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Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
Is it April already?
This sounds more like, "sorry I got caught" than sorry:
BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. ... "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."
No one caught doing something wrong is happy about the attention but they need to admit what they did was wrong not because a company was involved but because it harmed their customers. The above makes it look like they think they still have the right to block traffic their customers want. Beware of special deals like this.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
So I can look forward to 0.3KB/s downloads for using "too much" bandwidth? Haven't we been down this road with Comcast before, advertising "unlimited" internet and then sending sh*t-o-grams to people who go above an unwritten limit?
My head just asploded!
Even though I had hoped that bit torrent would become the ISP's friend, I had not expected the devil himself to be one of the first to cozy up... WTF?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
This, to me, is like Comcast jacking off into a hat and BitTorrent wearing that hat with the full knowledge of what's just been deposited in that hat.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
well now the question is: does this refer to all bittorrent (the protocol) traffic, or just torrents approved by BitTorrent, Inc. (the company)?
I'm not sure they have said anything but it looks like nothing good if they want to make a special deal with a single company. If they want some good attention, they can unblock ports and dedicate themselves to network buildouts. The core issue is one of network freedom. Without freedom, the internet is no better than cable TV.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
i think itsatrap would be more appropriate. something tells me we're not getting the whole picture here.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I'm looking and looking and looking but I can't find anything where money is changing hands between these companies. Someone has to be making money on this deal but I can't figure it out. Either that, or BitTorrent has a lot of data to make Comcast look really bad. So, they are taking a path that keeps their "evil deeds" hidden. Does anyone have any insight here on the financial deal, if there is one?
How to Download YouTube Videos
BitTorrent the company is not BitTorrent the protocol. Bram Cohen may be working with Comcast to get the "legitimate" BitTorrent 6.0 (with its closed source code and protocol) operating cleanly on their networks, but don't expect that this will magically work for every client and tracker out there. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they actively collaborate to cripple the original, open protocol.
Interestingly, this news comes almost at the same time Azureus develops a plug-in to detect ISPs that cripple your torrents transfers:
http://gizmodo.com/372442/bittorrent-plugin-detects-isps-raping-your-torrents
Of course, a peaceful solution such as this agreement is always preferred, as it enlightens more and more people about the true nature of BitTorrent, and opens up the doors for more and more ISPs to do The Right Thing (tm).
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If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
I mistakenly feared slashdot users would have one less thing to whine about now. But the real difference is instead of "Comcast sucks because they do this!" we'll be hearing "Comcast sucks because they once did this!"
Whale
Right. All you people going "about time" "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense" didn't even read the summary. The deal is with BitTorrent, Inc. and probably has nothing to do with ALL bittorrent traffic, just the stuff Comcast is doing with video.
BIG HINT: This is probably why they started throttling bittorrent traffic to begin with.
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First off they were getting BAAAAD publicity, and in this instance bad publicity is bad. When geeks start turning away from you and telling their friends not to use your service it begins to ahem... hurt. But I also think that perhaps the congress critters that are worried we are falling behind infrastructurally, may have hinted at dropping investigations and maybe even a little free gubmint money to help "upgrade" the public infrastructure. Indeed. And the other benefit is that .... AT&T is now the SPY ISP attempting to pick through traffic and block your downloads. We shall see, though, keep an eye on the broadband forums, we shall know soon enough.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
The new architecture from the Comcast/BitTorrent effort will be of great interest to content delivery networks (CDNs) who have been sorting out the best way that P2P can be used to assist in delivery of large files. Yesterday a CDN called Velocix announced a hybrid P2P streaming media service combining traditional caching with P2P delivery for live events. Velocix used to be CacheLogic, and worked with BitTorrent to develop the Cache Discovery Protocol, which lets ISPs cache the most popular torrent files, and then seed the files from servers within their network, reducing network traffic.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
The article states:
"The Comcast-BitTorrent dispute has been a cause celebre among Internet advocacy groups and others who called for greater regulation for an open Internet, citing Comcast."
I fail to see how greater regulation would ever be the solution. It was regulation that made Comcast's monopoly possible in the first place, allowing them to pull idiotic stunts like traffic filtering. No company in a competitive environment could ever get away with that, because users would simply switch to another provider. Greater regulation is definitely not the answer. Instead, the government should be keeping its claws out of the economy in the first place.
If anyone doesn't get the whole picture, it might be Comcast. BitTorrent is based on peering and people seeding what they have. They can't exploit it unless they find a way to get their users to seed content for other users instead of coming from their ser... vers....
Oh dear. I guess they do have the big picture. I can see it now: all Comcast users must keep a background application running while using their network (or have bandwidth severely throttled on a per MAC address instead of per packet shape) and will seed data to other users using your hard disk space and electricity instead of Comcast's central servers. Diabolical.
*adjusts tin-foil hat*
This is just Comcast PR spin doctor damage control, since most people won't differentiate between Bittorrent, Inc and the bittorrent protocol. Comcast is just saying that they will stop inhibiting Bittorent, Inc's traffic without mentioning other bittorent programs/services like Azureus, utorrent, etc... Or possibly Comcast will give Bittorent, Inc. preferential treatment as compared to other bittorrent programs/services - so long, net neutrality!
The real issue is Comcast underinvesting in its infrastructure to the point where nodes meant to serve 400 residential customers are serving up to 700 (as confirmed to me by a tech who came in for a service call). In fact, Comcast actually INCREASED it's dividend to shareholders this year, meaning that instead of investing its increased profits into its own network for the benefit of its customers, it paid out to investors since the stock price is stagnant and it hopes they will plow that dividend back into Comcast shares.
Without investing in its infrastructure Comcast will continue to use underhanded tactics to scrimp and save bandwidth costs on a seriously overburdened network, to the detriment of its millions of customers. Complain loudly enough to Comcast and threaten to switch providers unless their service improves - ultimately that's the only way to make it change course to a customer-centric business model, which ultimately is the only way for it to stay in business.
All that "more to it" is the problem and Comcast needs to be clear about network freedom. They can rig all sorts of schemes to make BitTorrent a traffic cop or to be some kind of traffic cop but none of that is appropriate. Comcast needs to do it's job, which is delivering bandwith. Everything else is bad for them and leads to real censorship.
All of this nonsense about "unauthorized reproduction" and single file copies being a criminal offense represent a tremendous and wrong expansion of copyright laws. Copyright disputes should be a civil matter of who deserves money earned from works. Copyright protection of restricted files violates the limited time provision of the Constitutional establishment clause and the whole point of copyright is to insure a rich public domain. Censoring the press (aka the internet) in order to enforce this new and unwholesome copyright idea violates yet another portion of the US Constitution.
Money that can't be earned in a free society is money that should not be earned. It would be better to live without mass produced entertainment than to live without a free press. Comcast and other ISPs should be at the forefront of the battle to preserve network freedom. As long as they insist on port blocks and traffic shaping, they are an enemy of freedom.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Isn't that the perfect network model?
I'm surprised more ISPs (particularly foreign ones where bandwidth is pricey) haven't looked at ways to bias traffic to share internally. I know i talked with some ISP in the UK and tried to convince them to let their cable modems run much faster but to apply the traffic caps at their network boundary. Unfortunately it didn't seem practical to do that on that scale at that time.
If comcast were to double or triple the upstream available when staying within their network then i'm sure p2p tools would start exploiting it.
This sounds like the plot of a B-rated sci-fi horror flick. Two organizations have a difference of interests, become aggressive and then hostile, conflict escalates, and then, all of a sudden: everybody's happy! Of course we'll help you out! We'd be delighted! Think of all the ways we could help each other! And then the one PI starts poking his nose where everyone's so happy and he finds out it's stage one of the evil plan of a mind-controlling space bug from Venus, building it's legion of manslaves.
As an added bonus, it further makes the issue harder for non-nerds to understand. Obligatory car analogy: You own a highway, and I own a motor vehicle company called "Cars". You deny all access to motor vehicles (due to "congestion"), and when people start complaining that you're denying cars, you let my Cars-brand vehicles on and say "That's not true, we fully allow Cars!" Yikes, even the car analogy was hard to explain. This should get interesting...
My understanding of their BT filtering is that they're sniffing the tracker traffic in order to determine which connections to cut. Since any internal use of BT would be to known trackers that they run themselves, I'd assume that it would be relatively easy to add exclusions to the filters to avoid blocking "legitimate" traffic.
It should be noted that one can bypass comcasts crappy seeding-only blocks by running tracker traffic through an external proxy. Encryption of the individual p2p connections doesn't cut it, you need an encrypted tracker stream as well.
This would point heavily to the tracker being the telltale
In the words of Strongbad, "I like-a to say, 'Holy Crap!'"
This certainly is unexpected.
First off, Comcast is going to stop blocking or filtering or slowing down bittorrent traffic. That's bittorrent the protocol, not BitTorrent the company. From TFA, "We are working hard on a different approach that is protocol-agnostic during peak periods." Protocol. Not just torrents sanctioned by BitTorrent, Inc., but any torrents whatsoever.
Second, what seems to be even better, is that Comcast is going to be increasing throughput to its customers. "Internet Capacity" as stated in the summary doesn't really make sense, unless it's referring to an IPv4-IPv6 changeover (-1: Pedantic), but if that means what I think it was supposed to mean, then it's great. However, is it an increase in last-mile throughput, or overall throughput? Or both? Because overall throughput would simply mean that if your neighbors are torrenting, your connection isn't slowed down, whereas last-mile throughput would only increase your peak speed when no one else is downloading anything. It seems like last-mile throughput is generally already maxed out with today's (yesterday's?) technology, namely, cable, at around 6Mbps, and the bottleneck is in the shared line.
What I'm saying is that both should be improved. The shared line should be made so that everyone could attain peak throughput at all times, and the peak throughput should be about 10x-20x what it is now. That's right. The bottleneck should be in our own Cat5 cables or 802.11g networks, not imposed on us by our ISPs.
Of course, ISPs won't willingly provide this (it costs precious $$$s), but for what we're paying ($50 a month, or $100 with TV, which amounts to $1,200 a year) it kinda seems like we deserve it. Telecom companies are required to put most of their profits back into their networks, but I don't think ISPs like Comcast, which operate over cable, are. Maybe they should be. Seems like it might help.
Of course, most of that was just my incoherent rambling about one aspect of the state of technology in the US (don't get me started), so if you were expecting that to be meaningful, well, just forget what you read.
This still smells bad on Comcast's part. What the heck does Comcast care what is BitTorrent used for? So if it's going to be used to share files with a friend (the extent of which is illegal is questionable) it's wrong and needs to be censored, and if it's going to be used for business it's acceptable?
This is still comcastic censorship, corporativism and licking the media mafia's asshole. Keep boycotting Comcast.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
But how would they discern the difference
BT Inc. could provide hashes of official torrents to Comcast. If the handshake doesn't send an approved info_hash, Comcast throttles.
Notice the fine print: They aren't saying they are ending interference with P2P, they are saying they will stop treating BitTorrent differently then other heavy transfers.
Which is a Good Thing, IMO, and I'm happy to have been proven wrong (I thought the P2P vs ISP war was going to heat up further.)
However, a guess: it may be a consequence of improved traffic shaping: they are already starting to prioritize short connections ("Speed boost", which is being very heavily advertised in this area).
You don't NEED to do RST injections if you can take the 1% heavy-users and traffic shape them down to a reasonable level when there's congestion. RST injection is very crude traffic management compared to the alternatives.
It also allows the ISP to deal with the cost externalities indirectly, because now the 90% don't complain as much about bad performance when they want to surf the net.
Finally, there is NOTHING in this that says they have to treat BitTorrent UPLOADS as special, just "not different from youtube".
Comcast has repeatedly claimed that they are only killing "leeches/seeds", flows which upload vastly more than they download. If Comcast instead just shapes all large uploads, this will have effectively the same effect, without the visible political repercussions.
Likewise, if ALL ISPs agressively shape uploads, this kills the P2P business model nearly as sure as anything else.
Also, the lack of topological awareness does hurt BitTorrent, as well as the lack of cacheability. If the ISP is able to say that
a) BitTorrent-type protocols can stay in my local loop and
b) These flows are ones I CAN cache without being sued
BitTorrent type flows become far less objectionable.
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Laws are neither good nor evil. It's a persons perspective that attaches good and evil. It is also worth bearing in mind how laws are created and how they are enforced. In short, the law is not there to protect you but to cage you. Almost. Good and Evil are subjective concepts, which means they can potentially apply to anything that interacts with people. There have definitely been both good and evil laws. 'User Privacy?'
There is no such thing as privacy the sooner people understand this the sooner you can see what a childish concept it is. It's absurd to say something doesn't exist when it actually does. Do *you* have anything that you've kept private? If you do, how can you possibly say it doesn't exist? 'You are in prison and don't know it.'
The size of the cage is limited by the size of your mind. If you wish to be caged then you will be. I'm not even sure what to make of this one. How is merely "thinking" going to change the "cage"? The only way I can think is via Orwellian "the cage is freedom" style self-delusion.