Comcast's Throttling Plan Has 'Disconnect User' Option

newtley writes "Comcast's new people, not protocols scheme may mean high speed for some, but by no means all. It's also created a draconian 'disconnect' option for use against anyone who fails to toe the Comcast line. But, says Robb Topolski, the Net protocol expert who originally uncovered Comcast's blatant efforts to control its customers, the plan does offer key take-aways, telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference."

Comments

Slow News Day

[LostCluster]

Excuse me? Where's the news here? We already knew that Comcast's bandwidth cap will be (starting next month) 250 GB... break it once and you're warned, break it twice your service address is cut off for a year.

Re:Slow News Day

[traycerb]

there's more to it than the cumulative cap. they also have an elaborate throttling scheme based on how much you're currently downloading:

The issue will be their strange throttling scheme, which puts users in a "penalty box" for using more than 70% of available bandwidth in any 15 minute window and releases them from the box when their activity drops below 50%.

It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?

Re:Slow News Day

[Mistakill]

yes the "70% of available bandwidth" is the issue which troubles me... im not a comcast user, but see it this way... 250GB per month? i can keep an eye on that... but id have no way of knowing what the currently available bandwidth from my isp was at any given time, so i would have no way of knowing whether im over or near such a target

Re:Slow News Day

[u-235-sentinel]

It has the net effect of decreasing the effective sustained bandwidth. I don't have Comcast, and I think the cumulative limits are fair, but this strikes me as unfair. What if I don't come close to the monthly limits, but I'm streaming/DLing something that will take longer than 15min? If congestion isn't an issue, why not let someone DL at the capabilities of their connection?

to make it even more interesting, since Concast doesn't tell us how much we're using (it's up to us they say), what if our metering tools show we're in compliance and Concast says we're using too much?

Which do they go with?

You guessed it. You are screwed and terminated for a year. It doesn't matter that you only used 30 or 50 gigs a month, you are gone.

And there is no escalation process either. You can't complain or contest it.

Sounds Concastic doesn't it

Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

[LostCluster]

Isn't this what you guys wanted? Comcast is being told they're can't discrimate against so-called-p2p protocols... so they're just counting bits and if you use to many, you get a warning, then you're out. Only people who are using their Internet connection as their primary HDTV input will be affected at the proposed level.

There's enough room in 250 GB to watch what you want 16 hours a day... sleep the other eight or you'll go insane!

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

[F�an�ro]

The cap sounds pretty reasonable, but the warmings and disconnects are weird to say the least.

If you are over your alloted bandwith for a month, would it not be logical to block you for the rest of the month only, or even give you an option to buy more?

The warning and disconnect seems more like a scare tactic, "do not even dare to come close to this limit"

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

[LostCluster]

All of the major cell phone companies give you a free text message and/or wireless web page that tells you as best as they can how many minutes/bytes you've used this billing cycle and such. Why Comcast can't do the same for their bandwidth limit is beyond me.

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

[Free the Cowards]

I agree. The cap is a perfectly good idea. Giving users no way to see how close they are to their cap, and cutting people off for exceeding it, are terrible ideas.

I see no reason why I, a moderate internet user, should subsidize that guy down the street who downloads 1TB of torrents every month. He uses more, he should pay more.

But the way Comcast is going about it is stupid. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too, essentially. An explicit cap can lead to more traffic, since now people know what the limit is and what they're really paying for, and they may decide that they should use more of what they're paying for. I think they're trying to limit the top people without causing this sort of increase, and doing this by having an explicit cap that still happens to be vague and dire.

If you were to do this right, you should really have a system where many different caps are available. You'd have a default one, probably well under 250GB, that comes with a service that's cheaper than what they offer now. Then you can pay more to increase your cap. You'd be able to monitor your usage, get a warning well before you hit the cap, and increase your account's cap at any time just by requesting it. And if you do hit your cap, then your account gets throttled to dialup speeds until your 30-day sliding window average decreases below the cap level.

Of course this would make far too much sense so Comcast won't do it, but it's what they ought to do.

Re:Comcast is just playing by the FCC's rules.

[nachoboy]

All of the major cell phone companies give you a free text message and/or wireless web page that tells you as best as they can how many minutes/bytes you've used this billing cycle and such. Why Comcast can't do the same for their bandwidth limit is beyond me.

Then you haven't thought very hard about it from Comcast's point of view. It makes perfect business sense. Developing a customer-ready bandwidth usage meter has very real fixed and recurring costs to Comcast, costs which have no potential to increase profits now or in the future. If customers are going to switch to or from Comcast, it will be because of the cap, not because of the availability of a usage meter.

Additionally, an easily-viewable bandwidth meter would in all probability only encourage customers to get much closer to the limit than they would otherwise. It's fear-based policy. The more of their customers that decide "I'd better not download this movie/album/ISO/whatever, I might hit my bandwidth cap", the better. Comcast wants customers to stay in the dark regarding usage and be as conservative as possible in their internet activities, while still pretending to offer the full 250 GB.

Question

[clang_jangle]

I don't do a lot of torrenting -- only when I really want something I can't find for sale, or to download "legit" stuff -- but I've found that TOR works really well against comcast's nonsense. It isn't like I'm downloading much, maybe ten to fifteen GB on a busy month (and zero most months). Before I found TOR, I'd start a torrent and my connection would be cut off within an hour or two. I could reestablish it by powercycling the cable router, but then would have it happen again in a few minutes. Then, I started spoofing my MAC address, which seemed to buy a few hours each time before the same thing would happen. Finally, I installed TOR and now it just works, at least with rtorrent.
I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?

Re:Question

[LostCluster]

That's the solution to the old model of blocking you... under the new plan that'll just put you deeper in the whole because adding all of TOR's routing information just makes your packets bigger. And bigger packets mean more bits against the 250 GB.

Re:Question

[hax0r_this]

Torrenting over TOR is incredibly slow, I typically get maybe 3-5kbps, as opposed to 150-800 without it.

Re:Question

[pwizard2]

I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?

Full disclosure: I'm in the Don't-use-Tor-for-torrenting camp.

I think the issue depends on how much you give back vs. how much you take. If your node is running 24/7 and you aren't limiting how much bandwidth goes through it (since it eats up your own bandwidth) I say torrent away. Whatever you're downloading is your business, BTw. What I take issue with are the people that leech off the Tor network by sending GB of data through it without giving anything back. (leeching http/text doesn't count as being bad, IMO, b/c it 's too small to make much of a difference)

Re:Question

[Free the Cowards]

It really depends on how much you give back.

Remember, Tor uses onion routing which means that every packet you send or receive goes through many nodes to get to you. This effectively multiplies your bandwidth usage by a factor of perhaps 5-10, depending on how many hops your packets travel. (I don't really know what a typical number would be.)

So, you run a node. Do you process 5-10x as much traffic as you torrent? If so, great. If you're only passing an amount of traffic equal to what you torrent, or worse less, then you are definitely abusing the system.

Re:Question

[neuromanc3r]

Basically because TOR's aim is to protect free speech and privacy on the internet, not to allow people to do torrenting, which probably uses disproportionately much bandwidth and other resources.

Warning! Don't read referenced articles!

[lancejjj]

telling P2P users on Comcast how to do what they do without the risk of corporate interference.

I've already watched a Netflix movie and downloaded a couple iTunes this month.

So I haven't read the referenced articles, as I'm afraid that doing so might exceed some Comcast quota.

Heh heh heh...

[suck_burners_rice]

How about a better idea. They should put into place a system whereby the speed of your access is inversely proportional to the amount of data you transfer. Thus, when people first sign on to this service, they'll be impressed by its speed. But as time goes on, it'll slow down increasingly, until Google's homepage takes a year to load.

Re:Heh heh heh...

[LostCluster]

Similar systems already exist overseas and with the US satellite Internet providers.

Re:Heh heh heh...

[lancejjj]

They should put into place a system whereby the speed of your access is inversely proportional to the amount of data you transfer. Thus, when people first sign on to this service, they'll be impressed by its speed. But as time goes on, it'll slow down increasingly, until Google's homepage takes a year to load.

Comcast has that option already. It's called "Comcast High-Speed Internet".

And

[Sycraft-fu]

If you want/need more, you can get a business class account. I've had business class Internet for many years now. Currently it's with Cox cable, but I've used Speakeasy and Qwest in the past. Business class accounts get you a number of things, like static IPs and such, but one of them is no bandwidth cap. Whatever speed you pay for, you are free to use as much as you like and you'll hear not a peep out of them.

However, you are going to pay more for it. Where a normal cable account might be $50/month, expect to pay over $100/month for a business account. However, if you are the kind of person who needs lots and lots of bandwidth, it seems only fair you should pay more for it.

You have to remember that consumer connections are something like a big LAN. Everyone gets to have nice fast access, but only if people are nice and share it. You use your fast speed when you need it, let others have it. For example I work for a university. We have a nice fast network, I've got gig to my desktop. We've got plenty of upstream too. I've gotten things like 100+mbit download speeds on Linux ISOs and so on. Wonderful, however everyone on campus can't do that 24/7 full bore. If we did, well there's be maybe 300kbps of bandwidth for each of us. It is fast and cheap because we all share.

Same deal on your consumer grade cable modem. If you want a nice cheap price and a fast link, you need to be willing to share with others and that means not running it at full capacity all the time. Otherwise you either have to settle for less bandwidth, or greater costs. Me, I choose the greater cost option and then do as I please.

Re:And

[aztektum]

My Comcast business account is only $5/mo more than my "home" service. And for 10 bucks on top of that I get 5 IPs. Sure only the upstream is a boost over my residential (384Kbps to 1Mbps) but I don't pay for satellite or cable TV, which is how I justified the extra cost.

Although I note my torrent speeds are still poo (I'm trying to download Intrepid Ibex Alpha 6 and I'm gettin' 25-30K). I have Googled around and found nothing about if they're screwing with P2P on their biz accounts.

Re:And

[WidescreenFreak]

Oh, you mean on the Comcast lines that were partially funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars that were given to Comcast (and others) to get the Internet infrastructure to reach as many people as possible? And now those lines that were funded by the public are to become new profit centers under the guise of "network management"? And you don't have a problem with that?

How about instead Comcast actually do what they were supposed to do and build capable infrastructure that has enough bandwidth for everyone to do anything?

Personally, I would love for the General Accounting Office to take a nice, close look at Comcast's finances to find out exactly where that taxpayer money went to. Looks more like it went into Comcast's advertising budget so that they could oversell their capacity instead of putting it into the hardware that could have prevented all of this in the first place.

Verizon has millions of miles of dark fibre and have said numerous times that they have plenty of bandwidth as it is. What's Comcast's excuse?

Re:And

[compro01]

That's presuming they'll sell you a business account in a residential area, which they won't always do.

Re:And

[Isotopian]

Unless of course you live in an apartment complex where you can only get one provider. Or a neighborhood, or city where there's only one even mildly affordable provider. It's not a question of shopping around, it's a question of what's available.

Re:And

[MBGMorden]

The problem is that Comcast is overselling their network in some areas. It would prefer to attack it's own customers (sound familiar RIAA) than upgrade the product.

That's the crux of the issue, and the problem. Comcast, like ALL ISP's, does not have the network capacity to serve EVERY user going at full blast all the time. And you know what? Most people, even on Slashdot, don't really expect them to.

The issue is though, that if you do this you HAVE to build enough capacity so that when normal usage as a CUMULATIVE value across your subscribers is taken into account, you still have sufficient bandwidth. Comcast and most ISP's are NOT doing this, and that's the problem.

Essentially, (numbers for example and not accurate), they have a network that is cable of serving each customer at say, 1Mbps constantly, but their average (mean) constant use per customer is closer to 3Mbps. They're selling the service with a claimed speed of 20Mbps. The solution here is NOT to cripple progress and drag usage back down to 1Mbps so your outdated hardware can handle it. The solution is to improve the network so that you can handle an average usage of 10Mbps constant per user. Take care of the problem at hand and leave yourself some growing room for the future. That's the only long term solution.

I really don't think many people have a problem with overselling when the math behind it works. It's just that they're overselling with insufficient capacity.

It'd be as if I charged people for access to drinking fountains at a concert, and said you could go as often as you like. Naturally there needn't be a drinking fountain for every single patron at a concert with attendance of 200,000, but if I put out 2 fountains for 200,000 people and call it a day that excuse just isn't going to fly. If you undersell you HAVE to still allocate sufficient capacity - not some arbitrary number and then tell your customers to bugger off if they don't meet your self-defined criteria of what "normal" usage is. Particularly in ANYTHING dealing with computers where "normal" describes an ever increasing number.

Problem with caps

[fishthegeek]

The problem I have with bandwidth caps as offered by ISPs is that when the ISP is also the cable provider the bandwidth cap is anti-competitive with Hulu and other video entertainment sites. As far as I can tell this is prime territory for an anti-trust investigation.

IANAL but it seems to me that these caps are not because of P2P but put in place because of competition for the television audience. By capping the users Comcast seems to be trying to guarantee that their cable service is still viable.

Chill pill people

[nweaver]

250 GB is both transparent and a real shitload of bandwidth.

This is 7 hour a day, 7 days a week, of 720p HDTV video over Hulu. It takes a LOT to reach this point.

Additionally, beacuse any user who gets terminated will undoubtedly ALSO terminate their cable TV and phone services with Comcast, its something that a company would not want to do lightly.

Where's my measurement tool?

[dniesen]

So Comcast customers need to homebrew their own bandwidth monitor to see if they're nearing their cap each month? Pretty hefty consequences when you are not provided with an official way of measuring your own usage.

That isn't so bad

[kerashi]

I have WildBlue Satellite for internet, as I live out in the boonies where there is no cable or DSL. I am restricted to 17 gigs download, 5 gigs upload, the least restrictive option available to me (Hughes Net and Starband are worse in that regard). At this point, I would fucking kill for a 250gig cap.

That said, most people won't ever come close to hitting it. I don't use P2P (it simply doesn't work on a satellite connection) but I do a reasonable amount of downloading, and I manage to keep around 11 gigs download.

That said, Comcast definitely needs to provide a bandwidth meter. They're obviously metering bandwidth to employ the cap, it would be a simple matter to provide a web interface for their customers. Hell, every satellite ISP does it. Comcast must just be lazy, incompetent, or both.

Holy exaggeration Batman!

[glwtta]

A draconian option for those who don't toe the line? Blatant efforts to control their customers? Corporate interference? Are you sure you aren't being just a teensy wee bit melodramatic about this?

I recently got Comcast (they are the only provider available at my new place), I routinely get download speeds around 1-2MB/s (with a 'bytes', not a 'bits'), including torrents, and the price is more or less reasonable. By my calculations I am damn unlikely to ever hit the 250GB cap (I may use 8GB in day from time to time, but far from most days), and even if I do, I was aware of this limitation of the service before signing up.

So remind me, why am I so damn outraged about this? Is it because someone would dare to suggest that there be some kind of limit to the amount of porn and movies I can download for 60 bucks a month?

I used to pay through the nose for Speakeasy, so far I'm getting a better service from Comcast.

Re:"without the risk of corporate interference"

[retchdog]

Are you really that fucking stupid?

To put it as plain as day: If the corp is making a decision to maximize value, by denying or restricting your access to something, you are going to want to find a way around it. None of this is good or bad in any general sense, just rational behavior.

A better question may be, why don't we give credit to corporations when they do good? Well, we do give credit, in the form of $$$. Complaining, boycotting, &c. is the socially acceptable form of "negative money" (the unacceptable form is vandalism, robbery, kidnapping, &c.).

I think the problem is that Americans (I am one) tend to pay far too much respect to the rich and corporations. I can and do complain legitimately about Microsoft, but I still oppose most uses of anti-trust against them. Nonetheless, people look at me like I'm a communist, when I suggest that Bill Gates isn't wonderful. Even an atheist can appreciate the sense of the phrase "Render unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's."

The beginning of the end for cable modems

[realmolo]

It's not that Comcast is setting bandwidth caps. It's that they have no choice. Now that you can get high-speed internet service via the cellphone network, AND Verizon is rolling out FiOS everywhere, how can they compete?

Remember, the internet runs over the *phone* network. The big cellphone/telecommunications providers own most of that. AT&T and Verizon are both Tier 1 providers with huge networks. It's almost *guaranteed* the Comcast is paying AT&T and/or Verizon for bandwidth and/or transit. And yet, Verizon and AT&T are competing with them.

And the same is true for most of the other cable TV providers in the United States. They have been offering phone and internet service for the past 5 years or so, but only because the telcos weren't doing it. They are now. The cable companies are FUCKED.

Plant

[M1rth]

I find it really funny how every time this comes up, rather than fulfill the contractual obligations they originally signed with people, Comcrap has a bunch of its plants hop onto Slashdot screaming "pay us more money."

However, if you are the kind of person who needs lots and lots of bandwidth, it seems only fair you should pay more for it.

I'm not the person who needs "lots and lots of bandwidth." I expect that, rather than be let get away with this crap, Comcrap and the other telcos be required to live up to their contractual obligations.

They've screwed the customer, committed an amazing number of breaches of contract, and now want to have a do-over and get off scot free. I don't think we, the people, should let them.

Weird Behavior with Bittorent.

[Nester-San]

My Comcast Exp: Florida/Fort Lauderdale: I have always left by total upload speed capped at 24 Kb, so the excuse that I am seeding is rubbish. As soon as I load a torrent my download bandwidth drops to 10Kb. I cannot resolve pages, my browser gets timeouts. Email cannot connect, even the Comcast email, Yahoo and MSN Clients both disconnect. Within ten minutes of closing the bittorrent app, my connection speeds up again. Of course the self-proclaimed "Engineer" from Comcast told me my computer is not compatible with Comcast, despite it working great until bittorent opens. I informed her that I was aware of the bandwidth throttling, but she was telling me that "Bittorent, or whatever it is, is not compatible with Comcast at this time, please call Microsoft for help. Is there anything else I can help you with" Last night I decided to play hard and leave my bittorent client open chugging along at 4Kb. This morning no internet, not even tracert to www.cnn.com or www.comcast.net would work. I went out and came back at night about 9:30 Pm Eastern, my internet is back to normal speed. WTF..they are surely laying the smacketh down on me :-(

Ok fine

[Sycraft-fu]

But then no bitching if all you can buy is 256kbps. Bandwidth isn't free and the larger the links get, the more pricey they are. You can see this with LAN hardware. It is damn near impossible to get 10mbit switches anymore, 100mbit is the minimum and those are cheap as hell. However gigabit goes up a good deal in cost. A 24-port 100mbite switch might run you $100. A 24-port gigabit switch from the same vendor is over $400. Ok well then 10gbit goes waaaay up. Now you are talking thousands of dollars to get a gigabit switch with even a couple 10gbit ports, and then several hundred per port to get the transceivers.

Now suppose you want to design a network for 500 computers on 5 floors (100 per floor) that gives 100mbit to the desktop. So you get a bunch of 24-port switches and hook them together. Turns out you need about 31 of them. 1 central switch, 5 floor switches and 25 access switches. Those are about $100 each so $3100 total. Ok great.

However you then decide you want everyone to always get their full 100mbit. So now you still connect the computers with 24-port 10/100 switches. However those switches need to have at least 2 gigabit ports (channeled together) on them for uplink, assuming you hook 20 PCs to each. So you now need 25 access switches, but each now costs $180. That's $4500 for for the access switches. Now on each floor, your floor switch has to be able to take 10 1gbit connections in and so a 10gbit connection out. For that you are talking about $2500 per switch for the switch and transceiver. So $12,500 for those. Then for your core switch, you need something with 5 10gbit ports. That is getting extremely high end, and is nearly $10,000 for the switch and transceivers. So for this solution you are talking $27,000.

Well that's a difference of $6/computer and $54/computer. Costs a hell of a lot more to do guaranteed bandwidth. Also this is just a small scale example. Now suppose you have 10 buildings that need connection, then 20 cities with 10 building complexes, and so on. Gets amazingly expensive if you have this "Everyone must have dedicated bandwidth" idea.

What's more, you'd find that for less than that, you could do something that's better overall. If you ran gigabit to the desktop, gig to the floor switches and then gig or maybe 2 gig to the core you'd find that in real usage, everyone would have faster transfers, and you'd pay a less than the dedicated 100mbit solution. Yes, it can get overloaded, however so long as people share it'll actually be faster for everyone.

Re:"/." is just playing by the it's rules.

[Ostracus]

"They are setting up their operations managers for an opportunity to fraudulently keep trimming the higher-usage customers off their bell curve."

http://help.comcast.net/content/faq/Frequently-Asked-Questions-about-Excessive-Use#tracking

How does Comcast help its customers track their usage so they can avoid exceeding the limit?

We are in the process of creating a usage meter that will measure consumption for the Comcast account which will be available in the coming months. In the meantime, we offer a meter for free with our McAfee security suite available at http://security.comcast.net/

There are many online tools customers can download and use to measure their consumption. Customers can find such tools by simply doing a Web search - for example, a search for "bandwidth meter" will provide some options. Customers using multiple PCs should just be aware that they will need to measure and combine their total monthly usage in order to identify the data usage for their entire account. Comcast cannot verify that any tools customers may find themselves and use to measure data usage are accurate or without other flaws. Comcast's determination of each customer account's data usage is final.

It's important to note that when our new threshold goes into effect on October 1,2008 it will not change our practice around excessive use. We will continue to call only the top users who consume the most data each month, which is usually well over 250GB, which is the same practice we've had in place for several years.

250Gb/Month should be interpreted as start of a billing cycle to end of a billing cycle. Just call and ask at the first day of a billing cycle and set your meter appropriately. You can figure out the rest.

Re:"/." is just playing by the it's rules.

[JazzLad]

First: My bank displays the amount avbl. in my checking account 24/7, I don't have to keep track.
Second: Even if I had to keep track (which I happen to do anyway), it's not like I make as many payments as I do online interactions.
Third: This is more akin to a cell provider threatening to cut off service if you go over on your minutes and not providing you access to how many you used - you could, of course, keep track yourself, but who does?
Fourth: it's == it is, not possessive it.

Stop it with the thruthout FUD

[willyhill]

The issue is neutrality and censorship

While I don't necessarily doubt that ISPs are salivating at the pay-per-byte thing, the whole truthout.org thing is a figment of your feverish imagination, fueled mostly by your insane hatred of Microsoft. At the very least you should research your claims before using them in any sort of cuasi-authoritative way.

Go ahead and read through these and then come back and tell me that "M$" or Google or Yahoo or any ISPs are blocking *anything* related to truthout.org at all. And please don't reply to me with your name trolls or sockpuppets.

http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/truthout_blocked_censorship/

Online political group Truthout.org is crying foul over Hotmail and AOL blocking its e-mail from reaching subscribers.

But rather than conducting an internal assessment of its e-mail program to find out why it's having delivery troubles at two of the largest providers of e-mail inboxes, the organization's executive director, Marc Ash, is calling on subscribers to pressure the ISPs into delivering their mail.

http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss@isoc-ny.org/msg00354.html

1. If two large ISPs independently begin blocking mail from
a given domain/IP address/network block/etc., then it's usually
a pretty good sign that there is an issue with the mail source.

http://mainsleazespam.com/collateral/truthout_org.html

truthout.org email server at IP 38.114.2.39 has been caught up in a widening list of IP space at cogentco.com blocked by spews.org, a widely used blocklist to protect against abuse from spam supporting ISPs. ...
So, while truthout.org is in no way listed itself as a spammer, the email coming from this IP appears at the moment to be caught up in a widening blocklist of cogentco.com IP space due to their inaction to stop abuse from their network by others.

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001260.html

I saw this story earlier today. While I do go to truthout, I was not a subscriber. So I set up a Hotmail account, subscribed to truthout's newsletter, and immediately received the confirmation email from truthout. No blockage whatsoever.

In reading the comments from readers, there were claims that even emails that had the phrase "truthout.com" somewhere in the mail -- for example, I send you a mail and say "please read this article from truthout.org" -- were also being blocked. I tested this as well several times from several email accounts, both sending to and receiving from the new Hotmail account. It worked perfectly fine every time.

I even clicked on the "email this story link" in a truthout story and sent it to the hotmail account. This, of course, worked fine as well.

Truthout's credibility took a serious hit last year with Jason Leopold's reporting on Karl Rove. It seems they are about to take another. As someone who has seen the Microsoft legal team from the inside, I'd hate to think what they'll do to Marc Ash and truthout.org if these claims aren't removed and an apology issued.