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Comcast Blocks Web Browsing
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers have found that Comcast has quietly rolled out a new traffic-shaping method, which is interfering with web browsers in addition to p2p traffic. The smoking gun that documents this behavior are network traces collected from Comcast subscribers Internet connections. This evidence shows Comcast is forging packets and blocking connection attempts from web browsers. One has to hope this isn't the congestion management system they are touting as no longer targeting BitTorrent, which they are deploying in reaction to the recent FCC investigations."
On my service provider's homepage, it takes a half an hour for me to just find the place to pay my bill, and it moves every couple of months. If such an option is available, I doubt anyone has ever actually found it to activate it! (Luckily, I don't have comcast, and am in a rare area with two cable providers, the OTHER of which is comcast, so I'm hoping RCN won't pull this crap because they actually could lose customers and are already second-place.)
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
How come they still have customers? Are they a de facto monopoly? Where are the class action lawsuits and the antitrust regulations then?
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Or just don't use comcast. Too much bull to deal with, if you ask me. Fios will be in my town by June, and that's the route I'm taking. For now, DSL works fine.
Why should you or anyone opt out? If they can't give you the bandwidth they promise you in your contract - they shouldn't have advertised it as such in the first place.
Does Comcast have a death wish? It sounds like something out of Dilbert.
When ISPs were just targetting the minority of users who use P2P (and then under the excuse of stopping piracy/ thinking of the children/ protecting us from terrrists) there would never be enough backlash from their users to stop this kind of abuse.
However if they start screwing with http, then suddenly every Joe Sixpack will be up in arms about traffic shaping, and maybe the pressure will be sufficient to actually bring about some change.
My sincere thanks, Comcast, for bringing this issue into the mainstream.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The fact that ISPs are doing this is scary. The fact that customers accept it is also scary. The ISP figures most people aren't going to bother changing their settings, but the people who really love file-sharing are still free to do so. Which seems kind of strange. The "problem users" are those savvy ones who transmit tons of data, who are the same ones who will probably change this setting. What's the point in throttling the non-savvy users who just do light web-browsing anyway?
Okay, I'm not specifically a network engineer, but I like to think that I'm not network stupid. To me, this would sound suspiciously like someone trying to perform a denial of service attack.
Now, I can understand being irritated at forged packets coming back as a result, but at the same time, isn't it reasonable to expect Comcast to do something to shut down connections coming from this host? Frankly, I'm a little surprised that Comcast didn't shut off the connection altogether.
Am I missing something?
I wonder what Comcast's network would look like if they spent as much money improving bandwidth as they apparently do "shaping" (damaging) the traffic already on their wires.
To me it seemed rather obvious: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=501572&cid=22882416
please someone correct me, but this appears like comcast is knocking down SYN floods. If this is the case, it is a good thing. In fact, if they stopped all connections both ways to some tool who is slamming the network with a bunch of crap at peak time for a limited time on each offense, wouldn't that be a good thing ?
Just wait till they do the same thing with TV/phone: Hundreds of channels* Free unlimited long distance** *If you watch your TV more than 20 hours a month we'll cut you off **As long as you don't place a lot of really long distance calls. Then we'll throttle them so you only get every 3rd word
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Granted, the person on the other end of the phone doesnt know or care about such issues as net neutrality. But she did ask why I was cancelling, and she did type in my response. So hopefully someone down the line will read it.
Someone will probably read it. Here's your problem though - what she typed is probably something like this:
You can't bust through the customer service morass when you're dealing with people making $10/hour who have been strategically placed by their employer as a defense between you and anyone who could actually solve your problem.
This crap has to come to a halt. Not just Comcast's antics, but ISPs in general. If an ISP is going to block ports, traffic shape, or otherwise impose restrictions on internet connections, they should be required to advertise those restrictions more prominently than the features of the service. It's not right to bury restrictions on page 30 of a TOS agreement. If you're going to advertise your service as 50 times faster than a dial-up connection or advertise "blazing speeds" and low prices, they should also be required to advertise their service's restrictions just as prominently or more so. The same thing goes for "unlimited bandwidth". If they're going to advertise unlimited bandwidth, they should never be able to cite excessive usage as a reason to cut someone off. Our world should not be run by marketing and PR people. "Liar" should not be a viable career path.
Thank you for pointing that out.
They love to moan (especially ATT) about how they can't afford fiber, when the truth is they are too busy rubbing our billions of tax dollars all over their fat sweaty bodies.
"We already got paid, why should we invest in infrastructure?"
We need either a carrot or a stick for the telcos in this damn country. The carrot would have been making them ACTUALLY DO FTTH before giving them a big fat check. The stick would be forcing them to make good on it now or else face criminal charges of defrauding the US public, and/or fining them $200Bn.
Instead, we've chosen neither--to let them do whatever the hell they want, forever, with no consequences.
Customers don't accept it because they don't understand the first thing about how communications networks work.
The fact that there is nowhere near perfect information and that last mile access is usually a natural monopoly (if not a statutory one) in most places, the free market will not work as advertised.
People are so easily lead by spin! Remember when a few of the Katrina victims used their govt-issued debit cards for nonessentials and everybody freaked? Now the whole country is receiving a cash windfall of borrowed money from the govt. and nobody cares, because it's a "tax rebate" of "your" money - even if you didn't pay that much tax in the first place, and even though govt. services are still being provided! "Freedom isn't free so I don't mind sacrificing other people's lives for it, just don't tax my capital gains or my inheritance windfall!!!"
Of course these providers have improved their services. The problem is they have not improved them quite as well as they could have. And a lot of the ways they are "improving" them focues on ways to extract more money out of the customers, rather than providing a service that increases the value to customers. Would you expect any less of a business motived exclusively by revenue growth?
One big problem is that these companies are sitting on "gold mines" that were established for them (or for the company they bought out) through exclusive monopolies on the infrastructure. Although they invested in this infrastructure, they benefitted from government guarantees of an exclusive regulated monopoly. Now, with most of the regulation lifted, they are using this infrastructure they "inherited" to gouge customers (as opposed to supplying a regulated service that would be sufficient to pay back the investment). At the same time, they know competitors are basically unable to overbuild, not because of any exclusivity, but merely because it doesn't make sense to invest in another infrastructure (because the new builder would know they could at best get 50% of the customer base).
IMHO, the people have a "lien" in that infrastructure because of having guaranteed the exclusivity in the past. That "lien" should be exercised in the form of maintaining a level of regulation on the infrastructure that permits fair, equal, and neutral use, as well as pricing that is fair and does not gouge consumers.
It's bad enough that we have such a poor service from companies like several cable companies and many telephone companies in terms of how the internet layer services are rendered over the infrastructure. If we had fair access to the infrastructure by other providers of internet layer service, then competition would at least allow someone that does a better job to offer services, if not encourage others to do better to keep customers happy.
Long ago, AT&T was broken up between local service and long distance service because at the time it was seen that long distance would be better provided through competition. This was in fact correct and it did improve long distance through better offerings, better pricing, etc. But the split wasn't quite right in terms of today's needs. What we need today for telephone and cable service is a split that separates the ownership and management of the infrastructure, and the companies that can offer services over that infrastructure. We are already seeing this point of split taking place in many areas for electrical power service. In many areas, people can contract to get their electric power from any of a number of power providers (some that actually generate power, and some that merely buy it on the generation market). This has opened up options we would not have otherwise even seen, such as greener power preferences.
What I propose is that governments in all areas support (even financially) the development of an all new fiber based infrustructure. Instead of this being a branched fiber structure like Verizon FiOS, this infrastructure install a minimum of 4 fibers from each home (maybe more for businesses) all the way to a central office connection facility. This infrastructure, including the central office facilities, will be owned by the local government (or liened or otherwise regulated by it), and operated in a fully fair and neutral way. The home owner/renter can then acquire services from any company prepared to connect service to them through one or more of these fiber circuits. Legacy/incumbent providers of information/entertainment service like Comcast, and telco service like Verizon, can make use of this by being one of these providers. They would be able to offer any services they want through that fiber connection (which is plenty sufficient for a huge amount of service on just 1 of the 4 fibers). They could even choose to subcontract
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, since it was a tax break, it was taxpayer money. The fact that it stayed in the corporation's bucket instead of making a trip to the feds nad back again is irrelevant.
It would be dishonest of me to sit here and say the corporations have not done a damn thing since 1996.Mostly, they've consolidated their position and worked to make competition impractical, preferrably illegal. Screw them - build FTTH, revoke their last mile right of way, and make them rent the service like anyone else who wants to.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"