but in general it's ungrammatical, poorly-reasoned crap.
It's disheartening to think that Americans are really this dumb.
At least the crap, along with the good stuff, is on our side. I've yet to find a comment supporting Comcast.
It's not just P2P traffic that is being hit with the throttling. They are throttling IPSec, HTTPS, SCP, SSH, SFTP, FTP, among many other protocols.
In a lot of areas they are the only cable provider, so they have a virtual lock on the local market. ( yes, i can go DSL for network and dish for TV, but its a different medium so it doesn't count )
I was one of lucky ones, but it seems they recently flexed their muscles and bought ( forced ) out my local cable company. So now i get to share in the pain of trying to use the service that i paid for with legal uses.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Actually, IIRC from my geology courses years ago, there's only one real problematic form of asbestos. There was also in use a safe form of insulation containing asbestos, but since people freaked out about it, and there's a lot of money to be made in asbestos removal, it all got labeled as "bad", and that was that.
It was a previous government that paid for the entire infrastructure that this company now has the monopoly over. Then along comes another government that likes to make the books look good (but as usual, are much worse) and sells the government owned infrastructure at a price that is ridiculously undervalued because an end of financial year is approaching and they want to hid the cost of military action and make it look as they are financially responsible. The fire sale is made with little consideration of the implications. I'll let you join the dots from there.
.
Though I'm spelling it wrong, it's DEFINITELY THOSE LETTERS IN THOSE ORDER. But some of them may be doubled. Netsukkuk. netskukku. Something like that. Google it. You'll find it. It's insane, but it just might work.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
There's a slight problem with your analogy there. We all know the internet is not like a bunch of trucks. I believe, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that it's like a series of tubes.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
surprisingly, asbestos still has a lot of industrial uses. Contrary to popular belief, it is not outlawed, just the use as asbestos paper and asbestos spray insulation is illegal due to the high fraction of volatile fibers.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Strawman, but not your fault: I just realized the article summary makes the same mistake.
This isn't about throttling. Some people bitch about throttling, but what Comcast has been doing goes far beyond that. It's the RST packet forgery that has people super-pissed.
I see that you support throttling (if done openly and exposed to market forces), and your arguments seem reasonable. But what do you think of packet forgery?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I recently tried to FTP upload a home movie to my web site so my family could download it. I noticed my FTP speeds were incredibly slow - slower than dial-up speeds and I have a 6MB/384K cable connection.
I've noticed that my P2P traffic seems to upload OK but downloads very slowly.
And I don't know where the problem is.
Knology, my ISP, claims they don't throttle. But how do I know someone somewhere along the way isn't throttling?
Even if I bothered to dig into the problem, I'm sure all I would get for my troubles would be a lot of finger pointing.
The bottom line is, if the internet quits working the way I want to use it, I'll quit paying for it, because it will have become useless to me.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A good friend of mine hasn't been able to consistently access Google's main search page for almost 2 months using Comcast. His ability to get to Google with Comcast is so bad, he's starting using Yahoo so he can do searches. I'm on DSL, I don't have these issues.
Burn Hollywood Burn
But in the service contract, it states that vpn connections can warrant them to stop service. We were outraged. They basically said, eh- don't worry about it.
Really? Cool! I've been trying to get that useless copper scrap ripped out and recycled for years -- and you say all I have to do is sign up for FIOS and they'll haul all that POTS junk away?
I can see a lot of us going back to that actually. Point to point communications to people you trust, no packet sniffing, throttling, spying... Sure 56k will suck for speed, but it will at least be secure.
Sort of what freenet offers, but it risks throttling/banning from your ISP since it uses the 'cloud'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"If ISP's didn't oversell bandwidth you would be paying $300/month for internet access."
SO be it.
However, that's not correct. They could sell limited service as a base service. For 20 bucks you get service for 5 hours a day.
They could put a bandwidth cap. for 20 bucks you get a gig a month.
There is nothing wrong with the pay what you use model.
Over selling and then complaining when all your customers want to sue what you sold them is crap.
IF an airline overbooks(and they do) and everyone that booked a flight shuold up, they don't just tell the people that can't get on "too bad, we got your money now go away"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can't access some Wikipedia pages through a Comcast link. Are they blocking some URLs too?
Why the fuck should I pay for their bandwidth? Why don't they just release it via plain old HTTP? Too simple for them? Because it works for those of us behind firewalls? Because it doesn't involve opening ports to the public Internet? Because it doesn't require "Allowing" through twenty or so firewall alerts for who-knows-what to get server rights?
Open the needed ports then, or wait for it to be hosted on some other server. Before BitTorrent became adopted for content distribution, they hosted them on servers, and if it was a popular game, it took a long time to download because the connection was saturated. Now I can max out my connection while downloading so it saves time. i don't play WoW anymore, but when I did it was much appreciated by myself they used torrents. I do understand if your on a college campus and they won't allow you to use a torrent to download, but I think Blizzard also offers a http server to download from too.
Don't forget to tax every truck driver so we can compensate all those hurt by the smugglers.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
That is a terrible idea. Your analogy falls flat when you realize that the Internet isn't a truck. It's a series of tubes.
Yes, WoW does use Bittorrent for it's updates. I'd be rather unhappy if it were to be further restricted.
I was quoted in the Ars Technica article. Here is the text of my FCC comment.
Dear Commissioners,
As a longtime customer of the Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) I feel it is necessary for me to provide you with my views and opinions regarding their use of throttling bandwidth for point to point (P2P) users that access their network.
File sharing is a gray area with regards to the law. It can be used for not only illegal purposes, such as the sharing of copyrighted material like music and movies, but for sharing of information that is perfectly legal such as software updates, free operating system distribution, free movie and movie preview distribution plus free music distribution. I will cite examples of each accordingly.
The most widely publicized use of P2P file sharing is illegal music and movie distribution. As this review for comment does not touch upon the legal issues surrounding the data being shared I shall focus my attentions to those legal methods that are affected.
Blizzard Entertainment, a wholly owned subsidiary of Vivendi Games (Euronext: VIV), uses the Bittorrent P2P file sharing protocol to distribute updates and patches to the players of the very popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. If their data is interrupted for any reason, even for a short time, then thousands, perhaps even millions, of users will be unable to play their game. This will directly cut into their profit margin.
The Linux operating system is a freely available alternative to both Microsoft Windows and the Apple Mac OS. As the Linux operating system is free they rely solely on donations of both time and money from people across the planet. That money, however, is not unlimited. To reduce the high cost of bandwidth they use the Bittorrent protocol for much of their software distribution. Interrupting their distribution channel would only benefit Microsoft, an already proven monopoly. To help ensure competition I feel that Bittorrent should not be interrupted.
To give but one example of free video entertainment you may want to look at the TV Guide 2007 Online Video Award winner Star Trek New Voyages. They are a very high quality non-profit production that was able to beat out contenders such as the 4400 and Battlestar Galactica. Their preferred method of distribution is bittorrent as they have a very limited bandwidth.
Many movies distribute their previews via bittorrent. This would damage not only their advertising structure but limit the consumer to one method of retrieval.
To see that Bittorrent and the movie industry, music industry and gaming industry are working TOGETHER and that they are seeking to create a strategic partnership please view the following URL for more information:
http://www.bittorrent.com/about/press/bittorrent-inc-launches-the-bittorrent-entertainment-network
Of course now that you know that Bittorrent is a popular, legal, and economically feasible method of content distribution let me explain a little bit of how it works.
Let us say that the makers of Star Trek New Voyages come out with a new episode. They have a few options at their disposal. One of them is to create a simple link to a file and have everyone who is interested in the file download it from one single location. The downside to this is that the single location will be paying a fortune to accommodate the high volumes of traffic.
The other option is Bittorrent. By having people connect to what is referred to as a "tracker" they can find out who else is downloading the same file and start taking pieces from multiple different users. Essentially everyone is
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
I dunno about WoW, but I do know that Valve's Steam Content Distribution System uses a Torrent-like swarming protocol ... mainly because they hired Bram Cohen to write it for them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I see. So if I buy something from the government, and later another administration decides that they charged me too little, *then* they're allowed to force me to rent it to others?
What school of thought is this? "Any series of bad decisions by the government can be corrected by just one more bad decision"?
When we founded this country, we wrote a document called the Constitution to protect people from the government. I don't see anything in the Constitution that allows the government to force a company to rent something they own, regardless of whether the government previously sold it to them below cost. It would help me to understand your position if you said either "it's in Article X, section Y", or "I think it's OK for the government to violate the Constitution in this case".
-Good call. Blizzard ought to be able to support it's own customer base... UOG wins all.
I think you mean big, popular files faster.
Our home ISP is Earthlink over Covad DSL. We are seeing all you-tube and other media downloads stop at 10 seconds at some times of the day. Large mail attachments have stopped working from gmail. I have discovered that using wget with --limit-rate will work when other methods are failing. Next step, our own bandwidth limiter on our home firewall. My feeling is, if the isp wants bandwidth limitation, then they should do it, and not stop the media from downloading part way through.
Screw that, lets take the Comcast route, all white trucks exceeding such and such size and speed should be run off into a ditch and blown up.
All I have to say is I hope that Comcast and AT&T don't join forces and share their anti p2p methods with one another. Soon having a torrent client installed will ban you instantly from the internet. How would we get our Linux software then? Or use Jamendo and so on... I hope both Comcast and AT&T are sued until they figure it out.
POTS is self powered and the telcos are very serious about keeping the power up no matter what happens to the electric grid, when the NE grid went down for three days, my POTS phone kept working, VOIP normally comes with an 8 hr back-up then your SOL if you need police or fire.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Hell, we could probably even come up with some patent-troll-company who owns a patent or two covering RTS packet forgery. (A method and/or mechanism which blocks custom-targeted network traffic and serves as a counter agent to
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
not paying out the ASS for data just to send a fax?
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
Not if the power goes out and your FiOS backup battery dies....... at least POTS on copper is line powered.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Uhh, speaking as someone who has worked with a lot of the field techs from Verizon (and others), I highly doubt that there is any malicious intent on the part of Verizon techs to fuck around with Cox (or any other cable company for that matter).
Beyond the fact that Verizon itself wouldn't condone that (for obvious reasons), I just can't see most of the field techs I know doing it. A lot of them just don't give a shit about Verizon (many of them predate Verizon and be back to GTE -- or even to the Bell System for the old timers) and wouldn't be inclined to purposefully damage a sabotage for them. The ones that actually do tote the company line don't seem to remain field techs very long....
In any case, I would blame it more on an honest mistake of whomever was doing the FiOS install. Ever done installs of CPE at residencies before? They are working with impossible deadlines (pushed by a business office that has no clue what's going on in the field) and wind up cutting corners and making mistakes. "Hmm, I can just follow this wire... let me cut it right here and pull it through...."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
yes, but that "safe" form becomes less safe over time, turning into the problematic form.
there's a good lot of asbestos insulation in the roof of this house, but to get at it, you'd need to whack a hole through the roof, but it's something to keep in mind if you ever need to do repairs/renovations up there, as it'd be pretty much powder and require caution to clean it out.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yeah, go on. Flamebait, I'm sure. Unless you do a little bit of research - the very things that make it strong (redundancy, peer to peer nature) are also what makes it suck up bandwidth like a Hoover on crack. Even on a switched LAN, you can see noticeable slowdowns in other traffic while a torrent is running, even though the torrent itself is using relatively little of the actually available bandwidth.
Yeah, it was fun the first time. Second time, not so much.
It's like when you're watching a movie and the actor does something funny and the guy next to you says "ha ha, did you see that he was all like *boo* and she was all like *aah* that was fun!". It sure was, until you came along.
.. but seriously? Bittorrent is a horrendous resource hog. I'm /glad/ comcast is throttling it, because a significant number of paying customers don't want to watch their connectivity slow to a crawl
So, you prefer them watching their connectivity slow to a crawl because of the hundreds of thousands of YOUTUBE users. Oh guess what. If you have a favorite youtube video, there's no easy way to download it. You need to re-download it again and again and again.
Want to download your favorite videos? Download them via bittorrent ONCE (and in high quality for that matter).
I'm sorry, but your resource hog argument is simply a lot of bullshit. You give no statistics, no studies, no data. It's just your opinion.
Last time I played racing games was Pole Position. Tux Racer is a lot cooler, and takes a lot less quarters.
`nuff said.
How does WoW patching works with a ComCast line?
Blizzard uses Bittorrent for patching the game (and sharing the patch as well)
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Very, very clever. Their product is smart and adaptive, but it can be beaten. The short answer is convoluting the shit out of your streams.
Consider this. Stream sharing clouds, local relay sharing swarms to bounce streams among users within nearby hops within the same AS, over UDP and TCP, using it's own protocol reliability mechanism driven by the application, patterned and unpatterned packet sequences and lengths, rotating ports with no regard to RFC intentions (I'm sorry).
If you can colorize your stream brown, the ISP can only, only, prioritize streams that operate on predictable usage. Envision vmplayer running a *nix OS, designed as a single pc virtual router/relay host, which is easily 'dropped in' running in the host OS, publicly md5 checked, with all who run the system agreeing to share their upload and download to push this oppression into obsolescence. A little like tor, a lot smarter, a lot more accessible, a lot dirtier. Open source, or the system fails from lack of trust and manipulation.
File share over this system until QoS, port rate limiting, resets, and other session management is worthless against manipulating streams at the edge or peers.
Consider this a message in a bottle from an island with a conspicuously skull shaped mountain.
This is assuming ppl actually have a choice in ISP (or better said broadband ISP's) which many ppl in the states do not have, to my knowledge.
Your argument stills hold if the ISP in question gives a choice for throttled and non-throttled policies.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Of course not. It's like a bunch of station wagons full of quarter-inch tapes hurtling down the highway.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...just not a very good implementation...
p2p should be abolished. its main purpose is copyright violations. we need to be rid of it
Slightly offtopic, but I recently signed up for 3G service with ATT (yeah, yeah, I know). The actual driver for the device is 2-3 megs but the "Connection Manager" is over seventy! The mandatory installation took ten minutes and it made my hard drive run as if it were being defragged.
And the speed sucks. I'm thinking about bailing out.
Well, then hook up your car battery......
Actually, that might not be a bad thing. I'd get a FioS line installed in my mother-in-law's house and pray for a major power outage.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
As you say, overselling is not bad, but overselling is a RISK that the company must make. They are betting on users NOT using but so much bandwidth. It's more and more clear that users ARE using that bandwidht.
Put this in terms of a buffet. You put up a sign saying "$5 - ALL YOU CAN EAT!" in your window. Some will eat more, some less, but you're betting that you'll have enough food out there to keep everyone happy. Now, a month goes by. You notice that every day the buffet is almost empty. People are paying their $5 and coming in to discover that there's no food left.
Your options are:
a) Put a "men in black" style security guard at the buffet and explain to anyone who goes back for more than 1 plate that "they've had enough, please refrain from further indulgence". If the patron ignores this said security guard snatches buffalo wings off their plate and tosses them back onto the buffet bar.
or
b) Raise your damn prices to $7.50, $10, or whatever it takes, and use the extra money to make sure that the buffet stays full.
Clearly b is the logical choice, but the idiot ISP's keep going with the equivalent of A.
They can oversell, but they need to set their metrics so that they can handle their heavy users without running out of bandwidth.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm aware of all the things it could be.
I should not have to do all that leg work to insure that I'm getting what I'm paying for. Imagine if every time your car stopped working you had to do all that you propose I do for my internet connection. Moreover, my point was that there is a limit to how much investigative legwork I will undertake to fix the problem before I just say, "Fuck it, this isn't worth the hassle." Perception is reality. If ISPs create the perception that the internet has slowed to intolerable speeds, thanks to throttling, it's going to cost them business.
What we really need is a good tool that you can log into that gives a precise, accurate assessment of your internet connection, and pinpoints where the slowdowns are happening, if any. And it needs to be immune to having its results inflated by being detected and enhanced by QoS services, like many of today's speed tests are rumored to be.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I heard that when you switch to FIOS they remove your POTS lines.
Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.
IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.
which is why I've been advocating projects such as Utopia here in Utah. If you have a company treat you like garbage (like Concast) then you simply FIRE them and get another provider over the same lines.
It forces companies to behave or go bankrupt.
Would would want to do business with a company that treats you like slim?
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
If ISP's didn't oversell bandwidth you would be paying $300/month for internet access.
Overselling isn't the problem. Way, way overselling is. Some things can be oversold without a problem, including bandwidth.
Correct me but it sounds like you are saying they can advertise services but don't have to provide services AS advertised.
At least that's how I'm reading it.
Speaking of which, lookup the NII from 1994. Seems companies have received over 200 Billion in our tax money to build the new fiber infrastructure. They already have been paid IN ADVANCE to build plenty of infrastructure.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Insightful?!?! You sit there all proud of your Score:5, Insightful mod, when your fucking analogy is entirely wrong!!
/. community isn't as smart as they think they are.
Here is an insightful comment: By throttling the bandwidth, they are not trying to stop smuggling, they are trying to stop you motherfuckers from using all of the bandwidth for your smuggling. Duh!!
Ignorant comments like yours getting modded that high only demonstrates that the
Sheesh!!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Mod me a troll because I'm an AC.
this type of issue. I tell people where if they are running into this issue to run a very simple program that blocks Comcast and the government/schools and such from tracing and seeing what you are looking at/downloading.. it isn't perfect, but hey whatever gets you around the Comcast blocking program you shouldn't shake a stick at. And you will not have to switch to Verizon to get their stupid package. But if you all knew how to do that you wouldn't be reading this article ;)
'Broadband' is not synonymous with 'high-speed'. It does not refer to unfettered communication or how 'wide' your connection is. Broadband is a technology describing a type of RF signalling scheme. Wi-Fi is narrowband because it uses a single frequency per connection. Cable TV uses their cable plant to carry a very wide group of frequencies, from channel 2 at 55MHz to cable modem traffic at 0-55MHz and 500-1000MHz, therefore it is broadband. The word has been bastardized by improper canonical use and by ignorance such as the FCC trying to 'define' broadband as data connections above a certain data speed. Show you are clever and don't use broadband to mean high-speed internet.