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Comcast, Cox Slow BitTorrent Traffic All Day
narramissic writes "A study by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems found that Comcast and Cox Communications are slowing BitTorrent traffic at all times of day, not just peak hours. Comcast was found to be interrupting at least 30% of BitTorrent upload attempts around the clock. At noon, Comcast was interfering with more than 80% of BitTorrent traffic, but it was also slowing more than 60% of BitTorrent traffic at other times, including midnight, 3 a.m. and 8 p.m. Eastern Time in the U.S., the time zone where Comcast is based. Cox was interfering with 100% of the BitTorrent traffic at 1 a.m., 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. Eastern Time. Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice downplayed the results saying, 'P-to-p traffic doesn't necessarily follow normal traffic flows.'"
I'm paying for bandwidth, I should be able to use 100% of what I paid for. If their infrastructure can't handle it - maybe they should go back to selling tv.
But that does not address you blocking any of the traffic.
'P-to-p traffic doesn't necessarily follow normal traffic flows.'
Nope it sure doesn't when you implement layer 4 filtering and then configure it to block/messwith/"delay" p2p apps. Who knew?
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Now the real question is whether there will be enough pressure for Comcast to remove this unnecessary throttling. Given their track record with many of their other questionable services, I doubt that they will.
Not all file sharing is thievery. What Comcast is doing IS highway robbery.
I don't really use BitTorrent much at all. Sure, I downloaded some HiDef video to test out content delivery over my home LAN from a server to my HDTV, but I don't scour the net for movies and music like I used to. I just don't have the time and interest.
However, I did just grab the new Nine Inch Nails album, and as a former musician myself, I still dabble in remixing on occasion. Thus, when I went to go grab the freely available multitracks for remixing, I was somewhat surprised that they were only available via Torrent. That's smart on the part of Trent Reznor and his tech team (why bog down only his own servers with information that he's freely sharing with everyone?), it's bad for other artists and remixers if their access to this media is going to be limited because of the "taint" associated with BitTorrent.
I'm not sure there's a solution here. Any distributed network will inevitably be used for some amount of "gray market" trafficking, but it would be nice if we preferred and promoted technologies for their Common Good usage rather than limiting them by their potential negative effects. And by "we" I mean the corporations who gouge us for $100 each month just to shuttle electrons around.
So just because there's a law against it, it's wrong?
In this day and age when most of the middle class doesn't give a fuck enough to vote with their dollars or otherwise, we techies do what we have to. If that means enabling everybody to steal from the big corporations that have been ripping everybody off for years, then so be it. I encourage everyone that I know to do the same.
what? we don't need to overturn net neutrality, we need to create net neutrality. what exists currently is NOT net neutrality.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
World of Warcraft used torrents to patch the game when last i was playing. My ISP US Cable throttled the traffic severely and I always had to download the patch using other methods. There are many legitimate uses for torrents.
Limiting bittorrent because it can be used for illegal downloads is like scrambling epsn because people make illegal bets on football games.
dude, replace "net neutrality" with "the lack of net neutrality", and your whole comment makes sense.
Oh give me a break. You are saying it is ok to rip people or companies off?
Mind if I grab into your pocket to steal your wallet?
What you remind me of are those people that go into the fields of farmers and dig up vegetables or fruits. My father in law is a potato farmer and he has about 500 acres of potatoes. YET time and time again people go to his fields and steal potatoes.
They think it is ok to rip off from larger farmers. After all he won't notice, or he is ripping off the consumers or he is big enough to deal with it. The reality is otherwise...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
That is correct, however BitTorrent is a much faster way to download it, when it is a new release of something popular such as Ubuntu, HTTP downloads are around 30KB/Second while torrents are around 200Kb/Second, therefore, there is little justification to not use BitTorrent when downloading large files, and when you figure that BitTorrent doesn't stress the servers of the project, it is a better choice in the long run too.
So yes you are right, but that's the theory. Let's look at the facts. There is more illegal software than legal software. And I am sure it is clogging the networks of Comcast and other network providers.
There is illegal software via HTTP and FTP too, in fact one might say that there is just as much via HTTP as via P2P. As for clogging the networks, the ISPs should have gotten more bandwidth before they offered higher speed Internet or at least have it in their advertising that they throttle P2P and certainly contracts. It would be like if I set up a huge pile of sand in my backyard, and I had people pay $40 per month to get as much sand as they wanted and it said so in the contract and through advertising. Of course some people only needed a bit of sand and took some home in buckets, others would take bigger ones. However, fearing that my sand would run out I poked holes in all of the larger buckets making them carry much less. People would have a right to be mad at me for promising unlimited sand and then limiting it. Same thing with the ISPs
Don't like, switch!
I don't know where you live, but here in the US there are about 3 main ISPs and most if not all have torrent throttling. Some of the more rural areas only have one way of getting high-speed internet and if you don't like that ISP it is either that or dial-up. And as for creating your own company, the grants the government/cities gave out to help get internet to the world, chances are won't be given again making it impossible to
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Oh please for the love of all that is holy, everyone stop using the "dont like it, switch" argument! Its common knowledge that the majority of US broadband users are only serviced by ONE company. Its simply not an option, and its getting old.
As to your other arguments to the legality and saturation of networks, your viewpoint is quite backwards. The fact of the matter is, its a precedent being set, that they can sell you "always on high speed access to the internet", but then dictate what you can and cannot do with it. A phone company that listened in on your phone calls, and then disconnected you because your conversation with your girlfriend wasn't deemed as important as a business call being handled by your neighbor is an apt description of whats going on here. We pay for access to something, we don't expect them to determine what is important to us and why we are going to use it.
If it boils down to a supply and demand issue, why doesn't it sort itself out the same way all other markets do? Do you see gas stations dictating where you can and cannot drive? No, they raise their prices and pass the cost of business to the customer. Its simple economics.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Allow me to correct you.
Besides, there are other uses for bittorrent besides Linux distros. What about Free / Creative Commons media, like music (or even free-as-in-beer professional music, like Radiohead's latest album) or videos (anime music videos, Star wreck, independent movies, video tutorials)?
Comcast's reasoning (p2p is for i113641 w4r3z!!!111ONE) is simply a lame excuse. Their infrastructure sucks and they're only using the pirate excuse to cover their arses.
Taken from you? So someone held a gun to your head and forced you to buy that Britney Spears CD?
Wow, the Parent Poster is a thief! To access *any* website (including /.) you need to download a copy of the files on the slashdot servers. Opps, score one for holistic generalizations!
Then again, the AC poster was obviously just trolling. No one is stupid enough to actually mean that.
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
First of all:
When you take back something that was unfairly taken from you (i.e. high prices due to monopolies), that isn't ripping someone off. It's called justice.
1) People use P2P to get free movies, music, and pirated software. None of this stuff was "taken from you." You have the option to buy it at many locations nationwide for reasonable prices. There's no monopoly on movies, music or software at the moment.
2) Yes, you are ripping people off. We all agree the MPAA and RIAA exaggerate the damages, but it's also not a victimless crime, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Illegal? Maybe, but don't forget a lot of laws were made only to benefit the rich and powerful.
Then get off your lazy ass and change the law. The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed because Martin Luthor King, Jr sat on his ass all day, then occasionally stole a candy bar from the corner store under the guise of "justice."
If you think the law is wrong, change the law.
Comment of the year
copying is stealing. Period.
No. No it isn't.
Circumstance matters. Copyright laws are about who has the Right to produce copies, and in case you haven't read or bothered to look up any of the US laws the copyright holder does not have exclusive rights in all cases.
Furthermore, blocking P2P isn't just used for copyrighted material. It is also used for distributing legal software and files and those users are also getting punished.
Though the reality of it has nothing to do with punishment. It has more to do with the fact that the companies feel they can get away with it for this segment of their user base. They would prefer to throttle down everyone unless an exorbitant fee is paid, but still be able to advertise their fast rates.
Some of the PS3 games are also using torrents to seed updates to games, like MGS4 online. That game is going to be HUGE (granted, it probably won't be as big as WoW, but it'll still piss off a bunch of people)
The real reason that Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft don't spend a great deal of time going after pirated software is because they would quickly lose market share. Even if software is cheap, it's never going to be cheap enough for a college student eating Ramen and saving money for beer on the weekends. He's going to nab a copy of whatever he wants to putz around with, and mostly use it complete school work and personal creative projects.
If Adobe made it impossible for him to get an illegal copy of Photoshop, guess what? He'd learn something else. And when he arrives at his first job and they ask him which version of the Creative Suite he needs, he very well might say "That's alright - I know Gimp and Inkscape, and I already have them. Just get me a bigger monitor instead."
It's a nightmare scenario, and one of those things I wish they (Microsoft/Adobe/Autodesk/Apple) would be more honest about. I hope they do lock down Windows with DRM so it is nearly hackproof and rejects the installation of pirated software, because Linux would gain a few million users overnight. In the end, the best thing the OSS movement has going for it is the greed of the big guys, so here's to hoping they only get more delirious with it.
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Read your contract. Does it not say that they have the right to terminate you if you overuse the network?
Who said they were overusing? One Linux distro via P2P per month is throttled the same as 24/7/365 pirated movie downloading.
It appears they are throttling on the means, not the content or quantity.
Now, rentals, I do consider to be reasonable prices -- but I'd much rather not have to actually go to the store. Netflix is a good idea, but their "watch now" service is heavily DRM'd.
So tell me where else I can go, when I want to watch a movie right now, without going to a video store -- or maybe it's not even at the video store yet -- oh, and I want to watch it on Linux.
The business model is just screaming for someone to implement it. There's no monopoly on movies, music or software at the moment. The majority of movies come from a shockingly small number of studios. The majority of music comes from a shockingly small number of labels.
And there are certainly monopolies within software. Microsoft, anyone? We all agree the MPAA and RIAA exaggerate the damages, but it's also not a victimless crime, not by any stretch of the imagination. I used to feel bad about it, yes. Then they started suing 12-year-old children, grandmothers, and dead people for $100/song. Now I really don't care.
I will go out of my way to pay for indie music, when I find a band I like. But with the things the MPAA and the RIAA does in response to piracy... Seriously, proposing a "piracy tax" on ISPs? If they already assume their customers are their enemies, then I really don't care. The Civil Rights Movement didn't succeed because Martin Luthor King, Jr sat on his ass all day, then occasionally stole a candy bar from the corner store under the guise of "justice." At the same time, Rosa Parks didn't wait for the law to change. Neither am I.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Because the bandwidth you think you're paying for costs a lot more than you're actually paying right now.
What you're actually paying for is a kind of time-share bandwidth thing. Based on a profile of an average user who wants spurts of high speed (to make web pages responsive) but doesn't actually need that data rate anywhere near 100% of the time.
This is generally a good deal all around, because by selling it this way, the ISPs ensure good utilization of the equipment, and you get fast web pages. And that connection is on 24/7.
If your use profile doesn't conform to that estimate, for instance, if you're actually using a fairly constant bandwidth, then you need to upgrade your service to a plan that figures that in. Prices for those plans are sure to come down soon, as the capacity is built in to satisfy the upcoming demand for internet-tv.
It is unfortunate that the ad campaigns didn't specify this explicitly at the outset (although they're getting better). But I think it was in the name of brevity rather than malice. And also some malice, but at least at some point someone probably figured that many people either weren't bright enough or didn't have enough time to fully absorb the details, so they oversimplified them. I don't think that assumption is wrong, btw.
Haven't you ever wondered why a T1 line, which ostensibly has lower data rate than your plan by a factor of between 3 and 5 in most of the country, costs so very much more? That's because they don't expect you to use that data rate anywhere near all the time.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
you gotta low how bold corporate shills can speak due to years of republican administration spoilage.
;). (Yeah--I'm taking it easy on the Democrats at the moment. If the party that used to share my views is collapsing, it's kinda hard to throw stones.)
how bold corporate shills can speak
What? She's not allowed to speak? Or she's not allowed to speak boldly? Or is it that she works for a corporation? Isn't this (at least where I am, and Comcast is) America? Ever hear of the first amendment? Be you a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Marxists, or Communist--you can't restrict the freedom of speech in America.
republican administration spoilage
Meh. I'm a conservative which means most liberals identify me as a "republican", but I'm pretty pissed about the way the party is heading. It used to be about doing honorable and decent things, limiting the control and taxation of the government, standing against our enemies, and keeping a great nation going strong. Now it's about power, gay sex with interns, having a 'secret' second family, compromising beliefs, and slowly eroding the constitution. Not saying Democrats are any better though--Bill slept with a fat chick
There's no place like
That is, let's say the ISP has 100 Mbps available, and they're providing "unlimited" service capped at 5 Mbps to 400 customers, under their old estimate that an average customer would use 5% of their available bandwidth.
Now BitTorrent comes along, and soon the average customer is using 10% of their available bandwidth. Instead of doubling their network capacity to 200 Mbps, the ISP can halve the per-user cap to 2.5 Mbps, keeping overall usage the same without spending a dime or raising their rates.
(Well, it isn't quite that simple, since in reality everyone hasn't increased their usage equally, so the lowered cap wouldn't affect them all equally. But there is some number where the ISP could set the cap to keep usage under control without having to add capacity or raise prices.)
Of course, ISPs don't want to do this. They want to keep advertising big numbers. But the fact is, people use more bandwidth than they used to, and that demand isn't doing away, so something has to change: the ISPs need to either add capacity and/or raise their prices, or stop advertising service levels they can't provide at the current prices.
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