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."

Comments

Throttling

[CRCulver]

Throttling wouldn't be so bad if you could just opt out of it. The ISP providing my home Internet connection throttles your performance by default, but if you visit one their website, you can change the settings to unthrottled, and then upload and download gigabytes and gigabytes of music and films each both with no problem. 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.

Re:Throttling

[noc007]

No offense to you, but much offense intended towards all telcos, they shouldn't have squandered the $200,000,000,000 they made from the 1996 Telecommunications Act that was intended to bring FTTH. Be livid; Google one of the following:
"$200 billion" telecommunications scandal
"$200 billion" telecommunications rip-off

Re:Throttling

[electrictroy]

I love to hate on Corporations as much as the next guy, but there is such a thing as "truth" and integrity. The Telcos were not given $200 billion of taxpayer dollars. They were given tax breaks which allowed them to keep more of their money (in the same way I was given a ~$6000 standard deduction, which let me keep more of MY money).

They did not just sit on the money. They reinvested it in upgrades of other services such as:

- Rewiring analog lines with digital lines (cleaner phone calls/faster internet)
- Improving cell phone communications by upgrading to a digital network.
- Providing upgrades to DSL over standard lines.
- Not declaring bankruptcy during the 2000 dot-com collapse, because they had cash reserves to save them.

So the $200 billion was the *corporation's* money, not taxpayer money, and it was spent to upgrade many of the things we take for granted today (clean digital calls, ubiquitous cell availability, and high-speed DSL to the home). In my own area, I've seen my internet increase from 24 kbit/s on dirty analog lines to 53k on clean digital lines. I've seen cellphone costs drop from $60 a month to $5 a month so that even I can afford it, and in just the last few months, I got 3000k internet.

It would be dishonest of me to sit here and say the corporations have not done a damn thing since 1996.

I would be lying.

I'm not sure it's all bad...

[iceT]

Responding on behalf of hosts that don't (aren't supposed to) exist isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can save on the 45 second timeout for customers, and can help keep FW state tables smaller.

That being said.. spoofing addresses to return RST commands and etc. just SUCKS.

I wish DSL providers would improve their coverage. Many people don't have a choice of anything BUT Comcrap.

Cancel

[Badbone]

Im tired of Comcast pulling stunts like this too. So today I did something about it. I cancelled my Comcast service. Completely cancelled. And when I called to cancel, I let them know exactly why.

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. But even if they dont, at least I know that my money will not be going to a company I despise.

Re:Are you serious?

[Rakishi]

They're probably a government mandated monopoly in many places which isn't a horrible system per say. The problem is that the government is doing jack shit to uphold it's end of the bargain which is to keep comcast in check. A company given an artificial monopoly will abuse it, directly or indirectly, and if you give a company a monopoly then you better also take the effort to keep them in check.

I have heard, for example, that roadrunner in NYC needs to provide satisfactory service to customers due to it being a government created monopoly. Sure they won't mention this but I have heard of at least one person making enough noise (ie: contacting every politician within 50 miles, among other things) to have roadrunner cave in (well first they begged him to switch to dsl then they caved in).

They are still forging packets

[corsec67]

The biggest objection to what Comcast was doing was that they were generating reset packets that didn't originate with either host.

Now, this article seems to say that they will generate reset packets for hosts that don't even exist on the internet. This may be a kind of throttling, but it is sill FORGERY, and shouldn't be allowed at all.

FIOS availability

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Fios will be in my town by June,

How did you discover the FIOS rollout schedule for your location? I'm contemplating moving my household and I would definitely use the current/future availability of FIOS to help me choose my destination. However, I can't figure out where to look to find a map that says "This is where you can get it, this is where you can get it in 6 months, and this is where you're out of luck."

So how did you figure this out?

Re:FIOS availability

[ciscoguy01]

In Orange County, CA there are literally hundreds of boxes with AT&T on them being installed on the sides of streets. They are working on them continuously. I assume that is FIOS going in, and they are really working hard, it's *everywhere*.

After the way AT&T whined about the condition of their copper plant and how they couldn't give us DSL during the DSL rollout (because they were too cheap to fix it), this is a giant change. It may have to do with the UVERSE TV rollout I have been getting bill inserts about.

Course since it IS AT&T it will probably have too many problems and gotchas, and I will likely be trapped on DSL for the time being, since I have a grandfathered static IP.

Re:FIOS availability

[It doesn't come easy]

Unfortunately, AT&T's "version" of FIOS isn't truly FIOS. They take fiber to the boxes you see them working on but from there to your house it is still the old copper. The result is essentially the same internet speed you see now. They may be able to essentially double the practical speed but there's no way they will ever be able to get to Verizon's 20mbps symmetrical service. And I also heard that AT&T will be reserving most of the added capacity for their HDTV channels (their technology sends up to 3 HDTV channels down the wire to your house at any given time -- and even then they have to reduce the quality in order to get three channels over the copper -- it also means you will not be able to watch/record more than three channels at the same time at any given time -- might be somehwat of a limit for large households). There's lots of technical details around AT&T's approach verses Verizon but sad to say AT&T's version is already obsolete and they haven't even gotten it out the door.

Isn't 100 syn packets a second a bit abnormal?

[InsaneGeek]

Sending 100 syn packets per second to an invalid internet address... that would seem like a big red someone stupid is trying (or testing) a DOS syn attack flag to any ISP worth their salt. They basically were trying to create 100 outbound connection attempts per second for an extended period of time, I would be more annoyed if the ISP didn't catch something like that, only need a few hosts to build up a nice syn attack and overrun someone's tcp stack.

Re:Comcast: we hate our customers

[thrillseeker]

Comcast does not have common carrier status, nor do they want it.

Then it's an excellent opportunity then for some do gooder to bring a class action against them for not actively preventing access to illegal content - think of the children.

Maybe they want it after all.