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Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices
Wired reports that Comcast finally provided information on its network management practices late Friday. In a report to the FCC (PDF), the cable company admitted to targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella. Quoting:
"For each of the managed P2P protocols, the [Sandvine Policy Traffic Switch] monitors and identifies the number of simultaneous unidirectional uploads that are passed from the [Cable Modem Termination System] to the upstream router. Because of the prevalence of P2P traffic on the upstream portion of our network, the number of simultaneous unidirectional upload sessions of any particular P2P protocol at any given time serves as a useful proxy for determining the level of overall network congestion. For each of the protocols, a session threshold is in place that is intended to provide for equivalently fair access between the protocols, but still mitigate the likelihood of congestion that could cause service degradation for our customers."
Shocked, shocked I am! Evil in the telecoms industry? Never! Well, hardly ever.
Perhaps Google could develop a not evil telecoms company. (Or, as they did with the spectrum auction, play the evils off against each other and not actually spend ridiculous sums of their own money.)
I think we need a Microsoft telecoms company. Their evil has been slipping lately. It's not good enough, Mr Ballmer!
(I'm picturing Steve Ballmer with his high-pressure used car salesman shout: "EVIL! EVIL! EVIL! EVIL!" Bouncing around the stage.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps.
How's that better than throttling?
That is worded to basically say 'if the bandwidth is available, anyone can do anything' but from what I've been reading, those affected have been saying it's 'no p2p no matter what.'
They're lying.
But either way, the idea of throttling is bunk. If their networks cannot handle the service they sell, then they need to upgrade their networks.
Anything an ISP limits - whether it be browsing certain sites, severely limiting upload speed, or throttling p2p - is limiting free speech. They need to watch themselves. It's not hard to see that the 'big media' companies essentially want the Internet to turn into cable TV - where the customers are zombies that cannot contribute.
Comcast offers a voip product. Would anyone like to guess how the throttling practice was applied to traffic that was catagorized as VOIP but was not associated with Comcast's subscription service? Can anyone out there say anti-competitive practice? Real easy for Comcast to put those copyright infringers out front as the rationale for this policy but when one reads between the lines..... things are not quite as pristine as outlined. Connect the dots and get a clue.
Choice? I wish! In my area Comcast bought out everyone and now they are the only player in the game. Needless to say their service is horrible and their customer service is horrendous! Something really needs to be done about these ridiculous cable monopolies.
You have to love how the text is carefully crafted to be virtually incomprehensible to the average person. Actually, check that - totally incomprehensible to the average person and virtually incomprehensible to all but the hardest core network tech geeks. Of course, it's intentional because saying, simply, "we slow down users who utilize programs we don't like" is too easy to understand and rally against, which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what Comcast wants. This Byzantine text just sounds like a lot of techno-mumbo-jumbo so it has to be ok, right? Thankfully, Slashdot is filled with hard core network tech geeks so I'll be reading comments with interest to get an informed synopsis rather than staring at Comcast's text and thinking "huh?"
That the 250GB limit will not be applied to traffic within Comcast's own network. Can you say anticompetitive? I thought so.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
our big fancy piece of software slows your download speed to a trickle if you use hardly any of your upload speed. so god forbid you try to ssh or rdesktop into your box
That is better because now consumers can make an informed decision when choosing a internet provider.
Only one high-speed Internet provider offers service in many areas of the United States (home of Slashdot). This means choosing a high-speed Internet provider is like choosing any other public utility such as your power or water provider. What recourse do people dissatisfied with a public utility have?
you can make a fair comparison between different providers.
You get this provider if you live here; you get that provider if you live there. Should people really be choosing where to live based on the only ISP that isn't dial-up?
For well over a year I have had intermittent but persistent dropouts during primetime (Comcast). I've put in about a dozen service calls and had a tech at my house just the other day. I've had two new cable modems and the tech confirmed that the signal is fine.
I used tcpdump to show him the traffic scroll by at a nearly constant rate (I have a very active home network) and then *bam* it's dead. He looked at the lights and from his point of view says "the signal is fine". It's not my network because I see the same dropouts when connected directly to the cable modem, and it's apparently not the signal.
So that leaves the network. I think it's saturated. I can see 30+ ARPs per second immediately after service comes back up. And if this new policy helps that, then I'm all for it.
That the 250GB limit will not be applied to traffic within Comcast's own network. Can you say anticompetitive?
As I understand it, it's fairly commonplace in the Internet access industry not to charge end users for traffic that doesn't cross the ISP's upstream connection. For example, ISPs in Australia and New Zealand, two countries that have a slow, expensive pipe to other anglophone countries (USA, Canada, Ireland, UK), follow this policy of not counting accesses to, say, Linux distro mirrors on the ISP's network against the user's cap.
Did you see that the gal suing that city said thanks and offers a link for ya? It's on this discussion: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/17/0238226
The US is a capitalist economy, right ? Isn't the market supposed to fix this ?
How does the market provide for digging under a non-subscriber's real estate to pull cables in order to reach a subscriber?
Also, it's always possible to move to an area where there are more or better ISP's to choose from.
Part of my point is that moving every time an ISP noticeably changes its policy for the worse would be a drastic and expensive measure, involving finding employment for you and your SO and a school for your kids.
This was put in place per Comcast's talk at the IETF largely to IMPROVE VoIP service from Vonage et al. You look back to 2006, before this was deployed, and there were lots of complaints about "Comcast is disrupting Vonage and other voip services..."
Those complaints largely dissapeared after Comcast started policing P2P uploads.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Sounds like the marketing guys got to answer to the FCC.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Personally I don't thinks this has anything to do with what they claim. I see it more as comcast realizing that people are starting to get content from iTunes, or off the Xbox 360 or from Netflix and they are going to lose cable advertising dollars as well as customers paying for pay per view or home box office type services. Cable companies do not have a history of being customer friendly and have pretty much always taken the position of "you will pay us through the nose for our crappy signal and you will damn well like it" attitude. Now consumers are getting some choices of how to get their entertainment and I'm sure this just burns them up. So if they give you a 250 gig limit now, you can bet it won't stay that high and you can bet that if they can start throttling traffic they will. If it takes mom 14 hours to download that episode of Lost in HD, you can be sure she will just go back to the lovely ad packed version on TV. Just like newspapers, cable tv has become irrelevant and we all just want pipes to our homes, not the crap they give us over them. Just like when AOL came along and shook up the industry with the one price for all you can eat internet, someone will come along again and kick these greedy crooks in the nuts.
... Can't they ensure minimum bandwidth as well? Why not sell a plan that guarantees a certain minimum bandwidth 24/7, so that the people who feel they need to download so much material constantly can do so without worrying that (favorite pr0n) 7 might take longer to download than did (favorite pr0n) 6?
For that matter, isn't that was the "business-class" broadband does?
Maybe I'm just not angry about this enough yet. I use a cable modem (though not through comcast) and haven't really been found bandwidth to be a problem yet. Maybe our connection has been throttled at times, but if it has, I haven't noticed it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Some people have been defending Comcast based on the amount it would cost them to upgrade their network and provide their current customer base with unlimited network bandwidth as advertised. If cost were really an issue, their overall profit would not be nearly as high as stated in their annual and quarterly earnings reports at http://www.cmcsk.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=118591&p=irol-earnings
Based on these reports Comcast has had plenty revenue to spare which could have been spent on upgrading their network for quite some time. Instead, they choose to throttle their network users in order to increase company profits and earnings per share for their stockholders.
What a joke FAP and caps. Other ISP do it in better way like have A download threshold when if you go over it you get slowed down for as long as it takes for you to Recover it but they also have FAP free times and / or a Pay for the data over the limit with no CAP. Some ISP do have FAP free zones but COMCARP dose not even want to do that.
I have Comcast in Denver. I can not get a VPN connection to work now. The packets get to the gateway but get dropped on the way back. Also, I cannot load www.parts-express.com, it consistently fails when I know the site is up. This has been consistent for a month. Will Comcast fix this if I call with a tracert, or is Qwest an alternative?
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the judge writing the Unaninous(sp) brief for the case
used the fire thing as an example.
The private entities in the US operate under the US Constitution. Therefore they
must obey the law as written or ajudicated through precedence. Failing to do
so would open them up to a ton of lawsuits.
The tail shall not wag the dog. We ALLOW these people to do business here, not the
other way around.
And move the TCP part into the application. You can't break a session where there is none to break.
Azureus already has UDP support, but it very rarely falls back to UDP unfortunately.
I think it's reasonable for ISPs to limit the number of connections and sustained upstream bandwidth if they disclose what they are doing.
However, they should not try to inspect packets or limit specific protocols. First of all, doing so is pointless given the existence of so many encrypted protocols. More importantly, what matters to me is whether my QoS gets degraded because my neighbor is tying up the line; which protocols he is using makes no difference to me or the degradation.
Per that PDF, on page 10 Comcast described how they "delay" the packets, using "reset packets." Stop letting them get away with calling forging reset packets "throttling". Instead, they are blocking connections via forgery.
Except, they admit that packets with the reset header are only supposed to be used by the two end computers, and not by any of the routers in between, which should be handled by ICMP.
They say, in that pdf, "As used in our current congestion management practices, the reset packet is used to convey that the system cannot, at that moment, process additional high-resource demands without creating risk of congestion.", which is just crazy.
Reset isn't a "slow down" message, it is a "stop sending me any kind of data on this connection" message.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Cable companies are in a tight spot and they really do not want to sell us the rope (bandwidth) that we will hang them with (lost advertising dollars) by ultimately allowing other people to provide content and undermine their primary business model, infotainment content delivery.
I'm not sure they will "win" though in the long run. There will be too many other options for both data and content delivery --- even though the menu is small and the content kind of crappy, cell phones are already showing TV and providing low-end broadband data connectivity, and there's no reason to believe that future network upgrades and signaling schemes will enable greater wireless data, allowing cable to generally be bypassed altogether.
They do have a short-term advantage with their symbiotic relationship with networks as well as a largely convenient and 'solved' technology that allows high definition viewing without rocket science, but this will gradually evaporate, too.
The funniest part about people bring up ye olde crowded-theater-fire in support of limitations on free speech is that they rarely no the issue at hand in Schenk, viz.:
Prohibiting people from expressing opposition to the draft.
That's correct. Holmes et al (unanimous decision) felt that endangering hundreds of people's lives by causing a panic was morally equivalent (or at least morally relevant) to a guy handing out flyers saying that the draft is bad.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
That sounds very much in line with the repression of free speech typical of the Wilson administration during the period that the US was involved in WW1. Didn't realize just how bad things were unitl reading Barrie's book on the Great Influenza (which he describes evidence as originating in western Kansas).
When Comcast's behavior first started getting attention, P2P protocols as well as Lotus Notes traffic were proven (I thought) to be affected. Now they say "targeting P2P protocols Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FasTrack, and Gnutella." What about Notes? Was it mischaracterized by Sandvine, not actually a problem, or is Comcast lying again? Perhaps someone with more detailed knowledge than I could comment...
There are a few sites like this now, but I hope this can work for people
http://www.overclock.net/networking-security/276902-sandvine-fix.html
They throttled my iChat video conferences to less than dial-up speeds, effectively making it useless.
Thank god. I hear eDonkey constitutes 99.9% of traffic on the tubes. It's not just a big truck ya know.
The part I liked was how they are degrading customer service to prevent degradation of customer service. Orwell would have loved these guys.
Remember, Big Chimpy is watching you.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Nod. It's much like a preemptive war to prevent war.
There ARE people lying out there. Plenty.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
When the number of unidirectional upload sessions for any of the managed P2P protocols
for a particular Sandvine PTS reaches the pre-determined session threshold, the Sandvine PTS
issues instructions called âoereset packetsâ that delay unidirectional uploads for that particular P2P
protocol in the geographic area managed by that Sandvine PTS. The âoeresetâ is a flag in the
packet header used to communicate an error condition in communication between two computers
on the Internet. As used in our current congestion management practices, the reset packet is used
to convey that the system cannot, at that moment, process additional high-resource demands
without creating risk of congestion.
- comcast report
Their use of RST packets are exactly what ECN and ECN+ are for. The difference is ECN doesnt completely break TCP. Vista has ECN built in, but disabled. I'm not sure how ECN works in Linux or BSD.
If the idiots in the theatre trample each other in a mad rush from a fire that doesnâ(TM)t even exist, it was their own stupidity and lack of clearheadedness that killed them, not the person shouting fire. If your reaction to the mere threat of danger is to hurt others, you are the culprit.
For example, think of George Costanza in the episode of Seinfeld where he throws the old ladies in their rockers to the ground in order to rush to the door. Are you going to tell me it was the messengerâ(TM)s fault? NO. His behaviour was deplorable and his panic was his own fault for being a non-clear-headed individual willing to hurt others just to preserve himself.
If someone tells me there is a fire, I am going to at least look for smoke so I can figure out what direction to flee. And I am not going to trample people unless I actually see a real fire about to burn me up and itâ(TM)s me or them. But trampling people just to get out when thereâ(TM)s no actual fire? Simply because of a panic? I think thatâ(TM)s far worse than yelling âfireâ(TM).
I know I am unique in my extreme opinion.
I think painting speech as potentially physically harmful has a chilling effect: Just look at the whole Cartoon Mohammad thing for an example of that.
âoeWords can hurt, so you canâ(TM)t say words [or draw cartoons] that hurt.â
The censoring of Mohammad in this weekâ(TM)s South Park was a perfect example.
Anyway: Words donâ(TM)t hurt people. People hurt people.
Learn to think for yourself, and mere words will never be able to physically hurt you.
The idea that everyone must mindlessly follow whatever words they hear, in and of itself is a dangerous idea. Should we panic just because someone told us to? No. Should we panic if the loudspeaker tells us to? Maybe. Should we panic if Fox News tells us to? Quite likely. But before you go tramping people to death (and thus tramping our free speech rights by being too much of a moron to think for yourself), consider whether you are actually on fire. Dumbass.
Edit, 9/12/2007, comment from below incorporated into this post:
Fyngyrs (http://slashdot.org/~fyngyrz) says:
âoeThere is no harm in yelling fire. There is no harm in filing out of a building that isnâ(TM)t burning, There is no harm in filing back in. These are the acts of reasonable people. In fact, the practice would do people some good. We used to do it all the time in school. The fire alarm would go off, and out weâ(TM)d go, not knowing if there was a fire, or not. No one ever got trampled. The theatre owner has, as an owner of a private business, the option to no longer serve that customer. Of course, should one patron fail to file out reasonably, and in the process trample another, then a crime has been committed, that of assault by that patron upon another. The idea that it is acceptable for people to trample one another â" or that it somehow âoeisnâ(TM)t their faultâ â" is just one of the things that is wrong with the cliche, aside from the initial, completely incorrect, idea that one could not yell fire â" or anything else â" in a crowded theater. Itâ(TM)s socially retarded, and if it were *my* theatre, itâ(TM)d be the last time you ever got in the door, but other than that, there you go. Free speech trumps all. Every time. Thatâ(TM)s the basis of liberty.â
orig post: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2006/04/14/294/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Comcast hasn't advertised "unlimited internet" in many years. After a Google search, the only use of "unlimited" I could find in a current Comcast ad was associated with their phone service: "Make unlimited local and long distance calls with 12 popular features..."
This is true for extremely small values of many.
My own contract with Comcast specified that I would receive access to the internet at a certain bitrate. Comcast has since repeatedly increased this promised bitrate. At no time have they informed me of any limitations on my use of this service other than 1) insisting that I not run an NNTP service and 2) prohibiting certain types of abusive behaviour (most of which are already forbidden by law anyway). They have never, ever told me I could not run my own mail server although they actively prevent my doing so.
Why in the world are you apologizing for them? They have abused their customers, what makes you want to defend them?
I'm paying significantly more for a significantly slower ISP, and loving it! Not in my house, Comcast!
The funny part is that I just move to New Mexico and the only available option was Comcast. Oh the irony.
Back in the old days, unlimited meant unlimited - you were allowed to go 50kbps 24/7. They didn't rate-limit you to 300kbps after your first 10MB/month. They didn't kick you off after 20MB/month.
As a practical matter though, you didn't care, because the companies that did impose limits imposed either maximum speed limits - 33K, 24K, 14.4K, 12K, or some other number, or hourly limits which were an artifact of the technology. Monthly usage limits were rare.
Today, there is an explicit speed limit, the "X" in "up to X", usually 1.5-20Mbps, and an implicit speed limit which is your guaranteed rate-to-the-telco, usually 384Kbps but sometimes more sometimes less. There are no explicit or implicit hourly limits, and until recently among major American telcos, no explicit monthly usage limit, although many had an implicit "if you annoy us, we'll cut you off" limit, implied by their actions against other customers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
They are committed to spending money on gear who's explicit purpose is to interfere with TCP traffic in a manner that impacts it negatively. Have they never heard of WAN accelerator products that interfere with traffic in a positive way such as the Cisco WAAS or any of Riverbed's gear?
What really sucks about this is the unfair competition aspect...
Although I personally don't like the idea of a usage cap, at all, I realize that 250GB is pretty darn generous and far better than what most of the world gets.
However...
Comcast should be required to count their VOIP and VIDEO-ON-DEMAND services against the limit for their customers, because they are delivered using the same technologies as the internet, and if you were to acquire those services from a competing vendor it would count against your cap. To "penalize" a customer for choosing their VOIP or VOD services from a third party and yet give them a free ride if they use your services seems a blatant case of unfair competition.
Just got the email this morning... AT&T just revised their terms of service with their high speed internet services to include wording about throttling customers who use 'excessive' of bandwidth in their opinion, as well as only allowing redress by arbitration or small claims court.
Page is here
http://www.att.net/csbellsouth/s/s.dll?spage=cg/legal/att.htm&leg=ytosAug08
Terms changed are
" AT&T High Speed Internet Service Description
The Service is composed of narrowband or broadband access to the Internet provided by AT&T. The Site, provided by AT&T and Yahoo!, is composed of a broad selection of on-line resources including email, communication tools, forums, shopping services, search services and personalized content and branded programming. Broadband access is provided in speed tiers of: (1) 200 Kbps to 768 Kbps downstream (not available for AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet service), (2) 769 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps downstream; (3) 1.56 Mbps to 3.0 Mbps downstream; (4) 3.1 Mbps to 6.0 Mbps downstream; and (5) 6.1 Mbps to 10.0 Mbps (available only with AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet service) (collectively ?Service Capability Speeds?).
The speeds identified above are Service Capability Speeds, which are the downstream rates at which your line transfers Internet access data between the network interface device at your home, office or apartment building to the first piece of routing equipment in AT&T?s network. Service Capability Speeds should not be confused with Throughput Speed, which is the speed at which your modem receives and sends Internet access data (?Throughput Speed.?). These speeds may vary and are not guaranteed. Throughput speed depends upon many factors including customer location, destination and traffic on the Internet, interference with high frequency spectrum on your telephone line, wiring inside your home, office or apartment, the capacity or performance of your computer or modem, the server with which you are communicating, internal network factors, and the networks you and others are using when communicating. In order to provide a consistently high-quality video service, AT&T Uverse High Speed Internet throughput speeds may be temporarily reduced when a customer is using other U-verse services in a manner that requires high bandwidth. This could occur more often with higher speed Internet access products. It may be necessary, for some AT&T High Speed Internet users, for AT&T to set a maximum downstream speed on a customer line to enhance the reliability and consistency of performance. While this performance optimization process will prevent some customers from obtaining the maximum downstream speed capability, service capability speed will not be set lower than the service tier you have purchased. "
Which could bring your 6Mbps service down to 3.1 Mbps.
They do not say where the tripwire is.
The rest of the paragraph is
" a. IP Addresses. AT&T High Speed Internet and AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet Services are provided with either a dynamic Internet Protocol (?IP?) address, a static IP address, or multiple static IP address service (as applicable) at AT&T?s sole discretion. The dynamic IP address is a single Internet address intended for use with a single Member Account and any associated Sub Accounts. The static IP address or multiple static IP address is intended for use with a single computer or a network of computer/servers. You may not use the Service in a manner that is inconsistent with these intended uses. "
" * Termination of Voice Service. With AT&T High Speed Internet Direct service, we can deliver the benefits of broadband without a home phone connection. For customers who terminate their home phone service with AT&T ? but not their high speed Internet service ? we have added new language that will ultimately enable us to maintain a customer's broadband connection at the
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
Jesus Christ UPGRADE your fucking NETWORKS!
All these telco's and Cable providers. What about the fucking DARK FIBER. Guess we don't give a shit about that. These fuckers should be charging us exactly how much it costs to keep the LIGHTS ON and FOR NEW EQUIPMENT. Not by the fucking data byte war profit motivated fascist agenda.
Fucking FCC, and these bloodthirsty telcos are making the American people stupid and vulnerable.
Ma bell is a cheap motherfucker if she don't upgrade her networks BEFORE the next fucking DISASTER. Same for Cable. IF you can't keep your fucking network going proper, then YOU HAVE OVERSOLD MOTHERFUCKER! Jesus TITS!! It's like these fucking bastards calling these liar loans rated AAA, when in reality there's just a fucking TURD in the shoebox.
COMCAST HAS A FUCKING TURD IN THE SHOEBOX.
AT&T HAS A FUCKING TURD IN THE SHOEBOX.
Somebody in the White House has deliberately broken their oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution, an the United States. These fucking people are not protecting the American People, they are setting us up to be killed and FUCKED.
FUCKING ELECTIONS RIGGED.
Vote these corrupt motherfucking killers out, replace that asshole Kevin in the FCC, get ENGINEERS back in charge of our country!!
GOD DAMN IT WAKE THE FUCK UP!
Notice, that all this shit has started after they started snooping on our communications?
We have to stop this.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331315/in/photostream/
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
They may have a turd in the shoebox, but you have sand in your vagina.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I subscribe to audible.com, a source of downloadable audio books. I get two books per month for my $22. Occasionally I buy additional books during the month. Books are typically 80-120 MB in audible.com's format. Due to my small player I select a format that breaks the books into 2 or 3 separate files, each individually downloaded. I don't download any other significant data from any sources.
So... after Comcast took over the Houston market from Time Warner and got settled in, I noticed that my audiobook downloads were crawling... at slug speed, with predicted completions of hours or even days. Whenever this happened I switched over to my DSL feed and the same books downloaded briskly at over 600 MBytes/sec.
I don't know what protocol these downloads use, but there is no inherent P2P as these are paid downloads. There is no upload traffic whatsoever.
So I have to conclude that Compaq's assertions of somewhat complex analysis of traffic resulting in throttling of P2P traffic are bullshit. Whatever they are doing, at least in my area, is so moronic and simple-minded that it affects my simple downloads of paid audiobooks amounting to a total of a few hundred MB per month.
FCC complaint filed. Go thou and do likewise.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
Break open the yellow pages and start shopping under ISP's for the local mom n pop operation.
My options are slim out where I reside, so I'm considering an extreme measure; a full commercial T1 BRI. No caps, 1.5 up, 1.5 down, I manage it with my own router and servers. The telecoms will grit their teeth and grind them to nubbins but they cannot control or throttle a commercial T1 without due recourse. It's a Tariffed service so if they do throttle, they'll bring the state PUC down on themselves like vultures to a kill.
Last quote I got three weeks ago was 550/mo for 2year contract, no backhaul. I furnish router and routing services. Fine with me, I know where to scoop a Cisco 2500 router on the cheap and OpenDNS is my friend and companion.
It does appear like it's coming down to purchasing our own backbone and they know it. No matter what they do, we will fight for our rights for unlimited service, hands down.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
1. Never play 'hide-the-fact' when you seek to decieve, always play 'control-the-arguement'.
Comcast should have never used lies and ultimately 'hide-the-fact' as part of their throttleing of P2P traffic.
Ultimately, 'hide-the-fact' is weak because some revalition will knock down everything you said and did.
I hope these liars get stung, and stung hard.
2. The arguement should be, and should ALWAYS have been that 'we DO throttle, and we throttle to ACHIEVE nuetrality.'
i.e. if one protocol takes up too much of the bandwidth, the others are squeazed out. Inorder to protect the smaller protocols, we DID throttle the biggest one in a manner suffiecient to allow the others to exist.
See what a nice ARGUEMENT that is. Don't ever play 'hide-the-fact', it's a loser's strategy.
Preemptive war isn't supposed to prevent engaging in a war, it's to shorten the war that you believe you will inevitably be engaged in. By attacking early, you prevent your enemy from accumulating the resources needed to win or at least to carry out a prolonged war.
There's nothing wrong with preemptive war when war really is inevitable anyway. The problem comes from when you start a war preemptively simply because you overestimated the likelihood of war in the first place.
This looks like a thinly-veiled attack on George W. Bush. Hint: There are better criticisms of Bush than Iraq or Afghanistan. Pick any domestic issue, really.
I really don't get why so many people are fixated on the US-initiated skirmishes in the middle east. The place is a social disaster of epic proportions, and no decision anyone makes is going to make the area a paradise any time soon.
http://outcampaign.org/
No. They are not. The point blank told me you're not allowed to run bittorrent. Period. It's a bot. They point blank told me if I download more than 100G in a month, I'll be terminated. (I was pushing 250G/month.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com