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Another Inventor of the Internet Wants To Gag It
MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the
Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the
father of networking through data packets. And he's
turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer
file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices
can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."
Yes, but who decides what's "high priority" going from the consumer to the cloud?
Whoever owns the router/switch/frame/NAP/whatever I'd guess.
What makes your 6mbit line so special that your traffic gets precedence over mine? We're paying the same amount, shouldn't we get the same service, no matter WHAT we're transferring?
Not if your contract with your ISP allows them to prioritize traffic. What does it say about the issue?
Do you want a postal service to decide how quickly to deliver letters based on their content?
I don't know about you, but that's absolutely horrifying.
How can you tell if someone is using a secure SSL connection for work related purposes (Email, large file transfers, terminal services) and someone that is using SSL for bit torrent?
You can hazard a guess using traffic analysis. Bit torrent (and other P2P apps) use a different pattern of connections to normal browsing because the torrent clients also act as servers for many simultaneous external clients, and it's very difficult to conceal that, even if the content of the connections is hidden by encryption. (Of course, such analysis cannot detect the legal status of the data being transferred. Not unless the EVIL bit is set in the packet headers...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Having worked for an ISP, I can tell you. The problem isn't prioritizing traffic. It's capacity and scaling.
If you are a small ISP with a OC-3 and you have 1000 lines, that means if all lines are active, each one would only have an average speed of 6Kbps.
That's not very good. The problem is, in the UK, an OC-3 from BT costs £20,000+.
People buy broadband for cheap (£8-£15/month), and expect spectacular results. It just can't happen.
All networks seem to be oriented towards the idea that 90% of the DSL lines will be idle most of the time. With the advent of BBC's iPlayer and more streaming video, this network model falls flat on its face.
If they're going to provide dirt roads, they shouldn't advertise the Autobahn.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
That I should start an ISP which wont discriminate it's customers.
AppleTV downloads off Akamai's edge network.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I know that the "Al Gore Claimed to Invent the Internet" thing is used in a lighthearted way, but he never made that claim
that will last till your upstream/downstream bandwidth saturates, and your users experience a total network lockdown instead of a slowdown. at which point, you will begin to prioritize traffic.
the alternative would be to make sure you actually had 6mbit to dish out to every user, and kept all their connections straight to the backbone, instead of using switches to consolidate traffic. at this point, the price becomes way too much, and for the overhead you'd charge your customers so that you'd make a profit, they could just buy their own dedicated lines (which is what you'd be selling anyway), or switch to a cheaper, discriminating ISP.
Soap box, Ballot box, Jury box, Ammo box. Use in that order.
I agree that things like socket limits and so on only matter at the ISP level if they're mucking with things. (Though I have, to my dismay, encountered RTG networking tools before which actually /do/ impose such limits.) You're right that the irony of this is that the problem for the ISPs becomes greater when they start trying to muck with traffic (thus requiring per-connection rather than per-packet information), and so they want to try to muck with the traffic to fix it.
But there are still differences. If you're opening 10 streamed stateful connections versus 1, you'll still on average generate more overall traffic; if there's a momentary lag on the connection to one place, you're still generating traffic through to others.
Though this, of course, assumes a sufficient number of seeds and peers to have a BitTorrent download be notably faster than the same download over a single HTTP connection. When the BitTorrent file takes 5 hours to download, you're probably actually using far less bandwidth overall and being friendly. :)
This doesn't get into the upload issue, of course. To go back to the original 'there's no difference between downloading a 600MB ISO over HTTP versus BitTorrent' objection up-thread, when downloading the ISO over HTTP, you have very little traffic upstream. BitTorrent, you have a lot upstream, which also introduces additional overall load on the network.
So, yeah, BitTorrent can be a heavier burden than an HTTP connection. (Not in all cases, but the possibility exists.) I personally remain unconvinced that this problem is The End of the World and requires throttling people, but I will still grant that P2P connections /can/ consume more bandwidth and cause more load on the network than straight HTTP downloads.
And that there are significant differences at the network layer between a 600MB ISO downloaded over HTTP and over P2P.
--Rachel
All advertising tells you only partial truths to entice you to buy...
In this case, the small print effectively nullifies and renders false the claim that the service is "unlimited". It's misleading to the point of lying.
The people who insist that they have a full blown, pipe with no limits at all are the ones clinging to the advertising rather than the contract they likely signed.
And you think that isn't grounds for criticism of the company?
Still, at the end of the day, caveat emptor. I didn't trust the salesman to tell me what was in my cell phone contract, why would I trust an advertisement to tell me what's in my ISP contract?
As I said, in this case, the contract doesn't merely expand upon or add restrictions to the advertisement's claim, it basically nullifies it.
I don't know how you feel about misleading advertising, and consumer protection in general. I live in the UK where there are generally stronger laws about this than the US, and I'm quite happy with that. IMHO, the lengths to which a consumer (as opposed to a business) should reasonably be expected to go to to find out such things should not be excessive (e.g. on page 37 of a contract in impenetrable legalese) relative to the prominence of the claims in the advert.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Although it is my "homepage" link here at /. I try to not mention it often. The word "ISP" has a variety of meanings and sometimes it is used to apply to the business that I own. I own a small web hosting company with just a few employees and we lease space in a data center in Michigan but that is digression. My point is this...
We charge inexpensive prices but, by no means, are we nearly as cheap as the major hosting companies. They claim they sell all sorts of space and bandwidth (we can digress for hours as I point to countless examples of them not actually allowing anyone to use their purchased space or bandwidth) and the term there applies as well as it does here. They "oversell." They advertise more than they are actually able to provide if everyone actually used their alloted space/bandwidth.
Now, if I may, I'd like to NOT touch on the debate of legal vs. "illegal" P2P. And, if I may, I would also like to avoid the potentially explosive conversation about the merits of copyright and the various **AA organizations.
I have a lot to say but I'll try not to digress a great deal and limit it to on-scope comments.
We offer non-oversold space and bandwidth. We also offer a privacy agreement that is pretty forward, meaning we'll go to bat for you each and every time even if you're doing something that someone has deemed illegal. We give each of our clients the benefit of the doubt. We host some sites with adult content even though we pretty much claim we won't and don't - we judge them each by their own merits. (Yes, I have a point and I'm coming to it eventually - blame wine.)
We host sites that are politically controversial but we do so blindly. We have very liberal sites and some very very hard right wing sites that are attacked a great deal. We host anything that is legal and I've got a handy dandy liar (lawyer) on retainer whom I go to if someone comes to us with a question or complaint.
For instance, we host a few large/busy sites that LINK to various sites that contain links to content that is considered illegal under the current United States of America laws. (Specifically they host links to other sites that contain "pirated" software or music.) It is our determination that we won't be held liable nor will they. In some instances we've gone further though we're careful to invite people to ask prior to ordering.
We are marginally adept at what we do and we make a decent profit. (I'm getting to my point, damn it...)
We offer what we say we are going to provide at a cost that is higher than the industry standard and provide them with liberties that they'd not get with another company. People pay for this. They pay for the individualized attention, service, and understanding. More than anything they pay for the understanding I think.
That's part of my point.
My other point is that we provided what we said we'd provide in the manner we said we'd provide it for legal content. If we have an instance of a spammer we shut them down, immediately. If we find someone who's hosting stolen content we have a policy where we email them and rename the file temporarily. They are then invited to explain or to remove the offending file, continued issues result in a termination of the account. However... We have never, nor do we ever, actually go actively seeking illegal files. We don't, as a general rule and internal policy, ever actually look into a user's account without their express permission or to investigate a complaint or a service issue.
So, the remainder of my commentary (hopefully), is really just a drawing of ideas from the above. They, the ISPs, are under the impression that all P2P is illegal and they have motivation to make it seem so. The various industries out there have done a great job at creating fear and large businesses are aware of the risks they take to shareholder monies and strive to avoid lawsuits of any type. In order to maximize value to their shareholders they have mad
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Pretty much every Slashdotter who claims their service should be unlimited because the commercial says so should know better especially since so many work in the IT industry. They're using the commercials as their excuse for behavior they know crosses the line of acceptable use.
You're implying that they should *know* that they're being misled by the company? Well, quite(!)
Some might say that it's the company's problem if they're intentionally fudging things behind vague and obscure policies.
Just because I invite you to a party with unlimited food and drink doesn't mean you get to move in with me, eventually, you have to go home or I'm going to throw you out.
That's a poor analogy, not least because you're comparing a social event (driven mainly by social rules and without much underlying legalism) with a business contract.
Most people understand the rules of parties, that they don't last forever, and (as you yourself implied) there's no contract, and the owner of the house/etc can throw someone out of the party!
Most people don't abuse the hospitality at parties because they don't want to be assholes. It's really not the same thing at all.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).