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Comcast Sued Again over P2P Throttling
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica brings us news of a disgruntled Washington D.C. Comcast customer who has filed a lawsuit against Comcast over claims of false advertising. The complaint seeks punitive damages, class-action status, and attorneys' fees. The customer claims Comcast advertised 'unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer.' We discussed a similar lawsuit brought against Comcast by a Californian customer back in November, as well as the FCC investigation into Comcast's practices. While Comcast confirmed reception of the new lawsuit, they declined to comment on it directly. Spokesman Charlie Douglas was quoted saying, 'To be clear, Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services, and no one has demonstrated otherwise.'"
Their spokesman gets an A for confusing the issue.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why not just buy the content rather than stealing it via bittorrent, you thieving cocksmoking teabaggers?
...they just throttle them into oblivion.
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... You'd think by now, instead of fighting all of these legal battles, they'd stop the throttling, instead of opening themselves to more costly law suits.
You're arguing with Comcast about the words they used to describe their service? Do you know how that works in the UK?
Unlimited 1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.
4. (ISP Def. only) Confined within limits; restricted or circumscribed: a limited space; limited resources.)
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
==> There are plenty of legitmate uses for bit torrent. Blizzard uses it to distribute patches, and vuze uses it to distribute liscensed content.
Yeah yeah, them are few and far between. p2p is mainly used for pirating and violating copyright law. ISP should kill it completely
Servers. Last I checked.. hosting your own email, telnet, httpd servers (I'm sure there are others - seems like it's most of the well known ports (1023)) wasn't doable using standard ports - both against TOS and directly dropped into /dev/null. If a judge won't understand/take into consideration the difference between throttling and blocking, I don't give them leeway regarding the loss of needing standard ports.
up to 1023.. forgot to do < manually
Is this going to get federal class action status if out of staters join in with the defendent? If not, count me in to make it federal.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
I have Cablevision, and I have noticed that I was throttled after downloading torrent files. The interesting thing was that they throttled my upload speed only, which I didn't even notice until I tried to upload a file to a friend of mine and it was capped at 17kb/sec. I guess that isn't as egregious, and definately more surreptitious, which is why they probably have been keeping their throttling under the radar...
This is regional, unfortunately. I mean, it's good that it works in some places, and if you actually ask a tech, they'll say "we don't allow it," but I run an FTP server at home and it works just fine. I also had a web server up for a short while, but the upload speeds are too slow to make it worthwhile; it ends up typically oversaturating the connection.
Technically they state that any "server" is against the TOS for the home connections, and that if you need "server" capabilities you should upgrade to their business class price range. But given how goofy their definition of server is, they certainly aren't totalitarian about enforcing the block on ports/servers.
Isn't the answer to define block on a data particle level?
"Did X action related to this policy block one or more bits of data? Yes or No."
Take it out of the adjective "State of zero data throughput".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So please explain to me why Linux distros were PAINFULLY slow to download until I implemented rules on my firewall to block RST packets?
Tagging this article "getfios"
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The line is drawn, has been drawn, and always will be drawn at the profit margin (or above, if they "project" growth).
If I go with provider A because they say, "unlimited service at $50/month," and then they say, "Well, we meant 200M/month and we mess with some protocols," I believe I have a case.
Where are the libertarians? How can you have a market when one party breaks contracts?
Comcast's technology is pretty protocol indiscriminant, as I understand it. Any bulk data transfer that goes on for a certain amount of time gets hit with these false RSTs. I've heard at least one case of it screwing with a business VPN.
So yes, they target HTTP, IRC, etc as well. They draw no line.
The idea of assigning unique signatures to "approved" bittorrent traffic is a fiasco waiting to happen, and counter to the ideals of an egalitarian internet (rather than a one-way tube from large corporations into the minds of consumers - we already have TV for that!) Since a signature would have to depend on the data being torrented (to prevent 'illegitimate' parties from coping it verbatim for their own torrents), a new one would be required for every new or changed file. This would add an anticompetitive barrier to any smaller organizations that want to use it, as well as delaying release of "approved" torrents, since each release would presumably have to be hand-checked, which would almost certainly cost $$$ that few can afford. (If each new release isn't checked for potentially infringing content, it becomes trivial to sneak arbitrary files into signed torrents, defeating the system.) The fact of the matter is, the main appeal of the bittorrent model is the ability to widely distribute files without having to have a high-powered server infrastructure to handle all the downloads. That's why pirates use it, that's why OSS people use it, hell, that's even why Blizzard uses it. The difference is, Blizzard could afford to distribute updates by HTTP if needed - lots of others can't. And, once this is done for bt, piracy will move to other avenues, requiring authorization and official signatures for more and more protocols - maybe even HTTP!
Making it so only multi-billion-dollar entities are allowed to distribute content to users isn't going to kill piracy --- it'll just kill the internet as we know it.
It IS a series of tubes. If you're trying to explain how the network of interconnected nodes that we call the internet works - a series of tubes is a great straight-forward analogy that damn near everyone can understand. It's an analogy I used to use to explain concepts to grandfathers before that poor sod said it in front of a camera, and it remains true. Other points aside - the series of tubes mocking should stop. -GiH
mmm... but I don't think it works like that.
This is where I wish I had a deeper understanding of networking protocols, but as I understand it, what happens is that that the receiving computer gets so many packets and then signals back to say "my buffer is full - don't send any more until I say so". Under normal use the receiver would then process the buffer contents, and then signal the sender saying, "next packet, please"
Thing is, you can throttle a protocol just by increasing the time between clearing the buffer and then telling the sender "Hit me!" If the time you add is greater than protocol's timeout period, you can effectively block it without a single byte being consigned to the bit bucket. Even if the protocol has a very long timeout, you can still slow it down to the point where it's becomes basically unusable.
And if it ever goes to court, there's not a single byte you can point at and say "this datum was blocked, your honour", for the simple reason that it was never sent, so how could they block it?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!