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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.
It's about time someone stood up to you no-good file sharing thieves. All you assholes do is steal other peoples hard work. Just because the internet existed when you were born does not mean that free music and movies are a birthright.
And fuck your nitpicking - copying is stealing. Period.
It is horrible. My experience is that all of your internet traffic grinds to a halt while running a BitTorrent client for more than a couple hours. It takes forever to even load a web page. I usually have to kill my BitTorrent client and wait about five minutes for things to return to normal.
But that does not address you blocking any of the traffic.
As long as I can get my episode of gattai-subbed macross frontier when I leave azureus on over night, I'll be fine.
'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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"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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.
Cox is my ISP. Sometimes, after using BitTorrent, regardless of what is being transferred, my cable modem's connection to their system will be severed, and it will not return for a time which more or less seems to be directly proportional to the time spent using the torrent.
/. told me that they had the same phenomenon happen to them when using VoIP.
I remember that someone here on
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.
Are they only slowing the protocol or are they still spoofing packets?
Nor is FIOS from what I have read from other users here on /,
Face it we are screwed thanks to Net Neutrality. What pisses me off is that the government just put up billions of dollars in infrastructure improvements a year or two ago. Did it go to upgrade their network?
Nope it went to the CEO's and their shareholders and more lobbying to take away our freedom.
I give up on bittorrent. Its going to be something that Americans will no longer do such as program or have drm-less hardware.
What is truly sad is that we just kick our feet back and do not care. Why can't I run my own software on my iphone?
We need to write to our legislatures and see if we can overturn net neutrality. Who owns the internet? The government, people, or a few monopolies?
Unfortunately the maga telecom's have already answered this for us and took it over. What is stopping them from filtering out content or having their own ICANN for DNS? They own the pipes at this point and can do whatever the hell they want. Sorry to rant.
Something needs to be done.
http://saveie6.com/
Cox has been dicking their customers and... the others are getting comcastrated.
The same thing is happening with Linux. If you want to download the latest release of Ubuntu in a few days to a few weeks after it has been released using HTTP, you will find that the connection's max speed is around 30KB/Second, the torrent however hits around 200Kb/Second. If you want the release and don't want to mess with time-out errors, torrenting it is the only way you can really get it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They say cox does it? I get 1 MB on average DLs with Bittorrent with them, and my service plan is only 7 Mb/s. I have a friend who reports the same experience (and he pirates gigs upon gigs of stuff) Either we got lucky or the researchers got unlucky. Now, Comcast, on the other hand, I can believe throttles.
To be fair what she is refering to about "normal traffic patterns" is the sustained nature of P2P. That said there are much better ways to go about traffic control then what they are doing. I love P2P and see an enormous amount of potential in the future. At some point the ISPs and P2P programs need to find a way to get along. What that is, I don't know, but we have to figure it out somehow.
Thoughts? (and please dont just cry about the evil ISPs. We honestly need to have a constructive conversation about this. (yes, i do realize this is slashdot))
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
Cox tries to sell you the KY while Comcast tries to sell you the bread.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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.
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
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.
But you can apply that same reasoning to any service offered across the internet. What if they'd just posted it on mirrored web servers? Is Comcast going to start limiting web traffic? Or FTP? I suppose I shouldn't give them any ideas.
From a technology standpoint it just seems like a retarded policy. The rise of BitTorrent traffic only means the content available on the internet has evolved from text to digital media. If they start screwing with torrents, people will switch to something else. They'll find a way to get through.
Guess that means Comcast would have sided with the buggy whip manufacturers and tried to limit automobile traffic.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comcast charges me a lot for their service, yet when I try to get a return for my money by actually using what they claim to offer - I'm kicked out. This false advertising is appalling and I hope a class action lawsuit will follow. They disgusted me off with their "no criticize" clause and this is the last straw.
Call Comcast during a business day and select the choices to cancel service. A customer retention person will come on and ask why. Say you're switching to DSL at $25 a month. They'll lower your rate to 33. And in the meantime, it's 3:00pm PST and pretty much every peer that tries to leech from me is getting killed by lovely Comcast.
thank god i have at&T dsl. hopefully they dont start this crap. also, i use newsgroups, not torrents.
Now I shouldn't be defending them because I have Cox, but I'd just like to say I get anywhere from 30-300kBps when downloading torrents which is not terrible but ultimately lags far behind what I could get back in the urban area where my parents live that uses Bright House.
shhh.. don't mention news groups, no one needs to know about them. you're gonna mess it up for all of us. ;)
better title: `cox blocks around the clocks`
They either charge for a product or don't charge for a product. People who are having their internet connection throttled after having paid for it should be entitled to a refund. Otherwise, Comcast should advertise a P2P-free service at a discounted price.
Isn't there any kind of consumer protection in all of this?
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
This is the only thing I have seen that will allow me to get speeds on torrent networks where they should be. If I didn't do this Cox cable red flag me for days and my internet drags for a couple of days until they decided to uncap me. I would have not been able to get Kubuntu 8.04 when it launched without using bit-torrent so don't give me the bit-torrent=pirate bullsh*t. All the Http and FTP distribution servers were overloaded that day.
it's true
I have Cox internet in Rhode Island, and I have not experienced any throttling. The difference is that there is a strong presence of fios from Verzion, which is known to not mess with your connection. Cox, and all these ISP networks actually have tons of extra capacity. The proof came for me when fios first arrived. Cox flipped a magic switch, and increased their standard service to 5Mb down/2Mb up, to directly match the specs and pricing of a basic fios connection. While I won't complain about the huge increase in upstream speed, it really makes me wonder what the hell these ISPs are really up to.
On a related topic has anyone seen comcast interrupting network "Watch Instantly" traffic?
My netflix server worked great until about two months ago,... then shows would start stopping mid-way.
Arggg..
Is there a good reason that common carrier non-discrimination was removed from data networks?
Does that reason outweigh the benefits of a non-discriminatory communications network?
Should we not restore at least the non-discrimination provisions of common carrier for data networks?
Would non-discrimination not automatically, and with minimal government interference for good actors, result in net neutrality?
The only downside I can immediately come up with is that less regulation means less opportunity for graft. But I cannot see a desire to engage in graft as a valid economic priority.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Yawn.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They are rationing the bandwidth so its not monopolized by a few users.....
Comcast offers 2 gigabytes per month of free newsgroup access. Newsgroups are going to be faster than any torrent you try. Comcast newsgroup service maxes out my connection any time I use it. The whole idea that slow ftp/http is the only method of downloading isn't true. You just need to be a little more knowledgeable about methods available for downloading binaries.
Thanks for nothing Cox.
Net Neutrality is obviously already dead as long as this is true.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Actually it's information superhighway robbery.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The subject says it all!!!
you gotta low how bold corporate shills can speak due to years of republican administration spoilage.
Read radical news here
What's the best way to measure one's bandwidth. For example, once you get above 2Mb/sec and live more than 600 miles from a major speed text site, there's not a single speed test meter that works right, in my extensive searches.
Comcast also puts in these 10 second bandwith burst boosts so any test you do has to outlast that if you want to know the sustained rate.
The best way I seem to be able to test things is to find some server and start multiple scp sessions going. But this is plagued by weird artifacts probably having to do with routers at the far end shaping things.
Bit torrent used to be the only way I could actually see anything within a factor of 3 of the bandwidth I pay for. But now I can't even get that speed even when I'm dealing with 100% seeds (I use comcast).
My basic reason for caring is that given I never am able to get within a factor 3 of what I pay for in a sustained way, I'm thinking of downgrading the service level I pay for. But I worry that my service might just get proportionally worse.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Hi Guys, Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole start of the Internet "web" was started with P2P Researchers could share their research back and forth. Isn't this really blocking what the intention of the Internet is? P2P does have its uses, but I don't think ISPs should tell you what you should be doing. This is a form of censorship.
No Issues. I have been on torrents and uploading at the same speed for well over 2 years with no issues. I have tracked a solid 70k/sec upload speed for months and months and my charts show no throttling at all. I am on the best residential connection Cox offers and I cannot see how my experience would be any different than another users unless Cox is identifying the tracker and blocking if they recognize it (TPB/*nova/etc). Cox would be unable to identify the trackers I use and maybe that lets me get away with it? Who knows, just thought I would share.
My $.02
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Has anyone done any studies to see if encrypting the traffic has any effect on the throttling?
I recently was told I was downloading a movie via bittorrents BY Cox. As true or false as it may be, please explain to me why when I called the cox security team the guy on the phone was asking me if I was using bittorrents .. when I told him no numerous times he was "surprised" .. monitoring connections much are we? .. and can ANYONE please explain to me HOW he was able to tell me what kind of motherboard I am using?? ?!?!? .. Last time I checked about the most info you could get from a net connection without hacking it was just what kind of adapter it is (among some other handy info of course ... BUT NOT MOTHERBOARD) ... the worst part .. if I want ANY sort of internet, its either cox or hijack someone's wireless .. America WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!!!!!
I'd probably settle for 50%.
I get fiber-to-the-home. I may have to call at some point, as I'm supposed to get 100 mbits, and their test actually results in more like 60. But you know, a doller/month/megabit is a damned good deal. Full duplex, too -- I often seed torrents at one megabyte per second.
The difference is, of course, Fiber rocks, and also, my ISP actually believes in net neutrality, or claims to. If they're throttling my traffic, fine, I'm still downloading at 300 kilobytes/second. Again, kilobytes, not bits.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If we really want to beat this type of behavior, there is a simple answer: class-action lawsuit.
These companies sell "internet connections", and market different speeds of service. Then, after the sale, they limit the speed of service.
If Comcast/Cox/etc. sells me a 5Mb connection, and then afterward, says "no, we really only meant for those things we allow", then they are engaged in fraudulent marketing (i.e. "bait & switch"). Even worse, they are doing for unsound reasons ("it will crush our network"). If it will crush the network, then don't sell me the 5Mb connection - make it a 3Mb connection, and drop the fraudulent marketing.
Bring on the lawyers...
I have Cox High Speed Internet.
I have Deluge running on high ports, all day, every day.
I have encryption forced.
I have no problems whatsoever.
It's just a matter of putting a little thought into things.
I used to have a similar problem, except with eMule. I'd fire it up, it would run for a few minutes, then my internet connection would go down.
Turns out it was my router, a D-link DI-524. It has a tiny connection tracking table, and reboots if you go over.. which happened reguarly when using eMule's KAD network and all the UDP packets that implies. If I disabled KAD, I no longer had the problem.
You could be seeing something similar with the DHT that is used in some BitTorrent clients, or really any feature that uses UDP and hits a large number of hosts. Try disabling these features, or perhaps test with a different client entirely (with the same caveats in mind).
I am a subscriber to Comcast in a metropolitan area. Whenever I've used BitTorrent, the upload/download speeds were actually very fast. Perhaps Comcast doesn't throttle traffic in all areas.
Oh, and then there's the legal media downloads via BitTorrent. Azureus Vuze comes to mind. And I am sure it is clogging the networks of Comcast and other network providers. Their fault for overselling. Not my fault for using what I paid for.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm on Concast in Massachusetts, it takes ~20-30 minutes for most torrent files to even start. For the first 10 minutes after starting, the download rate is usually from 10-25kbps, never going faster. Then, it's stuck on 50-60kbps for 10 minutes, then I finally get to download my file - but very rarely do I get over 200kbps for a download speed...
Please do not feed the trolls. Thank You.
Well, my BitTorrents of Ubuntu, Slackware and such aren't "stealing" a single thing from a single person by _any_ definition.
The _stupid_ thing about this disruption is that it actually causes the transfers to use _more_ bandwidth.
Consider:
The participant will _still_ download the entire content.
The participant will, for every segment downloaded, now have several false starts and partial segment transfers.
Participants who elect to stop their transfers will most likely go to another means (http etc) of transfer so 100% of the content will be transferred again on top of the partial transfer that was aborted.
A given provider pays cash money only for bandwidth usage that "crosses" the boundary of their service. So every Comcast/Cox customer who would have gotten a percentage of their transfer from a peer on the same service instead gets their transfer from original source, raising Comcast/Cox/etc's upstream service usage.
Now a big company like comcast _may_ be able to soak some of this cost in proxy space so that several transferers are actually not leaving their net, but are instead getting the contents from their proxy. But that would make Comcast/Cox/etc's proxy server the agent of "illegal sharing" in those cases where the content was infringing, so I doubt they are doing that to any useful extent.
As an added bonus, by interrupting the TCP connections, they _do_ prevent the TCP window sizes from scaling up to speed, but they don't prevent the outstanding window-size-worth of packets to be delivered and discarded by the target host. That is, by inserting the reset artificially, _neither_ side had the opportunity to discard their "already queued" packets, so that buffer skid goes all the way across the internet, costing time and money and congestion but now artificially devoid of benefit to anyone.
So by sandbagging their own customers they are actually raising their bandwidth costs and in-network infrastructure usage. And an infinite number of their customers can raise their "simultaneous connections per torrent" for free. I raised my limit to something like 200 in each direction, which restored my throughput and cost Comcast one hell of a pile of churn. [I also use advanced packet shaping where my packets leave my network and hit the wire, ensuring that I never "drop" a connection request locally due to modem buffer sizes etc.]
The technique being used by the provider is a classic foot bullet by every technical measure.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
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?!
What this boils down to is really quite simple:
Most of the people "stealing" content don't have the money to buy it in the first place.
It's not like without the internet I'd have 10,000 dollars worth of CDs instead of a bunch of MP3's.
I don't have 10 grand to spend on CDs.
I'm not "stealing" anything because the producer/corporation loses nothing tangible and they never would have gotten any money from me anyway.
I'm with Cox, and to test the claim, I started to download a ubuntu iso. I hit speeds in excess of 1000KB/s
In Soviet Russia, Cox blocks you!
Having lived in areas "served" by both Cox and Comcast, and relying on telecommuting to work, I have looked into the "business packages" for both. Essentually they offer static IPs (or a block of them), open incoming port 80, 25, 443, etc, and a higher SLA (for an increased cost). Since I depend on faster upstream connection speed for my job, I was wondering if these filters are in place with the (more expensive) business packages (Comcast was about $85/year for 12 down 2 up, Cox was about $110 for similar).
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Here in Phoenix they've doing network upgrades and around those times the whole DOCSIS network(Phone(packetcable), TV, internet) has been down on and off for two days. My CMTS is PEORCMTK01(telnet to your gateway on 3918 and it tells you the internal hostname). I've also seen SSCTCMTK01 going down.
www.isoHunt.com
for the last few months, if I have bittorent traffic, even at a very low bandwidth consumption, once I try slashdot or any other web site, I get a "navigation interrupted" or a lot of "bad header" error and various connection lost. Refreshing after a while bring the web page. Going 5 minutes after ward to work I get an immediate display of the web page. This is not happening once, but every day.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Using Azureus/Vuze http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ and ISP Network Monitor http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/ISP_Network_Monitor I've been able to track Comcast's network interference here in Atlanta. In general the interference has been 24/7 but there is the occasional reprieve (about five hours Sunday morning being the most recent).
The four files I've been uploading are GPL / public-domain and I would encourage you to visit the links above and do the same. The more data collected the better.
As torrents gain in popularity I'm hoping that software companies adopt this superior technology for updates - not just to improve downloading efficiencies but also to make it much more difficult for the ISPs to throttle P2P traffic. Can you imagine the impact if Microsoft's updates were torrent files?
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Or you can follow George Washington's lead, If you think the law is wrong, pick up a gun.
As a Comcast customer, I'm also more than a bit upset that I'm not getting all the bandwidth I paid for, but as the first wave of bandwidth shaping attempts based on packet fingerprinting encouraged more people to use data encryption, Comcast's use of packet injection (TCP resets) to shut down P2P seeders will encourage development and usage of transport encryption (VPNs work, or even better some method of opportunistic point to point encryption). Then they won''t be able screw with our transport.
Someone please make this work soon, easy, and standards based!
The days when you could trust your ISPs with your network data are over. It's now time to start using the encryption technology that's already out there to return our privacy and get our bandwidth back. It will also provide a nice how-do-you-do to the network monitoring spooks out there as well.
Thanks!
It looks like that the main issue most posters are having is that they bought ISP's marketing drivel about "all you can eat" connectivity. They accepted it as a fact, and now they want ISPs to live up to unrealistic promises with unrealistic oversubscription rates.
It is not going to happen. These last few years were the only period when bandwidth was truly free for *early* P2Pers, but it is over now. Regardless of the amount of uninformed bitching, you will pay for the bandwidth, and it will change P2P equations (ISPs will stick to all-you-can-eat mantra for some time, as long as 90+% of their customers are web users and don't download too many movies.)
How much will you pay?
At T3 rates, 1Gb of transfer costs $0.20-$0.30. This price changed very little in the last few years and is unlikely to rapidly drop. Add at least 50% markup for the lower speeds (some would say 5x - 500% - but let's stick to the rock bottom), and you get $0.30-$0.50/Gigabyte. So if you want to download 50 gigabytes per month (20 movies in bearable quality) it will take $15-$25 just to cover the bandwidth costs, the raw material. It is *not* free.
I have seen very little here about the strong probability that Comcast itself is breaking Federal communications laws by forging TCP Reset packets. I tried the Max Planck Institute test applications myself last night, and Comcast was blocking 100% of my "uploads" of perfectly legal content.
Terms of Service (which are probably unenforceable anyway) aside, Comcast has no legal right to forge TCP packets that say they are coming from YOUR IP!!!
Furthermore, our Cox business internet (3Mbit symmetrical optical fiber) has no monthly bandwidth limits or throttling. I use it heavily for remote backups of clients, and haven't had any complaints from Cox.
I've been with Comcast a few years here in Eugene, and it isn't too bad as long as I don't care about mooching. I have pretty well unlimited download, but upload has been capped at 35kB/s for as long as I have used them (~5 years). It doesn't cause me any problems with downloading whatever I want, but if I try to be a decent participant in my favorite BT sites, it's a real bitch to get around or above a 1.0 ratio.
For your edification, ask a marketing agency if they'd rather have a talented artist who knows how to use the Gimp, or a Photoshop expert with the creative mind of a turnip. It's not ad hominem if it's true. It's ad hominem if you attack the other person instead of their argument. Even if your petty and subjective opinion was correct, it doesn't dim your inability to provide a stimulating counter-point.
Adobe will never fully prosecute a college kid for pirating their product, because the damage that occurs is far outweighed by having that person hooked on their tools. If they do start sending out the lawyers, it means that there is a better product available for a better price, or Adobe has hired an idiot to run their company.
In reality, the college kid downloads a multi-thousand dollar package for free, and Adobe looks the other way because it's to their benefit.
We could combat these ISPs with a Consumer Reports approach. Develop a measuring methodology and put real world results for various tasks on a web page. Comcast advertising says "5 Mbit down"? Check the web page for what you *really* get for BitTorrent, HTTP download, and other common applications. If the measuring tool is easy to install and use, people could submit their own results - kind of like gasbuddy.com. Measurements would include the time it was taken, so that day vs night performance can be compared. Maps could show geographic areas where service is slow or fast.
I have cox and my bittorrent speeds tripled this afternoon. Its not hosing up my internet connection either.
They must have got the memo! =)
Thank you slashdot
I've been reading this little thread, and I wish you'd STFU Copponex. Shut up about hockey and senators and shit. Stop waving your hands about. In a job in an office with a lot of other people, chances are they'll supply the tools and expect you to know them.
In an office of PS jockeys, a gimp user is going to be a PITA. File compatibility and all that, not to mention all the things gimp can't do that the Adobe suites can. Yep, there's a whole bunch of other SW that Adobe makes that other people in the office may use. Like InDesign - it will import PS files with layers intact. Apple's FCP will do the same. Dreamweaver and Fireworks like PS, too.
Working in an office is about teamwork, not who is the shining star. While the boss may occasionally hire a prima donna, if she doesn't get on with everyone else, she'll get dumped. Then she can go work on The Greatest Artwork In The World.
And in your false dichotomy of the ad agency hiring a Rembrandt Gimp-meister or a PS superstar with the creative skill of a turnip, I think they may readvertise the job.
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.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
So, you have nothing to add to the discussion about the copyright policies of major software vendors?. Well, thanks for stopping by!
But before I go, I wanted to sincerely wish you luck with teamwork and creation by committee. I'm sure your work will be forgotten long before you're dead. But hey, somebody has to market Hannah Montana Easy Cheese Macaroni!
(Yes, simpleminded AC, I'm well aware of the entire CS3 suite and the traction of existing software platforms. Believe it or not, I even paid $400 for the CS2 Premium Design suite when I was in college, and I was the extreme exception to the rule. But your whole tirade, in left field again, has nothing to do with the topic of piracy and Bittorrent throttling. The whole hypothetical situation was based on the premise of Adobe shutting down piracy, which they will never, ever, ever do, unless they begin to lose market share for other reasons. So, have a heaping helping of your own advice, and GFSUTD - go find something useful to do.)
My work forgotten long before I'm dead? Chances are it'll be forgotten next month. And I do expect to live longer than that.
Once again, you present the false dichotomy: working in an ad agency (your example) with a team consigns me to the dustbin of creativity, or I COULD USE GIMP AND BE A CREATIVE INDIVIDUAL! There is a difference between working on a team (my term) and "creation by committee" (your term), both in the perception of someone reading the terms as well as the reality of working in them. FWIW, I work for government so I know more about committees and stifled creativity than anyone should know. Furthermore, my marketing campaign for HMECM would include full nude pics inside.
(Insert retaliatory ad hominem)
Adobe won't go after student pirates for a few reasons, and only one of them is yours. The BSA-types like to get the big fish: distributors and entire workplaces. More money in it and it has more effect. Students (and any schmo at home running a copy) are small-fry. No gain for Adobe. And, yes, Adobe et al want mindshare. They want the pirating student to become the legal businessman - it's still about running the numbers. Would they like piracy to be zero? Probably, but it's all about costs.
While your post may have started out being about shutting down piracy, it started veering off into wild-scenario territory. Hence, my post.
And I have something useful to do: I'm watching FCP render and export. To prove I can multitask, I am going to get a coffee. Then I'll go home early because it's POETS day.
No retaliatory ad hominem? What am I going to do while I repave my laptop?
Yeah, I get hung up on stuff. Hyperbole flows in these veins. But at least it's entertaining.
I do think OSS solutions will replace a majority of creative software in the next 10 years, and five if plugin and file format standards are established. I'm not a zealot by any means - I use XP and OSX at work, because I have to get things done. But I have converted every one of my workplaces to OOo and haven't heard a peep. Four years ago I would not have considered it.
With all of the Linux toolkits coming to maturity on the Windows and OS X platforms, OSS will begin to infiltrate very effectively. All it takes is a company to fork the GIMP and give it direction the way Sun did with OOo.
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That is rather a dumb comment if you realize how many World of Warcraft client instances there are out there, and how large an update can be. Do you really think *ANY* company wants to provide the bandwidth needed to serve that amount of data, for a once in a month or so occurance? If you do, then you need a new calculator.
Let's do some simple estimates. A day after the release of a new content patch at say 200M (which is a quite reasonable size, we've had bigger), if 1/7th of total subscribers have downloaded it (this might be a bit of a high guess, but hey), that means that 1 million downloads have happened of the 200M file.
Let's keep it simple and in Megabytes, so we get 200 million MB in 24 hours, that's 2314MB per second.
I agree that there are definitely links that can handle that amount of data. Notwithstanding the amount of connections running through that. But most backbones have serious problems with anything over 1GB/s. Also. The costs of having an infrastructure in place that can handle that sort of bandwidths are high enough to not make it worth it to even think of investing in it just for upgrades.
I personally think Blizzard made the best decision considering all the factors, and seeing as you can refuse to upload anything, you personally should not even have any problems with this.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Oh come on this is America. Where's the lawsuit ?
(Along with stealing other peoples oil) litigation is the only activity Americans are really interested in so get with the program already.
use IPv6 to avoid filterings
Come to eastern Canada. We've got Bell on ADSL, and Roger's on cable.
It's like voting in an election, you're deciding to choose from which candidate is the least undesirable.
Cox blocker...
One would think they use p2p just as much in Japan, Korea, Europe and South America. I know for a fact that p2p is used quite a lot in Europe and we aren't subject to these kinds of issues... So why is this even on the table? I believe the need to delivering record earning *every* single quarter is the problem.. Instead of building a network that doesn't saturate, you try to limit the networks overall use...
Frickin' Cox basically made it impossible for me to get the Age of Conan client download. I had to get it elsewhere and copy it over. It's not like I have a choice, it's Cox or nothing where I'm at. I hate government sponsored monopolies.
only in U.S. can happen something like p2p throttling, I feel sry for u guys there meanwhile we get our downloads here up to 10Mbps in europe
Doesn't bittorrent traffic encryption help against this kind of problem?
Actually it's information superhighway robbery.
That's what I thought the 'IS' stood for...That's great if you have DSL. Or is the name misleading?
why can I not pay extra for the right not to be throttled? These throttlers are shortchanging their investors AND their customers. Shouldn't some sort of fiduciary responsibility class action lawsuits be occuring at least?
What you have described as the current situation is pretty much the definition of Fascism. (If you don't believe me, look it up.)
I do not think it has gotten quite that bad... but I do agree that the situation is in need of a great deal of improvement.
I ended up here because I was searching for a reason why my Comcast internet was so slow recently. I did all the things I am supposed to do, like make sure my software is updated and turned on and off everything, but I was still having problems.
Problems such as going to the iTunes store to buy two one hour episodes of Torchwood and instead of them downloading in the normal 15 minutes, it took FOUR HOURS. I used to enjoy watching some anime on YouTube in the evening and I can't even download a 9 minute file to watch. It simply won't load. I get a couple of minutes of it stuttering off and on.
This is like paying $50 a month for dial up. Alas.
How I maintain my performance:
Get a linux box to use as a firewall.
put in rules to control your _outgoing_ packet rate so that you don't drop the all-important TCP ACK packets as they leave your premises...
In particular throttle your outgoing bitrate to be about 98% of your advertised ustream bandwidth. That is, if you have 768kbits advertised, set the throttle to about 760kbits. Then if you know how you want to make sure that "short" TCP packets (less than about 70 bytes) have the highest priority.
This will reduce your network bandwidth _waste_ by up to two orders of magnitude (on a really crappy link, less if your link is okay, your mileage may vary).
By doing this you are helping _both_ yourself and your provider.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press