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Encrypted Traffic No Longer Safe From Throttling
coderrr writes "New research could allow ISPs to selectively block or slow down your encrypted traffic even if they cannot snoop on your transmitted data. Italian researchers have found a way to categorize the type of traffic that is hidden inside an encrypted SSH session to around 90% accuracy. They are achieving this by analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals instead of looking at the content itself. Challenges remain for ISPs to implement this technology, but it's clear that encrypting your traffic inside an SSH session or VPN connection is not a solution to protect net neutrality."
They could just throttle all encrypted packets for free.
First, encrypted traffic was never safe from throttling anyway. Second, FTA:
"So it seems the use of a tool like this would be limited to an extremely controlled environment where users are limited to a white-list set of network protocols (so that they can't use a different tunneling mechanism, stunnel for example) and only allowed to ssh to servers under the control of the censoring party. In which case you would wonder why the admin wouldn't just set the ssh server's AllowTcpForwarding option to false."
Kinda useless.
If the application is not time-critical, introducing random jitter would go some way to subverting this, no?
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Can anyone explain to me why any ISP would use this technique? If they start looking at packet sizes to determine different kinds of encrypted traffic then the packets will just be padded, causing their network to be further overloaded...
Not really, they're providers of the medium and have no business limiting or snooping the datat that goes through their network especially since they were often granted a monopoly over building infrastructure in their area.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Even without this analysis it was kinda obvious that throttle-happy ISPs would simply throttle all encrypted data once encrypting became mainstream in P2P.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Well, what about if they padded the packets with random amount of data?
You can identify the type of traffic, because we're not trying very hard to hide it. If you keep going down this road, we'll just send all the time, the same constant packet size, the same rate, regardless of actually required service. It's the same to us, really, because we pay a flat price. It is not the same to you, though, because when we have to make every traffic look the same, we'll use much more of your precious bandwidth, so cut out the crap.
I would have been first but my ISP throttled my SSH tunnel
Next step? Encrypted packages that are arbitrarily sized to be like any other encrypted package.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
All its going to do is encourage P2P developers to try (and they will likely succeed) to make P2P traffic look more like other traffic. Want your bittorent to look more like encrypted telnet? Easy send tons of tiny packets and take a short break every few seconds. All this is going to do is increase the packet overhead the ISPs see. That same overhead will also hurt P2P end users but unless its more then the throttle does they will do it anyone. Its a loose loose situation really. They ISPs should realize they gain nothing going down this path.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
And throttle all encrypted traffic over whatever an IP phone or VPN connection would use on assumption of file-sharing. They don't give a rat's ass what you are doing, really, they just want a reason to throttle you and this company just makes money by giving them one.
Would the same problem exist with ssl vpn's like openvpn?
And here I thought this was how we did throttling before we did start examining the content.
But as usually the summary is probably balantly wrong and on principal I will not RTFA, so mod me as flamebait already.
How about:
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control what's going through the government-funded, monopoly-protected, public-land-using network.
You're right, facts do change the interpretation.
Well, the next move would simply be some tool, or modification to bittorrent, that makes the traffic patterns look like that of other protocols. While I'm sure it would have some impact upon performance, surely torrent packets can be make to look pretty damn similar to a bunch of HTTPS images being loaded on a web page (or something along those lines). Just like DRM, each move like this isn't solving any problem, just slowing things down, while a counter-move is made. (Or, another provider is chosen who doesn't throttle traffic, competition permitting.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Could be worse. Rogers and Bell, here in Canada, just throttle ALL encrypted traffic.
Do you understand that ISPs are not exactly charity organizations, don't you? I am paying for their service and I expect it to work as it was advertised in their offer.
So the ISPs now have another way to detect types of communication for throttling that they shouldn't normally have a problem with if they had actually kept to their agreements with the US Gov./the people to use the massive tax breaks they were given to build out their infrastructure so that..sort of like that whole deal was intended to do...we could've avoided this kind of problem where throttling would be necessary or desirable to begin with.
What next? You sign up for internet service and pay your money and they hand you a nice glossy screenshot of what your browser would be seeing if your computer was actually connected, because, you know, if they actually had to *transmit* packets, then the tubes would be congested and the pirates/terrists/hackers/crackers would win? What good is a connection to the internet if there's no "inter" in your net connection?
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
detect if one of the mario brothers is inside the packet, 89.9% of the time
no, but they can add some latency
rewriting history since 2109
Just throttle ALL traffic from ip adresses that you consider "excessive."
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Its fairly easy to ID standard encrypted traffic and throttle or just outright block. This is something iv'e been talking about all along that people claimed wasn't possible. Once they ban non government 'blessed' encryption, it will just be blocked.
But at least in the meantime, while they can do packet shaping, they still cant snoop on content.
Once that happens we have to come up with practical 'transparent' encryption techniques.
Its always nice to be vindicated, again. Go me!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A reverse DNS lookup will tell you a lot about whether an IP you are sending to is a home user or a corporation. I wouldn't be surprised if they use this also (though Net Neutrality legislation might stop it).
If these policies where openly documented, and there where truly free competition, I'd agree with you; let the market sort it out.
That typically isn't the case. First, these policies are rarely documented at all, and if they are, it's in language so vague as to make it useless for purposes of comparing one ISP to another. ("We may, at our discretion, at various times, perform adjustments to packet-priority")
Free competition is also the exception rather than the rule. A huge fraction of end-user-lines where built by telcos acting as a government-granted monopoly, and then they somehow got to keep a large piece of this after the monopolies are no longer in principle monopolies. Which means in many areas they are still in -practice- pretty close to monopolies.
And even where they're not, competition is low and that will remain so. Few people have more than 2, perhaps 3 physical cables coming in that are suitable for broadband. (many have a twisted-pair copper that used to be for POTS and a coax that used to be for analogue-cable, and that's it, extra bonus if the old monopolist owns the tv-cable in your area!)
This ain't gonna change. A single modern cable has moder than enough capacity for all needs, so it's not economically sensible to have a large number of competitive cable-networks.
Really, last-mile networks should be owned and run by the neighbourhoods, or failing that atleast be considered infrastructure, really today a working broadband-connection is basic infrastructure like electric power, water, sewage and roads. (it's not -equally- crucial as those, but it's crucial nevertheless, I doubt a house with -no- telecom-connection of any sort would find many buyers)
Wireless changes the picture a bit, for low-bandwith applications. But only a bit. The problem is that the RF-spectrum is fundamentally shared, thus it will not be possible to deliver the same speeds and reliability as is possible on physical cable. (a single single-mode fibre easily supports speeds up atleast a Tbps or thereabouts which is more than most people need for the next few decades)
Not a solution to defeat ISPs attempts to control, what's going through networks they constructed with large sums of both public and private money they mortgaged against providing a service to their customers, not fighting against them.
Yup, sure do.
Once word gets out that there's some restriction on a service people are used to, they will always find a way to beat it. Last century they tried to ban alcohol and that worked about as well as throttling packets will work here. Inevitably they will have to stop because they'll just force people into any goofy method that circumvents their restrictions.
stuff |
Customers who need to make encrypted connections to a business network can upgrade from a one-nine home SLA to a two-nines business SLA.
where there's a will, there's a way.
Do you understand that ISPs are not exactly charity organizations, don't you? I am paying for their service and I expect it to work as it was advertised in their offer.
Do you understand that they believe you owe them and that they're just being nice guys for "improving" your online experience. And in the process making it easier for grandparents to download pictures of their ugly grandchildren.
Http://Stineomite.org (Yeah Thats Right I'm An Organization)
Yeah but that's a cheat owing to the tubes. See, they route all traffic through a huge green pipe and listen for the "Gew gew gew" noise that signals the presence of a Mario Brother.
Why would an ISP do Deep Mario Brother Inspection, I hear you ask? Well if you remember, those depths were filled with coins! There's no depth an ISP won't go in order to get those.
And in the next (or two) release of SSH implementations, this weakness will, no doubt, be fixed.
Professional cryptographers have known for decades that you don't just switch on your transmitter when you want to send a secret message - no matter how well encrypted it is. The mere fact of traffic is frequently a sizeable tell-tale itself. Instead, you keep your transmitter on 24*7 sending encrypted garbage, with the ability to interleave genuine messages when the need arises. I'm sure that in a short time, the SSH people will remove the ability to profile the transmission to glean anything usable from it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Attempts to analyze (and then throttle) Internet traffic reminds me of copy protection schemes. The schemes get more and more complicated (and costly) and at every turn the user gets more sophisticated in his or her attempts to get around the protection. ISPs would be wise to look at the music, movie, and in particular video game industries and realize that there are many, many more users who wish to use P2P software than there are ISP engineers who wish to throttle said users, and that it will always be a losing battle.
Personally, I think the granularity of the ISP payment schemes need to be increased. We pay for cell phone minutes in blocks of 100 or so (or by the minute, depending on your plan); we pay for electricity by the kWH, we pay for water by the gallon (or liter), and so on... why not pay for bandwidth by the Mb? In a perfect world (yeah, well, one can dream!) this would mean reduced costs for the average home Internet user, as most people aren't using anywhere close to what is available, and maybe slightly increased costs for people like me. But then at the same time throttling is no longer an issue. Of course in reality this is unlikely to happen any time soon; why charge responsible, realistic rates when you could charge a flat fee and then just block any traffic you don't like with increasingly expensive technology (and pass the cost on to your monthly subscribers, of course)?
ISPs, learn from the "War on Copyright Violation" - you won't win this battle; give it up and fix the underlying problem.
Isn't it about time that ISP's were upfront and simply charged users for what they use? This would encourage ISP's to grow bandwidth to meet demands ( as it adds revenue ) and for users to decide how much content they wish to pay for
Call me a troll, and I don't usually comment, however I don't think this is what "net neutrality" is about. If you want to be able to download anything and interrupt other people who want to surf freely, that is one thing, but if you just want to be able to surf freely without restriction being imposed by IPS's and such, that is a totally different kettle of fish.
Not a Bell customer, but stuck using the Bell network (because they have the DSL last-mile monopoly here)...
Bell doesn't even seem to bother inspecting my packets. As soon as I open up an SSH connection to my box (during peak hours, during off-time when they're known to relax throttling it's fine), things go slow as shit. Not just the encrypted traffic either... there seems to be an overall slowdown that hangs up other connections.
And I'm 99% sure it's not my settings, because everything worked fine until Bell's throttling kicked in (no such issues pre-throttling, with my previous ISP, or when I only SSH to that box from the LAN).
Funny, when I began using their service they never told me they would throttle certain protocols. They said they'd give me access to the internet at certain speeds to the best of their ability. Throttling packets seemed to be significantly below their best.
An Introduction to Traffic Analysis (see slide nr. 9)
thing is that isp's are mutating. they are no longer simple "road" providers/maintainers. now they sell you the "fuel" and the "car" as well.
all in all, they want the good old vertical silo of providing the "whole widget".
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It seems that all that needs to be done is to solve it is to upgrade the backbone to allow each user an average download of two x264 movies a day or so, circa 10-20GB.
There is no one able to consume more than that, daily.
Problem is that processing power is cheaper than fiber these days, so they analyze and throttle the packets, instead of increasing the bandwidth.
See the user. See the user after 1 hour. See how many bytes up and down. Check how many different IP destinations the user is connected with.
:)
Errrr, if they are using VPN then they will have 1 IP destination, to the company that's providing the VPN (think SecureIX or Relakks)
If they aren't downloading or uploading much, why throttle?
well, of course, we could all just buy an overpriced brardband connection and just not use it. At all. Then we could confidently boast that our connections are never getting throttled and happily invite people to look long and hard at how fucking good we are.
As it happens, we bought our net connections for a reason.
And while Iâ(TM)m at it, does anyone notice that the same ISP's that are most inclined to throttle you (or even report you to the music industry) are the ones who *still* advertise their service by boasting how many music/video files you can download in an hour?
What they have accomplished under a single authentication protocol will probably be extended to the others. When this technique is fully developed, it has potential for other uses besides throttling. For example, a company could use it at the perimeter firewall to prevent use of ssh tunnels to bypass a web proxy.
Here's a novel idea: if you intend to sell metered service, sell metered service. Wow. That's just blowing me away with its simplicity. How could they have not thought of that?
Call it "Bandwidth Plus" or something.
Better yet, call your local politician and tell him it would be really cool if power districts could sell communications services, because, you know, they own the rights of way and the incumbent communications providers aren't interested in building out the post roads of the 21st century.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Mario Brothers would never be in the packets, as they travel through pipes, not tubes. :-)
"Bend over and cough please"
...and listen for the "Gew gew gew" noise that signals the presence of a Mario Brother
That's odd; the Mario Bros. don't look Gewish.
It seems to me a core issue is not wanting to spend money building out infrastructure to support the greater need for traffic. It's expensive, laborious, but eventually it will become unavoidable.
Companies like Verizon who were smart enough to lay dark fiber in the past are struggling less now, but they face the same issues.
Instead of anal retentive traffic analysis and throttling to save the current infrastructure from breakdown, it's time to look to the future.
Sure, P2P coders can create programs more "friendly" the network - indeed it's to their advantage to do so, but if I'm paying for bandwidth, and the ISP will throttle it (esp. if they don't tell me), then I will demand a lower charge for the connection.
This is where consumers have power.
So, it either ends up being a fight over bandwidth, or it becomes a mutual effort to build the infrastructure out and grow the network in a sustainable manner.
Some Govt subsidy and tax breaks would probably help, too.
It doesn't take a genius to determine what type of traffic (P2P) is passing through an encrypted tunnel with this precision. It takes only little monitoring. Also note that this technic can be countered easilly adding dumb packets to tunnelling protocols. This technic as been used before and is probably already ready in big corporations like AT&T and others with research teams dedicated to stop users from enjoying the Web.
If your ISP is dumb enough to do bandwidth throttling on P2P, is dumb enough to slow down every encrypted connection.
analyzing packet sizes and inter-packet intervals ... which are easily modifiable.
This research is stupid, as is anybody that tries to implement filtering based on it.
Okay, before everyone starts their throttling engines for war please remember the following:
A: ISP's are not throttling data because of bandwidth, they are throttling because of latency. If you do not understand the difference, here is a simple way to look at it
A router can handle a million packets a second let say. Wether the packet is a size of 10 or a size of 1000 it still can only handle a million packets. Bandwidth is how many seats on the bus (or if all the buses had the same number of seats, how many lanes on the road), latency is how fast the bus is going. A router it a toll gate. Too many buses, regardless of how many seats, will bog down the toll gate. P2P is very chatty in the number of packets and depending on how it sliced the data, lots of big chunks, or a whole hella lot of small chunks. Either way the guy working the toll gate is going to go postal at some point.
B: Encryption, your rights online, data type, freedom, and all of that supurious crap we like to toss around means nothing when: "You sign a contract." While I am not a lawyer I am an informed customer (I read the small print). When you sign up for Internet service, regardless of what you feel, or in fact what your rights are, you can and do sign most of those away when you sign up for a commerical service. If they say that you cannot encrypt your P2P traffic and you do; thus losing your service... that is more then acceptable under most nations idea of contract law. You have no right to privacy if you sign a contract that gives them the right to look.
Keeping A & B in mind please feel free to march forward with your discussions but, the most important thing to remember, is point A. Telling people there is plenty of bandwidth has LITTLE IF ANYTHING to do with throttling as far as I can tell. I watched 3 hearing on CSPAN and not one rep from the big three telecoms mentioned BANDWIDTH as a reason, but I did hear 18 engineers talk about routers, MTU initiated fragments, and total packets per second capacities on core routers, and I did keep count of bandwidth vs. latency.
Bandwidth Mentioned: 34 times
Latency: 400+ times (I ran out of chicken scratch space on the page and gave up...)
Now I admit I did doze off after 30 minutes of an engineer trying to explain to a senate committee the difference between TCP and UDP but I am human after all.
Now certainly there is some complexity in latency and bandwidth in how they are related and from what I have heard fiber does take care of a lot of the latency issues (signal to noise ratio seemed to be a big talking point from some AT&T engiee who looked like Dracula) so feel free to toss that into the discussions.
But seriously, this whole filtering stuff has nothing to do with bandwith, so please, please, please, stop with the bad 3rd party reporting. We have already seen on /. that the ISPs aren't hurting for bandwidth.
Getting accurate information from the mainstream press on Internet filtering is like asking a caveman to fix your car... all he's gonna do is smash it with a rock.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Ok, balls in the software writers' court now. Lets see what they come up with.
-- Mskadu (Blogs: http://mskadu.blogspot.com/ and http://mytechieself.blogspot.com/)
1. Collect a (large) sample of allowed traffic ...
2. Build a model of the traffic (neural networks, markov models, hidden markov models, etc.)
3. Use the model to generate traffic between peers
4.
5. Profit!!!
So now we're going to have to tunnel encrypted traffic as a payload for non-encrypted traffic? That would work, no?
Just thought I'd share a video relevant to the discussion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw3G80bplTg
The ultimate solution would be to ban last-mile owners from providing any services at all. No voice, no video, no data. They exist to provide copper and/or fiber to subscriber premises, and to operate central offices as colocation facilities. That's all. Nothing else.
Then, anyone who wants to provide services, simply colocates their head end equipment at the central offices in areas where they wish to provide service. At that point it doesn't matter whether they're offering video, voice, data, local or long distance, Internet or private lines, it just doesn't matter because the central office is shared between as many providers as will fit in the building.
We need to separate the last mile land-use monopoly from the services being provided. There should be no such thing as an ILEC.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I did that. And I pay exactly $10 more per month than the residential. I have a SOHO package (small home office, but definitely a "business" account)
It's the best $10/mo I could have spent.
You see, I don't deal with traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, blocked ports, or anything else. It's just a standard internet connection. I can download/upload as much as I want and I haven't ever heard a peep from my ISP. And trust me, if I was on a residential account.....I would have heard from them.
(ps: my ISP is Cox Cable)
You'd think those ISPs *cough* Shaw Cable *cough* would have learned the lesson by now. That lesson should have been wastin... I mean spending, MILLIONS and MILLIONS on products like Sandvine to try to throttle bittorrent only to find out a few months later people were bypassing it with encryption.
So now some Italians can identify prediction based on packet size etc... watch ISPs spend many more Millions implementing this, then the torrent client software guys simply change 10 lines of code, recompile and voila... Millions down the drain for ISPs!
So go ahead, make my day! Just don't try to pass off those costs in your monthly bills to me.
Adeptus
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Solution: proxy. Your computer connects to a proxy, which then disseminates to all of the P2P hosts. That way the ISP only sees one or two connections.
Wait, the ISP would just have to throttle bandwidth to this server. Nevermind. ^H^H^H
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
You have to pay twice as much to use VoIP (see here). Otherwise, even over a VPN, they detect the statistical signature of the packets and insert a latency which makes VoIP unusable.
It is definitely statistical, because if you do "wget --limit-rate=2.5k http://huge/file.bin" over the VPN at the same time, the latency doesn't get inserted -- presumably because the overall VPN traffic no longer matches the VoIP statistical signature.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
When did P2P become illegal? It seems like every comment on this story talks about P2P like it's evil and needs to be stopped. I pay for an unlimited connection to the internet with a max speed of 30Mbps. I should be able to download and upload legitimate data as often as I'd like. And I do have a computer seeding torrents 24/7 which are completely legal. If Verizon doesn't like the fact that I'm constantly using most of my available upload then they should change the contract to say I can't do it. So far they haven't had any problems.
The ultimate solution would be to ban last-mile owners from providing any services at all. No voice, no video, no data. They exist to provide copper and/or fiber to subscriber premises, and to operate central offices as colocation facilities. That's all. Nothing else.
Then, anyone who wants to provide services, simply colocates their head end equipment at the central offices in areas where they wish to provide service. At that point it doesn't matter whether they're offering video, voice, data, local or long distance, Internet or private lines, it just doesn't matter because the central office is shared between as many providers as will fit in the building.
We need to separate the last mile land-use monopoly from the services being provided. There should be no such thing as an ILEC.
I was going to reply to the parent, but this would do as well.
I completely can see and agree with both your points, but take this into account:
Do you HONESTLY want ANOTHER point of failure Ma Bell can point to when you can't sync with the DSLAM? I mean, another company for finger pointing to occur?
--Toll_Free
Throttling packets to you can increase their ability to provide access to others, since their total upstream capacity is inherently increased by lowering total packets going upstream.
IOW, lower heavy users throughput, and more users can use said pipe.
Not what we are paying for, unless your contract states otherwise, but you are getting the internet, they usually have a loophole like you stated (to the best of their ability, and if lowering 1 persons upstream throughput can increase throughput for 3 to 5 more people (and you know they would spin it higher than that), then they are INCREASING THEIR ABILITY!!)
C'mon, it's simple lawyerese :)
--Toll_Free
I wonder if doing
ifconfig ppp0 mtu 73
Would bypass that shaping?
Lots of people play online games every day and they need decent speeds plus ultra low latencies. This may force ISPs to limit or avoid packet inspection, let alone eavesdropping, of traffic once it's categorized as such. AFAIK (I'm not an online gamer) many games already encrypt packet in order to avoid cheating.
Would it be possible to hide p2p traffic into something identical or very close to online gaming traffic?
ISPs would think twice before throttling it due to the risks of upsetting too many users.
Where I live, almost all ISPs have their own DC hub and/or FTP server. Since an ISP has more bandwidth in its own network, downloads from local P2P are faster, so a lot of users use this option and do not use international bandwidth. Everyone is happy and "unlimited" connection usually means unlimited (at that max speed what you paid for).
Whatever the price difference, I'd much rather they sell me a guaranteed product, instead of a box of donuts with one donut and 11 mirrors inside. This kind of practice makes me not trust them one bit, and I only use them because they are (imo) a local monopoly (just about everywhere).
Moving to change school districts: practical.
Moving to change cable providers: not so much.
Sometimes I think I'd rather pay for my usage. It works that way for electricity, water, and cell phones... I guess we get screwed even harder in those cases. But at least the electric company doesn't shut off my power when I've left the lights on over night.
Move all sig!
Is there actually anything good going on in the US these days? It sounds like every day there is less privacy, more corruption, less rights, more 1984.
Here be signatures
Do you understand that they believe you owe them and that they're just being nice guys for "improving" your online experience. And in the process making it easier for grandparents to download pictures of their ugly grandchildren.
And in what way are they obligated to our money without having to provide the agreed-upon service?
This isn't supposed to be a tax.
I worked on implementing Error correction codes over IP some time back http://www.ecip.com/
This is what we would call part of a family of Rude protocols that would do reverse Throttling.
All of these ISP are counting on TCP being polite, but it's also counting on the network being passive or at least polite as well.
In our case we originally implemented ECIP and SPAK when we had a 100KBPS video stream and 99KBPS gave us nothing but garbage. Since video is all or nothing. http://www.videotechnology.com/jessem/all_or_nothing.html
But with ISP taking a hostile approach, application writers could also start talking a more aggressive approach in a sort of arms race.
I know everyone has been afraid of this, but I feel that this is indeed a necessary step if some sort if truce is to be reached between USERS and their ISP's. Right now we are really fighting over our rights on how we can use the "last mile" since it's all now been consolidated into the hands of only a few companies. We have already lost our ability to choose and market freedom.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Bill? Is that you?
Retirement's tough, buddy, but that's alright. Slashdot is here to listen. Judging by your UID you've been here a while (the Gmail address is a nice red herring, too).
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
SMTP Email is now useless as a result of all the countermeasures you ISP people added. Your systems now have no problem silently discarding legtitmate corrospondance.
The end result -- today we are blessed with both loosing legititmate messages and more SPAM than ever reaching our mailboxes.
Have we learned our lesson? Apparently not.. now we have people blocking RST and going down the same unwinnable road with stupid hueristics on P2P.
Did it ever once occur to you that this is just an evolution of war that at the end of the day everyone looses? Whats to stop P2P clients from implementing their own huerestic which detects the onset of P2P throttling supplying random trial and error methods to adjust packet length, spacing and connectedness until their bandwidth returns?
If usage patterns of the few Internet 'power users' are unaccepptably disruptive than for the love of god you need to change your access plans so that they more closely match the true cost of service!!!
For example uniform bandwidth limits or dynamic bandwidth limits which kick in after a user has been downloading z bytes consequtivly for x hours. Whatever you do just make sure it can be codified in a way the user can understand and accept up-front.
Until computers are smarter than humans your a retarded idiot if you believe for a second that technology will ever effectivly put a damper on human intent.
I know ISP's can be lousy with tech support, or terrible when it comes to hiding their connections to politicians... but can anyone really look at this and tell me what the real problem is here? In America, the best products usually replace the old and out dated... Not so with the broadband market. Why? Should we not have networks that allow our governments quick access to outside sources? Forget the Federal Government for a second and think about the local governments running off of podunk ISP's out in the boonies. Now let's say you have a county tax system that's trying to send records to a backup server at a datacenter hundreds of miles away. Without a reliable, heavy connection running encrypted packets, SSH or whatever (not an expert... just trying to keep up), it would seem that local governmental institutions would only be further pushed into unsecured networks. Common!? We should be screaming out to all the IT staff out there that these attempts will lead to more identity theft, more security breaches! It seems that the security of the less tech savy has become somewhat of a joke with microsoft security updates that crash 9/10 computers, zero day virii that will never be patched, local priv escalation that almost never gets detected in office environments... Sheesh! What next, Y2k+8+x where x is the number of years until we all are completely replaced by russian teenagers and chinese military agents?
On a serious note though... Can we stop compromising service in the name of money? Our future, and our children's(probably not the children, more like our elderly) futures depend on the developement of stong infrastructure. Please don't think I'm foolish in choosing the obvious side of this debate. I can see it from the other side as well. ISP's don't want to pay for what they think should come out of customer's pocket... Well that would be fine with an industry like electricity (pay for what you use), but honestly, when was the last time someone stole your financial records through your 110V? For the very providers to be hacking the customers just seems unamerican, dishonest, and greedy. Are we not entitled to privacy on our own home network? Are we not protected by innocent until proven guilty? I want higher bandwidth yes. Do I want to have my porno torrents packet sniffed because there may or may not be copywritten ass in a scene or two? Hell no. Sorry, I said serious... The only serious thing I have is serious delerium... Reading a story like this in 2008? (Walks off mumbling, cursing under breath in a futile attemt to locate alcohol and networking cable)
This is more reason for Net Neutralityin law. Anyone who does not support net neutrality seems to want freedom of speech to be taken away from them and wants to live in a fascist totalitarian dictatorship like china. If we want net neutrality we need to elect people who support it.
Who cares? If my plan were implemented then there would be no such thing as Ma Bell. If it were really really easy to switch to another carrier in the same central office, they'd have to work harder to keep your business.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I just got an image of Mario Goatse, thanks.
*shudder*
And in what way are they obligated to our money without having to provide the agreed-upon service?
This isn't supposed to be a tax.
I'm on your side, i was just trying to see it from the ISP's twisted perspective.
Http://Stineomite.org (Yeah Thats Right I'm An Organization)
That'll go over like a lead balloon as soon as the first worm comes out that looks for other infected boxes and begins exchanging the contents of /dev/urandom with them.
Maybe, just maybe, once these things start to cost people visible cash, people will start going after the people responsible for them. Maybe they'll even penalize people for not securing their systems sufficiently.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How can you tell that the ISP is not throttling for entirely different reasons? - Lets say due to agreements with Blockbuster to cause all competitors to appear crappy for live video streams, cause all bit torrent traffic to be be limited as agreements with Hollywood/RIAA/etc? To limit competition making sure smaller ISP's cannot provide better services than the bigger ISP regardless if the smaller one in fact have better infrastructure in place for a community?
A non-neutral net just screams "abuse me".
Are any bittorent/p2p organizations making any headway in court cases against this practice? They're throttling these guys while preparing their own pay-to-use download and internet TV services for release. Not to mention their plans to stomp the internet into a tiered subscription package(image). Is this not illegal?
Most people don't need insane data rates, they just need good response times. Online gamers and web browsers don't need to sustain 1.5MBPS. I'm not entirely certain why ISPs don't just lower data rates and focus efforts on responsiveness. And frankly as a P2P user, I don't even need most of the bandwidth available to me.
My life won't end if I have to wait an hour to D/L BSG rather than 10 minutes.
In my uninformed opinion.
There is no market in a monopoly environment. That's why ISP throttling is bullshit. They have been already paid to expand the network to provide what's needed so do it already. They're just greedy.
may in fact be me using something fairly bandwidth-intensive, like, oh, Camfrog with the ability to view 100 live webcams at once while I stream my own?
Sorry, your "Just look at it" idea is horrifically flawed.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It's called Camfrog. Look into it. I can saturate my connection down and up running a Camfrog server faster than I can torrenting the most popular Linux distro. It would look just like P2P traffic too.
I'd love to see them throttle my $200 Camfrog Pro server. The lawsuit for doing so and saying that it's 'illegal P2P' traffic would get them so owned in court.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Cancel your interwebs account and tell the provider why...in very expletive terms.
The providers can't exist without the users...and nerds are the top users. If we drop off line and boycott providers and suppliers, then the profits plummet, some CEO with his/her head up ass might take notice.
AN international strike of IT workers would surely get attention on a scale never seen before...that is if the interwebs worked while we went on strike...
This is the result of money being the most important goal, rather than high-function society.
So in order to defeat this analysis packets need to be padded
and randomized. But tell you what we'll implement that _after_
they invest.
when through political and legal maneuvering the corporations gained limited legal liability and gained the same rights as human beings ..
and
as long as corporations are sociopathic and criminal by design because of this fact .. and are allowed by the people to exist in their current fashion .. this is and will continue to be a private planet .. controlled and owned by those who own and control the large corporations .. there is and can be no neutrality of anything anywhere .. they can always buy of enough wage slaves to do their dirty work as there aren't enough of them to do it by themselves .. although with recent technological advances they are getting closer ..
and if you have not done the math .. they have .. the earth is probable capable of providing an average north american life style to about 1 billion people .. which means that 6 out of 7 of us needs to be killed off .. are you really naive enough to believe that you or anyone who frequents /. will be one the lucky ones .. they will let live to be their wage slaves ..
the ruling class .. the owners of planet earth .. will and are really going to start going after the average america and anyone else of the common class from first world countries .. as they all have way to much of a sense of entitlement .. they have out lived their usefulness and are not serving their interests anymore .. they will keep people from the third world who will be grateful for a chance a being a wage slave and to have a chance at the american dream ..
corporations and their owners will do what ever the fuck they please ..
the day that corporation gained limited legal liability was the day the war for planet earth was over .. they have won .. all that is left are the skirmishes by those foolish enough to believe the have some right to life .
evil has won .. for as be good book says satan has dominion on earth .. this is a private planet .. get it.. and if you don't think that true just do the math ..
unless the people stand up and remove the power and status of human beings .. that has been granted to the corporations by the power of "the rule of law" .. that's just about the most common phrase or some variation there of .. that you will hear in the political arenas around the world these days "the rule of LAW" it's a DONE DEAL ..
unless and until that happen ..
it is ALL just more news speak ..
and please stop calling a political system that is 50% +1 .. to be called anything but what it is .. a dictatorship .. IE. one person get to decide what is going to happen .. 50/50 is nothing but as state of WAR or a mexican standoff .. anything less than a 67% majority just doesn't cut it .. and even then you are still divided 2 to 1 .. no great state of agreement .. you would have to be at a least 85% for me to consider it's democratic ..
endless war .. war .. war .. war .. WAR=We Are Right .. until the culling is done ..
it's all just endless words ..
words .. words .. words .. endless meaningless words ..
Provide a lousy service like Telefonica in Canary Island. Make internet stop as soon as you start torrents. This will teach something to those Pirates! YYaarrr!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
No they wouldn't. That's utopia and it wouldn't work.
Ma Bell won't go away, they shouldn't have to. Just because YOU want faster internet doesn't mean they have to cease to exist because in YOUR business model they can't make a living.
I mean, I'm all for net neutrality, save-a-hoe, etc., etc., etc.... But c'mon, to expect Ma Bell to just give up infrastructure they put in.... Yeah, right.
--Toll_Free
If 90% of all internet traffic is associated with P2P data, then surely a box which throttles all internet traffic would have 90% accuracy.
My goodness! I think I've discovered a new business opportunity! Now how did that Profit meme go again?
(Unfortunately, I think spam mail upsets my traffic estimates. Damn those spammers and their estimate curtailing ways!)
In the government/military world, the traffic must be obscured so that the frequency and characteristics of the traffic does not reveal anything to the infidels. This could mean sending spurious packets intermittently or altering the size of the packets randomly. Both of these alterations increase the traffic on the net with only security to gain. If a large percentage of the users used an obscuring protocol, the load on the Internet would be increased.
How about as a last resort, have an army of hackers hack the ISP's, throttle it all to near-max, keep it at this level permanently, then utilize the power of the hacked servers to throttle other servers. Even if all it does is crash the servers; it will present a strong message to service providers wanting to utilize any throttling of their traffic.
Nah. I'm not BillG. Though that'd be helpful seeing the house-prices in the Stavanger area, but I digress...
The fibre is bog-standard. I could be wrong offcourse, and people could start using bandwith more quickly, but I feel pretty confident I'll be proven right; a Tbps or thereabout WILL be sufficient for the next few decades.
Today 10Mbps, 25Mbps and 100Mbps (symetrical, equal up and downlink) is offered on the fibre. Nearly everyone goes for 10Mbps, because there's just not many applications where it's worth paying extra to have a 100Mbps link at home. (I understand that by US standards, even 10Mbps is a lot)
If bandwith-demand grows by 50% a year, then it'll take 25-30 years before the Tbps-capcaity of the fibre becomes a problem. And frankly, I think that progress will slow down before that anyway. For natural reasons, such as once you can stream a couple of full-res HDTV-channels to every inhabitant of the house, perhaps demand for even more bandwith will slow ? Time will tell.
If the TBps -does- prove problematic, we've thougth ahead: We installed the fibre in a... uhm.... "tubes", and we've got drawstrings in the tubes, so we can easily and cheaply put in more fibres or whatever becomes the norm after single-mode-fibre is obsolete.
The scary thing is, I'm sorta joking, a Terabit pro second sounds like a metric shitload to me. Still, it's not a good bet to say "X will be always be enough" even for what seems like large values of X.
Agreed.
It's a total illusion that one can have any kind of free competition on a playing-field where one of the players OWN the fucking field.
It gets worse when the same company owns the last-mile-copper, acts as an ISP --- AND is a content-producer on the Internet.
AS someone who's been an admin for an ISP here in Australia the other side of the coin is that shaping allows you to improve performance for critical apps. If you want an un-shaped, business grade connection, sorry but you need to pay for it. The only reason consumer grade internet access is so cheap is because its generally over-subscribed by re-sellers. Stuff like bit-torrent, and users who are attempting to mirror the internet have unfortunately broken that model, hence shaping to try and regain some sort of acceptable interactive performance. Without shaping your interactive performance will suffer.
If you want un-shaped, committed data rates, your bandwidth is going to cost more, its pretty simple.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
We British seem to get along fine, with BT owning the last mile, the exchanges, the regional pipes and also being a content producer on the internet - I can take my ADSL service and go to any one of over 200 ISPs and get wildly varying levels of service for wildly varying prices.
BT throttled out internet last week because we exceeded their irritating "fair usage policy", meaning we used bittorrenting, but my dad rang them up, threw a false fit about needing the bandwidth for vidio-conferencing, and now we're back on full-speed, unlimited usage! I'd highly recommend lying.
Am I the only one that would admit to using P2P for unethical purposes? Note that I won't say illegal because that word is too murky, but enjoying the fruit of someone's labor w/o compensation or permission is certainly unethical (on the other hand so is charging unreasonable price for questionable products).