Elude Your ISP's BitTorrent Blockade

StonyandCher writes "More and more ISPs are blocking or throttling traffic to the peer-to-peer file-sharing service, even if you are downloading copyright free content. Have you been targeted? How can you get around the restrictions? This PC World report shows you a number of tips and tools can help you determine whether you're facing a BitTorrent blockade and, if so, help you get around it."

Comments

Glasnost

[Tobenisstinky]

Slashdotted already...

Re:Glasnost

[timelorde]

Unless, of course, your ISP is blocking that, too...

Re:Glasnost

[xXDarkNinjaXx]

+5: Creepy...

Re:Glasnost

[Hognoxious]

Don't be so paranoid, do you really think that they can be bothered to blo no carrier

Australia is lucky

[mrbluze]

.. kind of lucky, anyway.

We have a website which provides pretty detailed information on what the ISP's are up to. Because there are so many members, I think the ISP's are sitting up and paying attention to a degree, because it's really not that expensive to change providers now.

So here it's just a matter of choose your carrier and tell the other telco's to piss off.

Re:Australia is lucky

[QuantumG]

There is nothing lucky about competition in the Australian broadband market. We forced the monopolist to open their network and we enforced the laws to keep the competition healthy. The fact that the USA is incapable of doing this is proof that they have lost control of their political system and they're the first to admit it.

Re:Australia is lucky

[mrbluze]

We forced the monopolist to open their network and we enforced the laws to keep the competition healthy. That's true, and activism still works in Australia - except in Tasmania, of course (the place where you see bumper stickers reading "Tasmania, Smell the Corruption").

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again?

pot, meet kettle.

Re:Australia is lucky

[iminplaya]

They didn't lose control. They gave it up willingly, for the sake of convenience. If they actually cared, they wouldn't keep on voting for the one who can flash the most cash. They would seek out and vote for candidates who aren't so allied with big business. But... it's more convenient to just vote for the guy that mass media presents to them. Then bitch about it till the next cycle, repeat. If they would admit it, they would be on the first step towards a cure. As it is, the 45 year decline will continue for at least four more. There is no end in sight. Australia doesn't really look any better

Re:Australia is lucky

[mrbluze]

But... it's more convenient to just vote for the guy that mass media presents to them. Then bitch about it till the next cycle, repeat. And shoot the one who doesn't do the bidding of the money masters.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Not as much as for owning an unlicensed firearm. Which may or may not make sense, depending on how much of a fucking tool you are.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again?

They said they were in control, not smart.

Re:Australia is lucky

[the eric conspiracy]

I don't know about that - there sure good competition for my broadband dollar here in NJ.

Re:Australia is lucky

[bsDaemon]

You act like we ever had control in the first place. The Democrat Party has a history as far back as the 1840s (at least) of dragooning Irish immigrants and mobsters into their party, offering them city jobs if they'd vote right and beat up anyone who didn't. Once they had the Irish hooked, they moved on to Blacks and now Hispanics... Northern Dems, anyway. Southern Dems are the party of slavery and the KKK, lest we forget.

The Republican Party has always been the party of big money, cigar-munching industrialists who hire the mobsters that the Democrats didn't get to beat up Democrat-backing union-members and break strikes. It was always free market, industrialist and all that jazz. Lincoln was the first Neo-Con, too -- suspending habaeus corpus in Maryland and locking the state legislature up, invading the Confederacy, etc.

It wasn't until the 1960s when the Southern Democrats switched to the Republican (Carpetbagger) Party, for some reason which still makes absolutely no sense that the illusion formed that anyone was actually a Republican.

American politics has always been about whose gang is bigger -- just like Roman politics. Don't like it? Tough. I highly doubt that it's that much different in the rest of the world. You Europeans just have smaller parties and more of them -- but probably no more parties than your country has football teams, because your political lynch gangs are just called "football hooligans."

Rome's new mayor is of the National Alliance Party, which either is or is allied with MSI and Alessandra Mussolini, Playboy Bunny and Fascist MEP. Boys Roma, one of the local hooligan squads, backs that party.

Glasgow has battle lines drawn between Rangers (UDA) and Celts (IRA) and has in the past been a spill-over for that whole mess.

Of course, Latin American political mobs just kill each other outright with bombs and machine guns and deal drugs.
----

My point is, perhaps the only thing we've lost in America is the illusion that "we" ever had a say. But frankly, no one else is any better off either, really.

Except the Swiss.

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

Please could you elaborate? I don't get your point (seriously).

Re:Australia is lucky

[hedwards]

The Republican Party has always been the party of big money, cigar-munching industrialists who hire the mobsters that the Democrats didn't get to beat up Democrat-backing union-members and break strikes. It was always free market, industrialist and all that jazz. Lincoln was the first Neo-Con, too -- suspending habaeus corpus in Maryland and locking the state legislature up, invading the Confederacy, etc. Actually, Lincoln had the constitutional right to revoke the writ of habeas corpus under the US constitution.

W doing so OTOH is completely and in all other ways illegal. There was no rebellion, and as bad as 9/11 was there was no effort by al Quaeda or anybody else to occupy our country.
 

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it. This passage comes out of Article I of the US constitution. I don't think anybody other than the biggest partisan can argue that the confederacy wasn't engaged in an act of rebellion. And it is more than a little bit tenuous to suggest that there wasn't a legitimate claim at the time that it was in the interest of public safety to ensure that possible and known southern sympathizers could be kept from returning to the south.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Matt_R]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pointer#Australia

Re:Australia is lucky

[wharlie]

That must be the only lucky thing about Aussie broadband.
Compared to other developed countries it is slow as hell and overpriced.
The customer service is bad as well but that's not just Australia.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Fleet Admiral]

This has something to do about an article posted a while back. Laser pointers were banned because they could be directed at planes/helicopters and distract the pilots. I think that was the gist anyway...

Re:Australia is lucky

[ScrewMaster]

I don't think anybody other than the biggest partisan can argue that the confederacy wasn't engaged in an act of rebellion.

They weren't rebelling ... they were seceding!

Fine point for arguing, I know.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Maxo-Texas]

Not really.

You have to start with the party and take control at a much earlier stage.

In america by the time the voting for a candidate in either major party takes place, you've already lost to the corporations.

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

Sorry, I can't see that site at the moment. However, I'd guess there's some issue with laser pointers being considered dangerous in Australia and are thus illegal in some way?

That much I get. How this is related to this discussion is what I'm questioning...

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

ok...so that sounds reasonable.

However, what has that to do with this discussion?

Re:Australia is lucky

[duckInferno]

Significantly less than the cost of fixing the damage caused by a wayward 747 crashing into a populated area, I'd wager.

Re:Australia is lucky

[QuantumG]

It's the American form of arguing.

Re:Australia is lucky

[trawg]

speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again? I shall have to assume you're an American, because trying to score points off such a triviality as that while your own political system is rogering you every which way would be exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from one. We might not have laser pointers (note: that whole debacle was in one state, and it was only for laser pointers up to a certain level of dangerousness, and noone here even gives a shit about it anyway because we don't see the need to own laser pointers), but I'm glad we're not in the same spiraling descent into hell you guys are currently in.

If you're not American, then take the bits you want out of the above and consider me trolled.

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

eh? you mean taking the argument off on a tangent? ...or failing to fully explain something? ...or both?

(or, in my case, assuming above normal intelligence ;) - I'm not American, of course )

Re:Australia is lucky

[bsDaemon]

Before the Civil War, the it was "these United States are," now its "the United States is" -- that's not cool. not cool at all.

The Constitution was a contract entered into by the several states, who were themselves soverign entities. When one party to a contract no longer honors the agreement, the other party is no longer bound to.

Northern states, and the Federal Government, were not doing their due diligence or keeping up their end of the bargain, and were actively engaged in policies to undermine the South economically (protectionist trade schemes which would have destroyed the South).

The Southern States, being soveriegn entities and agreived parties, therefore, removed themselves from the deal. This is not rebellion.

This Whiskey Rebellion was rebellion. The Revolutionary War was rebellion. The civil war was not rebellion.

I grew up most of my life in Virginia, but was born in New York and had family on both sides. I'm not interested in fighting the war over again, especially not on /. but the point is -- Lincoln was a little bitch. There, I said it.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Gideon Fubar]

We have jerks here, just like everywhere else. Some of them take to pointing lasers at incoming planes and hovering helicopters. I don't endorse banning the lasers, but then i'm not the kind of guy who thinks it's fun to try to hit the cockpit of a landing 747.

Note, that (iirc) it's only class 3 and 4 lasers that are banned, not all laser pointers.

Re:Australia is lucky

[ScreamingCactus]

The media picks favorites and doesn't give anyone else much of a chance to be heard. The internet partly solves this problem, but most Americans still choose to get their news from television. Also, the most popular sources for online news are often the same as the ones that are on TV. Since money seems to be the key to everything, there is not a lot that can be done about this right now.

Somehow all the candidates manage to Artfully Dodge all relevant questions (partly because the media doesn't give a shit one way or the other), so the voter is left picking the one who (s)he most closely identifies with. Which usually turns out to be the best speaker. However, the U.S. is not the only place where this happens. Unfortunately, in the States, the rest of the majority has fallen into apathy and either doesn't vote or votes based on factors as weak as flipping a coin (it's hard to have faith in the democratic process after someone like Bush gets elected twice). The few remaining citizens who actually have the motivation to find their own sources for information, do vote for the candidate who actually could improve this country, on the rare occasion they are presented with one.

However, as I stated before, most of the American people are quite apathetic at this point (as they don't see any hope with any of the candidates), or they aren't aware of how badly they are misinformed (and actually believe what media like Fox News tells them), but some, unfortunately, do vote for whichever one seems most popular. And that is worse than not voting at all.

Unfortunately the cause for all this is that the country is run by money, not men, and curing that will be the only way to rememdy the situation. Until then, things will only get worse, further fueled by all the damage W. has done.

Re:Australia is lucky

[tonyray]

You know, carriers make money on some Internet customers and lose money on others. If you are one of the bandwidth hogs he is losing money on, I dare you to tell him to piss off. He'll probably die laughing.

Re:Australia is lucky

[QuantumG]

I mean mud slinging.

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

We might not have laser pointers (note: that whole debacle was in one state, and it was only for laser pointers up to a certain level of dangerousness, and noone here even gives a shit about it anyway because we don't see the need to own laser pointers), but I'm glad we're not in the same spiraling descent into hell you guys are currently in.

We're right behind them in almost every respect because idiots like you won't fight for something unless YOU stand to gain. You don't use laser pointers, so "we" don't need them. (Bollox to that. Green laser pointers have legitimate uses - like astronomy) Usually every time the US implements some draconian measure it filters back to Aus in 3-5 years tops. We have a few of our own problems too, like not having fair use, not being permitted to backup DVDs without facing the posibility of serving prison time etc.

Re:Australia is lucky

[kylehase]

up to 14 years in jail. 20 years if it's mounted on a shark. Probably more if it's on a great white.

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

Note, that (iirc) it's only class 3 and 4 lasers that are banned, not all laser pointers.

Unfortunately green class IIIs are exactly what you need to point out astronomical objects...

Re:Australia is lucky

[Frogbert]

1. That is only in New South Wales.
2. The Lasers that you need to get a license for are incredibly powerful, they aren't simple laser pointers.

Re:Australia is lucky

[rossz]

Some of us care. Unfortunately, we seem to be a small minority. The typical American is happy to sit at home being spoon fed his/her weekly episode of "American Idol" and trade email chain letters that are the online equivalent of the National Equirer (think big foot, Elvis sightings, and UFOs).

Re:Australia is lucky

[SpaceLifeForm]

When laser pointers are outlawed, only outlaws will have laser pointers.

GO BO + KO.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

So the fact that the United States has a terribly-managed last-mile internet industry pales in comparison to a possibly-real, probably-not-enforced regulation regarding laser pointer ownership?

I mean, in many kitchens you can find both a pot and a kettle. Although in this case, it's more like you borrowed an appliance from another room entirely, brought it to the kitchen, and said "Fuck, that pot is BLAAAAACK"

Re:Australia is lucky

[QuantumG]

The law was against having them with no legitimate use.. if you have a legitimate use then there's no law against having them. You'd know this if you had read anything about the law in question and you would have read something about it if you cared, so clearly you don't.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Gideon Fubar]

There is zero chance of those things ever working. Australia has neither the resources or manpower to police the internet. Anyone who says otherwise is gunning for reelection or looking to make a quick dollar from failed government contracts.

Re:Australia is lucky

[MadnessASAP]

Hmmm...

I wonder if me and a few friends decided to go to LAX and shine lasers into the cockpit of planes of final, how long would it be before possessing a laser point would win you a free one way ticket to Guantanamo Bay?

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

The law was against having them with no legitimate use.. if you have a legitimate use then there's no law against having them. You'd know this if you had read anything about the law in question and you would have read something about it if you cared, so clearly you don't.

I've read plenty about the law you arrogant fool. I just happen not to be naive and stupid enough to trust a NSW cop to recognise a legitimate use, nor a judge to be suitably informed to try a case. How many NSW cops and judges do you know that are into astronomy. How do you tell the difference between an amateur astronomer with a pair of binocs and a laser pointer, and a dickhead who is using the same equipment to "shoot down" planes.

And this tripe gets modded informative. Slashdot has gone to the dogs.

Re:Australia is lucky

[ryszard99]

IANAL + IMHO, sitting in a cafe with friends mucking about with a green laser pointer (one of the "high power" jobbies is not a legit use of a laser pointer.

However using one for astronomy, sitting in a room doing whatever you need to do with it (IANAA - Astronomer) probably is. I would wager that most cops would be able to tell the difference here./P

Re:Australia is lucky

[lordsid]

"pot, meet kettle." you, sir, are a troll.

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

Oh, how constructive. Just because someone doesn't understand how a comment relates to the discussino in hand doesn't make them a troll.

If you're smarter than me, perhaps you would care to explain.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Hypothetically speaking, do airplanes flying into buildings count as a "invasion of the public safety"?

Re:Australia is lucky

[Gordonjcp]

Glasgow has battle lines drawn between Rangers (UDA) and Celts (IRA) and has in the past been a spill-over for that whole mess.

That's an Irish immigrant thing as well. Once again, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the US Republicans for stopping pumping cash and weapons into these terrorist organisations - since you eased up on the Noraid stuff it's become a lot more pleasant around here.

Re:Australia is lucky

[rohan972]

I don't know if you realize how true this is. For a short time, I worked for an ISP. Our wholesale provider also trained us. Ineffective customer service was a part of the business plan. It was considered beneficial for customers who needed too much help (ie: problems aren't solved by running and automated setup program) or people who used their bandwidth to become dissatisfied and leave.

Re:Australia is lucky

[syousef]

Good for you, trusting person that you are.

I have no problem at all with pointers being illegal to point at an aircraft. When a cop has the power to arrest you for having one on your person, there's something seriously wrong. Even if you wish to trust your police to understand what you're doing with it, he's got one more thing to nail you with if he's corrupt. It's his word against yours. Yes, if he's corrupt he can claim you were pointing it at aircraft, but having that extra onus to prove it is exactly what you need to have a society that doesn't encourage corruption. I've also met some cops who are really pieces of work and wouldn't be able to tell a dobsonian telescope from a bong.

Re:Australia is lucky

[fractoid]

Some tools ordered high-power (up to a Watt or two, I think) lasers off some website and then pointed them at planes because planes are big and far away and going "yay I can make a dot on a plane" is fun. The pilots, however, thought variations of either "oh shit the world just went bright green and now I can't see" or "we have incoming at two o'clock, prepare evasive maneuvers".

And in its usual hysterical-nanny way, the government decided to ban ALL laser pointers because apparently it's easier to do that than to try and outlaw 'stupid'.

Re:Australia is lucky

[rdnetto]

True, but we were also too short-sighted to see the problems that handing over the infrastructure to a private company. The end result is that today our internet connections are among the worst in terms of speed.

Open networks = flexible connections, competition
Privately owned infrastructure = no upgrades; most areas don't have fibre and many still don't have ADSL.

Re:Australia is lucky

[stupidflanders]

The Arab population in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades
Based on how you read that statistic, they are increasingly occupying the country.

(Just playing devil's advocate, not in ANY way trying to say that suspending Constitutional rights is OK).

Re:Australia is lucky

[1u3hr]

And in its usual hysterical-nanny way, the government decided to ban ALL laser pointers because apparently it's easier to do that than to try and outlaw 'stupid'.

Well, it IS easier to ban a gadget than "outlaw stupid". Look at the US which tried the "outlaw stupidity" method with regrds to gun control. Isn't working very effectively, IMHO. Most other contries just outlawed the gadget rather trying to make people smarter, laudable though that is in abstract.

Re:Australia is lucky

[DMUTPeregrine]

Important point. Seceding implies that they didn't want to take over the existing government, merely implement their own and let the non-seceding states remain as the US. When their secession was denied they rebelled.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Sobrique]

As a wise man once said: "Democracy is the worst possible form of government, apart from all the rest".

At the end of the day, you never get away from the fact that half the voters are mentally below average. All of them are motivated by self interest, but some see 'way, get tax break' as more immediate self interest than investing in social services.

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwarfsoft]

If you think we have forced Telstra to open their network you really haven't seen outside of whatever city you are living in. I have no choice for ADSL2+ except bigpond. If it was shared, the way it was supposed to be, then any other ISP could be recieving my business.

As it is I choose to wait until they finally do open it up to competition. ADSL1 for me until then.
*sigh*

At least for now we don't have the throttling of service going on too rife. But thats probably because we are paying exhorbitant fees for poor service instead of the kind of prices we could be expected to pay in a free market.

Re:Australia is lucky

[BraksDad]

Can you mount 2 on a hammerhead shark?
If so, is it 28 years?

Re:Australia is lucky

[Dan541]

Owning a device frequently used to endanger aircraft !

Why on earth should that be illegal?

Re:Australia is lucky

[Dishevel]

Owning a device frequently used to endanger aircraft ! Why on earth should that be illegal? You sir are so correct. Would you minding helping with passing a law to ban the possesion of hands? Hands are used by almost EVERY criminal. Hands are used in theft, battery, rape and even MURDER! Please help ban these incredibly dangerous items from being able to just be owned by everyone.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are these people that need all these high-powered laser pointers? Am I missing out on some really crucial task that they play in people's lives that the ban has adversely affected?

I have no trouble with banning something that could potentially cause many deaths easily, the same way I have no trouble with banning firearms.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because someone doesn't understand how a comment relates to the discussino in hand doesn't make them a troll.

You must be new here.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Shakrai]

Northern states, and the Federal Government, were not doing their due diligence

You mean because we wouldn't return your fleeing slaves to you?

or keeping up their end of the bargain

You mean like the cynical Southern attempts to involve the European powers?

and were actively engaged in policies to undermine the South economically

While the South was actively engaged in the policies of trying to spread the abhorrent institution known as slavery? They weren't even content to just keep it going in their own states -- they had to spread it to the frontier.

The Southern States, being soveriegn entities and agreived parties, therefore, removed themselves from the deal. This is not rebellion.

It was after they fired on a Federal fort. Up until that point even Lincoln (the 'little bitch' as you say) wasn't prepared to try and end the dispute with violence. Go read his first inaugural address. He did everything that he could do to preserve the Union without violence. When that failed his choice was to let it be torn apart or fight to save it. Do you really think he made the wrong decision?

I grew up most of my life in Virginia, but was born in New York and had family on both sides

I was born in New York and spent some of my teenage years in North Carolina. I met way too many people that buy into the "Lost Cause" and try to whitewash over what the Confederacy was really about. The whole fucking war was about slavery from the Southern perspective -- their own Constitution said as much. How anybody can defend that is beyond me. There was no romantic lost cause -- their cause was clear for anyone to see.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Shakrai]

It's the American form of arguing.

How did marriage come up in a conversation about BitTorrent???

Re:Australia is lucky

[TheoMurpse]

Actually, Lincoln had the constitutional right to revoke the writ of habeas corpus under the US constitution.

Not this again. I suggest you look up to see who has the power to suspend HC. I think you'll find the language in Article I. Here's a hint: Article I is the "Congress" Article.

Lincoln was able to suspend HC because he had the political will to do it, and Congress didn't have the political will to stop him. Rather, they ex post facto ratified his action, making it "Constitutional" merely because the Congress said it was OK.

Hell, the Supreme Court issued a court order to stop him, and he flipped the bird and continued on his way (recall that Lincoln controlled the military, and how is the SCOTUS supposed to tell the military to do anything?

That's the big secret about the Supreme Court: they only have power as long as we think they're relevant.

They don't control the purse and they don't control the guns.

Re:Australia is lucky

[HiThere]

Unfortunately, it's a bit more complex and systematic. The election laws are rigged so that effectively only two candidates have a realistic chance of winning. (Say greater than 1 chance in 1000, though I admit that's a W.A.G.)

This is a direct result of the method of counting the votes, AKA the "Two Party System" which was so praised while I was going to school. (Well, you'd expect the system to praise itself.) Most other ways of counting the votes would be fairer, but with this one the lobbyists only need to buy off two candidates. (Usually, though, the candidates are bought before they are selected by their parties to stand for election. If they aren't, they can't pay for ads, and nobody even recognizes their names...unless they're movie stars.)

One recent exception was Ross Perot. He was able to run because he was one of the wealthiest men in the country. (You'll notice, though, that he didn't win. No backing from the politicos. And he *might* have been a poor choice.) If somebody who's popular but not wealthy runs, they just don't put his name on the ballot, or count any write-ins. (I can remember a couple of such cases, though in both cases the "candidate" knew that votes for him wouldn't be counted.)

Generally I vote for "the (presumed) lesser of two evils", in full awareness that I'm voting for evil. Unfortunately, vote fixing appears to have reached such a high technological level that I'm not sure HOW my vote gets counted...or even THAT it gets counted. (Since the number of votes counted doesn't match the number of votes cast in any reliable fashion, why should one assume that how you vote makes any difference. Sometimes the votes counted are thousands of times as large as the number of voters...and the election isn't declared invalid.

Re:Australia is lucky

[bsDaemon]

No, the whole war was about free trade vs protectionism.

The industrial north wanted protectionist trade because they wanted to maintain a domestic market for their products. The agricultural south wanted free trade, because tariffs at home meant tariffs abroad. They needed to export to Britain to make a living, and also imported from Britain to get things to enjoy life.

Slavery was incidental. It was a tool of the day. The North was no great friend of the black man either. Lincoln was going to ship 'em all back to Africa, and would ahve had he not been shot. Draft riots in New York were because the people, mostly Irish, didn't want the freed slaves coming north and taking their jobs, etc.

Slavery never should have happened in the first place, but it was hardly the cause of the war.

As to it spreading, free-soil Yankees had to push their manifest destiny, too. What about all the poor Indians, huh?

Re:Australia is lucky

[electrictroy]

>>>"The fact that the USA is incapable of doing this is proof that they have lost control of their political system and they're the first to admit it"

We have competition. Let's see... in my home I have:

- Netscape ISP
- Comcast ISP
- Erols DSL
- Verizon DSL
- Dish ISP
- Directv ISP
- Virgin Mobile ISP
- Cingular Mobile ISP
- Verizon FiOS (new)

What was that? Something about only having one choice? Hmmm. I'm not seeing that in my location, and I live in a small town. About the only monopoly that still exists is the cable tv company. In all other facets (internet, electricity, phone) we have competition and Consumer Choice.

Power to the people.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Reziac]

Let me translate this into everydaylifespeak for ya:

"I have no problem at all with hammers being illegal to use to pound on passing cars. When a cop has the power to arrest you for having a hammer on your person, there's something seriously wrong. Even if you wish to trust your police to understand what you're doing with it, he's got one more thing to nail you with if he's corrupt. It's his word against yours. Yes, if he's corrupt he can claim you were pounding on passing cars, but having that extra onus to prove it is exactly what you need to have a society that doesn't encourage corruption."

Or insert any ordinary tool of your choice.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Reziac]

Or to the other special interests. Many of the loudest and most influential are not corporations. "Animal rights" groups are a good example of that. Lots of money and a big agenda that no one wants but themselves, and because they make campaign contributions and hire lobbyists, they still have their way with legislators. (Polls run about 80% *against* these special interests, yet they still pass. I rest my case.)

Re:Australia is lucky

[Shakrai]

Slavery was incidental

Really? Is that why the Confederate Constitution specifically mentioned it as a right? Is that why the Confederate Vice President was quoted as saying that "our Government is founded upon the idea that the Negro is not equal to the white man"?

The agricultural south wanted free trade, because tariffs at home meant tariffs abroad. They needed to export to Britain to make a living, and also imported from Britain to get things to enjoy life.

Interesting analysis, but you overlooked the minor little detail that the production of virtually all Southern exports (think cotton people) were dependent upon the institution of slavery.

The North was no great friend of the black man either.

Indeed. The North was still light years ahead of the South though.

Slavery never should have happened in the first place, but it was hardly the cause of the war

Really? So it was purely economic tension that divided the country? It had nothing to do with the disputes that 'ended' with the Missouri Compromise or the Kansas-Nebraska Act? It's an oversimplification to say that slavery was the sole cause of the war but to whitewash it away and pretend that it was solely an economic dispute or "states rights" issue is to ignore just how abhorrent the goals of the Confederacy really were.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Reziac]

I wouldn't be so quick to point out the Swiss as a sane society... read this and the attendant links:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3818457.ece

Plant rights??!!!

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

Too right, mate.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about people having control of their government vs. it having control of them.

US has its issues, AU has its. So we'll get in a transpacific government retardedness-waving match, I guess.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Dan541]

So we should never ban anything?

Where can I buy a box of hand grenades?

Re:Australia is lucky

[dwater]

Interesting that my post gets modded 'off-topic', but the reply to my post gets modded 'informative'.

If the question is off topic, then so is the answer, IMO.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not related really at all. Just in the same sense that I'm a person and all serial killers are persons, so there must be a connection.

Re:Australia is lucky

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right, but the grounds were there, and the congress did get around to doing it a year and a half later. Which is still very different from the crap we've got now.

The basic problem here is ...

[ScrewMaster]

that the cable companies don't consider (or don't want to have to consider) the consumer of their broadband offerings as their customer. They'd much rather have us be parasites on their network, parasites who happen to be targets of profitable marketing campaigns. The ad injection nonsense that a number of ISPs have launched is indicative of this attitude: we're just eyeballs attached to brains that view commercials.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[grommit]

You must understand that the advertisers don't care if we're just eyeballs attached to brains. They're mainly concerned with whether or not we have a credit card to purchase whatever they're selling.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Darkness404]

Isn't that what all monopolies want us to do? All MS wants us to do is keep paying for needless Windows licences while they don't improve it much, pay for Office because MS can't be bothered to include a decent word processor, pay for Windows OneCare because they can't fix their swiss-cheese OS, pay for DRM-ed music because they belive that all anyone does with DRM-free music is share it (and of course we all know that transfering media from your computer to a CD-ROM/MP3 player/another computer is morally wrong!11!11!) All the oil companies want us to do is pay for the $4/gallon of gas while beliving all the "oil is scarce" nonsense. All the government wants us to do is keep being patriotic so they can go on witch hunts for "terrorists" on American citizens. To keep us in paranoia about how obviously they need to wiretap more American phones because they might be a terrorist. To keep help "keep crime down" by restricting our second amendment right to bear arms. All the record companies want us to do is keep buying a copy of a song for every device we own. To believe in all this "piracy" nonsense and how if you transfer your legally bought CD to a computer/MP3 player/another CD/Home server is now illegal. To believe that fair use is illegal. To make us believe that all "pirates" bring down the economy/cause global warming/are responsible for drownings/deface Internet sites or other outrageous things.

The fact is, monopolies are much like oppressive governments, they try to make the public not think. But to just exist and "consume" whatever crap they throw at us.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Tawnos]

And all slashdotters like you seem to want is validation of your own rants against society. If you're so unhappy with all the stuff you see online, get outside and talk a walk. You'll feel better.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[jamstar7]

That's mostly because we're not their customers, we're their product. Their advertisers are their customers.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Kjella]

Only because we choose to be their product. Try finding some data on what ad spots will cost you, then multiply it up by the number of spots and divide by viewer ratings. That's the dollar income per person they get, and they'd be just as happy to sell it to you in a super premium channel if you were willing to pay. Even with premium channels people would rather have ads than pay even more for them. Maybe there's the rare oddball who a) can't stand ads, b) doesn't torrent it instead and c) is willing to pay equal to what ads is bringing in but it will be a very small minority. Really, try the math and see if you'd really like the cable bill to be that high. If you don't, don't act surprised when they do everything to drive up the value of what you're offering...

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[stupidflanders]

F*CK! I'm not reading all that!

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Kjella]

All the oil companies want us to do is pay for the $4/gallon of gas while beliving all the "oil is scarce" nonsense. Producing oil, as in actually creating oil is a slow process over millions of years and we're pumping it out of the ground like there's no tomorrow. I have a little problem saying "scarce" about something we pump out 35,000,000 barrels/day of, but do you really think this is something we can just ramp up production of as we please? The cheap kind is running out, and you can hope we have some expensive oil but...

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[flappinbooger]

I'd mod you up but you're already at 5. Dude, that's like the most insightful comment I've seen on here in a while.

I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter...

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[mrbcs]

I have a little problem saying "scarce" about something we pump out 35,000,000 barrels/day of, but do you really think this is something we can just ramp up production of as we please?

Last I checked it was 86 mbpd. http://www.worldoil.com/INFOCENTER/STATISTICS_DETAIL.ASP?STATFILE=_WORLDOILPRODUCTION

Not scarce, just not as much as we're demanding.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[idunno2112]

The Power of Nightmares

There are some parts of this documentary also on YouTube.

Re:The basic problem here is ...

[Geak]

No, that would be the companies paying the advertizers. The advertizers only concern is to annoy the shit out of as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. They don't make their money from the viewers, they make it from the company paying for the ad. Personally, I think it would be better if companies selling their products would cut out the middle man, and pay the viewers for seeing their ads.

Protest

[Pig Hogger]

Protest by paying the bill in pennies or any other kind of creative check-writing various tax departments have been the victim of...

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

I did something similar to my credit card company last month. 8 weeks, 4 phone calls trying to get a replacement card after I lost my wallet.

I "accidentally" sent it to the wrong address, then I "accidentally" sent it signed "Santa Clause". They didn't think it was funny...

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a long time since you could do that. There have been court cases establishing the right of a company to refuse small change.

However, what you can do is to pay each charge on the bill with a separate cheque, on separate days. One day pay the basic cable, the next day the box rental, the next day, the remote control rental, then the FCC charges, et cetera. And if they ever screw it up and re-charge you for something you've already have paid (which guaranteed won't take long, since their system isn't set up to handle itemized payments), put the money from then on into an escrow account and only send them slips showing the money has been deposited, pending them fixing their error. If they close you down, sue them -- there's no way you're going to lose if you can document that you made all the payments until they started sending erroneous bills, and continued to place money in escrow until they could present a correct bill.

Or, just abandon the service, since "service" doesn't include service.

Re:Protest

[griffeymac]

Great, and then I burn through books of checks at four times the usual rate. Exactly how does paying the cable company in installments inflict harm on them? They get the check for part of the bill, and they reduce that amount from the total amount owed. They get another check, and reduce the amount from the total amount owed. As long as all the checks get there before the due date, they don't care how many checks they get--they have a whole department of people that do nothing but process the checks received in the mail every day.

Re:Protest

[dwater]

eh? you sent your wallet to the wrong address, and then signed it 'santa clause'?

Did you miss out some crucial bit of information in your post?

Re:Protest

[uniquegeek]

Not sure about cheques, but credit/debit payments cost the company for each use, plus the manpower and associated costs to process it. There's the reason why stores tag on $0.50 for interac purchase, especially if they're under $10.00.

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly how does paying the cable company in installments inflict harm on them? They get the check for part of the bill, and they reduce that amount from the total amount owed. They get another check, and reduce the amount from the total amount owed.

Ah, but that is the error. They can't choose what the payment should go towards if you have already specified it. Using the money you specified for paying the FCC charges to cover their service charge, for example, would be embezzling money from the FCC.

Re:Protest

[witherstaff]

In the US it's against the merchant policies to tack on extra fees for credit/debit. Visa/MasterCard/Discover/Am Ex/etc all are equal to cash.

But you can give a cash discount. It's wacky and lame and almost no one does that.

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure about cheques, but credit/debit payments cost the company for each use, plus the manpower and associated costs to process it.

Same for cheques, at least in the USA. Most merchant banks charge a fee per item (cheque) deposited. And of course the associated costs are per transaction, and by paying in pieces, you've greatly increased the number of transactions. Which is not entirely good, as your postage cost is per transaction, too. Credit card is going to be cheaper for you personally.

Re:Protest

[uniquegeek]

The merchant rules (in that respect) are the same in Canada, except that businesses blatantly say it costs extra to use plastic. The policy doesn't seem to be enforced by the credit companies. Something you'll also find is being polite but firm in a support call will often yield positive results. You're racking up their call time (a major metric that phone support is graded on), but they have no way of getting rid of you because you haven't given them a reason to. If they dropped you, they would be reprimanded. i.e. Don't let them off the phone. I've gotten a higher-insterest savings account this way, and reduced my Mastercard rate by 11% (the Mastercard call took 90 minutes, but it was worth it). A good way of dealing with this with your ISP is to arm yourself with techinical information, and ask technical questions. Ask questions about the CONTRACT YOU SIGNED, not necessarily the contract they assumed you have accepted (new versions forced upon you without consent). Remain polite and clam, and ask for definite answers. I wonder what would happen if you got hard numbers for a max cap and asked for a pro-rated refund for months you didn't all your data transfer. Oh boy, you could come up with some really fun questions...

Re:Protest

[arth1]

You can always deliver the cheques in person, unless it's out of your way?
That way, you'll even get a receipt, and unless they can document that the cheque bounced, you have made your payment.

Re:Protest

[rastoboy29]

I costs them time to process the payments.

It won't cost you time to schedule them via your PC banking, however.

If everybody did it, hilarity would ensue.

Re:Protest

[SmlFreshwaterBuffalo]

You mean something like this?

http://www.bizmediascience.com/uploads/badcheck.jpg

Re:Protest

[Tim C]

they have a whole department of people that do nothing but process the checks received in the mail every day

Yes, and if everyone does it and they suddenly start to receive three or four times as many cheques, they'll need to employ more people to process them.

Re:Protest

[dufachi]

Funny. Comcast charges me $3.95 to pay with my credit/debit card.

Re:Protest

[Anonymous Coward]

wow that was really great

Re:Protest

[markild]

And who will see that cost again?

Re:Protest

[Insightfill]

Funny. Comcast charges me $3.95 to pay with my credit/debit card.

The VISA Merchant Rules (Google cache - I'm having problems with the real link) on Page 15 says that they can't charge extra for a credit card transaction, but CAN charge a "convenience fee" (wink wink), but there are a bunch of rules on when they're allowed to do this. They're probably in compliance with all of them, but there's a small chance they've messed up on this one: "The customer must be given a opportunity to cancel prior to completion of the transaction."

Re:Protest

[Pig Hogger]

Once I owed some money to the tax department. I plotted my cheques on C paper.

One day, while being 15th in line at the bank, a new teller came to the counters, spotted me, and called me loud with a big smile: "Hey! Mister! We got your cheques back"!!! and she called me at the new teller window she just opened and handed me a big roll of paper and proceeded to cash my paycheque. Not only I jumped the line, but afterwards, every teller was glad to see me whenever I came to the bank... :)

Re:Protest

[Sentry21]

My previous roommate returned from an overnight flight from Spain, where he was crammed in uncomfortably and couldn't sleep. He arrived at something like three in the morning, and took a taxi home.

The taxi driver spent the whole trip complaining about all the stuff that was going on in his life (about a half-hour ride). My roommate tried to pay with his Visa, and the cabbie protested, because 'it costs me more'. Eventually the cabbie relented, and my roommate paid. Signed the forms, left the imprint, and started climbing out of the cab. He related to me with bitter words the last thing the cabbie said to him:

'What, no tip?'

A message to retailers: if you honestly and truly have a problem with me paying by credit card, you have two options: stop taking credit cards entirely, or refuse my business. Either way, I'll find someone else.

not me

[FudRucker]

but i only fire up a bit torrent client about once a year, i recently started bittorrent when slackware-12.1 was released, about 9:30PM i started it and before i went to bed at 11:00PM it was finished so i set it seed all night and killed the client in the morning, now if i started running a bittorrent client all the time i would imagine my ISP would throttle my connection back severely and i could understand why...

Re:not me

[Anonymous Coward]

now if i started running a bittorrent client all the time i would imagine my ISP would throttle my connection back severely and i could understand why... From all the complaints that your IP is only seeding slackware and no pr0n, no doubt.

Re:not me

[UncleTogie]

now if i started running a bittorrent client all the time i would imagine my ISP would throttle my connection back severely and i could understand why...

So if your car manufacturer kept track of how many miles you'd driven, then limited either the speed or distance you can travel, would THAT be OK?

I'm sick of the "now you can download movies and music" commercials that say you can do these things, but don't mention limits other than POSSIBLY in fine print... at the bottom of the screen... in a 2-second flash... in the middle of a paragraph.

Either sell the service and back it, or don't bother. Sticking it to the customers 'cause you oversold your bandwidth is about as obnoxious as it gets without bein' illegal.

Re:not me

[FudRucker]

RE:"From all the complaints that your IP is only seeding slackware and no pr0n, no doubt."

and i am a boring old man that keeps the Weather channel on my television 24/7 :)

Re:not me

[rabbit994]

It's not car manufacturers, it's more like taxing someone who spends more time on roads then someone else, which is something we do already with Fuel Taxes and Road taxes against Semis.

I agree with throttling, I just wish they would be upfront about it. If they have bandwidth limit, then state it. If they block certain protocols, say so.

Re:not me

[FudRucker]

yup, i agree with the road tax analogy, and agree with the ISPs need to be up front and honest about it so customers know what they are getting, lots better than dishonest marketing hype to get customers to buy then later they feel as if they were lied to and taken for a ride by deceptive marketing...

Re:not me

[Ichijo]

So if your car manufacturer kept track of how many miles you'd driven, then limited either the speed or distance you can travel, would THAT be OK?

They basically do that with their x-ty thousand miles warranties.

Re:not me

[DigiShaman]

I'm sure the next wave of cable modems will have red numeral LEDs on them. The more you download/upload, the higher the number counts (in bytes). Sort of like an odometer. The first of each month it gets reset back to zero. But, if you go over your monthly limit four things will happen. Should there be any question, the customer will have a visual representation of their usage habits.

1. Your connection slows down.
2. Your connection is turned off.
3. You pay extra past that X amount of bytes.

or...

4. You throw the damn modem out the windows and tell the ISP to go f*ck themselves.

Re:not me

[complete loony]

For those ISP's with periodic bandwidth caps, there's already a firefox extension called Net Usage.

Re:not me

[tonyray]

You just don't get it. It isn't the downloading any ISP is objecting to; it is the uploading. ISP's are paid for content distributed from their networks, like websites. It normally pays half the cost of the ISP's connection to the Internet. But now you have cheapo companies (the so called "legal" stuff) and IP theives using P2P programs to distribute their whatever on the ISP's nickel. Yah, ISP's are livid about it. When is anyone on this forum ever going to get it through their thick skulls that it is the "UPLOADING", the "SEEDING", the ISP's are objecting to?

Re:not me

[houstonbofh]

The connection I bought is 3 meg down, half a meg up. So I am paying for that "up' part. It is in all the adds...

Re:not me

[totally bogus dude]

If their business model relies on them explicitly charging people $X/MB for hosting packages and yet they give their internet customers unlimited uploads, then that's their own dumb fault. They need to either explicitly put limits on what customers can upload from their non-business connection, or better promote their hosting solution (faster speeds, higher availability, etc.) to make it worth the price.

On the other hand, if they're getting paid by their downstream customers for distributing content to them (i.e. other ISPs buying bandwidth off of them), then it doesn't matter whether it's their web servers doing the uploading or the cable/ADSL customers.

I think the only reason ISPs are livid is because a) they want to keep advertising high speeds and unlimited usage and b) they don't want to provide the infrastructure necessary to support people actually using their high speed connections as much as they please. Or, they may simply be getting paid by the cartels to be "tough on P2P" in order to help keep it marginalized.

Re:not me

[number11]

For those ISP's with periodic bandwidth caps, there's already a firefox extension called Net Usage.

For those who want to keep track of bandwidth from other programs as well (or maybe just aren't in .au, whose ISPs Net Usage customizes for), there's NetMeter, which tracks all traffic through your network interface.

Re:not me

[UncleTogie]

Or, they may simply be getting paid by the cartels to be "tough on P2P" in order to help keep it marginalized.

They can crack down on illegal P2P all they want. Won't affect me at all. If I want to help out my fave Linux flavor by seeding the latest version, h'wever, they shouldn't be able to tell me I can't.

They're making no distinction between "good" and "bad" P2P, they're just lumping it all together... and screwing us for their inability to provide a service in good faith.

Re:not me

[fugue]

So if your car manufacturer kept track of how many miles you'd driven, then limited either the speed or distance you can travel, would THAT be OK?

Of course. Using a car destroys non-renewable resources, causes air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution at night, is a direct kinetic danger to cyclists, pedestrians, and even other car users (not to mention the harm it does the driver), is the direct cause of urban sprawl and the untenability of walking cities... But it seems that leaving a car manufacturer the responsibility of safeguarding common resources is unlikely to be successful.

Re:not me

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, being upfront about it - or rather, not being so - is part of the problem.

I can't say I'd be happy if ISPs that throttle declared so upfront, since I'd rather have them not do so at all. But if they sell me "unlimited" service and then throttle me after all and lie about it when I ask them whether they do, for all I'm concerned, that's FRAUD.

At least with an honest ISP, I've got the option of saying "OK, your offer doesn't appeal to me, so I'm going to go with your competitor". But then, that's probably exactly the reason why they are lying and defrauding customers.

Re:not me

[Constantine XVI]

The latest releases of DD-WRT, and a few other custom router firmwares, have a built-in bandwith log for your entire network.

Re:not me

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally disagree with throttling. I am already being taxed on my bill. I am paying for premiere service which is supposed to guarantee me higher bandwidth. You choose your cap and speed and your price is based on that. I have no problem paying more if I use more.

The thing is this isn't taxing, it is prohibition.

Re:not me

[flappinbooger]

That is, of course, because my cable modem is NOT in a closet somewhere and I look at it all the time and not just when the connection drops.... Yep.

Re:not me

[PieceofLavalamp]

Not only that but in quite a few commercials that fine print isn't legible. I have a 50" sdtv, and many commercials fine print is just a fuzzy line across the bottom. If there are cover your ass requirement in there, im sorry but thats just fraud.

Re:not me

[DigiShaman]

I've seen some homes outfitted with a professional network installation. What I mean by professional is that having RJ45 wall jacks and all the cable splitters, modem, and routing equipment in the attic or closet. However, most users at home have their cable modem and/or router right next to at least one PC. I'm sorry, but your local cable/telco will just see you as a "special" case.

Re:not me

[Richy_T]

Many users have wireless routers and operate laptops from other parts of their home. Welcome to 2008.

Rich

I feel very sorry...

[patio11]

... for all three users who needed an updated Linux distro RIGHT NOW, as opposed to a few hours later.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Darkness404]

So, what are you implying? That those who pay for a high-speed connection to the Internet shouldn't have rights to the high-speed part of it? So you are saying because I pay $XX per month to get unlimited access to the Internet at a speed of say ~1.5 MB/Second I have no right to demand use of that unlimited connection? I don't get what you are implying here, it seems like you are saying that what you pay for you have no right to use.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you'll shutup when they come for your 3rd party VOIP.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's implying that anyone clueless enough to think they can get "unlimited access to the internet" for a measly ~$40/month deserves to get burned. People that dumb are the ones responsible for the subprime mess.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Darkness404]

But that is what the contract states (usually) or at least the advertising either directly says it or implies it. It would be equivalent as some company offering a price for an item and then that item never being available for purchase at the stated price. Someone should really sue these ISPs. The bad part though is, if you are like most people there are only 2-3 ISPs in your town to chose from, in worst cases there is only one ISP that offers high-speed Internet.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[iminplaya]

He's implying that everybody else is "pirating" commercial software and entertainment. You know, trolling.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[bluefoxlucid]

Uh, it's more like you purchase said item at the stated price and they bill your card and give you something crappy with a picture stapled to it.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[patio11]

I use first party, so I'm not too worried, but I wouldn't be too worried if it were third party either. BitTorrent is designed to saturate your connection, in both directions. VoIP is not. BitTorrent, for the typical problematic use case (Jolly Roger), is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (And it would need to be, to bust those Comcast limits discussed earlier.) VoIP, for an *intense* user, is on for perhaps an hour or two a day. A more typical user is on for a few minutes and uses less bandwidth than watching one of those Will It Blend videos. (Chuck Norris just roundhouse kicked your usage statistics to the face!)

The number of legal users who end up in the top X% of their ISPs' resource expenditure graphs is so small as to be insignificant.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Anonymous Coward]

For some of us its even worse. I'm stuck in an apartment lease where the ISP can terminate you at their discretion for "abusing their network".

  Ygnition

So if I was promised high speed internet when I signed the lease but these jokers kick me off would that mean I can terminate my lease, I think not.

Posted anonymously so that big brother Ygnition hopefully doesn't see this as an abuse.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[ScreamingCactus]

It would be equivalent as some company offering a price for an item and then that item never being available for purchase at the stated price. I see it everywhere, from grocery stores to wireless providers (some of the worst false advertising ever!)

The bad part though is, if you are like most people there are only 2-3 ISPs in your town to chose from, in worst cases there is only one ISP that offers high-speed Internet. Sucks when Comcast and dial-up are the only options (guess it doesn't matter anyay, as Road Runner throttles now too).

Re:I feel very sorry...

[houstonbofh]

The number of legal users who end up in the top X% of their ISPs' resource expenditure graphs is so small as to be insignificant.

Unless you are one of them. Then it gets very significant, very fast.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Raineer]

He's implying that anyone clueless enough to think they can get "unlimited access to the internet" for a measly ~$40/month deserves to get burned. People that dumb are the ones responsible for the subprime mess.

Sorry, that is not the case. People are morons for getting into subprime troubles, but they are not lied to when they sign the papers. Truth-in-lending laws require the total cost of the mortgage to be put right on the front page (the page with those four boxes) very clearly.

Comcast spamming the airwaves with "Unlimited! Always-on internets!!!" is not the same thing. It is very clear they are misleading their customers. I should be limited by either my speed or a total cap, but not both...and NOT measured via some imaginary total to which I can not be made privy.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[diggitzz]

The ISPs advertise unlimited access! If this isn't available, they need to stop advertising it! Last I checked, they weren't losing money giving away internet access too cheaply, and they're still overselling what they've got. Subprime *buyers* weren't responsible for the mess, silly, it was the *lenders* - the ones giving away more than they have, way too cheap. People are going to consume as much as you let them - it's a well known economic trend that hasn't failed yet. If $40/mo doesn't grant unlimited access, as advertised, then the least they could do is provide a disclosure of the restrictions to access, *before* the customer initiates service.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Corwn of Amber]

So what? It's true. Don't come saying you paid for all software and entertainment you use, liar.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[Corwn of Amber]

BitTorrent is designed to saturate your connection, in both directions.

You never used bittorrent or what? You know you can limit the upload speed to whatever suits you, right? As for saturating the download speed, the day I see a solid hour of download at 1 megabyte/sec, I swear I'll have a spontaneous orgasm.

Re:I feel very sorry...

[iminplaya]

So what? It's true.

"Citation needed"

Don't come saying you paid for all software and entertainment you use...

Hmmm, did you actually see that written somewhere? Besides, I am within my rights to do whatever I wish with software, entertainment, or any other information in my possession, the law not withstanding.

...liar.

Guess you're trolling, too. Peace, babe.

Why would you idiots give this guy karma back?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good grief.

I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[JohnnyComeLately]

My PC can run for months/weeks/hours of being on and have no problems with the connection. The moment I run LimeWire, the problems begin. 9 times out of 10 I end up having to reboot my cable modem to get back on-line....despite the fact my cable modem shows normal activity.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[FooAtWFU]

For what it's worth, the network load induced by BitTorrent can be sufficient to cause (low-quality) cable modems, broadband routers, and similar devices to become flaky, while they are capable of handling the relatively quiescent and straightforward data streams associated with "normal" use.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[BLKMGK]

That may be the hardware and not the ISP. Some modems puke when they get too many connection attempts - Limewire and Bitorrent can cause this behavior. You might want to try a different cable modem.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[syousef]

Some things to try:

- Find out what your upstream bandwidth is and limit your uploads to half of that. Better yet start off with 4kb upstream and increase it if you don't have problems after half an hour. You may find you're saturating your upstream connection which makes it hard for requests and control data to go upstream.

- Try a different bittorrent client. For instance you might find uTorrent works well, but Azureus brings your net connection to its knees.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[MoriaOrc]

FWIW, I have Cox and haven't noticed any problems with BitTorrent. Some torrents with good seeds have gotten up around 500-600 KB/s in the last month or so, and I am always able to seed normally once the torrent finishes.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[totally bogus dude]

As others have said, this might be due to your cable modem not being able to handle many simultaneous NAT connections. As an easier alternative to trying a different modem, you could try configuring your BT client to connect to only a small number of peers. Maybe start really small e.g. 10, and it should have no problem with that.

If it still pukes it's probably not the modem. If it's fine, start increasing it until it does break and you'll know its limit. Or you could try searching the web for any information on the particular model - someone might have already found out its limits and posted the info somewhere.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[thogard]

It can do in the higher quality stuff too... I've got a new fiber connection to a ssg 140 and that has a wireless link to my house where I was using two mac to torrent iso images. The poor firewall started getting over loaded at about 1000 connections and only 3 to 5 mb going in both directions.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in my case (Comcast-New England), it's definitely not the modem. Because it used to work fine. Then all the Comcast throttling stories came out and I laughed at the people it happened to. Then it came to my area and it wasn't funny anymore. Same modem, blatant throttling.

It makes webpages take 10 seconds to load while using bittorrent. Not the usual extra latency from using your upstream. Slower than dial-up type latency. Though I did get around the actual bittorrent seeding part of the throttling, by sending the tracker communications (not the actual data) through Tor, and turning on encryption for the rest. But still can't reasonably browse at the same time.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[flydpnkrtn]

OK but its possible your cablemodem can't handle a large amount of open TCP connections, or something along those lines.

Bursts of HTTP traffic looks a lot different than 200 open connections to an embedded device

(I know firsthand because I had to flash my Linksys WRT54G to Linux to get it to handle any kind of load...)

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[tsotha]

Yeah, my firewall ran out of space on the routing table and kept rebooting itself every few seconds. His problem is probably something like that.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Billly Gates]

I use AT&T dsl and my router was fine with bittorrents until a few months ago.

As a test I downloaded just one torrent with only a few k per second. My wifes latency in wow jumpes well into the the thousands. I tried about 10 torrents all pumping hundreds of k a second and it makes no difference.

The second I turn off bit torrent my connection mysteriously becomes better.

As a result my wife wont let me use bit torrents anymore and it pisses me off. It seems the whole connection is throttled with just a single torrent and this happens even if only a few k per second is downloaded. We paid for the highest speed possible for our internet service. I think I am no longer going to use it. Whats the point if I have to use only low bandwith applications?

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[arkhan_jg]

Basic - and not so basic - routers can sometimes fall over under the load of P2P all on their own. Specifically, they come with very small amounts of RAM, and building large NAT tables to keep track of all your connections to potentially hundreds of others simultaneously can be too much for them, and sometimes upnp is the culprit.

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_routers
is a good place to start to find out if yours is known problematic.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[complete loony]

Stateful firewall rules, and network address translation require memory to track every single incoming and outgoing TCP connection. Even if you have a NAT forwarding rule for every P2P related port, your modem is probably keeping track of every connection anyway.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[jimthehorsegod]

I've experienced something very similar myself. I was using a T-Mobile 3G Datacard (PCMCIA jobbie). I'd agreed to look at someone's PC on my way back from a business trip. I realised halfway through the drive that I didn't have any CDs with me, so I pulled over, fired up my laptop, found a torrent for Knoppix and set it downloading whilst I drive the rest of the way (which, by the way, I felt was cool.)

It hadn't finished by the time I got there, so I let iust carry on while firing up a browser to look in the Internets for clues to cause of the problem. Only thing was, I couldn't connect to a single webpage - everything timed out. I killed azureus, and immediately everything was fine again. Let Azureus run with a 10k/sec cap, then tried a 5k/sec cap and it bust the internets once more.

That's far more annoying that a bandwidth cap or usage limits - actually breaking *all* connections while you're using p2p is downright rude.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Constantine XVI]

T-Mobile 3G Datacard Not sure where you are, but the US T-Mobile doesn't have 3G in most places, and what they do have was put up a few weeks ago.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[amcdiarmid]

I don't know if T-Mobile's Edge is 3G, or 2.5G or what: However yesterday I gave a demo with using a t-mobile blackberry as an Internet Access Point. (AKA: Modem) The old GPRS Frankenberry (abused by another sysadmin) was horrible and laggy: only suitable for CLI geeks. The new "Edge" Crackberry was reasonable: Prob. about 200 Kbps, perhaps 300.

This was from the Illy at NH ave & M St. in Washington DC.

- mod down: would have been more relivant yesterday for the comparison of wireless data providers. The one that did not include T-Mobile.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[jimthehorsegod]

Sorry, to clarify, I'm in the UK. To put it into perspective, for my Datacard I'm paying £20 ($40ish) a month for 'unlimited' traffic (though they say that if you persistently go over 3GB/Month they'll ask you to cut down, and if you refuse they'll eventually restrict you/kick you off, which is at least honest)

The only protocol restriction is a flat NO to VOIP traffic, which whilst not entirely fair, is understandable given they're a Mobile Phone company first and foremost..

That said, coverage is far from brilliant, so it's not as though I'd manage to break 3GB in two consecutive months even if I was trying...

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Reziac]

As I say above, I am suspicious of the BT protocol itself. I never allow BT to have more than a few connections, yet I sometimes see "clogged up the network stack" behaviour -- from two unrelated BT clients. Conversely, I often have have *dozens* of other types of connections going, with no problem whatever.

Of course, this doesn't exclude that flakey hardware might be more susceptible to faults caused by certain *types* of connections, but considering that my own hardware has proved otherwise 100% stable over long years of use, and that only BT causes a problem, I'm inclined to blame the BT protocol.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[BLKMGK]

While you may only be accepting a few connections I'd bet that MANY more connection attempts are being made by others who are unaware of your limiting connections. You can see this sometimes by shutting down a Torrent client and yet continuing to see many connection attempts as others in the cloud continue to try and get traffic from you. All of those attempts come through your router, if you were to monitor the traffic you might be surprised at how much stress it's being put under. Its a bit like a DOS attack I would suppose. I guess you could call this a fault of the protocol but I'm not sure how you might fix this. Your router may perform flawlessly but how often is it being asked to act like a WEB server during a Slashdot storm? That's sort of what's being asked of it from a connection standpoint when you're in a Torrent cloud serving up a popular Torrent IMO.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[Reziac]

Yes, BUT.... these connection attempts continue for several DAYS after the BT client is shut down (I see 'em in my firewall logs). And there is *no* DOS-like effect from that.

The clogged stack problem only happens WHILE the BT client is running, and stops *immediately* when the BT client is terminated. Never, ever otherwise.

Re:I dont quite trust their list...Cox says "No"

[skidave]

After reading the Cox was blocking Bittorrent 100% of the time, I started a Bittorrent download of Fedora 9. It is running at 500 KB/s with 82 established TCP connections. No evidence of blockage here.

Re:Frist post?

[Aranykai]

Forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" button?

Anti-trust?

[hyades1]

It will be interesting to see if a major ISP steps forward with an offer to provide completely unthrottled service, perhaps at a premium price.

Would an across-the-board failure to offer such an obvious consumer winner provide grounds for charges of collusion or racketeering?

Re:Anti-trust?

[Darkness404]

Most ISPs won't do that. Why? Because they want to give you an illusion that they are really an Internet service provider to begin with. The moment they really admit in ads that they were giving you less Internet then the real Internet (by throttling P2P connections) will be the moment that people will become aware of this and may switch companies to one that doesn't openly admit to blocking P2P.

Re:Anti-trust?

[compro01]

that of course assumes that there is another company that doesn't throttle that you can switch to. without healthy competition, it simply won't work in that manner.

Re:Anti-trust?

[Darkness404]

No, it only means that there are other companies that don't admit to throttling P2P. Most uninformed people would switch to one that doesn't openly admit it thinking that because they don't admit it they don't throttle. That seems to be the trend in the general public.

Re:Anti-trust?

[hedwards]

Nonsense, they wouldn't want to do that, because all of a sudden they'd have to actually have all the bandwidth necessary to support the number of accounts they offer.

Much of this wouldn't be an issue if the FCC had the balls to demand that media companies actually observe a meaningful level of service and have enough bandwidth to reasonably cover their promises. That doesn't mean 100%, that would be terribly wasteful, but enough to ensure that when everybody's likely to be on that things are still quick.

If they're going to promise a certain amount of speed, they should be required to keep tabs on it and pay consumers back for hosing them.

Re:Anti-trust?

[Phroggy]

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that there is significant competition in the marketplace. If there were, then what you describe would almost certainly happen, but many people have few options. As far as I'm aware, only dialup and usually (but not always) DSL let you choose among multiple ISPs; for any other residential connection technology, you're locked in to a single ISP unless you switch to different technology (e.g. FIOS, cable modem, satellite, microwave) which requires new hardware and often requires an installation technician to come to your house. That's expensive, and ISPs know people won't pay for it outright, so they lock you into a contract and subsidize it that way.

Depending on your phone company, you may be able to change DSL ISPs, but you'll still have to deal with downtime while your phone company reprovisions the circuit.

Re:Anti-trust?

[hyades1]

Where I live (south of Toronto), we actually do have some options.

Verizon seems alright

[dave562]

I've had pretty good luck with Verizon DSL. For a moment I was considering switching to cable but with all of the horror stories I've seen around here regarding bitTorrent clients I've stayed away from cable. The only time I ever had a problem is when I was seeding some popular, copyrighted music that I pulled down off of a site that I found via a Google Search. It was kind of creepy. As long as I was seeding the file, my transfer rate went down to near zero. Once I stopped, it went back up to my full speed. I tried it out a few times over a couple of days just to make sure that I wasn't imagining things and sure enough, every time I seeded that one file my connection slowed to a crawl.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[Anonymous Coward]

G lets see tiny connection out overlwelmed by incoming connections sharing popular file. Wonder if that might affect my connection. Lets try that again just be to be scientific.

well duh!!! interesting?

Re:Verizon seems alright

[totally bogus dude]

You should be able to set the maximum rate your bittorrent client will upload at. If you set it to 80-90% of your maximum upload speed you should be able to surf and download without problems while it uploads. Experiment and see the performance you get.

You can also do more general traffic shaping, which will maintain a queue at your router and insert 'interactive' traffic before bulk uploads. A bit more complicated to set up but more robust. If you're the only one using your connection though and BT is the only thing you have uploading, using the client's throttle setting is good enough.

The reason it slows down your connection is that as you're downloading anything (e.g. a web page) you need to send acknowledgement packets to the sender before it'll send the next packets containing the content. Since you're uploading at full pelt, those acknowledgement packets have to wait behind the larger file upload packets before they get sent. Traffic shaping / prioritization lets them skip to the head of the queue.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[whydna]

Agreed. I'd specifically recommend the "Wonder Shaper" http://lartc.org/wondershaper/ from the kind, albiet insane, folks at the Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site.

Careful though; spending too much time there might cause mental grief (for example, go read Section 12.1.3 of the LARTC HOWTO), but I digress.

On the other hand, if you're fluent in this and/or like working in the kernel networking stack, shoot me an email/message, cause I've got a fun job for you.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been perfectly fine with AT&T DSL here.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[Anonymous Coward]

i suspect that if the GrandParent received an interesting moderation, it would indicate that the phenomena noted, to some people is an unexplained curiosity which attracts attention. Ie it is found to be interesting.

Your post should be modded insightful because it provides a possible mechanism of action.

We should use slashdot as a medium to increase each other's knowledge when possible.

Re:Verizon seems alright

[BLKMGK]

Very true and I'd mod you up if I could. My FIOS connection is capable of some pretty sick speeds when I let it off the leash - I actually see higher than advertised download speeds! However I don't abuse the connection too badly as I know that it would cause problems. I run a torrent client 24X7 with encryption turned on. I limit the speeds to a fraction of what it's capable of and only raise the limits when traffic is offpeak - like during the late evening hours. I also close out torrents when they have been sufficiently shared back or when the number of seeds is high enough to keep it going. Just because I have a good thing doesn't mean I should try to take advantage.

When I was on cable I also did this and I also discovered, as you noted, that ACKs can be pretty important (duh). On cable if I let my download free flow my upload would falter as would my VOIP and WEB surfing, eventually my download would begin to take a hit too. In the end I throttled my upload heavily but also my download to make sure that I had bandwidth available even when I was downloading something big. So far I've not seen this behavior with my higher speed FIOS connection but it was pretty pronounced with the ComCast cable - I never detected any signs of external throttling either. FIOS is coming down at about 3x the max speed I ever got from ComCast FWIW despite advertised speeds being somewhat close - YMMV.

I wonder what will happen when the ISP throttling begins to impact streaming video, iTunes, gaming, and other activities that require some sustained bandwidth. Will they finally own up to what they're doing? I for one will *not* be willing to goto a metered connection and think that this would be the worst idea possible....

Re:Verizon seems alright

[Reziac]

Some ISPs (mine included) will throttle you if your *upload* bandwidth is too high. That's probably what was happening to you.

Reason is, downloading is essentially free to the ISP, but uploading costs them money.

My ISP is a very talkative one-man-band, so I've heard all about it. :)

Re:Spam, spam, spam, spam...

[arth1]

Hey, PC World, want to know why you can't withstand the Slashdot effect? I don't know, maybe it's all those fucking ads!

Surely the /. crowd use ad blockers or lynx, and they get slashdotted on the pure HTML?

Don't elude...get a different ISP

[ucblockhead]

I don't have this problem because I am willing to pay more for service from an ISP like Speakeasy that does not do this. If you want these companies to change, you need to be willing to hurt their bottom line even if it costs you more.

Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP

[bagboy]

ISPs are glad to get rid of the unprofitable consumers... You'll be doing them a favor by switching as you'll tax the throttling equipment less and less and leave more bandwidth for others.

Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP

[Spad]

I'll bet you large amounts of cash they'll still claim the (new) Top 5% of users are using all their bandwidth so they have to throttle everyone.

Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP

[codepunk]

Actually having worked for a ISP the heavy users are way less than 5 percent probably closer to
1% or less. Much easier to just get rid of those couple of customers than to filter and or take
calls about slowness on the network caused by a couple of these users.

Re:Don't elude...get a different ISP

[rdavidson3]

Define a heavy user? Is it someone who downloads 30 Gb in a short time (couple of days) or spreads that 30Gb over a month?

Re:Here's an idea

[shadow42]

You must be new here.

Re:Here's an idea

[bluefoxlucid]

Good idea, but 5GB Ubuntu/Fedora/Slackcrap is free in the first place.

ISP

[codepunk]

A friend of mine runs a ISP, he has a very simple policy that works out
rather well. He does not go out of his way to regulate what people do
on the network until it causes a issue. Bit Torrent is a bandwidth hog
and attempts to evade filtering rather well. If he encounters issues
caused by a Bit Torrent user he just hands them their money back
for the month and drops them as a customer. This keeps the rest of the
network clean and the other customers happy. The profit margin on each
connection is so very thin that it just does not pay to mess with this
extremely small portion of the customer base.

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

Bit Torrent is a bandwidth hog and attempts to evade filtering rather well. BitTorrent only "hogs" as much bandwidth as the human user causes it to. It's no different in that sense from any other application: other P2P systems, YouTube, email, whatever. If you want to spend all day uploading email attachments at full speed, you can do that, and you'll use just as much bandwidth as if you were seeding torrents at full speed.

On the other hand, you can set a low rate limit in your torrent client, and/or set it to stop seeding once it reaches a certain share ratio, and you'll only use a moderate amount of bandwidth.

There's absolutely no need to treat BitTorrent differently from any other application. You don't need to use "filtering"; just limit bandwidth. If a customer is using too much bandwidth, charge him for the overage or lower his cap. It doesn't matter whether he's running BitTorrent, LimeWire, or just sending a lot of emails: all that matters is his total usage.

Re:ISP

[Moridineas]

BitTorrent only "hogs" as much bandwidth as the human user causes it to. It's no different in that sense from any other application: other P2P systems, YouTube, email, whatever. If you want to spend all day uploading email attachments at full speed, you can do that, and you'll use just as much bandwidth as if you were seeding torrents at full speed. You know, you might be theoretically right here, but I honestly don't think you could (and certainly not in any remotely realistic workload) max out any DSL/Cable/+ connection doing email. BitTorrent does manage to EASILY complete max out your upload and download speeds. Don't forget that many bittorrent clients automatically (by default!) adjust their upload and download rates to maximize their rates, and maximize their bandwidth usage.

On the other hand, you can set a low rate limit in your torrent client, and/or set it to stop seeding once it reaches a certain share ratio, and you'll only use a moderate amount of bandwidth.

There's absolutely no need to treat BitTorrent differently from any other application. You don't need to use "filtering"; just limit bandwidth. If a customer is using too much bandwidth, charge him for the overage or lower his cap. It doesn't matter whether he's running BitTorrent, LimeWire, or just sending a lot of emails: all that matters is his total usage. The difference is that it's exceedingly rare--virtually impossible even!--for someone to use up as much bandwidth as they regularly do using BitTorrent/P2P. Thus, the ISPs target the most popular p2p algorithm, bittorrent. Look it's not just techies and good network citizens who run bittorrent--idiots too do too!

You say companies should charge for bandwidth usage or lower their caps--isn't that what many companies are doing when they throttle bittorrent?

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

You know, you might be theoretically right here, but I honestly don't think you could (and certainly not in any remotely realistic workload) max out any DSL/Cable/+ connection doing email. In a "realistic workload", probably not. But you could certainly put your email client in offline mode, queue up a few thousand emails with big attachments, and then send them all at once. Presto: you're now using up as much bandwidth as you possibly can, at least until the queue is emptied.

The difference is that it's exceedingly rare--virtually impossible even!--for someone to use up as much bandwidth as they regularly do using BitTorrent/P2P. Thus, the ISPs target the most popular p2p algorithm, bittorrent. Yes, but that's a stupid way to deal with excessive bandwidth use. It's like looking at heavy traffic on the roads to and from the beach, and deciding to "solve" the traffic problem by closing the beach.

It's stupid for a few reasons. One reason is that it puts the cart before the horse: the network is there to serve users, not the other way around. The public works department needs to adapt to the fact that drivers want to go to the beach, and ISPs need to adapt to the fact that their customers want to share files.

Another reason is that it's just not a very effective solution. Filtering one specific application is more difficult and costly than imposing an overall bandwidth cap, and it sets off an arms race as new versions of the application evade the filters, and new versions of the filters detect the application again. And if the filter ever becomes 100% effective against one application, people will just switch to another one, starting the whole cycle over.

If people are using too much bandwidth, then restrict their bandwidth usage or charge them for it. It's just that simple. The only reason ISPs are wasting their time with these filters is so they can keep advertising an impossibly high level of service, knowing that none of their customers will actually be able to use it.

Re:ISP

[Moridineas]

In a "realistic workload", probably not. But you could certainly put your email client in offline mode, queue up a few thousand emails with big attachments, and then send them all at once. Presto: you're now using up as much bandwidth as you possibly can, at least until the queue is emptied. Actually I really doubt that IMAP/POP would manage to saturate any connection. You might be able to fill a slow upload speed, but my guess is server latencies would significantly limit what you can do. Not to mention in your scenario, your download amount is not going to be that substantial.

In a "realistic workload", probably not. But you could certainly put your email client in offline mode, queue up a few thousand emails with big attachments, and then send them all at once. Presto: you're now using up as much bandwidth as you possibly can, at least until the queue is emptied. More like clearing the 18 wheeler trucks off the main road to relieve traffic congestion. This is something that happens in the real world.

It's stupid for a few reasons. One reason is that it puts the cart before the horse: the network is there to serve users, not the other way around. The public works department needs to adapt to the fact that drivers want to go to the beach, and ISPs need to adapt to the fact that their customers want to share files. I don't disagree with you. Getting limited is annoying. Actually that happened once with Cox--I accidentally left bittorrent running over night and uploaded several gigabytes, so they capped my max bandwidth to nothing for like 12 hours. Actually seemed pretty fair. I was using way more bandwidth than probably 50 normal users and degrading the experience for others in my building. ~shrug~ I was always sure to cap my upload speed after that.

Another reason is that it's just not a very effective solution. Filtering one specific application is more difficult and costly than imposing an overall bandwidth cap, and it sets off an arms race as new versions of the application evade the filters, and new versions of the filters detect the application again. And if the filter ever becomes 100% effective against one application, people will just switch to another one, starting the whole cycle over. Sounds like what Cox did. Worked, though I didnt love feeling like I was on a modem again, even if only for awhile.

I would also very much dispute that ISP filtering isn't effective. I have no data to back this up, but would ISPs really be doing it if it wasn't to their advantage?

If people are using too much bandwidth, then restrict their bandwidth usage or charge them for it. It's just that simple. The only reason ISPs are wasting their time with these filters is so they can keep advertising an impossibly high level of service, knowing that none of their customers will actually be able to use it. Paying for bandwidth would be great (in theory at least--I think most slashdot users would be paying the bulk of bandwidth surcharge!).

Re:ISP

[Renraku]

Hopefully he doesn't do that to any law-savvy and sue-happy people if he's in the USA. He could be sued over it unless the ToS clearly defines what they did wrong. 'Excessive Utilization' won't cut it in court.

Cell phone companies used to have a habit of cutting people's service off if they complained too much or used up too many minutes with their support staff. The kicker is that they would then charge them the early termination fee and try to reclaim the phone they 'leased' to the customer. This only stopped once they got sued a few times.

A better way for him to approach the situation would be to warn them first. Hey, your torrents are a Problem on the network. Fix it or we'll have to cut your service. If he can document that he warned them of a ToS violation and they didn't stop, they'd have much less to worry about.

None of this would be a problem if most areas had access to multiple broadband ISPs, though.

Re:ISP

[totally bogus dude]

If people are using too much bandwidth, then restrict their bandwidth usage or charge them for it. It's just that simple.

Well, in effect they are. If you make the assumption that anyone using bittorrent heavily enough to actually affect the network performance is not going to be happy with a bandwidth cap below what they want to use and would just change ISP anyway, then it more or less amounts to the same thing.

Simply disconnecting people without warning seems a bit harsh, even if they do get their money back, but I imagine they would receive a warning or two that their usage is too high. think I'd prefer to refund them the unused part of their month's service fee, and throttle their connection to 256Kbit or so for e.g. a week while they find another provider. Just seems like it reduce the likelihood of really annoying a customer who uses their internet connection for things other than P2P and would be greatly inconvenienced by being suddenly cut off completely; and you want your former customers to still recommend you to others whose needs you might meet.

Anyway, in more general terms this seems like a valid economic input. If the ISP is able to less for a high quality connection because they don't cater for heavy downloaders/uploaders, then they'll be more attractive to the non-downloaders. It's simply a way of offering a better product by tailoring it to fill a specific niche.

Re:ISP

[justinlee37]

You say companies should charge for bandwidth usage or lower their caps--isn't that what many companies are doing when they throttle bittorrent?

No, they are A) enforcing an UNPUBLISHED bandwidth cap, and B) discriminating against a particular protocol instead of considering bandwidth alone.

Re:ISP

[Moridineas]

No, they are A) enforcing an UNPUBLISHED bandwidth cap, What ISPs have unpublished bandwidth caps? As I noted in a previous post, I ran into some throttling with Cox, but that was their policy after talking to them. Who are the tricky ones to avoid?

and B) discriminating against a particular protocol instead of considering bandwidth alone. I'm not sure I really see the distinction? Assuming (and it IS an assumption) that the ISPs reserve the right to throttle or cap, what does it matter if its one protocol or the whole connection? Heck, I'd RATHER it be one protocol, so if I exceed my bittorrent allotment, at least web/email/etc are still snappy.

Or am I misunderstanding what we're talking about ...?

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

More like clearing the 18 wheeler trucks off the main road to relieve traffic congestion. A BitTorrent packet, unlike an 18 wheeler, doesn't cause any more congestion on its own than any other packet.

Too many torrent packets may cause congestion, yes. But too many of any packets will cause exactly the same congestion. What matters is how much data is being sent, not what program is sending it.

I would also very much dispute that ISP filtering isn't effective. I have no data to back this up, but would ISPs really be doing it if it wasn't to their advantage? Yes, because the marketing aspect is what they care about.

Filtering is less effective than metering bandwidth, in the sense that it will punish some people who shouldn't be punished (moderate BitTorrent users) and give a free pass to some people who shouldn't get one (excessive users of other protocols). But it allows the ISP to still claim they're providing a high level of service -- with the unwritten caveat that you can't use the applications that benefit from that level of service.

Imagine an "all you can eat" buffet where they kick you out if you go back for seconds of anything except saltines and water. That's a fundamentally dishonest business model, and the only reason to implement it is to draw people in with an offer that's too good to be true.

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

Well, in effect they are. If you make the assumption that anyone using bittorrent heavily enough to actually affect the network performance is not going to be happy with a bandwidth cap below what they want to use and would just change ISP anyway, then it more or less amounts to the same thing. You're assuming there's another ISP they can switch to, one that will offer the same unmetered service at the same low price, even though the first ISP found it impossible. But high bandwidth use is something that every ISP will have to deal with eventually.

If the ISP is able to less for a high quality connection because they don't cater for heavy downloaders/uploaders, then they'll be more attractive to the non-downloaders. Why choose between those customers? Offer the same base package to everyone, with a monthly cap, and charge the heavy uploaders for their extra use. As long as you charge them more than it costs you, you're coming out ahead, right?

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

I'm not sure I really see the distinction? Assuming (and it IS an assumption) that the ISPs reserve the right to throttle or cap, what does it matter if its one protocol or the whole connection? The problem is that it punishes low and moderate BitTorrent users, while letting excessive users of other protocols off scot-free.

Heck, I'd RATHER it be one protocol, so if I exceed my bittorrent allotment, at least web/email/etc are still snappy. There is no "BitTorrent allotment". They always block or interfere with BitTorrent, whether you're using it a little or a lot. Meanwhile, someone else can do the same transfers with FTP, IRC, rsync, or any other program, and they don't get hassled. Where's the sense in that?

Re:ISP

[dissy]

What ISPs have unpublished bandwidth caps? Comcast in a lot of areas does.
In other areas they publish the cap but its different depending where you get it from (comercial, TOS, any most every phone rep will give different numbers)
Then on other areas they out right lie and claim there is no caps when not only is that technically impossible but they DO cap you above and beyond the line speed.

Google for site:slashdot.org comcast

Re:ISP

[dufachi]

The basic reason ISP's are targeting bittorrent is simple. 90 to 95% of the traffic is copyright violation.

Sure, there are some legitimate files being served through torrents such as software updates and linux distros, but I think we all know that a majority of the generated traffic is, by definition, illegal (in the U.S.).

I'm sure Usenet is their next target.

Re:ISP

[WMD_88]

The basic reason ISP's are targeting bittorrent is simple. 90 to 95% of the traffic is copyright violation.

That's not really the ISP's problem (or at least it shouldn't be). It's the business of the downloader and the **AA or whoever governs the copyrights. At most, the ISP should disconnect the user after a C&D letter.

I'm sure Usenet is their next target.

Considering that most Usenet servers are run by ISPs - or can be easily and centrally shut down - they would have dispatched of it ages ago.

Re:ISP

[codepunk]

Yes of course one can simply use filtering and capping to do so. However you have to take
into consideration that he would then have to install, maintain the filtering solution and
remember it is only because of a couple of torrent users that this is necessary. The few bucks
of profit per connection for these couple of users simply cannot pay for the installation and
maintenance of the device so it is a better business decision to just cut and refund.

Re:ISP

[codepunk]

No actually he is not imposing a bandwidth cap he is simply enforcing
the AUP which clearly states there will be no serving of content of
any type on the network.

Re:ISP

[Moridineas]

There is no "BitTorrent allotment". They always block or interfere with BitTorrent, whether you're using it a little or a lot. Meanwhile, someone else can do the same transfers with FTP, IRC, rsync, or any other program, and they don't get hassled. Where's the sense in that? What ISPs are we talking about? I asked in my last post, not sure if you didn't see that. I also quite clearly mentioned how Cox very much had a limit on the amount of data I could upload and throttled my connection when I hit that amount or rate--so there WAS a data allotment. To tell you the truth, I have no idea if Cox was measuring bittorrent bandwidth or everything else--I imagine it was everything else.

The thing I think you're not getting is that it does not matter if it's FTP or email or Bittorrent or whatever that is using the bandwidth--you're absolutely right about that. The difference is that the totally vast majority of big bandwidth users are using bittorrent. Additionally, I'm not so sure that ISPs that throttle or cap bandwidth DON'T monitor other usages.

Re:ISP

[roju]

90 to 95%? Given the distributed nature of bittorrent, that must have been a hard stat to determine. I'd be interested in seeing the original study, if you have a link to it.

Re:ISP

[Shakrai]

there will be no serving of content of any type on the network

Sweet! Does that mean that none of his users can forward chain e-mails?

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

The basic reason ISP's are targeting bittorrent is simple. 90 to 95% of the traffic is copyright violation. Well, yes and no. The ISPs aren't liable for their customers' copyright violations, so it's not like they're going after pirates to cover their own asses.

They are, however, betting that pirates will be less likely to complain. No one wants to stand up and say "you're interfering with my illegal torrents", just like no one wants to stand up and say "you're interfering with my porn", even though we all know both of those are major reasons why people pay for broadband in the first place.

So, the ISP can keep advertising "unlimited" service, while cutting off all the customers who are most likely to use that bandwidth and also least likely to make a scene about being cut off.

I'm sure Usenet is their next target. I doubt it. Downstream bandwidth isn't a big concern for these ISPs. Comcast provides their customers with a free, limited Giganews account, and (IIRC) Comcast customers also get a discount on a regular Giganews account.

Re:ISP

[Mhtsos]

That's so much more honest than throttling. To be more honest still, state that policy beforehand, maybe in the contract. Providing that competition works well, I don't think many ppl here have a problem with what your friend's ISP is doing.

Re:ISP

[Reziac]

That's exactly what my ISP guy told me (it's a one-man outfit). Rather than waste his time trying to close off particular clients, you can use whatever the hell you like -- so long as you don't *routinely* hog UPLOAD bandwidth. If you do, he just throttles down your uploads til you get the message. He said it's because downloading is essentially free to the ISP, but uploading costs.

He told me about one user that was a little slow... they were filling the uplink 100% 24/7, and that went on for weeks... so he kept throttling 'em down further and further til their uplink was down to barely dialup speed, and they still didn't catch on!! Oh well, says my ISP guy, if that's how they want it.... :)

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

What ISPs are we talking about? I'm talking about Comcast and others who directly interfere with the BitTorrent protocol.

To tell you the truth, I have no idea if Cox was measuring bittorrent bandwidth or everything else--I imagine it was everything else. Yes, exactly. That's the kind of policy I'm suggesting should be adopted by Comcast and their ilk. Count the number of bytes you send, regardless of what program you're sending them with.

The thing I think you're not getting is that it does not matter if it's FTP or email or Bittorrent or whatever that is using the bandwidth--you're absolutely right about that. The difference is that the totally vast majority of big bandwidth users are using bittorrent. Yes, today they are. Five years ago, they weren't, and a few years from now, they might not be -- especially if the filters become more effective. People will switch to something else that the filters don't catch.

Chasing after whichever file sharing program happens to be most popular right now is a waste of time. It's a moving target. The real problem is bandwidth scarcity, and that isn't moving anywhere: limiting bandwidth will always be 100% effective, and it's completely fair, and it's cheaper and easier to implement because you don't have to inspect the data stream.

The only downside is ISPs would have to advertise smaller numbers and/or admit that their service isn't "unlimited", and that's what they want to avoid.

Re:ISP

[Mr2001]

Yes of course one can simply use filtering and capping to do so. However you have to take
into consideration that he would then have to install, maintain the filtering solution and
remember it is only because of a couple of torrent users that this is necessary. You've got it backwards. They're already installing those expensive filters just to interfere with BitTorrent.

Lowering the bandwidth cap wouldn't require any of that; it's just a number they can tweak in the cable modem configuration. (Of course, then they'd have to tweak it in their advertising material too, which is what they want to avoid!)

Monitoring a customer's total use and charging for overage is probably something they can do with the equipment they already have, but if not, it'd still be cheaper than these custom BitTorrent filters, which have to inspect the data stream and track a bunch of per-user and per-connection state, rather than just bumping a counter for every packet that goes by. (But, again, they'd have to advertise "$50/mo for X GB and $1 for every additional Y GB", which is so much less flashy than "$50/mo for UNLIMITED(*) use".)

Re:ISP

[neo_star]

Close but I have one additional point to make. Using the current anology of a trip to the beach. If you find that beach traffic is hampering main traffic on a highway, then access roads are built to get that specific traffic off the main highway to prevent all traffic from becoming congested. In this same manner if high bandwidth usage is hampering the whole network than limit or redirect that traffic. Yes it may slow your ability to download BUT you still "get to the beach" AND you don't hinder the roadways that everyone else is using. I'm not saying that this would be easy nor am I saying to target bitTorrent. Blanket this rule across all types of traffic.

Re:ISP

[justinlee37]

Comcast has been known to deliberately reset the connection of torrenters who upload more than they download, in effect temporarily interrupting all of their connections; The claims have been brought to the attention of the FCC. They specifically target the .torrent protocol; you can bypass the resets with encryption. Of course, encryption reduces the total number of downloaders available to connect with, and Comcast's objective is to slow the downloads, not stop them entirely, so it is often more efficient (as a downloader, anyway) to not encrypt.

In any case, what Comcast advertises is download and upload speeds -- they do not advertise a bandwidth cap. Here is some nice drivel from their website, http://www.comcast.com/Shop/Buyflow/Default.ashx

"Get on the fast track...fast! With Comcast High-Speed Internet, you'll enjoy the most amazing online experience. Powered by Comcast's advanced fiber-optic network, you'll love the thrill of blazing-fast speeds. Speeds way faster than DSL from the phone company! * And with Comcast's innovative PowerBoost® technology, activities like downloading videos, movies, music and games or uploading photos go even faster.

Plus, you'll enjoy over $300 of valuable features included with your subscription at no additional charge. Like the highly-acclaimed McAfee® Security Suite ($120 value) and the Comcast Toolbar, a comprehensive set of security tools to help protect your family when online. You'll also get the Universal Address Book powered by Plaxo®, Rhapsody Radio PLUS®, Photoshow Deluxe 4.0 and much more!

So just select the plan that suits your needs, add it to your cart, and start enjoying the best Internet experience available. Happy shopping!

Current Cable TV Customer Special 19.99 for 6 months: Stop crawling the web and start burning rubber with scorching speeds up to 4 times faster than 1.5 Mbps DSL, up to 7 times faster than 768 Kbps DSL, and up to 100 times faster than 56 Kbps dial-up! You'll get free tools like McAfee® security software to keep all your info and computer safe. And with Comcast.net, you'll get amazing free content and features like The Fan(TM), your one-stop source for the best online video.

Promotional Rate is $19.99/month for 6 month(s), ongoing price is $42.95/month"

Now, this page links directly to a "shopping cart." Nothing has been mentioned about a bandwidth cap. Way, way, WAYYYY at the bottom of the page, there is some fine print:

"Comcast High-Speed Internet: Equipment fees not included in monthly service charge. Prices do not include applicable taxes, installation or franchise fees. Pricing, content and features may change and may vary by area. Call your local Comcast office for restrictions and complete details about service, prices, and equipment in your area. Pricing and service offerings displayed on this site are for residential Comcast customers only. Commercial and business pricing and service offerings differ. Speed comparisons are dependent on Comcast High-Speed Internet service tier selected (6 Mbps, 8 Mbps or 16 Mbps) and are based on download speeds vs. standard 1.5 Mbps DSL service. Not all service tiers are available in all areas. Many factors affect speed. Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed. Maximum upload speeds range between 384 Kbps and 2 Mbps depending on the service tier selected and can be even faster with PowerBoost®."

Emphasis mine. Now, that is the ONLY THING that might remotely imply a bandwidth cap that I've seen in this whole sales pitch -- they are basically telling me that, if there is a cap, I have to call them and ask about it. Now, I haven't gotten around to that part yet, but don't you already see how t

Re:ISP

[justinlee37]

PS I should have mentioned that the comcast URL I linked likely has a cookie associated with it, as there was a previous page that asked for your address. If you want to verify the info you'll probably have to use this URL.

Article Summary

[complete loony]

Detecting throttling;

• Download something popular
• Call your ISP
• Read their terms of service
• Glasnost
• pcapdiff
• Vuze plugin.

Avoiding throttling;

• Enable protocol encryption.
• Change the port number to something other than 6881.
• Tunnel through TOR or some other commercial VPN.

To which I would add, if you know your ISP is injecting fake RST's filter them out with a firewall rule. A little more complex a task than the expected audience of TFA though.

Re:Article Summary

[shentino]

If the ISP sends the RST to the other guy...doesn't the connection still get ripped to shreds?

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure a firewall rule isn't enough to stop reset packets, since they're sent to the remote user as well, and if they aren't also blocking them, the termination will still occur.

Re:Article Summary

[complete loony]

Yes. Unless of course you both setup a similar firewall rule. The ideal solution would involve using a different network protocol that was immune to man-in-the-middle packet forgeries. Perhaps using SCTP instead of TCP, or some kind of UDP tunneling built into the bittorrent client.

Re:Article Summary

[pwizard2]

Tunnel through TOR

Part of the reason why Tor is so slow is because people are tunneling downloads through it, which kind of ruins it for everyone else.

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not tunnel through TOR. The bandwidth required kills the networks usability.

Re:Article Summary

[FishWithAHammer]

Tunneling through Tor is a really shitty thing to do; it's not made to facilitate your downloading, and you put undue stress on people who are running Tor nodes for you.

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

my firewall blocked the test on the glasnost site.
uTorrent has no issues though.

Re:Article Summary

[ghostdancer]

Don't be an asshat to use Tor for Bittorrent (not you specifically, is anyone who uses Tor)! However, use Tor for proxying tracker communications are fine.

Read:
https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorifyHOWTO/BitTorrent

Re:Article Summary

[jfischet]

couldn't agree more.

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Tor is not meant for such a thing.
i2p is!
It is, however, an internal network. Meaning: you only download what's can offered in the network, not things from the 'regular' internet. Of course that means there'll be less things to download than in a regular network, but you'll be safe and anonymous.

Re:Article Summary

[nlightnmnt]

Yes. But so what? The kind of people who download illegally have already shown how much regard they have for other people. Expect them to do what's best for them.

Re:Article Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

works great with rapidshare :P hahahahahaahaahaah BURP FUCK ME!

Re:Article Summary

[Shakrai]

Part of the reason why Tor is so slow is because people are tunneling downloads through it, which kind of ruins it for everyone else.

You don't have to tunnel the downloads through it. Just the tracker communications. If you tunnel the tracker connection through tor you aren't using much bandwidth (less then the typical webpage load) and you prevent the traffic shaping device from intercepting the details of your file sharing. The rest is taken care of with protocol encryption in bittorrent.

Merely using protocol encryption but still communicating with the tracker in the clear allows the shaping appliance to sniff out the details of the other hosts in your torrent and throttle all communications with them encrypted or not.

Copyright Free Content?

[EzInKy]

Except for archive.org and a few other sites I've not seen much of it on the internet, and since just about everything is copyrighted by default I really doubt there is much copyright free content out there. There was a time when the US had much saner copyright laws, but that was before it went the way of Europe and signed on to the Berne Convention.

Re:Copyright Free Content?

[bsDaemon]

I think they meant things like Linux -- which is, of course, copy-written. The whole Free Software movement hinges on Copyright (Left?). So, presumably, they just meant crap like music and movies that someone is going to bitch about you copying as being copy-written.

It was a stupid remark on their part, I agree - but I think their intent was obvious.

Re:Copyright Free Content?

[EzInKy]

I think they meant things like Linux -- which is, of course, copy-written. The whole Free Software movement hinges on Copyright (Left?). So, presumably, they just meant crap like music and movies that someone is going to bitch about you copying as being copy-written.

It was a stupid remark on their part, I agree - but I think their intent was obvious.


Obvious or not it is still important to point out such errors because the RIAA/MPAA/BSA all want to create the illusion that it is illegal to share anything that is copyrighted.

Re:Copyright Free Content?

[bsDaemon]

Well, it more or less is - unless you have permission. The brilliant stroke with the GPL, BSDL, and others is that the permission is included with the "license" which explains the copyright scheme.

Re:Copyright Free Content?

[westlake]

There was a time when the US had much saner copyright laws, but that was before it went the way of Europe and signed on to the Berne Convention.

This argument would be more persuasive if traffic on the P2P nets wasn't dominated by titles less than one year old.

Re:Copyright Free Content?

[EzInKy]

This argument would be more persuasive if traffic on the P2P nets wasn't dominated by titles less than one year old.


Perhaps if the length of protection was a more reasonable seven years then they wouldn't be.

Re:Frist post?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol i did it nao!

Printable version

[rajkiran_g]

Slashdotted already... Copying the url and pasting it seems to work.

Here is a link to the printable version

Re:Printable version

[Nullav]

I think OP meant Glasnost has been Slashdotted. (Though I almost didn't know that, thanks to PCWorld also being 'dotted.)

Re:Printable version

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, Glasnost blocks YOU! Wait...

Re:Printable version

[socsoc]

People need to stop linking to printable versions... you're screwing the host by consuming their bw without giving them the courtesy of receiving a banner impression from your visit. I'm looking at you AdBlock folks too... You shouldn't penalize the sites that try to use unobtrusive advertising. That PC World site doesn't have roadblocks or expanding ads, they're fairly normal.

My site checks the referrer on print friendly pages and will redirect you to the actual content if you are including a referrer that isn't me. Until I rewrite it to use a print css, that's my best solution to combat leeches like you.

Re:Printable version

[rajkiran_g]

People need to stop linking to printable versions... you're screwing the host by consuming their bw without giving them the courtesy of receiving a banner impression from your visit. I'm looking at you AdBlock folks too... You shouldn't penalize the sites that try to use unobtrusive advertising. That PC World site doesn't have roadblocks or expanding ads, they're fairly normal.

Yeah, right. A fairly normal site, with the actual content needlessly split into two pages and compressed into a 260px narrow column.

Re:Printable version

[Kimos]

Even with AdBlock I had a hard time finding the content wrapped in all that other garbage.

It's their choice to put content on the net, and I feel no remorse from blocking ads.
"Your business model is not my problem."

Re:Printable version

[electrictroy]

>>>"with the actual content needlessly split into two pages"

I didn't realize you were handicapped. When you're handcapped, I imagine it can be painful or otherwise-challenging to click the left mouse button to turn to page 2.

What's that?
You're not handicapped?
Oh well then you're just lazy.
No Sympathy For You!

Re:Frist post?

[niktemadur]

Holy cow, have we just witnessed a guy p0wning hisself? Like the soccer player who unwittingly kicks the ball the wrong way and ends up scoring a goal for the opposing team? How about the guy who KO'd himself in the boxing ring? Or the fielder who tries to catch the deep long fly ball, and it ends up bouncing off his glove for a home run?

In lieu of uploading....

[awarrenfells]

While it does defeat the purpose of file sharing to a degree, but I have found that ISP's can only really detect file sharing through your upload to download ratio. I work for an $ISP, and we red flag accounts with an upload equal to or greater than their download, which sucks for some customers who upload large amounts of information to other servers or sites. I don't agree with it, but I have to pay the bills :P

Re:In lieu of uploading....

[freedumb2000]

That sounds like it would track only private tracker users at best and have lots of false positives.

Re:In lieu of uploading....

[Anonymous Coward]

So I need to download 100G of any old crap from websites to be able to avoid getting grief for seeding 50G of Linux distributions?

Are you sure this is a wise policy?

Re:In lieu of uploading....

[Anonymous Coward]

errr ... isn't uploading GOOD for ISP?
i thought with all the peering and stuff,
that DOWNLOADING is bad for a ISP.
i mean, if isp X gets 50 megs from ISP Y, butb then sends back just as much, is a nill to nill traffic thingy? seeding is good, leaching is bad, also for isps(*).
-
anyway, i live in a poor country (changing)
and i specifically upload more then i download (to help me isp), but maybe my logic is flawed ...

(*)ISP need to grow. once they stop growing, they shrink. so grow or die(tm).

Re:In lieu of uploading....

[awarrenfells]

There have been false positives, yes. People uploading files to ftp for backup, or people uploading and/or sending images for business and work purposes are other causes I have encountered that have gotten people's accounts red flagged.

Re:Frist post?

[poopdeville]

mi tew!!!!

Re:Frist post?

[poopdeville]

OH SHIT

Re:Here's an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu/Fedora/Slackcrap Slackcrap? Never heard of that...

Did you mean Ubuttu/Fuckdora/Slackware?

Insulting a distro's name isn't nice. As the creatoro of multiple Linux distributions, one of the hardest things is choosing a decent name.

Switch ISP

[Joce640k]

My ISP started messing around with this, I called them to ask about it and they flat-out denied it.

When I looked on the message boards and everybody else was in the same boat, I called again. This time they said they were throttling, but only at peak hours (not true - but that was the official line).

Next day I called their competitor. As soon as the line was installed (2 days) I called and told them I was switching, and to who.

Re:Switch ISP

[dargaud]

...and then a week later the competitor starts doing the same thing. Now what ? It's not like there's more than a handful of ADSL providers in any given area.

Re:Switch ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just don't pirate content? Just saying ...

This is equivalent [in scope] to bitching about governors put in cars to stop them from going beyond certain speeds (speeds often well above the max speed on any road anyways I might add). I bought my car, I should be able to drive 220km/h if I want to right?

If you were truly an educated and upright adult, you'd just buy the content you want. And it's not like it's expensive. I just bought a triple-feature of 90s movies (The Jackal, and two others that I can't recall right now) for $15. That's $5 per movie. That I can now watch, in full quality, whenever I want.

ISPs are obligated to carry your content, to a point. If 5% of the customers are doing 95% of the load, that's not fair to the other 95% of users now is it? What makes you so damn special that you can make my browsing experience more inconvenient, just so you can see that latest episode of Friends or whatever?

Re:Switch ISP

[MarcoG42]

Feeding troll. Your car analogy sucks. Yes, if I bought a car that does 400 mph I should damn well be able to drive it that fast. There are tracks around the country where you can pay to drive as fast as you like. So, yes, that governor on the car I paid my money for is keeping me from enjoying what I paid for.

That's nice. You paid $5 for a, what?....15 year old movie? Some people would rather not pay $30 for a movie that just came out, though.

ISPs are obligated to deliver on their promises. If I get a cable internet connection that says it delivers speeds of 30 Mb/s down and / 5 Mb/s up and has unlimited data transfer and no restrictions that's damn well what I expect to get. I don't care if my downloading every piece of free software via bittorrent I can get my hands on is affecting other customers. That's not my problem, it's the ISPs. They need to upgrade their network, not interfere with the service I paid for.

Re:Switch ISP

[Explodicle]

BitTorrent is used for more than just piracy, dipshit.

Re:Switch ISP

[Omestes]

Er... torrent != piracy.

Go look at your favorite flavor of Linux' distro page, and see what the prefered download medium is. Or hit up jamendo, see one of the ways to download music. Hell, go try to patch most popular video games (WoW, I'm looking at you). Torrent is becoming a popular way of content distribution, and not just piracy.

My old college blocked torrent traffic, which made downloading World of Warcraft updates a pain. It was about 12 hours per upload (@12kps, on a T1). Steam uses bit torrent too, which last time I checked was also a legal use, and wildly popular.

The point is that ISPs are blocking traffic, legal or otherwise, with no knowledge of the content they are blocking. Even with this knowledge, it is a questionable affair.

Re:Switch ISP

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as the line was installed (2 days) I called and told them I was switching, and to who. And, I trust, why.

Re:Frist post?

[willow]

I think it's more like admitting you made a mistake. In public. And not being afraid to own up to it. And taking the consequences. I think we need more of that.

Oops... getting too serious...

They already do

[patio11]

Every major ISP sells completely unthrottled, you bought-it-enjoy-it bandwidth to businesses. Get yourself a T1 line, never worry about being throttled again! Prices are quite reasonable starting at about $600 to $1200 per month.

Its an obvious consumer winner!

Re:They already do

[bogjobber]

That's bullshit too. I can get a badass hosted server with a dedicated, super-high quality 100mbps very, very close to guaranteed bandwidth for prices like that. For the price most people pay for cable subscription I can get a dedicated shitty server with 10mbps shared connection, still very high quality. Obviously residential areas have a built-in disadvantage, but shouldn't it be in the same ballpark? With the UTOPIA project here in Utah, I can get a 50/50mbps connection for $60/month that doesn't censor or throttle. Other than the will to organize and a significant tech-savvy population (hardly unique), what does suburban Utah have that most of the country doesn't?

It's not technically infeasible in America. Maybe in BFE but not in anything resembling a large city, let alone high-density cities. We're the kind of people with the knowledge to change this. Let's get off our collective asses and stop accepting this kind of service!

Re:They already do

[Sentry21]

Other than the will to organize and a significant tech-savvy population (hardly unique), what does suburban Utah have that most of the country doesn't? Multiple wives?

Canada is basically monopolized too

[tentimestwenty]

If you want broadband you've got basically 2 companies to choose from depending on where you live. Both suck. It won't be long before they really put the screws to people. Prices are going up and so are restrictions.

It's the marketing depts fault

[vxvxvxvx]

ISPs are often seen as big bad guys when they do this but the reality is it does cost more to support a user who actually uses their connection pretty significantly than someone's grandma who checks email 2x a month. It's not the fact that they filter/etc... that's the problem. They shouldn't even need to filter. It's the marketing dept. If they didn't sell the internet connection as "unlimited" they wouldn't have problems at all. Say $20/month for 2 gigs of transfer with an extra $5 per gig or a similar pricing structure. Suddenly the bittorrent/P2P problems vanish. Of course they could no longer advertise as "unlimited" but they aren't delivering that as it is.

Re:Frist post?

[totally bogus dude]

Maybe he's trying to start a new AC meme. Imagine a world where all the posts about chowing down on a jock's stool are followed up by a post apologising for contributing nothing. What an improvement that would be!

Canada too

[phorm]

For example, look at the recent shenannigans with Bell and those subletting their monopolized line-system. The regulating bodies basically just said that Bell is doing nothing wrong by throttling or otherwise screwing with the traffic of the 3rd-party ISP's customers, because there's no proof it will cause lost business.

Hello! The ISP's cannot provide the indicated level of services due to the interference of a third party. Screw loss of business, that's a pretty major way of screwing the customers, who now have absolutely zero choice for ISP's who aren't handing it to them up the tailpipe (Rogers, the non-DSL ISP, also throttles). So is it fair that customers aren't "leaving" because they're getting equally screwed elsewhere?

When I last spent time in Aus, I was amazed by how closely they kept tabs on their politicians and policies. North America in general could learn a lot from them in that regard.

Re:Canada too

[Sentry21]

ISPs should stop being cheap bastards then. Buying bandwidth separately and installing your own ADSL2+ equipment provides you with far more flexibility in regards to customers, plans, and bandwidth, and can save a ton of money.

For one Montreal-based ISP, the cost of paying a metered rate on bandwidth was cheaper than paying Bell a flat rate for line access. That is, reselling Bell's DSL is more expensive than installing your own equipment and selling your own bandwidth.

It got to the point where they would install ADSL2+ equipment wherever there was the biggest market for it, but move as many customers in the area over to the new hardware as they could. Every customer they plugged into their own hardware instead of Bell's saved them enough in a short time to buy more equipment to move more customers over. Pretty good deal.

For small mom-and-pop type operations, it doesn't make sense, but for large-scale organizations such as Uniserve, it would make a ton of sense, not to mention save a ton of money. Oh, and there's also the fact that Bell technicians wouldn't have to be sent to client houses, where they can say 'It's a problem with your phone, but I'm not allowed to fix it... but if you were a Bell customer I could...'

Re:Australia is America

[joocemann]

They didn't lose control. They gave it up willingly, for the sake of convenience. If they actually cared, they wouldn't keep on voting for the one who can flash the most cash. They would seek out and vote for candidates who aren't so allied with big business. But... it's more convenient to just vote for the guy that mass media presents to them. Then bitch about it till the next cycle, repeat. If they would admit it, they would be on the first step towards a cure. As it is, the 45 year decline will continue for at least four more. There is no end in sight. Australia doesn't really look any better wow.. sounds like america

2 Questions

[cynagh0st]

I'm a little confused on the legalities of advocating the bypass of an internet censorship/control/filters.

Would our headline be construed to encourage the violation of Terms of Service/Use contract between ISP and Customer? Is there a good site for condensed information on bypassing filters/firewalls/proxies etc. (that may not necessarily prohibit illegal actions)?

Best sign of victory...

[Kjella]

...is that computer magazines run articles like this anyway. I doubt they'd post an article that's more or less "How-to warez more effectively!!!1", torrenting is something a lot of people do. The pirate bay is around top 100 on the alexia webranking, and if you start reading the next 100 maybe you'll realize just how big that is. It's higher than IGN, NBA, Digg, 2ch, SourceForge, CNET, mozilla, amazon.de (not com!) and so on. Other prominent sites like IsoHunt (124), torrentz.com (157) also rate very highly. That's way beyond a few hogs they want to get rid of, saying "WTF I can't use torrents" is almost up there with "WTF I can't watch YouTube" or "WTF I can't run MSN". They'll be killing themselves if they keep this up...

Re:Best sign of victory...

[BlueStrat]

...is that computer magazines run articles like this anyway. I doubt they'd post an article that's more or less "How-to warez more effectively!!!1", torrenting is something a lot of people do. The pirate bay is around top 100 on the alexia webranking, and if you start reading the next 100 maybe you'll realize just how big that is. It's higher than IGN, NBA, Digg, 2ch, SourceForge, CNET, mozilla, amazon.de (not com!) and so on. Other prominent sites like IsoHunt (124), torrentz.com (157) also rate very highly. That's way beyond a few hogs they want to get rid of, saying "WTF I can't use torrents" is almost up there with "WTF I can't watch YouTube" or "WTF I can't run MSN". They'll be killing themselves if they keep this up...

Theoretically, I agree with your logic. Unfortunately the way it'll probably work out if history is any indication is that they'll partner-up with the big media and software interests to persuade the government to start another pointless, un-winnable "War On..." like the "War On Drugs" that's been such a success...oh, wait..it hasn't been "successful" at all in it's stated goals. But that won't deter them from making our lives hell in the meantime, I'm sure.

Hmm...what will they call it? "The War On Warez"? "The Purge Of Piracy"? How about "The Battle For Bits"? Whatever lame name or acronym they call it, I'm sure it'll end up costing *us*, the people, dearly...in money, freedom, and technical, scientific, and societal progress. Not to mention also further clogging the courts and packing our already-overcrowded prisons even further.

Cheers!

Strat

Re:Australia is America

[SpaceLifeForm]

Well, the darkside is everywhere. Home office is in Europe.

Try the telnet port.

[Anonymous Coward]

My old ISP throttled any non-privileged to non-privileged port connections. I ran bit Torrent on the telnet port for a while to get around it.

As soon as I could I switched provider.

My ISP

[Moe1975]

I dual boot Ubuntu Feisty and Win XP SP2. About a year or so ago, while on XP, I noticed that my ISP had began to throttle bittorrent . . . I tried a few techniques, and nothing worked, so, I immediately rebooted into Feisty and . . . ta-ra! I was pleasantly surprised to find that their throttling is completely nullified when on Ubuntu Feisty. Has been that way since, also noticed that switching to a better router (from a Dlink to a Huawei) made no difference. I use the default client on GNOME . . . yet another reason why I only boot into Windows about once every two weeks.

Re:My ISP

[MisterBlueSky]

AFAIK different torrent clients use different ports. It seems your ISP is looking at certain ports. So just switching to another client instead of another OS might also help. Or configure the client to use other ports.

Relakks Good, but run by Pirates!

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the Uk ISP Be. Gradually my Bt traffic slowed and slowed, over a period of months. It still worked but was very slow, about 1Mbit on my 24 M line. Then I took out a 1 month Relakks subscription. It was great, and my rates went up by a factor of 10. I was exstatic. I subscribed for the year and they sent me a receipt. But they did not enable my years subscription or otherwise acknowlege that I had paid. I wrote three or four times to their customer support such as it is, but there was no reply.

I do not believe that I was intentionally swindled, although there is something poetic in knowing that it is run by the pirate bay, and that that is after all what pirates do! Rather I should say I believe I was unlucky. But I cant see how to get my money back, and its pretty sloppy on their part that their customer service is so poor that they cannot even reply to emails.

Its a great service, but beware of dealing with pirates.

Mark.

Downloading Linux w/ Bit Torrent

[blank89]

I know that I've had problems torrenting linux iso's. My access slows down to a crawl for up to an hour after I stop downloading the torrent. Someone hates my isp so badly that they registered a domain about it. It's not a very good site, but the fact that they put even that much effort in to it... It's http://www.ntc-sucks.com/.

by the way...

[Mr2001]

Actually I really doubt that IMAP/POP would manage to saturate any connection. You might be able to fill a slow upload speed, but my guess is server latencies would significantly limit what you can do. Not to mention in your scenario, your download amount is not going to be that substantial. You'd be using SMTP, not IMAP/POP: upstream usage is what ISPs like Comcast care about.

BitTorrent doesn't use a lot of downstream bandwidth compared to other applications, anyway. You can get faster downloads from a well-hosted web site or a good Usenet service.

Re:by the way...

[Moridineas]

You'd be using SMTP, not IMAP/POP: upstream usage is what ISPs like Comcast care about. Ach, you're of course correct.

no such thing as a "bandwidth hog"

[Scudsucker]

There's only customers who use what they paid for and companies that oversell their connections.

What's worse is NOT knowing if...

[Glenn Rubenstein]

What's worse is not knowing if you've been throttled or not.

Every time I've had a series of slow connections, I start to worry.

Not that I've ever downloaded anything over Bit Torrent that was copyrighted, of course!

So charge per byte

[Anonymous Coward]

and don't pass spam on to me. That's YOUR data and I don't want it.

'course the cost of charging like that isn't what you want to do because people could then DECIDE who to go to for their internet connection with an informed decision. You'd prefer just to have a confusopoly and keep the customers ill informed.

Errors in TFA

[jyoull]

1. Not necessarily an error, but SecureIX is pretty much out of business and "looking for a buyer":

We are looking for someone that has more time than us to take over this service. There is definantly a need and demand for this type of service, but we have other buisnesses to run and this needs a full time owner/manager. What is included: the secureix.com domain, all the custom written software that makes this service possible, and help getting your initial servers running.
Until the sale is complete we will not accept new sign ups.
Email six@secureix.com with any offers/questions.
Here are some FAQ about this auction:
You will need one very basic Dual P4 server per 128-256 premium customers.
You will need about 75 mbits avg. per 256 premium customers.
Income potential is limitless.
Nearly 200,000 people have visted our site and signed up for some level of service.

Seems to me ya don't exit a business where the "income potential is limitless" lo+l

2. Relakks charges EU$5 so thats USD$7.50-8/month, not $5

...or router:

[Anonymous Coward]

Some routers (notably the WRT54GL , which I have), keep connections open for a very long time, effectively using up your available connections - more here.

what the hell, man?

[Kyokushi]

You forgot that the porn filter is already in trial phase? Where am I going to get my stamina booster now?
Oh, and why is the cost of broadband here is still hideously expensive?

With apologies to pink Floyd

[Sciryl Llort]

# it's no revolt, we're just seceding
    to split ourselves off from the union
    you intend to take away our slaves,
    you proclaim but we don't emancipate .../#

Stealth webpages?

[argent]

Is that webpage really grey-on-dark-grey or is it using an IE-only style sheet?

If so, is that one way to avoid the blockade, make your webpage on eluding the blockade so hard to read that anyone over 30 gets a migraine before they get to the end?

Re:Stealth webpages?

[Anonymous Coward]

No and No. I'm using Firefox here and the website looks just fine.

Re:Here's an idea

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Heh. So... 'slashdtards' make a minor typo. What do you call somebody that mangles grammar as bad as you have?

P.S. Thanks for proving my point!

Academia Affected

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even concerned about Bit torrent and what not, my ssh connections to Uni are damn slow! dd'ing a single line from vim takes a whole 2 minutes, how's a CS'er to get work done with these draconian conditions! Gaaaaaaaah assignment's due in 2hrs....

For god's sake, quit messing with the tubes!

Problem might be the protocol itself

[Reziac]

I haven't used Limewire, but I've noticed a problem with two completely unrelated bittorent clients, which caused me to conclude that the problem might be in the BT protocol itself:

When a BT client is running, occasionally the network stack gets screwed up, with the usual effect that I am unable to do anything online at all. Nothing connects.

Unload the BT client, and everything instantly goes back to normal.

Also, BT clients occasionally cause a BSOD by munging up the network driver... on a machine that otherwise NEVER crashes.

Re: War Between the States in North America

[billstewart]

I tend to agree with Jeffrey Hummel's arguments that the Southern states seceded primarily because of slavery, but Lincoln had the Union reconquer them for reasons of nationalism.

Economics was obviously a major driver (and slavery's as much a part of that as free trade), but a lot of it was emotional/political issues - slavery has a large impact on social organization, and people had strong emotional reactions both for and against it, and all that emphasis on the Union as personal identity and the "manifest destiny" crap; you don't get brother-killing-brother kinds of wars over trade policy. And you may remember that states were being admitted to the union in ways that balanced the numbers of new slave and free states - even though the new slave states weren't all in the Deep South which had the economics issues.

So much of the Union's desire to reconquer the Confederate States reminds me of China's insistence on reconquering and controlling their old empire, including Taiwan and Tibet (the, uh, Han shot first...)

And Lincoln wanted to increase central government power. While he wasn't a Prohibitionist, they were one of the groups that had joined to form the Republican party, and fighting slavery and Demon Rum required more central power.