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Comcast Invests in P2P
AHTuttle writes to mention Comcast, recently under fire for throttling P2P traffic, has decided to invest in a P2P video-delivery startup called GridNetworks. "Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are 'friendly' to Internet service providers."
It's the age-old philosophy of "understand or destroy." Once they realize something can make or save them huge bucks, they'll no longer demonize it. Or at least not their own brand of it...
The CB App. What's your 20?
An ISP will be stuck carrying traffic for whatever systems are deployed. It can't deploy one of its own and try to force people to use it (at least not without coming under fire on antitrust grounds).
And the commercial product will not become widely adopted and displace the other P2P applications. To do that it would have to be about 10 times as good an application and there isn't that much headroom available. (As for slowing down the other P2P applications, see above.)
Finally, it won't even be able to compete equally on a level playing field because it will certainly be hobbled with DRM.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Don't they understand that they could cut their P2P traffic down to 0 by just providing the MP3s and MPGs for free on one of their own servers?
Sheesh!
Slow down there, champ. The BitTorrent protocol uses an approximate tit-for-tat strategy -- more peers will upload to you if you upload to more peers. This can take a while, which is why BT speeds generally trend up slowly, although I'll admit 30 minutes is a bit much even in my experience (I used to have comcast, now have at&t -- they're both crap, in short). It's all explained in this very clear and easy to read paper by Bram Cohen (the original protocol author) : Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent (PDF link).
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
This screams antitrust and conflict of interest. It screams it from every cell phone tower and internet backbone.
No, we don't have a problem with P2P...as long as you're using ours. Yeah, I know, people will always find a way around it as long as there's a network somehow connecting two computers, but that's not the point.
Aren't they just trying to speed up their internet for the average user
No, they're not. How does using method A vs method B change the amount of megabytes of data that user X wants to download? It's irrelevant, unless you can prove to me that their "method" uses less "overhead" (the amount of stuff in each packet that isn't actual data). But downloading 400MB via bittorrent, limewire, Kermit or a binary dump is still going to amount to a 400MB download.
However you may have a bright future in either marketing or politics.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When you have Comcast or Cox Cable, it is a good bet to blame the ISP first.
Therein lies the clue you appear to be missing - not all BT traffic is illegal. Bittorrent has shown itself to be one hell of a sweet distribution channel during times when new releases of legit content and applications come out, which takes bandwidth pressure off of mirror servers.
Also, all questions of legality and illegality aside, I honestly don't see any improvements in bandwidth that come from Comcast's forging of RST packets. If anything, it would only increase the amount of crap traffic and excess traffic (mostly caused by peer reconnects, re-establishment of connections lost, seeking new available connections, etc)...
You'll find few if any people in here that have anything against buying legit software. The objections come from two places:
1) Comcast is perfoming 'man-in-the-middle' attacks on their own customers, regardless of whether that attack may be justified (pirated material) or not (legit material). Conceptually, if they can do that, then what's to stop them from pretending to be you in any other context? It's a violation of many things, including existing anti-hacking laws.
2) What right does Comcast have to interfere with legitimate traffic?
I already know the argument - it's their network, take it or leave it... great: so let's strip the artificial monopolies they've been granted by state and local government, and remove any special privileges that they've been enjoying from said governments. Until they are willing to give those up, then they should and must be subject to us, the customer base.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?