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Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown
Gimble writes "Richard Bennett has an article at the Register claiming that a recent uTorrent decision to use UDP for file transfers to avoid ISP 'traffic management' restrictions will cause a meltdown of the internet reducing everybody's bandwidth to a quarter of their current value. Other folks have also expressed concern that this may not be the best thing for the internet."
Plz seed
Finally, I'll have a legitimate reason to slack off and not do my job...
On the other hand, how am I going to procastinate without the internet?
So what you're saying is that it may clog the tubes?
Someone get a plumber, quick!
If you're going to transfer files over UDP then you need to build some TCP-like protocol on top of it. The article doesn't say exactly how BT works in this respect, but he's probably right. There's no way that BT's protocol could be as sophisticated as TCP, given its 30+ years of development.
Most people don't appreciate how amazingly well TCP's flow control works in terms of maximizing link utilization in a way that is fair to all network users. We really don't need is an arms race of new, greedier protocols.
However, one thing to realize about P2P is that because there are often dozens of active TCP connections transmitting from one machine, fairness goes pretty much out the window anyway. An alternate protocol could conceivably improve on this by applying flow control to the aggregate throughput for the whole "bundle" of connections, rather than each connection individually. This would improve fairness and also increase efficiency because you wouldn't have a bunch of TCP streams individually trying to grow their windows, causing packet losses.
In the end this will be a good thing for the internet.
Forcing ISPs to treat all traffic the same, because they can't tell what is what, will be good for net neutrality.
You should get the bandwidth you pay for, regardless of what actually travels over it.
The terrorists, it's all their fault.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
"They" said the same thing about once popular File Service Protocol (http://fsp.sourceforge.net/) way back when the net was young, pre-Napster, and before any massive internet infrastructure investment was made...
Comcast will just block UDP completely... duh it's not like they care if you can use 'your internets'
The net has been about to melt down any day now for at least 10 years.
The problem is, that it could be ligitimate. Are you the judge and jury? Don't let something set a precedent that could affect our legal freedoms as well.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
That ISPs will start shutting BitTorrent users down, including legitimate ones, when they realize that BitTorrent users have forced them into a 95/5 choice. It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network, let alone the vast bulk of what BitTorrent is really used for. You're not backed into a corner, getting stabbed in the face, or being locked in the bedroom; you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more. It's about to explode in your face. There's no need or reason for this switch to UDP. This will, however, create a serious reason for ISPs to want rid of BitTorrent.
BitTorrent is going to find out, very soon, that it shouldn't try to be a bully; it's making other customers vote with their wallets, and if you force the point, there are actually a ton of ways to stop this cold (which unfortunately hurt the rest of us too, like caps). Unfortunately, BitTorrent fascinated mods are about to call me a troll or say I'm promoting flamebait, when I'm doing neither, because I'm telling them something they don't want to hear, but whatever.
This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward, even when you only look at it as a collection of people using a protocol for legitimate purposes. You're just being greedy.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Gamers, VoIP and video conference users beware. The leading BitTorrent software authors have declared war on you - and any users wanting to wring high performance out of their networks.
What a load of nonsense. The best solution (if there's a problem here in the first place) is for ISPs to drop any bandwidth allocation.
Obviously, isps aren't going to lay down and die. They'll simply throttle the offending users and throttle udp for residential customers. The problem with this is that legitimate applications like voip will be blocked or throttled with the excuse of "fighting the thieving pirates". I hate packet tampering as much as anyone else here, but without qos rules everyone loses.
Well, since The Register don't seem to want to print my comment*, I'll repeat it here:
"I think this is a bit of scaremongering that's missing one vital point:
When an ISP throttles UDP packets because somebody is using excessive bandwidth, they'll be dropping packets *from that source*.
So while .torrent moving to UDP is going to affect VOiP and games, the effects of that will be *restricted to the person using excessive bandwidth* via bittorrent. There's no reason it would affect anybody else, and I doubt ISP's are going to be dumb enough to block packets at random.
Unfortunately that kind of blows the articles entire premise out of the water."
Myx
* Posted at 12:40pm, ten minutes after the article appeared, at a point where there were no other comments on the article. 3 hours later there are 37 comments, but no sign of mine. Now it may be that they've just been overwhelmed with comments, but I'm a suspicious soul at times...
If they drop TCP packets or try to fake reset the connection, it's obvious and provable. If they silently discard UDP packets, that's just normal network behavior.
I was thinking. The people doing Skype have a point. I don't care if my packets take three, four, or five times as long to get to me. I ONLY care about the total time to get the 700 MB (or whatever). It could take a path five times as long as the voice communication, I don't care.
Then it hit me. A CD-ROM. They're always falling off the shelf above me.
As I lay there rubbing my head I thought: if my roommates voice call is so important, he wont mind peering into a mesh network at the same time, to keep me from using his bandwidth with his ISP. The thing about mesh networks is, they're nowhere near as direct as your ISP. But with bittorrent it just and simply DOESN'T MATTER. It literally doesn't matter if it it take 8 seconds to get from me to my roommate to his neighbor to their roommate to their son downstairs in the basement to their neighbor across the lawn who is one of my seeds. ALL that matters is not getting throttled.
Folks: Bittorrent is the killer mesh application, and we need to get people who want their precious skype to realize that just by joining the mesh, they can improve their voice quality! It's the perfect trade-off.
UDP does not guarantee delivery. If ISP's want to, they can simply start dropping UDP packets once the total amount exceeds a certain threshold. This should be almost trivial to implement.
Sure, just blindly dropping all types of UDP packets will also degrade VoIP services etc, but certainly this does not need to impact "the entire speed of the internet".
Since VoIP and other "normal" uses of UDP do not need terribly high bandwidth, the problem can be easily solved by imposing a maximum UDP throughput per IP and simply dropping any UDP packets past that limit. That way, VoIP will still work just fine but other services "abusing" UDP will just be effectively capped by the unguaranteed delivery.
I'd love to see lawsuits about this as well, as UDP does not guarantee delivery so you would hardly have a basis to complain when ISP's drop such packets, especially as long as they deliver *most*, but not necessarily all such packets.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
In the end, is this truly going to change how the ISPs work? The article mentions that one of the reason for doing this is because of Bell Canada. I personally don't think Bell Canada is going to care - neither will Comcast and all the other ISPs who throttle and shape the network (can we say all ISPs at this point to at least some extent?).
Really, all this will do is continue to drive a wedge between the "evil" file sharers and "enlightened" ISPs who will attempt to use the other 95% of the users to make claims to whoever will listen... Personally I don't do much file sharing and I'd get real pissed if my broadband speed dropped to a quarter of what I actually pay for.
Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife from being locked in the bedroom.
So she should sacrifice her entire life for people who clearly don't care? Why not let them all burn? Are you sure you wouldn't do the same if you were in her position? What if it was worse then being locked in the bedroom?
Ok, moving on from a rather stretched analogy...
Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up.
Interesting anecdote. A few years ago, my NTL contract specifically mentioned how traffic over TCP/IP had to be legal, etc. For some reason UDP, ICMP, etc was not mentioned. Odd. I'm no longer with them, and they no longer exist anymore, so I can't check to see if its changed.
Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal. For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.
I don't care. I have *never* pirated anything over bittorrent, even thought I've used it a number of times.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Obviously if you're going to try to transfer large files over UDP you're going to need to develop some way to ensure reliable delivery - which is exactly what TCP does. TCP has years of work behind it, so the odds of you coming up with something just as good as TCP are fairly slim. So I can certainly understand why folks out there would be somewhat apprehensive about this decision... There is a distinct possibility that the new protocol will waste tons of bandwidth or do something horrible to existing equipment or summon up a shoggoth. There is certainly the possibility that damage will be done.
But is that necessarily bad for the Internet? ISPs are regulating the hell out of TCP traffic. They're shaping and compressing virtually every packet that crosses their networks. They're blocking ports and resetting connections. They are intentionally preventing their customers from using the bandwidth they've bought in the way they want. Doesn't that count as damage?
Maybe this is exactly what the Internet needs to drive home the point of network neutrality. Maybe if ISPs get stuck with a new, horribly inefficient protocol that they can't mangle they'll realize it was a bad idea to abuse TCP.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
It could be, or it could not be. To me, that's not even an issue that should involve the ISP. I pay them for bandwidth, not to be my nanny. It's akin to a car dealer that keeps checking into to make sure I'm not running drugs in the car I bought from them. Right or wrong, legal or illegal, I paid for the car/bandwidth, so butt the hell out or I'm going to either find another seller who doesn't bother me about what I'm doing, or just ignore your and route around your interference.
I want an ISP that sells me a pipe. That's it. What I send down it is of no concern, and if I pay for 5Mbps or whatever other arbitrary number, then I can't possibly "steal" bandwidth from other users because by definition I'm already limited to the amount that you sold me. If you can't provide it then don't sell it, because some users will use what you sell them. If you took the current ISP business model to any other industry you'd be laughed out of town, yet they get away with it. Can you imagine signing up for a "3 DVD's at a time" plan from Netflix and then when you actually check out 3 at a time they start bitching up a storm because "You're hoarding the DVD's!!! None of the other customers will be able to rent any of them!!!". Of course not. Because like most industry's they understand that if you sell a capacity you better damn well be able to meet it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Is more in cause of the frickin' meltdown of the internet with about half the content of web sites being Flash-based animated and (GAH!) audio adds.
Flash video is also irreparably defective.
Disclaimer: did I mention I hate Flash?
The problem with UDP rate control is:
a) Unless you make it TCP fair, you stomp on the user's OWN traffic, which is already a big problem for BitTorrent clients which fill up DSL and cable-modem buffers. And if you DO make it fair, then it doesn't matter.
b) It doesn't stop ISP traffic management, it just forces their devices to be inline.
c) The biggest offender, Comcast, is moving away from P2P blocking anyway.
Test your net with Netalyzr
They use UDP. And it eats bandwidth like none other. Oh noes!
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
The music industry is hardly a golden goose. I'll accept golden turd but not goose.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think actually we can reduce the bandwidth by switching to UDP. With UDP you need to implement your own transmission control, and if BitTorrent can make its own lightweight implementation, the transmission control overhead caused by TCP will be reduced.
Actually I see UDP a better alternative for BT because you don't need to make sure every packet is transmitted successfully, given how BT seeding works.
I see TFA's point is not that UDP increases traffic, but they are harder to be throttled by ISPs. Well then why don't the ISPs upgrade their own infrastructure to handle the increased traffic and charge their users accordingly to cover the cost? Blame the current economy?
Again, I don't know much in this area so I may be wrong.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
...but nobody wants to pay for it. It's been said many, many, many, times before but the average user doesn't have any concept how much bandwidth costs for the circuit to a carrier alone, much less the hardware required to light it. I work with carrier-level Cisco gear, a single linecard alone is in the 50k price range. A single router I work with has 8 of those. It takes at least 2 of those routers to handle a few small to medium size towns, (30k subscribers). That's just the price to give you a connection back to the local building, of course I'm omitting the cost of the wiring to your home, the equipment required to power it, etc, etc. We haven't even discussed how much the transport out to the internet begins to cost. I think a lot of ISP's are beginning to see that it's probably a failing business model, and because of that they are making some-what drastic changes to try and make it sucessful. Things like bittorrent, youtube, etc are what make the web truely great, but at the same time they very well could be the downfall in the current state of the internet. You of course could always get your own internet circuit but even a T1 will be at least $300 per month + construction costs and appropriate gear to utilize it.
ISP's have been managing UDP traffic for years now, this won't change anything. Any of the deep packet inspection boxes (Packeteer, Allot, Sandvine, Ellacoya, etc) can identify the traffic whether it is UDP or TCP as can open source tools like Ntop. Encrypting the traffic can of course disguise what's in the packets, but the overhead hurts transfer speed. In addition, several of the new generation of traffic shapers don't even care what layer 4 protocol you're using, things like Netequalizer just looks at the two IP end points of a given conversation and treats it as a flow regardless.
I hate to be the one invoking a Hitler reference--albeit tenuous--but the old parable about "They took the unionists, I was not a unionist, so I didn't protest. They took the _____, I was not a ____, so I didn't protest, ......" seems to fit.
Personally, I think this is a tough nut to crack. But if transferring files via a well established and well known protocol is going "meltdown" the internet, maybe the internet isn't as resilient as it should be?
I personally can't remember the last time I downloaded via torrent. I sucked tons of shit off P2P networks, napster, gnutella, fasttrack, even some BT, but I just graduated to an income bracket where I'm more time poor than cash poor.
But if we don't demand fair practices from ISPs it won't be long until they cross off BT and then move to the next biggest 80/20 rule traffic hog. And THAT might be something i DO care about.
This all sounds familiar, this promise that all computers would collapse and the internet become a smoking ruin that could never be used again. As long as I can log on and keep reading these prophecies of doom, I'll know that I still have plenty of time left before I need to go to the hardware store to get the materials for my The End is Nigh sign.
Sounds like the ISPs should have used the tax incentives we gave them to increase network capacity and reach to, you know, increase network capacity and reach. If they had done that years ago to keep pace with the growth of their network traffic, they wouldn't be in this situation.
But no, of course, it has to be the person who uses their connection's fault.
I pay for a pipe. My ISP should take no interest in the source or destination or type of service connections in this pipe. Anything else is just allowing the system to be used abusively.
It isn't appropriate for legitimate bittorrent users to be driving other TCP off the network.
The only way the BitTorrent use can drive other users off to the network is if the ISP's network is misconfigured or is being overutilized due to too much overselling (you have to have some overselling, not everyone is on 24/7). ISPs that have their shit together will have their network designed to handle expected and future traffic growth such that all of their customers can use what they paid for.
you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more
They paid for their bandwidth and I paid for mine. I have a cap on my connection speed; they do as well. The only difference is that their YouTube videos load instantly and my BitTorrent transfer is knee-capped. Who is the bully here?
This isn't the right way for BitTorrent to move forward
What is the right way to move forward? Accept that there are two levels of Internet traffic: "clean, good, wholesome non BitTorrent traffic" and "dirty, evil, corrupting BitTorrent traffic"?
from http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r21500602- :
Re: Is this a good thing for the net?
Yawn, here comes the typical argument... bandwidth is bandwidth, either way you look at it. All p2p does is open several simultaneous connections, splitting the user's bandwidth. Unless you horribly misconfigured your client to open up, say, 1000 ports.
It's not as if the user is using any more bandwidth than if they were conducting a regular http download. P2P actually is better for a network, as (given enough peers) it completes downloads significantly faster than normal centralized server methods, thus getting heavy users off the network noticeably faster (obviously, unless the user is dumb enough to allocate their entire upstream bandwidth to seeding).
As to bypassing the "TCP congestion control" you speak of, do you think Bell's solution is ANY better? The throttling of particular packets by itself violates the principles of TCP. Not only that, it also throttles/cripples MANY legitimate applications, such as secure VPN's or other encrypted connections.
Do you REALLY want that as an alternative to this so-called "problem" of p2p? I've said over an over, the ideal solution is to gracefully scale back speed for ANY upload/download if the said user is using their full bandwidth for more than 20 minutes during peak hours. This actually solves the problem, unlike throttling schemes like bell's, which render many legitimate applications useless. Let's face it, even Comcast here in the states has been forced to take a long hard look at their policy on Sandvine. Soon enough, we can only hope Bell will as well...
Do I even support the above solution? By itself, absolutely NOT!! IMHO, the ideal solution is to upgrade the core and its routers. However, that takes time and capital that companies like Bell are rather unwilling to spend; they'd rather (ab)use their position in the limited Canadian ISP market to deploy band-aid solutions like throttling p2p.
I find it disappointing that ISPs don't meter usage. It would help cut down on spam and viruses for example if users suddenly realized that something was costing them a lot of money and wasting bandwidth. I mean all our other services are metered. As for myself there are months when I download huge amounts of anime and then there are other months where I download next to nothing yet I still pay the same amount. This fact alone means it's more beneficial for me to download like a nutcase and ruin it for everyone else. Granted the only catch is that ISPs would hopefully charge reasonable rates with a certain flat fee to maintain the line. To folks to believe otherwise, I suspect you're not willing to give up your free lunch to the expense of others. The Internet is a limited resource as some ISPs are learning the hard way. Given the choice between metered usage versus throttled / controlled / broken Internet, I'd pay for metered anyday.
Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.
So what? Piracy is a social problem. Blocking BT, which IS being used legitimately, is a wrong-headed attempt to use technology to "solve" a social problem.
And in this case, they're trying to do it on the most flexible network in the world, one that's SUPPOSED to route around problem areas.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
People who want to steal content will just go back to running ftp servers, the way they did before teh Napster. Then they will go private and encrypted (this is where most of stealing starts already).
The end result is that in a few years, content providers will be calling for consumer ISPs to limit the amount of encrypted transfer that they allow on their networks. It will be fantastic.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
mod parent up. I couldn't agree more.
The internet evolved as a gentleman's system in the comfortable confines of the ivory towers of academe, but now that it's an essential part of daily life for more than a billion people, the time has come to get realistic about its management.
First off the internet originated from ARPANET a military funded library project...it was hardly an evolutionary gentlemen system. Secondly, the things the internet is two most used for are social networking sites, and pornography. Essential part of daily life? I hardly think so for those billion people.
Some of the people who use this system are spoiled children with no more concern for the greater good than junkies looking for their next fix.
What the hell is he even talking about? OK children and junkies don't need the internet, gotcha.
They can't be allowed to spoil it for the rest of us, and the only practical means to prevent their doing so is to unleash effective management upon them.
When is the last time anyone here heard of someone complaining about lack of bandwidth because their neighbor was using too many torrents? Never?
Most of the time when I hear crap like "By most estimates..." with out any sign of a source to back it up, I attribute the remainder of the sentence the same amount of credence as the sound of my coworker's ass cheaks flapping together after an especially hanious fart.
Maybe he's right, but with out anything to back up his opinion, he just looks like some shill who is lobying for some organization with a strong financial incentive for not seeing net nuetrality laws and being allowed to run deep packet inspection.
The best I can find is Ellacoya's June 2007 report that put P2P at 37% of total bandwidth. http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20070618005912&newsLang=en
A wee bit shy of the 50% the author is claiming.
Another obvious way to see what the impact is would be to look at a tool like http://www.internettrafficreport.com/30day.htm to see if the change to UDP and expected rise in bandwidth actually effects TCP communication. If it is as gloom and doom as the author makes it out to be, we should see a steady rise in lost packets as the P2P users upgrade to the new UDP defaulting version.
This report from March 2008 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,342988,00.html sites Arbor Networks (they bought out Ellacoya in early 2008) claims P2P traffic represents about a third of internet traffic.
I'm all for making a plan to be able to react if a problem is detected. But lets not get all worked up over someone's questionable theories.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This sounds like the basest kind of scare mongering, relying on a basic ignorance of the way networks work.
UDP is not any less filterable than TCP. To even make this argument, the reasoning is so contorted as to be silly. In either case, one uses a router to inspect packets and decide what to do with them. ISPs will simply go as deep through the envelopes as they like; they already do. With that knowledge they will do whatever is allowed by law. At present, almost anything is. If they abuse that power too foolishly, then it will start to be taken away from them.
And in the meantime, whoever they filter will tweak to retaliate, and it will always be a race. As far as I can see, this is just the ISPs (or their proxies) stopping at one random lap and crying how unfair it all is.
Why ignore the real issue here? If you sold a teenager in Topeka unlimited use of a large pipe, but now cannot handle her actual unlimited use of her large pipe, then you just need to start cutting better deals.
It's as simple as that.
If the teenager cannot actually use her fat pipe, 100% of the time, then stop lying about what it is you have sold to her. Either charge more or advertise less. It's as simple as that.
When I as a CEO, and millions of others like me, buy #MB upstream and #MB downstream, and utilize it 100%, 24/7, no one quakes over the calamity of the internet backbone melting down.
All of this discussion over filtering is really a discussion of pricing. And the fact that we are talking about it in the wrong terms is creepy.
Believe me, you do not want a bunch of unaccountable telecom bureaucrats playing god with the backbone. You want a free market making these decisions.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
The music industry is hardly a golden goose. I'll accept golden turd but not goose.
Not golden calf?
Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal.
Has it not percolated into your tiny brain that we don't recognize the legitimacy of the bodies that make the laws?
Have you ever watched Charlie Brown? You know the bit where the adults are talking, but all anyone hears is "Whaa whaa, whaa whaa whaa whaa." That's you.
Personally, I think the thing to do is to raze the offices of the politicians and corporate executives, with the people inside.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I don't use bittorrent, but frankly those (most of those) people are paying for unlimited internet access. At least that is how it was marketed. What I do uses is streaming video for alot of the shows I had been watching on TV. If my ISP is selling me unlimited internet and they decide not to deliver, I want a rate cut. If they don't have the capacity to reasonably provide what they sold me, they shouldn't be allowed to legally weasel out of providing it without penalty.
Perhaps if the big telco's spent a bit more on upgrading, widening and developing their networks rather than just pounding penny profits to shareholders this wouldn't be an issue. When are they going to realize that the people paying $35 ~ $200 a month for services which today cost about 10% of the charge are the real shareholders, and are the only real reason they are in business.
flinging poop since 1969
The proper way for ISPs to handle this kind of problem is to meter bandwidth, not completely block off an entire service.
I'm not sure if I'm real.
"Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
That should sum it up.
No sig here...
Richard Bennett could not more obviously present himself as a shill for comcast and the like. The article is complete nonsense, attempting to portray bittorrent as the enemy of the Internet.
This idiot drones on about the "ungentlemanly" conduct of using UDP for such purposes, but conveniently avoids the fact that comcast/sandvine caused this mess by injecting face TCP resets, to break bittorrent's TCP connections. Well, what does he expect would happen?
Obviously, UDP is not a good choice for bulk transfers as it lacks congestion control, but lets be fair about where the fault lies. This is not something that can be worked around at the application level, and after being pushed into this corner, there is little else that can be done to work around their abuses of the TCP protocol.
Has it not percolated into your tiny brain that we don't recognize the legitimacy of the bodies that make the laws?
You voted them in. Stupid fuck.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
That makes sense if you're used to being screwed by your ISP. But the CORRECT response would be to actually supply the amount of bandwidth that they advertise.
Ten years ago people only maxed out their connections 5% of the time. Nobody promised it would be like that forever.
that Car Dealer thing is a terrible analogy. With the ISP model, everything you do with the 'bandwidth' you paid for goes through *their* systems first - they're understandably concerned that the drugs you're running across their borders are going to reflect badly on them in the long run.
I'd bet at least 2/3 of all torrent traffic is for pirated movies, music or software and a large portion of the remaining 1/3 is probably porn.
As long as we're empowering gamblers with legal and commercial ramifications, I bet that you are a child molester that steals from your employer.
Now how about instead of making blind accusations we investigate and have a meaningful conversation.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That is a slippery slope, friend. You have chosen to live in a society and by extension have chosen to live by society's rules. If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy. Under your argument, if I don't agree with the rule that people have a right to private property, I can break down your door, take your stuff, and it's cool because I don't agree with the rule.
when you enter "google" into google, you can break the internet!
One would have guessed Spam is more of a problem. Or YouTube. Or the internet TV some networks are pushing now. Or maybe even WoW. Why? Because EVERYONE does it! Everyone gets spam, everyone is on YouTube, 11 Millions playing WoW... ok, nobody cares about IPTV, but still.
No. It ain't the spam that clogs my mailbox (and no, spam is no longer text. It's effing HUGE pics!), it's not megabytes of videos being streamed to every other computer connected to the net, it's not WoWheads spending 20 hours a day in front of their machine. It's Bittorrent. Something that less than one in thousand internetusers uses with some dedication that could be called "heavy use".
How about doing something against spam and botnets? I'd wager my salary that would instantly take care of any congestation, too. At least if that's the real problem we're trying to deal with...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
BitTorrent is believed to be harboring weapons of mass destruction. These weapons are believed to be capable of destroying all of the internet tubes. The government has no choice but to authorize the ISPs to use lethal force to prevent these terrorists from succeeding.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
"that Car Dealer thing is a terrible analogy. With the ISP model, everything you do with the 'bandwidth' you paid for goes through *their* systems first - "
Which is bullshit, consider the post office, I order something online from a retailer, does this give the shipping company or government the right to open my mail and packages because it passes through their facilities? It's bullshit plain and simple. They don't have a right to watch and monitor what you send. It's just another cash grab disguised as "helping the consumer"
Can you imagine signing up for a "3 DVD's at a time" plan from Netflix and then when you actually check out 3 at a time they start bitching up a storm because "You're hoarding the DVD's!!! None of the other customers will be able to rent any of them!!!".
Umm, I believe Netflix was throttling your movie delivery times based on your usage.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/11/0754230
While UDP itself fundamentally has no congestion control, this doesn't mean that the transport protocol layered over it by the application (Almost all uses of UDP have an additional application-based transport protocol layered over them, such as RTP or Sun RPC) doesn't also have congestion control.
Was this meant to bypass congestion control (probably not, TCP congestion control is fine and traffic shaping is usually fine if done right), or was it done in response to Sandvining which has NOTHING to do with congestion control and everything to do with the ability of an attacker to shut down a TCP connection with a Man-In-The-Middle attack (fake RSTs)?
I'm assuming it's a defense against MITM attacks, in which case it doesn't mean the end of the Internet as long as the new congestion control approach is sensible. Unfortunately we can likely expect lots of bugs and misbehaving applications so this could be bad.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy.
Pssst... You're clearly arguing with a junior high "anarchist". Anarchy (at least, the cool kind where everything works right and he gets cool guns and maybe a hot girlfriend in a leather thong) is his goal. You need a new tactic, quick!
His example is that multiple users behind ONE of these DSLAM ports have congestion. Per your example, the congestion is as soon as they reach their 64 kb/s policy.
However, everyone in these bittorrent debates pretends that the DSLAM port is the bottleneck. In a highly interconnected environment like a world full of bittorrent and other users, there are many other places for congestion far from the simple consumer-to-ISP policy enforcement point. TCP congestion control helps with congestion anywhere that multiple flow paths intersect. The Internet does not magically prevent intersections and congestion except at consumer head-ends.
BitTorrent is responding to the bully. ISPs have a choice here, acknowledge customer behavior and find a way to work with it, or fight it. They almost managed to work with it with the P4P initiatives, but they involved media companies who will undoubtedly find the centralized and friendly owned tracker logs easier to get. If ISPs went with common carrier arguments and found a way to publish their network topologies and got trackers to behave similarly to P4P, then everyone would benefit. P4P isn't about denying people access to off-ISP data, it's about preferentially treating free pipes. If you need to upload and the free pipe isn't available, you still get access -- and those off big company owned ISPs still get their data.
BitTorrent is designed to maximize use of everyone's available bandwidth. Azureus can give me better transfer speeds than any single HTTP or FTP server I've found. If the ISPs want to continue to ratchet up this game, then maybe the 'net truly is in for a meltdown. If the ISPs backed off just a hair, there wouldn't be a reason to investigate these harder to block methods and we could all find solutions that work for everyone (except maybe copyright holders) because siding with the copyright holders will only harm consumers and ISPs.
I think part of the answer is for Quality of Service (QOS) to be implemented properly and universally. Would even the most rabid BT user/provider care hugely if his traffic throughput took a back seat to video for the space of several fragments? It still wouldn't be shut down completely. The win is that when no higher-QOS traffic is on a network segment, BT gets the whole "tube."
There is much more of a workable QOS in IPv6 than in IPv4, where it was more or less grafted on after the original design.
Let's get moving to IPv6.
Well, apparently, you only have to fool the majority of people for a little while.
Right now the biggest problem ISPs have with bittorrent is not the bandwidth it uses, but the massive packet load it puts on their border routers, DSLAMs, etc. This is 99% due to allowing hundreds of simultaneous incoming connections. bittorrent clients have never been able to throttle incoming bandwidth aggregated across hundreds of connections very well, and the result is thousands of packets worth of backlog on the ISP's border routers, DSLAMs, etc, which blows them up.
Changing to UDP does not solve this problem, it just makes things even worse. The bittorrent people need to get their act together. The ISPs are just going to respond by changing their bandwidth filtering to be whole-IP-based instead of connection-based, and the result will be that people trying to use bittorrent will wind up with crappy, unreliable links for EVERYTHING they are trying to do over the internet.
I don't know why people using bittorrent should expect the ISPs to 'play nice' when they clearly don't give a damn about the mess bittorrent makes of the ISPs own infrastructure.
-Matt
They're already safe from liability. They don't need anything more.
Perhaps it really isn't about bullying, but getting every bit of what you pay for. Just because you have found a way to utilize all of your bandwidth doesn't make you liable for melting down the internet. It just means that the ISPs need to evolve along with the technology. They have been quoting bogus bandwidth amounts and corresponding prices for years. And now that their outdated model has proven to be a disaster, they should evolve or die like the rest of us.
These sorts of heavily biased, misleading articles are why I can't stand reading The Register any more. It's all GNU-bashing and items on defence spending. I don't remember it being this bad a few years ago. In any case, I don't want to read it any more.
Look, I'm a huge BitTorrent guy, I run uTorrent every day and pretty much max out my connection for about 8 hours a night.
That said, I don't understand this attitude of "If you sold me 10Mbps, then you'd better be able to give it to me 24/7"
The electricity in your home is also sold to you on the assumption that you can run any and all household appliances from it.
But guess what? If you switch everything on, because you're allowed to and can afford to, and so do your neighbours, and everyone else on the grid... the grid collapses.
There were certain statistical assumptions built into the grid and the pricing model. One of those assumptions was that their customers wouldn't take up 100% of their allowable usage ALL THE TIME.
This is hardly a new thing.
I agree but I wouldn't say it's as much like buying a car from a car dealership, it's more like leasing the car for a term. They can set the cap on the milage you can take it and they can put in a governer and charge you more if you damage the car removing the governer or go over your alloted. But your point is that they shouldn't be able to limit how you use it, and I don't think there is anything in the contract saying that they can. They don't have any right to decided what is a proper use of your bandwidth that you are allocated. They can't all of the sudden decide to limit how much to use.
At the end of the month if your over your limit that is set(cap) charge them more. If they are only allowed 50gigs of data and they have more charge them per gig or meg or however you want to spell it out. It's not like they are uncapping their connection and stealing bandwidth from the stream. They are using their bandwidth that was given to them to the fullest potential. It's not their problem that the ISP decided to oversell their bandwidth. Thats like saying four people can have 100 dollars having 200 and when Billy spends his 100 dollars accuse him of stealing from the other 3 because theres only 100 dollars between the last 3.
Anyone who doesn't think that numerous products, Narus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus) being one example that comes to mind, won't rapidly generate IPDR to track and immediatly filter/blackhole such excessive UDP dataflows is sadly mistaken. I remember when ping floods were the death nail. It rapidly became a non-issue. If TOrrent wants to make a brillany decision that immediately shines the megawatt spotlight on them being the nasties in the network neighborhood they will, in very short order, see the million monkey army come up with that quick fix brillant solution to quickly put them out of business.
In today's world of high speed networking, I'm honestly surprised that UDP is even allowed to traverse the backbone. Short of the million monkey solution, rather than allowing a runaway child to melt down the big boy back bone providers, I would see them black holing UDP and forcing all protocols to use TCP. Sure it will kill some audo and video streaming. It will also decrease utilization at the backbone by 75% and improve all the "real" traffic (HTTP/HTTPS/SMTP) performance by an order of magnitude. Sucks to be a media content provider. They beter start looking at TCP alternatives if they want a sustainable business model. Its not like people haven't been considering the possibility (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=01295064, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_media). RTSP will just become the defacto standard rather than an alternative. .02.
My
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Oh, please make it a goose! You know how the story ends, right?
I vote goose!
(And I really don't care if it's golden inside, I'll live happily ever after!)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with bittorrent, is that it's MORE convenient than watching TV the old fashioned way. All the benefits of TIVO, except that I can use my computer (and keyboard) to specify which shows I want. I don't care which channels are broadcasting them, they just appear in the downloaded folder. I can watch from any computer in the house (or outside with a laptop). There are no DRM restrictions.
That is a slippery slope, friend. You have chosen to live in a society and by extension have chosen to live by society's rules.
Didn't that society also make a few promises to the people that decided to live in it? Like freedom of speech, freedom to keep and bear arms, freedom against self-incrimination, etc, etc, etc?
If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy
So pot-smokers and people who exceed the speed limit lead us down the road to anarchy?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Its true for now that most links are sold purely by bandwidth, so your statement about getting what you've paid for is valid -- unless what you're paying for includes by contract a cap on total use or continuous use, or something else. Most home network access contracts contain those use case caps.
What really caught my attention as I read your note is that comment about the number of open tcp connections. As I read it, I'm surprised that hasn't been used as a valid limit on use by contract.
If you think of things that add cost and hurt performance from an ISP perspective, total number of sessions is one of them. It increases the load on routers and adds overhead and latency to network (or it can, unless more money is spent on bigger and faster routers).
Limiting concurrent sessions is probably just around the corner.
I currently pay for the highest bandwidth version of consumer net access offered in my area. Its more that sufficient for downloads, but because I work from home it is slower than I'd like for uploads. I use a hosted server at a co-lo site so that my business system isn't carried over a consumer line, but I still pull down a pretty huge amount of data sometimes.
I'm completely convinced that if my ISP wanted, they could slow my links by about the third week of most months. I believe they don't only because they don't offer a higher level of service than I'm paying for. At least for me, they've always been fair and responsive.
If anyone is limited by an ISP when they've got an agreement to pay for services that doesn't support those limits being applied, they should take legal action. If not, they should pay more attention to what they purchased and either refuse to buy what's offered or live inside it.
If you can't live with what's in the agreement, lease a line and pay for your own service to somewhere. What you'll find is that without the aggregation that's done by the big ISP's, you'll never be able to afford the on-demand use you want to buy.
I want massive bandwidth on demand too -- I want to download 4gb movies in under 30 minutes whenever I want. I do not, however, want to pay for a leased line capable of doing that. When I buy into a shared provisioning system (a consumer isp arrangement) I'm agreeing to live within that ecosystem and share the cost of that high bandwidth as well as sharing that bandwidth.
The contracts are obscure and don't come right out and say so. Maybe it would be better if they did.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I will admit to the occasional download using BT. I justify my downloads as they are available for free from the web site of the show, but the plugins are not available for me to view the streams.
Anyway, I get letters from my ISP that are copies of the complaint sent to them by the studio. The studio is threatening the ISP to try to force them to do the bullying of the "violator".
I am not in any way condoning what the ISPs are doing and am in no way condoning uTorret's use of UDP to try to circumvent the issue under discussion in the original post.
Just my $0.02 worth.
It enforces bad design -- most client/server applications should be either stateless or session-based, rather than connection-oriented.
What? Why? Why is a connection based application "bad design"?
A "session" is just a hack to give you connection-like qualities over a connectionless protocol, such as HTTP. If you want connection-like behavior, and you're free to design your own protocol, why not just use connections? Why make your life more complicated?
There are plenty of advantages to connection-based applications; no need to re-authenticate on every message, for one. Clear indications of when a client is done talking to you for another (the connection is dropped, whereas in a connectionless world you never really know if the client has died or is just about to send you another message).
Even most "connectionless" applications, such as your web browser, try to cheat and get connection based behavior. Renegotiating an SSL connection for every request would be remarkably expensive for the server, so the server and browser try to reuse the same connection as much as possible. Fire up wireshark, and you'll see your browser will only open two connections when you read Slashdot, and all the images and text all come across those two connections.
Yes, I do have 10,000 sheep. But this land is common, I have a right to let them all graze there if I want to.
Isn't the main issue against ISPs not the throttling of flows but the injection of fake TCP RST (Reset) packets and other such illegalities. Illegal from the PoV that the protocol specification and IETF have not ratified this behavior. http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
What is needed is a "secure TCP" where all control information within the packets at TCP level are cryptographically signed like with a MAC checksum. (No SSL does not fix this problem! SSL sits on top of TCP and ISPs a messing with flows at TCP level)
This will however require kernel support at both endpoints. Maybe it could even be implemented as a series of TCP options.
I would not support actions that lead to an internet meltdown that the article suggests, /. is presuming that no flow or congestion control will be implemented via this UDP alternative to TCP (which remains to be confirmed and certainly the forum in the article indicates THERE WILL BE flow/congestion control implemented with the UDP alternative).
Why don't they just use a form of TCP protocol but apply techniques from "VJ Compression" and add a MAC code it should be possible to get the overhead of sequencing .
TCP header (no options) is 20 bytes. UDP header is 8 bytes. UDP provides you port info already for connection tuples. So you have a 12 byte budget to implement:
* reliable sequencing
* flow-control/retransmission (window control/timestamps/selective-ack)
* MAC/protocol security (the real reason IMHO why they need to resort to UDP in the first place)
That should be ample budget. We specifically don't need hi-performance delivery just a protocol that scales well enough in the domain of 30mbit at the users access point communicating to between 1 and 30 others.
Routers deeper inside the network cannot keep tabs on millions of IPs and who uses how much, they already have much to do.
This article (And the summary, of course) is spinning this way out of control.
This is taken DIRECTLY from the guys behind uTorrent:
Source: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813
Hey look at that, this actually stops uTorrent using more Bandwidth than you have. If your ISP sells you an 8Mbit connection and you use all 8Mbit of it, surely that's all well and good? If the ISP can't handle you using all 8Mbit, then they shouldn't sell you it. Simple-as.
If (And it's a big if) this actually does cause any kind of "Internet meltdown", it'll be because the ISPs oversold on what they can actually deliver - it's not your fault, my fault or uTorrent's fault.
Hopefully ISP's will either stop overselling their bandwidth or update their infrastructure to cope.
Progress++;
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Who gets to decide how traffic is metered? If it had been metered back in the late 90s/early 2000s with typical usage levels of the time I doubt we'd have all these wonderful video on demand services.
Metered bandwidth is a death blow to innovation.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
> You voted them in. Stupid fuck.
No. Suppose I vote against someone, but they still get elected. Have I voted them in? No. If I don't vote (because there's nobody I like), then you people say it's my fault because I didn't vote. Basically, voting is tyranny of the majority. I suppose, though, that when you're in the majority it makes sense and is a great thing ;-).
I'm not for or against piracy, but this is a common misconception that I feel compelled to dispel.
Actually yes, I can very well imagine that. Overselling capacity is a common practice in lots of industries, based on the customers' statistical use. For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.
See also: banks and loans, but that's not a good example nowadays ;)
The ISP's problem is they oversold based on a given statistical model. That model is becoming obsolete as people increasingly use P2P. So they're trying to stem the tide by crying wolf (as in this example), or by claiming that the users are doing illegal stuff (copyright infringement) and should stop.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
The author of this article could have called or emailed Bram Cohen before writing this article, but then he wouldn't have had such sensational tripe to garner page views. If he had, he would have known that he has got it completely wrong. The switch to uTP is actually to make BitTorrent traffic more friendly to Internet traffic. You see, BitTorrent is trying to sell a content delivery service based on their client and the #1 complaint from their customers (businesses with content to deliver) and their customer's customers (end users) is that the BitTorrent DNA client seeding/downloading in the background hurts the performance of other applications. That's unacceptable if you're trying to sell an unobtrusive alternative/complement to traditional CDN.
Yup, good ol TCP is what is causing the problem. That's because BitTorrent breaks the assumption in TCP that one application needs only one TCP stream to do its work. To solve the problem BitTorrent acquired advanced congestion control techonology and it's inventors from "Plicto." The congestion control technology lets BitTorrent work without causing crazy latency for other applications on the box. BitTorrent is the responsible party here, recognizing the need for congestion control and implementing it in their protocol. Compare that to the author of this article who saw that BT was using UDP and assumed it was a naive attempt to get around ISP blocks.
The people who work at BitTorrent are smart enough to know that you can't beat your ISP by making a new protocol. The ISP sees all and can control all, even if it may lag behind the changes. That's why BitTorrent has been working to make changes where it can make a lasting difference, in the political layer of the network.
You know what I'd like to see happen? Deliver the throughput that I pay for. If I exceed that throughput, charge me for whatever I use in excess of my allotment, or cut off my service. Whatever the terms of my contract state.
My ISP charges me a fixed rate for a fixed amount of throughput (100 GB per month). If I and everyone one else try to download large files during peak times, our transfer rates will suck. Just like everyone getting on the freeway at the same time to drive to work causes traffic congestion, or those same people all firing up the air conditioner at the same time when they get home from work may cause brown outs.
Do you want the utility company to decide how you can use the electricity that comes in to your house?
My traffic is just as "legitimate" as yours. We're both just moving bits of data. Why should your bits take priority over mine?
I don't care why you're posting AC
mod up
Both BitTorrent and Comcast are working in the IETF ALTO working group, which is intended to improve the use of bandwidth and other resources by P2P.
Having been in these sessions, it is clear to me that BitTorrent has no interest in melting down the Internet and is well aware of the implications of what they are doing. Note that if worse comes to worse, UDP can be blocked too.
Is the IP selling constant bandwidth, or peak bandwidth? I'd argue that if you have a business account, it's constant bandwidth. But when they sell residential accounts, what you buy is peak bandwidth.
Buying a car that easily goes 100 m.p.h. doesn't mean you've bought the right to constantly go 100 m.p.h. - even though you've paid taxes and registration on the car and taxes on the fuel that helped build the roads.
Most residential bandwidth users don't care about constant bandwidth. All they want is peak to be there when they require it. And all most drivers require from their 100 m.p.h.-capable engine is quick acceleration on the on-ramp, or to avoid a hazard. In selling you that, there's no ethical requirement that you also be provided the option of running what you've bought constantly at the peak capacity.
If you want that, you need an arrangement with a race track ... or a business-class Internet account.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yet it does not matter. There is a lot of legitimate use of bittorrent. From linux images to world of warcraft updates. The ISP should not be throttling any of it. If they are going to be unable to support the traffic from everyone using the bandwidth they pay for at the same time, I think they're going to need to use some of the money we pay them to update their network infrastructure.
And the only effect of people insisting on this will be that there will be a more prominent (*) next to the word "unlimited", with a paragraph of 2 point legalese type at the bottom of the ad from henceforth, clarifying that unlimited doesn't really mean unlimited, which most people won't notice or care about, because it will always be the case that there are more users who just want to surf the web and check email than run bittorrent (and even people streaming video aren't, for the most part, watching streaming video 24 hours a day).
Network capacity will always be oversold because it makes sense from a business perspective to do so. People who complain loudly about this will only find a new emphasis on legal distinctions being made, and you'll have to pay a lot more to find an ISP that will give you "true" unlimited bandwidth. And that is the way it should be.
You're a liar.
Why?
Because I think you might be, and I don't agree with your opinion.
See how that works?
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Do you have any proof (or even evidence) that the GP has pirated over bittorrent?
Then the legal assumption is that they haven't. End of story.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
A car lease would be a more accurate analogy since you are only leasing the equipment.
Still, would you lease a car if it came with some guy who sat in the back seat and bitched about the miles you put on the vehicle? Maybe disable the car or limit how far you can travel during periods of high usage? Or said "No, you can't drive to X because X is the bad part of town and you can't possibly have a legitimate reason to go there"?
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
If the ISPs are so interested in saving bandwidth, why don't they turn on multicast on their routers.
Oh wait, that would cost money.
Seems to me the problem isn't bittorrent. I happen to pay for a 7.5mbit down, 1.5mbit up connection. So does everyone else with my provider. But, I guess the internet providers pass out bandwidth the way banks pass out money - that is, all the customers have a certain bandwidth to share and the provider simply hopes no more than 10% of their customers (or whatever the number is) will make a run on the bandwidth all at the same time. How about you give and guarantee me the bandwidth I pay for? You know, the bandwidth in all your advertising and contracts? I never use more than my 7.5/1.5mbit connection, so there should be no reason that me maxing out my connection should interfere with anybody else - if it does that's because it's really shared bandwidth (not the bandwidth that I bought which should belong to me, used however I see appropriate), and perhaps we should look at fixing your infrastructure problems and business model instead of pointing at my usage habits?
I understand that a lot of the users fall into your catagory, that is why I think that a cell phone esk model should be created, you know get so many peak GB, and so many off peak GB, if you are over you pay a reasonable fee per GB.
I test OS's so every month that there is a new release of Fedora, SUSE, etc. I download at least a couple of the available releases. This means that some months I can easily get 20 to 30 GB above my normal use. (Plus uploading, I seed to a minimum ratio of 2.5) The cost of the overage GB's for those months would still be less than getting 4 or 5 different disks shipped from who knows where every 3 months.
Looking at the comments UDP could be beneficial on the basis of lower overehead. If ISP's spent less time trying to control us and more time exploring a fair payment and delivery this debate would not be so heated.
The last comment I will make, my contract promises me up to 5 Mbps, I have yet to measure over 3 Mbps, if I tried I bet I could show I have never (not for one second) experienced 5Mbps throughput on my connection and that is a provable fraud.
Who, exactly, is this 'BitTorrent' entity you are lecturing to? bittorrent is just a protocol. This isn't some company, or even loosely affiliated organization, that can be spoken to, or can 'find out' anything.
Its like saying FTP is doing something wrong, and its going to find out it isnt allowed to anymore.
And, like another post mentioned, you pay an ISP for a particular amount of bandwidth, and any sane ISP rate-limits you to exactly that bandwidth. What you are sending or receiving, or via what protocol, or to (or from) who (so long as that entity desires/agrees to send/receive/exchange whatever it is, with you), is none of their damn business.
As ISP's, monopolistic media cartels, and governments try more and more to control what information can be sent, I think theres going to be one good way forward for new protocols - fully encrypted tunnels between endpoints - rather than having various specific ports open, there will be one specific port (perhaps ssh) that will be opened, and then all further negotiation of protocols will occur over an already encrypted wrapper channel. To be effective, it must be something they can't block without causing major upheaval to the aveage end-user - so here's an idea that Mozilla and Apache could collaborate on - have a *new* http-type protocol that would operate this way, that both Firefox and Apache would support, and would try by default. In transition, administrators would/should configure Apache to listen for both legacy http, as well as the new transport. Firefox would try the new transport first, falling back to legacy http. When to cut off legacy http would be a judgement call for each server admin
I'm not sure why BitTorrent is getting the bad rap here... The real problem is companies like Comcast selling connection speeds that their network can't actually support if most people were to use them. Instead of investing in there network or perhaps selling what they could actually support they start filtering content.
Comcast *shut off* two of my friends connections for downloading the new Fedora ISOs via BitTorrent. This is just getting out of hand.
In three words: Do as Sweden.
We got tons of high-speed fiber layed out and over one fourth of the country got fiber. Most ISPs sell 100/100 without throttling or caps for as little as $29 USD a month. ($20 with student discounts).
I haven't heard about any problems regarding bittorrent clogging the intertubes here, and most ISPs seem to deliver what the people wants.
...and those 10 guilty persons, what about them?
They'll never cause another innocent to suffer?
Your logic (I know it's a stretch to even call it that) falls flat when those 10 guilty persons set free cause suffering to countless other innocents; such that could have been prevented but for the suffering of that one innocent.
We all suffer for the individual and the individual suffers for all. That's called society. Deal with it.
If a user have bought a 2Mbit connection then it does not matter to the ISP what kind of trafic that goes on that link, so it should not impact any other users if I use udp instead of tcp. It is not as if I am allowed to send more then 2Mbit just because I use udp. (It is all just ip packets for the router anyway).
There are 2 situations where using udp might be a problem.
1: If the isp sell you a 2Mbit connection but can't handle that on their internal network. In that case the tcp connections might(We don't know which slowdown solution that uTorrent uses) back down faster then the udp, and thus give more bandwidth to upd.
But does this really happen? I live in Denmark and the 5 different danish isps I have had so far, have always been able to deliver the full speed i bought on their internal network. So if this is a problem for isps in USA, then its time for the Isp to upgrade their hardware. An temporary solution might be to lower the speed of all customers duing peek time.
2: If you share a single internet connection, and don't have any internal rate limit software this might be a real problem, but the solution is simply to limit the speed in the uTorrent client.
Ya, since there was never any software or media piracy before the late 90s... You must be new to this trolling business.
you just want to bully other people out of their bandwidth so you get more.
Um, what?
How can I "bully" anyone? My modem is capped at the speeds Comcast sold me, no more, no less. In addition, I have a monthly transfer limit.
If Comcrap can't provide what they are selling ... they shouldn't be selling it. Oh, but wait! That's not their fault, it's those users! They're actually trying to use what was sold to them.
I'm not a big bit torrent guy, except for WoW and other legitimate torrents. But the thought that people are being told that they can't use bit torrent for any technical reason is silly - it's the ISPs over-selling and under-delivering, plain and simple.
FedEx/UPS/DHL have every right to open your packages, yes. You grant them that right when you agree to their shipping terms. Perhaps you should read the airbill before you sign it. The government operates under a different set of rules than private companies. If you'd like the government to run you ISP service then you can have the right to not have your traffic monitored.
I forget the statistics, but let's admit it -- it's highly likely that BitTorrent developers, on all platforms all know, understand and encourage the fact that some enormous fraction (far above half) of total BitTorrent traffic is used to illegally distribute copyrighted content.
I'm not going to make a value judgment on that for the purposes of this post, although I have an opinion on its moral correctness -- but many of the features introduced by BitTorrent clients (protocol encryption being the biggest example) seem to exist solely because BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs.
BitTorrent is being blocked by ISPs because it is hugely taxing on network infrastructure, and is almost always being used to do something illegal. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone I know has downloaded Linux ISOs over BitTorrent, but a colleague's recent purchase of as many 1TB hard drives as his SATA controller will support for the express purpose of "downloading every Bluray rip he can find" is, I believe, reflective of the general use of the protocol. Maybe not its intended use, but certainly its defacto use.
BitTorrent developers have to realize that their protocol is almost exclusively for illegal purposes. By constantly adding features to "get around" restrictions placed by ISPs on the protocol, they're actively supporting such activity.
It is insane to think that broadband shouldn't be oversold by a contention ratio. Why shouldn't it? Almost every ISP advertises speeds "up to X megabits per second", key word being "up to". Most people even in normal use will never see those speeds -- because their usage habits never require it of the system. Or if they do, it's for a fraction of the time that a BitTorrent session will max out a connection. The most taxing thing I've done that I can think of is load a page of several hundred ~1MB photographs in Firefox. It took a long time to download, but that's only a 200MB transfer that happened once -- not someone downloading multiple HD movie rips at all hours of the day, all the time.
If the majority of BT usage was for legal purposes, the traffic using the protocol would drop down to near-zero and it wouldn't be an issue. It's only come up because of the connections to illegal activity.
What we need is a legal solution to the problem. Let people use their connections for whatever they want -- we just need a more reliable way to punish those who break the law, and to do so more reliably. The exact mechanics of this solution can be debated from now until the end of the Universe -- but a technical solution to a social problem will never be successful. Whether it's a change in business models, more policing, aggressive prosecution of large-scale Internet distributors, or something else, there needs to be a change on the human side of things.
Otherwise, they're likely right -- the Internet, in its current state, will not survive. And it will be BitTorrent's fault.
Wait - let me see if I get this straight...
ISPs, the gateways to the Internet, are doing bandwidth management at the TCP layer and above. Since bandwidth on an IP network is properly measured at the IP layer (duh), obviously the ISPs are not actually doing bandwidth management. They are doing something, but it is not bandwidth management.
Some software operates on not-TCP. If that software is high bandwidth, the ISP's "bandwidth management" (which is not really bandwidth management at all) fails. And that is the fault of the software?!?
"We built a toll road, and in order to eliminate traffic jams, we strictly regulate the number of blue cars entering the road. But people are driving cars that are not blue, and causing traffic jams. Those people driving not-blue cars are flooding our road!"
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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err, this is exactly what the Customs department does to mail coming into the country.
Don't meter then. Sell them a realistic line speed.
My ISP is selling me a line speed. In an ideal world (leaving out the marketing droids), they will be selling me a speed that I can reasonably expect on their already oversold network. They will cap my network connection at this speed such that I can never exceed it, and that's it. That's all that they will need to do.
In the real world, however, the line speed they sell seems to have nothing to do with what their network capacity is. Their line speed seems to do with "having a bigger one than the next guy" to bring in more subscribers even if their network can't handle it. As a result, they oversell a network that already can't realistically cope with their utilization numbers. Instead of looking at utilization and capacity numbers and figuring out what they can realistically support, they make shit up.
This making shit up is biting them in the ass. Hard. The need to do one of two things:
They've been dragging their feet on the first item because they want to erect tollbooths and speedbumps (destroying network neutrality along the way) so that they become the gatekeepers of the Internet - using public funds to fuel a private agenda, penalizing popular sites because they didn't think of the idea first or because it threatens their business model. They won't do the second because honesty is apparently taboo even if their realistic line speeds are pretty much an open secret (see dslreports.com).
the nice thing about capitalism is that it's not my job to worry about the health of the internet. I have a contract that clearly states what I can expect for the monthly service fees I'm paying and this means I get to download at 16Mbits ALL DAMN DAY. Should I have priority over VoIP and gaming? I don't know and that's really not my job either. Let the ISPs figure it out, they are the (sorry to use the word) stakeholders in this.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
Mislabeling it is not. If you sell 1MBps with a 25GB/month cap, then you need to be advertising your "1MBps peak bandwidth, 0.01MBps constant bandwidth" service, not misleading your prospective customers.
Practically every ISP should be overselling peak bandwidth; because people don't all use it at the same time, your only choices are to let them use as much as they can (overselling) or to throttle them. But both peak and aggregate bandwidth are important; if you're not providing much of the latter you shouldn't get to imply otherwise.
"I don't care. I have *never* pirated anything over bittorrent, even thought I've used it a number of times."
The unverifiable claims are the easiest to fabricate.
There are legitimate usages. Very large game patches for instance. Especially on the day of release. Given the demographics of the slashdot crowd, I'd be willing to bet money that the statement applies to someone here.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
Maybe its time to end the all you can eat buffet. You either get speed or you get data. If you want the speed, you pay more once you exceed a center data threshold. You can get both if you want to pay for both or you can just get data and suffer lower speeds.
One or the other, the all you can eat data buffet is no longer a sane business model.
Then pay for a T1 or OC3 connection.
You're the person who whines about ISPs overcharging for bandwidth, I'm sure, when they charge the full cost for the pipe. 7MBps for $40/mo with no caps and full utlization.
You want business class services at economy prices, and you already use way more of your connection than anyone else - you take up 80% of all traffic (sorry, not you personally, but I wouldn't doubt 4x what others use). Face it, you are *already* benefitting from massive infrastructure investment that is being subsidized by your no-nothing aunt and parents who barely use their connections.
But of course you are whining about the legroom and not getting your 'fair' share. Which you can have, just pay for it. Ah, but that's against the principle of NOT paying for anything - BitTorrent's prime audience. It's not unfairness or unclear advertising, you know what is going on and are just trying to get the most bang for your buck. That's fine, but you don't really have a high horse here to climb on.
Not 'you' personally, of course this is characterization.
And thats when you start embeding encripted info on alternative files like images, or so. BTW how do you plan to distinguish between normal raw binary data and encripted data? how do you tell between a legal data of a PNG file and a RAR file containing encripted files? You plan to use the evil bit?
DON'T PANIC.
You have chosen to live in a society
Are you sure? Supposing he didn't choose to live in society. Where would he go?
If you took the current ISP business model to any other industry you'd be laughed out of town, yet they get away with it.
Cough...fractional reserve banking...cough
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Why should your bits take priority over mine?
Emergency call. Actually any call, if your data is ftp, http, torrent, or similar bulk data.
Or if I pay more - this is capitalism.
And, perhaps, because I use less (average) bandwidth (i.e. am a better customer).
And yes, I want the utility company to limit it, as it is obvious you will not (use QoS).
Someone get a plumber, quick!
Let's call Joe the Plumber ;-)
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
It says what is really happening - assuming it is true, of course.
Sure, there must be some overselling, but how much?
The sensible way to do this is to watch what's in the pipes and use this information. For a long time over 90% of traffic was TCP. Now suddenly one class of high-volume traffic will switch to UDP. Ooops. Should ISPs have seen this coming? I don't think so. This is not expected traffic growth, this is different.
UDP is a very bad protocol to use for mass transmission. There is no built-in feedback loop. Unless the protocol running over UDP is very well designed (basically mimicking TCP), UDP will always saturate the bottleneck on any path. If the upper level protocol accepts losses, it gets worse.
Of course, this can be done well - just put rate caps on each transfer, inside the client. But hey, everybody wants their new movie asap! With open source this will not fly. With TCP the transfers were at least competing fairly with other flows. With UDP bittorrent will soon start competing only with itself. More bandwidth won't cut it, TCP will suffocate.
So far ISPs tried to fight bittorrent for all the wrong reasons - it's a useful technology with many positive uses, just a bit heavy on the backbone and with the stigma of piracy. Limiting it was the wrong choice, but an easy one. Fighting the caps was the right thing to do, whether you actually use bittorrent or not. Switching to UDP changes the game.
Switching to UDP will make it public enemy number one. Watch for new contracts specifically disallowing it, heavy caps on all UDP traffic, and so on. Even worse than before, but now ISPs will have my full support.
Interesting anecdote. A few years ago, my NTL contract specifically mentioned how traffic over TCP/IP had to be legal, etc. For some reason UDP, ICMP, etc was not mentioned. Odd. I'm no longer with them, and they no longer exist anymore, so I can't check to see if its changed.
Well, UDP & ICMP do run over the IP protocol, so they are probably covered. I guess it depends on the legal meaning of "TCP/IP" instead of "TCP".
Contracts often have a generic "no illegal activity" clause.
My car analogy.
I'll sell you a unlimited gasoline plan for 29.99 a month. All the gas you can use in a single car!!
* Please note you are only drive said car for 15 miles a month and are limited to 10 gallons gasoline a month.
While not correct if someone wants to be pedantic about it, it's very common to refer to the entire IP stack as TCP/IP or the TCP/IP stack. I can't think of a book that touches on networking either in part or is the entire subject of the book that I've read that does not use TCP/IP as the generic term for the entire stack. Possibly not a good idea for a legal document, but that's how it is.
Just like even though kleenex is a type of tissue, but tissue is not a type of kleenex, if someone asked you for a kleenex you wouldn't respond "I don't have any. All I've got here are these Great Value Facial Tissues", you'd just point them to whatever you have and know exactly what they meant. The same goes for when someone says "TCP/IP", while TCP/IP is a more specific thing than just IP, you know (or should know) what someone means and know that they very well may be referring to the entire stack, not just TCP and its sub-protocols specifically.
Why do they say that this will happen? One has paid for a certain width on ones internet, so one should be able to use it. If they don't let us use what we have paid for, then they have sold us something that dont exist...?
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"? Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff. Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly. Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave! Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! But really. The Internet isn't a damn packet radio network. Transmission errors are largely a thing that has been taken care of via providers putting infrastructure in place to make retransmits unnecessary. In fact, BitTorrent over UDP shuld sould like a good thing to Service Providers....unless they are over-subscribed kinda like this whole subprime thing. Wait. Comcast...node...saturation....no wonder they're spreading fire-and-brimstone FUD. They HATE spending money. On the other-hand, we have hashing. So if the connection is adequate, then ISPs shuld praise this sort of thing for lowering their network overhead.
I don't remember being given a choice. Just try "leaving society behind" and let me know how that straitjacket or that cold slab in the morgue feels. I'll give you a hint, it doesn't work very well.
And yes, you could *try* to take my stuff. You wouldn't get far. No government intervention or laws would be required for me to solve that problem.
And no, I'm not an anarchist. I am a libertarian but not to the point of being a weird luddite.
Picking a choosing laws can be a slippery slope but I like to refer to it as "civil disobedience".
Every week there's another post about how "X" is going to cause the Internet to come to a grinding halt and cause a meltdown. Yet each day more and more videos are posted on YouTube of kittens riding roombas, and somehow the Internet survives.
Call me when the sky is MEASURABLY and DEMONSTRATIVELY falling.
What? That makes no sense.
Unless I missed something and nowadays downloading at high speeds suddenly endangers the lives of those sharing your connection, you may want to rethink that comparison.
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and get off your lawn? Care to back up any of your claims with actual information? "OMG, Flash sucks!!!!!!" doesn't mean shit.
How is Flash video defective exactly?
Too bad you don't like newfangled audio/video on your websites. A lot of us find it very useful, especially for tutorials and such.
Err... you HAVE ISPs that will "sell you a pipe and that's it" pretty much in every big city of the developed world. What I bet is that you are NOT willing to pay for what that service costs.
Ask your ISP how much for a corporate unmettered, unfiltered, 5Mbps full-duplex link with a barely-acceptable SLA (say, 4h MTTR, 95% bandwidth available @ 98% of the time to their peering points). Chances are it won't be below US$ 1k/month even if network backbone connectivity is easy and cheap where you live.
I've been thinking about this topic for a while. It almost always degenerates into a "I paid for X mbps, I should get to use it 100% of the time" vs. "You're killing my connection, and my XYZ traffic is getting hit even though I'm a good consumer, we should pay for each bit we use, and let the market sort it out." What if we implement a QoS service level based largely on the existing pricing model. When you subscribe, you get a certain bandwidth of traffic that you are (almost) GUARANTEED (as if you were (almost) leasing a T1 to yourself) The ISP doesn't mess with it. The rest of your traffic is "best efforts" at between X and Y mbps. Let the ISP shape the "best efforts" bandwidth in whatever way they feel brings the best average consumer experience. Let the customer choose if they want to use their guaranteed traffic to surf the web, run VOIP, Games, BT etc. That way I'm not limiting your BT, and your BT isn't killing the voice quality of my phone. Everyone talks like QoS, shaping, and throttling is a bad thing. I've used all 3 tools on my own LAN to IMPROVE the connection of my network for ALL it's users. Sure some HTTP traffic gets delayed while Voip jumps the queue, and when there's heavy surfing, BT slows down. Network bandwidth is a finite resource. Burning it up like fossil fuels in the 60s is a bad long term idea. I can't afford a guaranteed bandwidth connection at home. I'd much rather participate in a MUCH bigger shared and shaped pipe than be stuck with what I can afford to buy all for myself.
Something about more sessions to track uses more cpu and memory. I'd imagine it has to do with the tables required to track the sessions.
The same is true in your workstation. There are performance limits and real serious points of diminishing return as you increase the number of concurrent sessions. Some operating systems are better than others at dealing with this, but there are limits in all cases.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Actually if the DEA drug dogs or the X-ray machine turns up something suspicious you can bet your ass the USPS will open that package to protect their system from misuse.
The car analogy is really bad using torrent to pirate shit and use up all the local bandwidth is more akin to doing donuts in the dealers lot which I am pretty sure they would take a dim view of and probably call the cops.
It's called a society and there are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Being a filthy pirate and hogging all the bandwidth is not nor should be acceptable behavior even though you really like all the free stuff you get from it.
I didn't say "limit it," I said "decide how you use it."
I don't care why you're posting AC
If you want true net neutrality get rid of broadband and make everyone connect, including businesses, using a 14.4 modem. Current infrastructure can handle that kind of bandwidth for every citizen. In ten years upgrade everyone to 28.8, future infrastructure will be able to support it I think...
Might as well, because in a net neutral world that's what happens. Not because of technical mumbo jumbo some techie tells his CEO about, but because of the bottom line cost. Equality reduces throughput for everyone, and increases it for no one. That's the way business works and thinks.
Analogy time: In 1990 the average professional woman's salary was 60% of what a man's was with similar experience. In 2000 it was 80%, but the average salary of women only increased 4%. Guess what happened, to make things more equal men were payed less. Money is a limited resource, bandwidth is a limited resource. Business isn't going to pay anyone more to make things equal, they are going to pay someone less.
Even if they upgraded infrastructure, people would just download more movies and audio. People who download from BT don't just get 1 movie or one song. They get whatever they can, which IS limitless, unlike the bandwidth they are using to get it.
Simple supply and demand economics really.
That said, I'm all for net neutrality. In fact I don't even support overall bandwidth cap limits. If your network can do 1000Mbps down, let me try to pull it off on my machine, along with everyone else on your network...it would be fun watching this thing seize like a 90y/o epileptic at a laser light show. After all, I miss Prodigy.
I pay for a pipe. My ISP should take no interest in the source or destination or type of service connections in this pipe. Anything else is just allowing the system to be used abusively.
Counter-example: botnetted computers spewing spam. Your ISP should damn well care about that.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How is it being a bully? Really. Explain this to me in terms my little brain can understand.. So walk me thru this.. We have these huge ISPs overselling their networks--knowingly and wantonly--and refusing to invest in a practical solution (i.e. upgrade at least enough to deliver what they promise in ads, contracts, etc.)
In the other corner is the small fraction of users who use the "unlimited" 'net connection (it doesn't make a bit of difference WHAT the traffic is from) and pay good money for the privilege, but find out that "unlimited" really means "if you only browse amazon, a few news sites and check your email a few times a day, you'll never know the difference."
Bittorrent is not the issue. There is no file transfer protocol that will ever be an issue. The only issue here is that ISPs have oversold network capacity by a huge amount, are unwilling to upgrade the infrastructure and are (apparently) uninterested in re-evaluating the way pricing is calculated.
So yea, I must be stupid because I just can't see the guy in the suit with the money coming out of his pockets as the victim here. In fact my ignorance goes so deep as to feel SORRY for the evil bully users who don't give a shit about anything but getting full use out of their paid-for bandwidth.
maybe I'm extra jaded today because I've already reached my allotted bandwidth for December on my "unlimited" plan..
A car used to run drugs can be confiscated, costing the dealership money if you are still making payments.
See http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?id=49813
"What is in 1.9:
uTP, the micro transport protocol. This UDP-based reliable transport is designed to minimize latency, but still maximize bandwidth when the latency is not excessive. We use this for communication between peers instead of TCP, if both sides support it. In addition, we use information from this transport, if active, to control the transfer rate of TCP connections. This means uTorrent, when using uTP, should not kill your net connection - even if you do not set any rate limits.
What was in 1.8.1:
uTP, but connection attempts were not initiated by default, and there was no control over TCP as described above. You can enable it, but likely you will see the uTP connections not transfering much data, because they are pushed out of the way by TCP."
This sounds like congestion control of some sort to me.
I'm paying for a certain amount of bandwidth a month. Using a lower percentage of that than I do does not make you a "better customer".
LOL! Well.. good luck, I hope she's worth it, and with any luck the wife will never find out about her. Don't forget to burn the receipts!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That is an internal problem of the small business. They rent one T1 line for 50 people, which is obviously not enough for 50 people watching stuff on YouTube. So they need some policy to prevent excessive use. On a former job of mine we actually had such an event: ;-)
One guy was running eMule from his laptop and collecting Gina Wild videos
We found him through the router management software and told him to switch his P2P application off, problem solved.
The problem with most end-user ISPs is their excessive overselling:
They have a bandwidth per user that may not be much better than in your example, but they market the connection to every single user as if he had the line for himself. Then the ISP complains or starts throttling the bandwidth, if it is actually used heavily. Users feel cheated.
My point is that it is very much the fault of the ISP if they make empty promises. It is not the duty of the customer to figure out how much capacity the ISP actually has and restrict his usage accordingly. Actually, I think the behavior of some ISPs borders on fraud and I'd like to see them lose a lawsuit over it. AFAIK there is actually one brewing, some users have sued Comcast.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I seem to remember the pundits saying that there weren't enough applications that could make use of the broadband connections and all that bandwidth was going to waste.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
For example, where I live, I have signed for an electrical plan that entitles me to use a certain amount of electrical power at a given time (=bandwidth). If everyone in my neighborhood used the power they're entitled to, the power lines would melt.
That's half-true. The power company MUST meet peak demand, as well the rest of the electrical system. You can't say to people "sorry, you won electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power". That's absurd and ridiculous. What ISPs did was to HEAVILY oversell capacity. Too much greed is the problem, not heavy usage.
p2p applications should switch to SCTP.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2960.txt
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
So to transfer your 1 gigabyte movie file you will 'surreptitiously' transfer 50 gigabytes of images? Right.
From the point of view I'm arguing, there isn't any normal raw binary data to worry about, you are supposed to be using the internets for commerce and legitimate licensed content.
Note that I'm not advocating this, I'm just pointing out that technical wack-a-mole doesn't really lead to an internet that anybody would like, whereas the post I replied to was all like "just turn it off, don't affect me none."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
exactly. the argument espoused in this article is fundamentally flawed. in fact, it reads like it was written by an industry mouthpiece for the sole purpose of demonizing P2P users without absolutely no regard to logic or reality.
first off, as you said, it's impossible for the "download fiends" to actually use more than their share of bandwidth. if i have a 56K dial-up connection, there's no way for me to just decide, "hrmmm, this isn't fast enough for me. i think i'll be a dick and download at 9 Mbps by stealing bandwidth from my neighbors."
secondly, the author seems to be suggesting that everyone should use, or have access to, the exact same amount of bandwidth regardless of what they paid for, and that this level of bandwidth is decided by how much he personally uses/needs. well, that's very convenient for him and the ISPs. most of us are paying for 3+ Mbps connections, some people are paying for much more than that, but i guess we should all only be allowed to use 1~3% of the bandwidth we paid for because that's how much the author needs for his daily web surfing, e-mail, and posting of shitty articles on the web.
but why stop there? why not divide up internet bandwidth evenly between all 6.6 billion people around the globe. total global broadband internet bandwidth was estimated by Cisco to be 5,372 petabytes per month in 2008. divided up between 6.6 billion people means we all get a 0.00265869476 Mbps connection--that's each person's 'fair share' of internet bandwidth. of course, we would all have faster internet connections if it weren't for those darn greedy business/enterprise internet subscribers.
internet bandwidth isn't a fixed commodity, or a limited natural resource. technology has always been driven by consumer demand, and broadband internet is no different. it's bandwidth-intensive applications like P2P, streaming-video/audio, enterprise applications, etc. that create the push for infrastructure upgrades and ever-increasing connection speeds/network capacities. it's idiotic to accuse "power users" or "downloaders" of destroying the internet or stealing other people's bandwidth. it's even more idiotic to think that everyone should use as little bandwidth as you do, as there's always going to be a someone who uses even less bandwidth. artificially manipulating internet usage while overselling more and more is what's going to cause broadband connection quality to continue to decrease. meanwhile, there are ISPs in Japan and Korea who are doing the exact opposite by increasing network capacity and connection speeds to meet the growing demand. perhaps if ISPs in the U.S. and Canada focused on making technological progress rather than opposing it, we'd be rolling out 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections too, rather than fussing over people actually using their 3-4 Mbps connections.
There are roads and plumbing and electricity and the Internet. These are services.
You pay for road access (tolls and taxes) but if the road is too busy, that sucks and deal with it. There is not enough room on any roadway to handle all potential customers.
You pay for water but if everybody flushes their toilet and waters the grass and takes a shower at the same time, water becomes scarce and that sucks but you deal with it. There is not enough water throughput to deal with all potential customers claiming their purchased usage.
You pay for electricity. Too many users = brownout. That sucks, deal with it.
The internet isn't a product, but a service. Like all services, it is oversubscribed. If there is a sudden surge of demand it becomes unavailable and that sucks but just deal with it. Go outside; it's hi-def too.
If there is a continuous over-demand for the service, the providers will build more infrastructure. And that will probably mean temporary limitations.
Just like road construction, or plumbing and electrical upgrades.
Don't get me wrong, I like to "download Linux" over bittorrent like everybody else. But I don't have a Service Level Agreement with my ISP, or my city road crew, or my utilities providers. I just deal with downtime.
-Alex
How much work could a network work if a network could net work?
If my ISP starts blocking traffic I consider valid coming to me, because it happens to be torrent traffic, they deserve what they get. Regardless of what type of traffic I am getting, if I use the bandwidth for A, B , or C it does not matter how I use the traffic, I still have 1gb per month download. Don't penalize me for using one form over another, or getting all my download at once instead of over the course of the month.
I hope enough people complain that this does not become an accepted practice amongst the ISPs to block torrent. Many technologies use the torrent download system, and do so because of better performance for people using the same technologies in conjunction with torrent
Only ISPs that have oversold their bandwidth should suffer. What a shame... Now they will actually have to invest to deliver what they actually sold to their customers.
Having actually read the article, the author has his facts wrong. His characterization of the technologies (UDP v. TCP) is incorrect and... prejudicial. The use of UDP in this application will avoid large amounts of TCP overhead and largely unnecessary TCP resends - for a net reduction of traffic.
Although the article characterizes this as an attempt to dodge throttling this actually looks like a good engineering decision. I'm not part of the design team - I don't know the rationale, but it certainly seems to have a good basis in technology.
Then pay for a T1 or OC3 connection.
I looked into that. Where I am would be $24,375 per year for a 2Mb line or over $275,000 for a 45Mb.
If she can't use her fat pipe, she can use mine...
Would Jesus uTorrent?
BitTorrent is used to distribute open source software and materials. You cannot just block BT because a few also use it for piracy it will hurt open source and you cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I am not a networking master, but wouldn't UDP be a better choice to avoid the TCP syn/ack packets? As many connections as a P2P program makes, changing from TCP to UDP would help alleviate some stress on routers worldwide. Although in this case, more unreliable, hash checks and pieces would help prevent corruption amongst files.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Sounds like another RIAA/MPAA conspiracy to get people to stop downloading via torrent...I'll believe this when i see it.
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Exactly!
I've been waiting for someone to say this. Sure, I've used torrents for other activities, but my primary one is watching TV shows because it's simply easier, and as far as i know this should be legal. I think the ISPs (in my case Time Warner) need to realize this and adjust their strategy accordingly. I've often wondered why it is that i really pay for cable TV when i can pretty much get the same stuff over the net. I think eventually all we will have is a network connection and all TV/Phone/Internet will flow over it.
you missed the "World" part
-- dnl
It's called a society and there are acceptable and unacceptable behaviors. Being a filthy pirate and hogging all the bandwidth is not nor should be acceptable behavior even though you really like all the free stuff you get from it.
You can't hog all the bandwidth, you can only hog the bandwidth allocated to you.
What you're saying is this:
The ISP gave my neighbourhood 500mbps, and some asshole is using all of it so I can get on the internet, but still paying for it!
The realty is this however:
The ISP gave me personally 10mbps, and the asshole ISP is telling me now I can't use all of it but still expecting me to pay.
See the difference here?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I do both... yeah, I've hit a few things.
See also: Airlines.
The difference is, of course, that if your flight is overbooked, the airline will actually spend more money -- on hotel space, a taxi to take you to the hotel, dinner, etc -- and then put you on another flight.
If your ISP has determined that they've got too much load, they can just cut you off -- this would be like the airline telling you to go home.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
They'll never cause another innocent to suffer?
Your logic (I know it's a stretch to even call it that) falls flat when those 10 guilty persons set free cause suffering to countless other innocents; such that could have been prevented but for the suffering of that one innocent.
We all suffer for the individual and the individual suffers for all. That's called society. Deal with it.
The difference you're missing here is that 10 *individuals*, even if guilty and sure to cause harm, have a limited ability to cause society harm as they have only the power to compel others on a limited basis as individuals, whereas government has, for all practical purposes, unlimited ability to compel through force of arms & law, and hence the power to cause nearly unlimited harm to society and the individuals within it.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
UK ADSL offers this, picking one provider, here's some pricing options for you,
8Mbit contended, 10GB/month cap : £27.00
8Mbit contended, 50GB/month cap : £50.00
0.5Mbit uncontended unlimited : £157.00
2Mbit uncontended unlimited : £412.00
scaling up, you could get 8Mbit uncontended unlimited for around : £1600/month
Consequently, you can get the performance of a £1600/month connection most of the time at a price of £27/month providing you're willing to share it with sixty other people. If you use more than 1/60th of the connection you'll either get a bill (bandwidth capped connection) or throttled ('unlimited' connection). Either way you aren't going to get to use much more than you pay for unless the ISP is trying to go bust.
If you want an ISP with low latency you want a bandwidth cap because they have spare capacity, if you want to try and squeeze more bandwidth than you pay for out of the line, the a throttled connection will let you do that but your internet access will be high latency because the ISPs lines will always be full - that's how they bandwidth limit.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
but why would you trust the programmer/user to report the time-sensitivity of a piece of data? Do we trust injured people at the hospital to triage themselves?
Netflix is a bad example too. They will throttle you if you start sending back your 3 DVDs too quickly... Of course they don't advertise that.
What's an "emergency call?" Are 911 calls routed through the Internet in your area?
Sorry, why? Your voice call takes priority over my file transfer or http traffic because ... you say so? What's so special about your voice call that it should take priority over the updates I need to run on a machine I am deploying? Why is your kids telling Grandma what they did at school today more important than me getting useful work done?
Excellent point. If you require guaranteed levels of service, it is you who should pay extra for it. My bandwidth should not be throttled to reduce the amount of time Youtube needs to buffer your streaming videos because someone at the ISP makes an arbitrary decision that your traffic should take priority over mine.
So you and I go to an "All You Can Eat" buffet and you eat less than I do so that makes you a "better customer."
I've already responded to this little straw man of yours, but I will add that limiting all customers equally would be acceptable. That's what those of us who are not in favour of "traffic shaping" are saying: sell us bandwidth, not services, and if the level of service degrades because everyone is trying to use it at the same time, we all suffer equally.
It's not up to IPS - or you - to decide my traffic is less important than yours.
I don't care why you're posting AC
I just graduated to an income bracket where I'm more time poor than cash poor.
That is, incidentally, why I still use BitTorrent. There is not yet a DRM-free or even Linux-supporting service which will allow me to download high-def, reasonably uncompressed movies over the Internet.
I don't have the time to deal with Windows more than I have to. Nor do I have the time to take an extra trip to the video store. I suppose I could use Netflix, but that's going to be even more hassle for even less quality (DVD vs 1080p).
Now, if such a service existed, it would probably use BitTorrent anyway, so that solves nothing for the ISPs. But if such a service existed, and would provide a decent selection, I might pay for it. As it is, no one has even reached feature-parity with piracy, let alone surpassed it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That's why we have a judicial system and a system of checks and balances.
My response was solely concerning the post above mine, and the implied assumption that no-one should be criminalized, just in case we might be wrong...
It's ridiculous to the extreme.
You do, if you've paid for the right to graze 10,000 sheep there. If the land can handle 20,000 sheep, and the land owner has sold these grazing rights thrice, who is at fault?
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.
And if BitTorrent went away, Linux DVDs would be much slower to download, and much more costly to host.
Why should Linux distributions have to suffer because of a completely unrelated activity? I suppose, if they moved to an HTTP-based protocol, we should just ban HTTP, or web hosting on residential connections? What's next -- NAT every connection, and start banning Skype, because it punches wholes through NAT?
I don't want to live in a country where whole protocols are condemned because they might be used for something of questionable legality. I kind of like actually having the Internet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy
So pot-smokers and people who exceed the speed limit lead us down the road to anarchy?
Oh god, someone invoked the pot-smoking and speeding argument. Well guess what, you speed and you get a fine. Feel free to speed often, and have your drivers license revoked. Feel free to smoke some pot and spend the next couple of months protecting your precious rear entry from a guy who calls you Susan.
If the law is not correct, civil disobedience is not the way to make people see that it's incorrect. Civil disobedience in modern society just gets you in a lot of trouble.
BT isn't the problem, it's the internet providers offering more than they can handle. If I am capped at 5Mb/s then I should be able to use that regardless of my protocol and so should everyone else. Internet providers, upgrade your infrastructure and stop over selling!
First post! (just in case I am...)
You could lay your own fiber for much much cheaper, even accounting for buying up all the property on the way.
why would you side with the ISP after a switch to UDP with BT? The ISP's actions caused this arms race. The power is all in their hands. They could spend the money they were supposed to on building up the infrastructure and this problem could be solved. How much energy is being wasted just fighting the desires of their customers?
Balderdash!
You're absolutely right.
And while we're at it, most thiefs enter houses using doors don't they? We probably should ban doors.
And people who do highway speeding or drug smugling use cars? Probably should ban cars also.
Do you want me to follow that line of thoughts? Because some people use some things illegaly doesn't make it right to ban the thing outright! That's not the same problem!
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Emergency call. Actually any call, if your data is ftp, http, torrent, or similar bulk data.
And who gets to make that decision?
Certainly, if the ISPs actually provided enough throughput, you could simply do QoS on your own router and be done with it.
Or if I pay more - this is capitalism.
So long as it applies equally to all the bits on that connection, I've got no problem with it.
And, perhaps, because I use less (average) bandwidth (i.e. am a better customer).
Not using what you paid for doesn't make you a "better" customer, any more than buying a donut and eating half of it would.
And yes, I want the utility company to limit it, as it is obvious you will not (use QoS).
Let's think about this -- we're comparing the Internet to a utility company.
What happens to those 911 calls when everyone's air conditioner kicks on at once, causing a particularly old piece of equipment to fail, killing the power?
That's right -- they have backup generators. Just as they would have a backup phone network, and very likely pay more for their service, and ensure that all calls make it through.
That's fine -- but the ISP does not get to pre-emptively throttle me because they think I might cause problems for 911 calls, someday, maybe, which is likely bullshit when the 911 center in my area probably isn't using VoIP anyway.
The client application can't know about congestion in the core of the network, so it breaks control at the core of the Internet where there's less management. If you read the article fully, this would have been apparent.
Real-time applications use UDP because they have built-in bandwidth caps and they don't burst to the full capacity of the network like file transfer applications. It's dangerous to put P2P on UDP on a very large scale and it will require a massive change in the core of the Internet to deal with this new behavior.
Civil disobedience in modern society just gets you in a lot of trouble.
What a cowardly point of view (no pun intended).
Something about more sessions to track uses more cpu and memory. I'd imagine it has to do with the tables required to track the sessions.
A "router" doesn't have session state. The only information it keeps are routing tables, and those are not dependant on the traffic being sent, but rather on the network topology.
Most home users have routers that also contain address-translating, stateful firewalls, and this is probably what you are thinking of. Too many active connections can cause such a device to stop working, but in practice even the cheapest sold today can handle somewhere between 1000 and 2000 connections.
Excellent analogy.
Selling a clearly marked service "
- "5mb/sec, 50gb/month"
- "1 air transfer to new york, you and 20kg of stuff, this friday at 0800"
then they oversell their capacity based on statistical analysis and when their statistical model fails, which it will always do, statistically speaking, they tell you
- "you bandwidth hog, we bill you on a backdated, horribly expensive business plan AND cut you off from now on AND never deal with you again. And if you sue, we tell everyone about your midget porn"
respective
- "We are totally sorry you cannot take this plane, take a later plane with an upgrade to business class OR take a hotel on us OR take some hundred dollar compensation"
And I was always furious about airlines doing this. Now it turns out they're actually pretty sensible about this matter and pure angels when compared to other businesses.
Actually, no, it's not a good thing.
I once brought a very large and very expensive intranet to its knees by accident. Basically I was using UDP packets to transfer a few gigs of data back and forth between a master node and a bunch of slave nodes. Neither the ATM interfaces on the Solaris boxes nor the switches themselves handled this well; the former wedged completely requiring cold reboot, and the latter just froze for long periods of time. You'd think it wouldn't matter, but evidently the designers had anticipated TCP would be the bulk of the bandwidth, and optimized for it.
Using UDP to move large amounts of data around on a network you have complete control of is risky. Doing so on the public internet is a very, very bad idea.
The land owner is at fault - but it would be both short-sighted and selfish to keep on grazing your sheep if you knew it was destroying the land.
Not to mention that nobody actually "chooses" to live on the land they were born into. That notion is just absurd. What happens to 99% of the world's population is that they are born into a society and CANNOT choose a different society without paying an overwhelming penalty. Therefore they make due with the cards they were dealt.
Very few people actually enjoy the ability to sit down and "choose" a better place to live. Out of the few people who do change societies, 99% of those are forced in one way or another (work, family, health, etc).
Well ALL of my bittorrent traffic is legitimate. And I don't know anyone else to compare it to. I've got to presume that you're commenting about either your own use, or that of your friends. ... Either that or that you've been illegally snooping.
I'll grant that there *are* people in a position to legitimately have information justifying the position that you have taken. It's just that the ones I know have never expressed one even similar to yours. (OTOH, I haven't asked them. It would seem a violation of professional confidence.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You're just another global warming apologist. Oh SUUUURE... it's BITTORRENT causing all this melting...
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
"You'd be really pissed off if no laws were enforced, someone decided they wanted your computer and either beat the living shit out of you or shot you in the process of relieving you of its ownership."
Who is this "someone" that seems to be held back from killing and looting only by the continued integrity of our legal system?*
If murder and theft were suddenly decriminalized, my desire to commit them would remain unchanged. I suspect the great majority of people feel the same way.
Perhaps laws against murder and theft exist not to prevent people from killing and stealing, but to punish those who do?
If that's the case, the people might be able to do away with their legislative body without becoming murderous, avaricious berserkers.
(Aside to moderators: I know this discussion is off-topic, but he started it.)
*Sounds like a pirate, ironically. Arr! (Cue 57 responses debating the definition of irony. Tinny and Bronzy, now we only need 56.)
Funny you should mention that as an analogy. In fact, there has been a lot of discussion in the past about DVD shipping delays and how they seem to happen to people who turn their rentals around overnight. Turn your rentals around too quickly, and suddenly they won't be "received" for four or five days. In effect, your DVD bandwidth gets throttled. To the best of my knowledge, no one has been able to prove that this is happening deliberately though. Maybe it's just coincidence, if you believe in that sort of thing.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Consider doing such a transfer trans-Atlantic when there's a temporary loss of capacity due to (say) a ships anchor cutting a fibre route. Suddenly your connection is congested although your ISP has not been overselling you - there's just been a loss of capacity on the network and now the backoff features no longer work. So instead of stuff just getting slower the whole system starts to break. That's what the author of TFA is afraid of - whether the actual implementation in uTorrent will do this, I can't say, but it sounds plausible.
Civil disobedience in modern society just gets you in a lot of trouble.
Stupid Rosa Parks and her civil disobedience. Could have avoided all that hassle if she had just given up her seat......
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The real world of us grown-ups outside the Soviet Union is not about real actual costs and real actual usage, it is about contracts and contractual compensation.
Which is the reason why a bottle of Coke costs 1 dollar at the store and 20 dollar at a fancy restaurant.
Which is the reason that all the people flying with you in an airplane all paid a different price for their seat.
If you abolish that, you help people in the short run, but instantly abolish freedom of contract as the basis of any and all successful economies.
But that's too far out to mention here, because in this country, we have laws of commerce which basically just say "a contract is a contract is a contract" albeit in a hundred different clauses.
Which brings us back to your post: company A offers a contract to the general public explictly stating "x mbit/sec and no other limits for the low low price of 10 dollars per month". When General Joe Public accepts this contract, Company A and Joe are in a binding contractual obligation with each other, out of which neither can escape for non-serious reasons without serious lawful consequences.
Company A didn't sell "a reasonable and sane share of x mbit/sec, while we define what 'sane' actually means" just as Joe Public didn't pay with only a part of his 10 dollars.
If that wouldn't be the case, we would have an economy where every partner in a contract could give as much or as little as he wanted. This may work for money donations on Christmas and candy on Halloween, but is no basis for an economy. That's why we write down contracts since the Middle Ages and have contract lawyers a dime a dozen.
If you object to that, I will gladly sell you my new car for which YOU pay full retail while I deliver only a glossy brochure, three wheels, a tiny spare wheel and a bag of seat stuffing. And then terminate my contract with you telling all the world how greedy YOU are.
Actually the whole "better 10 guilty people go free than 1 innocent person be punished" is the basis of the legal system's "innocent until proven guilty" and "beyond reasonable doubt" standards.
We, as a society, have made the choice. We would rather risk a guilty person walking free, and possibly harming more people, than risk punishing an innocent person. *That* is society, deal with it.
I think you lost a lot of credibility when you called a contributor to the WiFi and Ethernet specs an "industry mouthpiece".
I agree. They shouldn't be selling 10/15/20+ mbit connections if they can't provide that speed to the end users. I wouldn't hold them accountable if their network can't handle the provisioned speeds during unforeseen events (like the cell networks not keeping up during the VA Tech shootings) but if they can't meet the provisioned speed a majority of the time then they need to upgrade their damn network or stop selling those speed tiers.
I guess it's easier to market if you use great big BOLD letters that say "10 megabits" and little tiny ones in 4 point font preceding them that say "Up to"
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
then my torrents will download slow!
If you're going to transfer files over UDP then you need to build some TCP-like protocol on top of it. The article doesn't say exactly how BT works in this respect, but he's probably right. There's no way that BT's protocol could be as sophisticated as TCP, given its 30+ years of development.
Isn't this partly why SCTP was created? (Of course not all OSes and routers / NATs know about it, so it would only be of limited practicality in this instance.)
No, they haven't. What starts as a claim that BitTorrent has declared war on VoIP turns out to be a claim that BitTorrent has made a change to their protocols that might impact VoIP users as collateral damage - but ONLY if ISPs decide to engage in a foolish and moronic packet blocking scheme that would also impact DNS and therefore is unlikely to ever be implemented.
The article is choc-full of half truths and downright lies. The reality is that ISPs have many choices in how they "shape" user traffic, and the most obvious solutions (outside of upgrading their networks) that are fair rather than discriminatory are also the solutions that will have zero effect on VoIP users.
You can identify heavy bandwidth users and throttle their traffic. It's easy. Each packet has this thing called an IP address on it, that records where the packet is from, and another one recording where it goes to. If someone's identified as making heavy use of bandwidth at a time of peak congestion, you can use this hitherto completely unknown attribute of every IP packet to throttle traffic to and from that customer.
Easy. But it's not a knee jerk "It's BITTORRENT that's destroying out Internets!" response. So you get the Richard Bennetts of this world - who clearly have an agenda that's anti-BT rather than anti-bandwidth hogging - pretending it doesn't exist.
Idiots.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Actually, one could block BitTorrent. It's possible. Of course, it would be re-written into a different form, that one would also need to block. And again. And again.
The general term for such a game is "arms race". It frequently continues until both participants are eliminated. You don't find either saber-toothed tigers or mastodons around anymore. And BOTH Athens and Sparta ended up conquered by Macedonians.
Personally, to me it seems fair to offer a fixed amount of service/month + a cost for extra service. AND TO MAKE IT CLEAR!!! Hiding things in blocks of text is not making it clear. And if they advertise unlimited service, then they are *emphatically* required to deliver on their promises, even though they can't possibly do so. There should be (are?) severe legal penalties for lying in your advertisements. They should be enforced.
I see the entire mess as companies trying to get out of living up to their advertising claims. I see no justification in allowing them to do so.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
No, pot smokers who speed lead us off the road right into a tree ;p
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Post whatever price you see fit - all are fine with me.
But if you can't keep your contract BUT keep my money, you're going to jail.
Note to self: never make any explicit measures except the asking price in a contract of mine and then only sell vague assumptions that I never have to fulfill while collecting serious hard cash from gullible consumers.
Note to the general public: I have a reasonably new car that can drive reasonably fast, looks reasonably shiny and has a reasonable fuel consumption assuming you drive responsibly. It also has a low probability of failure*1, is not too loud on idle and will start without serious problems in a reasonably warm winter*2. The price is 10000 dollars and is not negotiable*3.
*1 this term does not apply for sales in Mexico
*2 this term does not apply for sales in Canada, Montana and Wisconsin.
*3 if you make any real offers, I will apply a 3000 dollar surcharge for a reason I will only tell you after the sale
And if you apply NOW within three minutes, I will NOT charge you a broker's fee.
Sounds to good to be true, eh?
Just look through your ISP contract and come back whining.
And no ads.
"As long as the UDP doesn't reach 176 degrees, the PVC tubes should hold up."
Surely the issue isn't using UDP to get around ISP's 'traffic management', the problem lies with the ISPs who have forced BitTorrent to use UDP with said 'traffic management' policies.
If the ISPs didn't throttle bandwidth, BitTorrent would have no need to use UDP and the world would be a better place. If the ISPs didn't complain to their customers for using the bandwidth they supply but had networks that could support their advertised bandwidth, everyone would be happy.
Unfortunately as well we all know, using 10Mbps of the 10Mbps connection you paid for is bad, you're not allowed to do that - heaven forbid you use the bandwidth you're buying from them :o
Informative? Try more like "troll" or "flamebait."
Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife from being locked in the bedroom.
You know what I'd like to see happen? Anyone who is caught using uTorrent with this setting gets their broadband internet access contract torn up. Don't even pretend that most bit torrent traffic is legitimate and legal. For every Linux DVD image distributed by bittorrent, there is probably dozens of times that much data in blatantly bootlegged content being distributed.
Please, go back to facebook.
I'd be happy to watch ads if it meant I could get the same speed/selection/quality as bittorrent. A big issue with current online offerings from networks is that either you can't play them outside of the US.
Often they use some proprietary client, or a terrible quality flash version, or they won't let you view in full-screen mode. Or you have to individually queue up 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 and 4/4 to actually watch a full episode. That's all assuming they have enough bandwidth to actually stream it to you in the first place.
Would this not only be a problem with transfers that are running while the cut happens? I mean if I start a udp transfer after the bandwidth is cut, then uTorrent should detect the lower transfer bandwidth and set the transfer speed lower. They do not have any way to know how the bandwidth between me and an random other peer, so when a new 'connection' is opened between me and an other peer, they need to determine the bandwidth. And in case of a cut, they should detect lower bandwidth.
And I think they really do need code to do dynamic available bandwidth detection(Similary in effect to tcp), because If I open a connection in my browser that uses half my available bandwidth, things would really fuck up(Both for uTorront and my browser) if uTorrent did not lower the speed.
There is also the "80 Hole". Basically since firewalls are often set up to block other ports than the regular HTTP port of 80 (plus SSL ports), anything else ends up being rewritten to tunnel through HTTP. With the overhead and security risks that incurs...
Are they willing to block the "80 hole"?
The best way to ensure that uTP doesn't kill the internet is to throttle it at the source, and any law that stands in the way of ISPs exercising that level of management is deadly to the internet.
The problem here is that he starts with a valid premise: completely unmanged uTP is a threat to the continued smooth operation of the internet, and comes to the completely unsupported conclusion that any law restricting the ISPs is bad.
ISPs need to be allowed to control bandwidth flow in a fair fashion to provide the best service possible to their clients, but this doesn't mean we should let them do whatever they want either. ISPs should, for instance, not be allowed to treat packets differently based on who they're coming from/going to, or what their content is, but some ISPs have been talking about doing exactly that.
Over regulation is bad. This doesn't make no regulation good.
Drugs are illegal, yet it's a multi-billion dollar international trade, despite many more times that amount spent on eliminating it. Why? Because there're drug users.
Vast majority of P2P traffic is probably also prohibited by various IP laws, but if enough people want something badly enough, no power in the world can prevent them for long.
The Post Office is a good example for the Internet. Right around the holidays, everyone starts to send catalogs, Christmas cards, and other packages. Far more than the Post Office deals with on a normal basis. Which causes delays in delivery. They even warn people: send everything by such-and-such date or it won't arrive in time for Christmas.
That's pretty much the Internet. Everyone expects a certain amount of bandwidth to be used. Occasionally, someone will exceed that, but usually at the same time, someone else isn't using theirs, so it's okay. But with Torrent, it's basically everyone using their bandwidth all at the same time. It's always Christmas. Now, the Post Office could staff for that situation, but obviously, prices will have to go up to accommodate their extra load. Likewise, your ISP can provide all the bandwidth necessary to let everyone use their limit of bandwidth all the time, but they're going to have to raise the prices a lot in order to provide that.
Note that they don't actually open the packages themselves unless there is an extenuating circumstance (bomb, etc), they might quickly look inside the box with a scanner to detect explosive devices/etc, but this is far and away from what ISP's can do, you can't send bombs that can blow people up in packets. Your counter example is not with the intent of my original message - being able to open private mail.
The problem is that running ANY bittorrent program is considered "running a server" by just about EVERY ISP, and if you read your terms of use agreement, "running a server" is terms for cancellation for most home connections.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
"does this give the shipping company or government the right to open my mail and packages because it passes through their facilities?"
Yes? Have you met the ICE? How about Homeland Security? Hell, even before that your packages were sniffed for drugs.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
You can use it but what you can't do is use it for things you agreed not to use it for in your Terms of Service agreement.
That tends to include such things as "running servers." Because of the amount of data uploaded by things like BitTorrent, the ISPs tend to consider that "running a server."
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Yup, I had a 5-at-a-time plan and would go through all five movies in two nights. After sending all 5 back on the same day, I'd get the next 5 spread out over 3-4 days.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Guess who has a lower tolerance for BS? ..."Lynette" whose children are screaming at her because their Wbox 3 is 'broken'?
The developers of the next generation of consoles and game software will do so in the environment created by the ISPs.
Give me one good reason why a console game *needs* the ability to send out multiple streams of UDP data at the same time. 'Cause that's what ISPs will look for -- not individual protocols. You just look for an app that *looks like* a badly behaving P2P app and throttle the entire user's stream. Well-behaved P2P apps, like Steam, will be whitelisted.
And I don't see very many mothers continuing to scream when the service rep looks at why the connection is throttled and asks if their family is using any file-sharing apps and strongly hints that the ISP doesn't support piracy of movies and music and that they should either shut off their filesharing or upgrade to a package that supports it or be faced with possible termination if they're caught violating their ToS. Little "Lynette" here isn't likely to even be AWARE of most legitimate uses for P2P, and frankly most big ISPs (the ones making the filtering decisions for the little ones that sublease their lines too) don't have to give a damn about customer service because they're one of the only two providers in town. ...And the other guys are doing the same thing.
Game, set, match for the ISPs. It's cheaper to hire low-skilled workers in India to listen to screaming moms than it is to upgrade backbone bandwidth. You don't honestly think whining to the outsourced customer support rep of the local duopoly actually *means* anything, do you?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Haven't you heard of "rolling blackouts?" They're saying "sorry, you won't get electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power."
Recently the hospital I work at got a call from the local power company asking us to run on genny for a few hours and sell them some of our excess juice.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
No, pot smokers who speed lead us off the road right into a tree ;p
Hahaha, true enough. Reminds me of a joke: What's the difference between a stoned driver and a drunk driver? The drunk driver blows right past the stop sign without even slowing down. The stoned driver stops at the stop sign and waits for it to turn green.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You have chosen to live in a society and by extension have chosen to live by society's rules.
Oh.. really. But the internet has a different society (world) and in here BT is OK. Protecting ourselves from the people, laws and morality of the physical world is justifiable.
A meltdown is good, at least those ISP will start to upgrade their services. Those ISPs have been living on a free income for too long.
The government do have that right. There's an entire department devoted to it - Customs.
Whether they should or not is a different matter, but they do have that right.
Did I just miss some sarcasm..?
The post office is a private industry, not the Government.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Everyone here seems to work under the assumption that heavy bittorrent users would be worse off in a world with download caps or metered bandwidth. I don't think so. It would force companies to compete to give good service with clear contracts where they actually tell you what they are really selling. This is bound to increase, not decrease, the availability of real bandwidth per dollar for most users, included us computer geeks.
How?
Is this some sort of strange free market fundamentalist idea that the market will provide solutions that make everyone happy, or do you have a good clear model by which free riders on the system stand to benefit under a system that holds them accountable and is explicitly designed to discourage their behavior?
I mean, I have to accept that what I am, from the view of lying "We sell unlimited bandwidth and are happy to serve customers of all stripes!" ISPs -- a "free rider" of sorts. I pay for the absolute cheapest DSL package available in my area, and I use about a third of its maximum capacity (upstream) every month. I probably transfer 10-100x the data of the average user of their *most expensive* package, and my ISP probably sees me as someone using "more than their fair share."
What ISPs want to do by metering connection is to create a world that provides a financial disincentive to heavy users. This gives them more breathing room to slow down upgrades, lets them attract more customers (who can't afford current rates), and lets them gouge the living heck out of the those who have high demands (restoring the usual "supply v. demand" pricing curve you get elsewhere) and turn high bandwidth into a premium luxury good that you can charge increasing rates for (like they do for business customers).
In a world priced to suit low bandwidth users and to dig more money out of high bandwidth users, how do high bandwidth users benefit more? Right now I pay less than average for my connection and use far more than average. I can see policy reasons for the public as a whole maybe benefiting from such a move, but how on earth does flipping the cost equation benefit me at all?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
first off, as you said, it's impossible for the "download fiends" to actually use more than their share of bandwidth. if i have a 56K dial-up connection, there's no way for me to just decide, "hrmmm, this isn't fast enough for me. i think i'll be a dick and download at 9 Mbps by stealing bandwidth from my neighbors."
I think you misunderstand.
The point isn't that you or I will use more than our share of bandwidth on our local network, it's that we'll use more of our share on intermediate servers between us and our destination.
With TCP, when I run into a congested intermediate server, my connection backs its speed down.
UDP doesn't and everyone else suffers for it.
I knew a girl who would be ecstatic if her man bought her some sexy underwear. She likes to flirt sometimes, ya know? Girls like to feel pretty and wanted...
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Except that you forgot the only reason they let you watch those shows on TV is because the commercials are included. It seems trivial, but the commercial advertising model is the one they depend on for revenue. Otherwise there would be no TV, no radio and now no internet. If you are willing to just press mute and or skip via TIVO they're willing to let you keep watching at the same price whatever that is. Its a gamble on both ends. Not that you shouldn't complain about it if you feel its a problem, but keep in mind that the result is probably going to be higher prices. Everyone complains that ISPs are advertising x and you're paying for it. Sure they're counting on you not noticing the overselling and not reading the fine print. But the bottom line is you would not be able to buy it at all if you really want it that way. Advertising is a broken business model that only works because SOME people actually watch commercials and are influenced by them. Overselling bandwidth is a similar broken business model but it works for a similar reason in that only a few people fully utilize and only a few people are interested in complaining about it.
I would love to see a statistical analysis of taxes paid vs bandwidth between those ISPs in countries people keep raving about doing so well providing internet vs US. People keep saying how the internet in the US sucks compared to so in so country. Well if you consider how many people are actually using a particular network you might see where the problem is. In the US we're lazy and consumption spoiled. You can get almost anything at any time. The quality of that which you get is mostly based on what you pay. Pay less, get less, pay more get more. This "rule" doesn't always work out but if you are a careful shopper it may work out for you. That's all anyone can count on unless one gets off one's ass and produces their own product. In some other country that may have much more taxpayer subsidy or a smaller number of users to support or a smaller percentage of users to support or a smaller land mass to cover maybe they are getting better service. It's a lot easier to support 10 users than 10,000. Its a lot easier to support 10sq miles than 10,000sq miles. If you want to keep griping, I challenge you to produce a service that is superior to that which is available. Talk to me in a decade.
You can't destroy the Internet; it's an instantly renewable resource. Once it's exhausted, it's done. It's a pure flow resource and if you overuse it the way to fix it is to back off; if you overuse a stock-flow resource like land, you have to back off AND wait, or you may find that it just doesn't grow back anymore.
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While your analogy about Netflix is good for the example, Netflix actually wants you to hoard the DVDs as long as you can because they make/retain more money that way.
Local families even were named after the drifting sands, or in Dutch 'stuifzand': Peter Stuyvesant.
So, incur maintenance costs, and fuel costs, on a small scale, which costs about 3 times as much as power plant retail power, and sell back some of it? Sure, but you're paying us the difference between your cost and our cost for what WE use, and full price for what we sell you.
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You pay for electricity by the pound, not on a monthly rate. If you want to run an ISP like a power company, then you have to accept a rate plan based on how much you use, rather than based on how much you want access to.
The disconnect with ISPs is that they are overselling because they're selling access - except they can't deliver on it certain peak situations. For the vast though shrinking majority of their customers, the maximum access potential will never be reached. It's those few times, people and places that actually hit that max that are causing them problems - because in those cases they've sold a product they can't deliver.
Unfortunately, without changing to a pay-as-you-go scheme, they don't have many tools for reducing the problem users; forcing them to quit, suing them, or trying to ignore them being the obvious ones. If they raised their rates to match the power user use, they'd lose market out of the bottom bunch of people. Who is going to pay $100 a month to check their email at home? No one, especially with cell phones covering that these days.
Telecoms don't WANT to move to a pay as you go plan, though, because they're making a lot of money right now off of those customers who don't use the service much. Ideally, all their customers would be like that - paying more for less - and they will want to manipulate the market in that direction.
And that is why regulation is needed.
[Ego]out
The basis of your argument for why complaints won't mean diddly ("the company doesn't care") is the exact reason why this would blow up in their face.
Because the company isn't going to care enough too selectively whitelist services or even differentiate between 'well behaved' and 'ill mannered'. You know they aren't going to, because they aren't right now.
And because they aren't differentiating, they will catch enough people in their dragnets that they will manage to piss off the wrong people and pay for it.
Have you noticed lately how badly cable companies are getting their lunches eaten by the satellite companies or the phone companies having their lunches eaten by VOIP and cable providers? These are groups that used to have a monopoly in their area and are now fighting off fairly strong competition because they got complacent and arrogant enough to not care what the customer thought of them.
No, I'm not saying that they are quaking in their boots right now, but the one thing I am certain of is that the genie is already out of the bottle. People are ramping up their internet usage and they aren't going to be willing to settle for less rather than more. If the current providers can't provide service, someone else will. Maybe that'll be a direct competitor or maybe it'll be something completely different. But it will be something, because as powerful as the telco and cable companies are, they aren't powerful enough to shut out everyone.
BitTorrent is believed to be harboring weapons of mass destruction. These weapons are believed to be capable of destroying all of the internet tubes.
Maybe that's why the government has has deployed 4,700 troops domestically, ramping to 20,000 over three years, trained to respond to "weapons of mass destruction attacks".
Think that will be enough?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You know.. this one time..
The sign DID turn green.
My life's never been the same since!
How *dare* you attempt to impugn the liberal practice of "shoot the messenger"!? He *allowed* the Messiah an opportunity to say something that revealed his true thoughts and beliefs!! Burning at the stake is too good for such a heretic!!
I'm so torn! I could go one of two ways...
The High Road Reply:
"You know, you'd be a bit more credible if you simply noted that partisans of all stripes play the 'shoot the messenger' game, and portraying it as a 'liberal practice' only reveals your own short-sighted, partisan bias. You could have pointed out that the whole 'is he or is he not a plumber because of a union-backed licensing program' was a silly argument to begin with by people desperately grasping at straws to discredit and already non-credible messenger that the McCain camp looked silly embracing in the first place when they could have just let the guy flame out on his own."
The Low Road Reply:
"At least his wife's cover wasn't blown, severely damaging her career, (arguably treasonously) endangering undercover agents, and destroying our line of info on Iran's nuclear program over an article calling BS on an obvious lie. 'Cause that's the kind of stupid thing you'd never expect security-conscious conservatives to do!"
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Something about more sessions to track uses more cpu and memory. I'd imagine it has to do with the tables required to track the sessions.
Routers don't track sessions, so more sessions has no effect on CPU and memory.
Network Address Translators have to track sessions, but those are at the edges of the network. Network hosts (i.e. your PC and the one you're pulling bittorrent data from) have to track sessions, but again those are at the edges of the network.
Your ISP's routers only have to track sessions if they're doing some sort of session-based QoS. Few ISPs do that, and none should.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
By comparing it to Netflix wouldn't I have to fill out a form of what web sites I want to browse to and if the site that's highest on my list isn't "available" I'll be redirected to a site lower on my list?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
So, in other words, people complaining about BitTorrent users overutilizing the network should read their contract, see there's no minimum guarantee of service or line speed, and get stuffed instead of trying to bully other people into using the network in ways that would make life more convenient for them?
Despite being a heavy BT user, I can't feel anything but horror at that line of thought because that line of thinking is behind every single tragedy of the commons situation EVER.
"There's no law saying that I can't."
"It's my land, so I'll do what I want with it! Don't you tell me what to do with it."
"I don't care about people downstream; I'll do what I see fit to do with MY water."
Et cetera. I mean, that's the situation as stands, but actually encouraging that line of thinking only encourages those on the short end of the stick to consume as much as possible to "get theirs." Pretty soon, it sucks for everybody.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Can you imagine signing up for a "3 DVD's at a time" plan from Netflix and then when you actually check out 3 at a time they start bitching up a storm because "You're hoarding the DVD's!!! None of the other customers will be able to rent any of them!!!". Of course not. Because like most industry's they understand that if you sell a capacity you better damn well be able to meet it.
BUT... Netflix is notorious for "choking" customers who return DVD's too quickly. Basically, if you return a movie per day, you cost them more in postage than you pay for your monthly fee, and eventually, they start delaying your movies by a day or two, slowing down your "bandwidth" so that they don't meet the "capacity" they sold you.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
UDP senders don't know when they're flooding the connection, so they just keep doing it. A TCP stream would back off to try to be fair, but your UDP stream is just going to keep on blasting at full speed.
If that's the way that it's implemented.
But UDP is just a pass-through of the underlying IP transport. You can build anything you want on top of it - including recreating as much of TCP (or an equivalent tuned better to your own usage patterns) as you want.
However: Suppose they DO just ignore flow control and hammer away: This is being done as a workaround for ISPs who throttle Bittorrent traffic. So it looks to me like the ISPs just brought it on themselves.
uTorrent looks to me like the users' nuclear option - a threat that creates the incentive to abandon war and come to some peaceful arrangement.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's half-true. The power company MUST meet peak demand, as well the rest of the electrical system. You can't say to people "sorry, you won electricity tonight because your neighbor is consuming too much power". That's absurd and ridiculous.
Say what ? That's EXACTLY what happens - when power companies can't meet demand you get brownouts and blackouts (which may or may not be planned and scheduled).
Assuming you're right: So what? You're claiming that legit activity is the minority; I noticed that you didn't claim legit activity doesn't exist at all.
So.. what to do about the legit BT users? Your solution appears to be: kick them off the 'net.
They do not have this problem in the top tier countries for
internet access, we have fallen almost out of the top 20
here in the USA.
To me it is pathetic, but the reason is greed.
We can run DWDM lines between all the major cities,
and have more bandwith that we can possibly use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWDM#WDM_systems
1.6 Tera bit over a single fiber pair and it has been
kicking around for several years, with proof of concept
in the 1970's.
Most of the fiber in the ground is Dark Fiber:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber#Dark_fiber_overcapacity
We don't have a resource problem, just like the corrupt and
crooked high bonus financial thieves, we have a greed problem.
The bent over shaved sheeple also were sold a load of manure
being told we would give 200 Billion in Tax dollars for
an upgrade to the system and we got the shaft.
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
That is right, we paid the evil slimy bells 200 Billion in
US tax payer money and they ran off laughing and gave us nothing.
They decided to cheap it and run DSL over existing lines
and give us a sub par product that did not even meet half
of what was spec'd and they slow rolled it out to us.
They also committed sabotage against other companies trying to
use their lines to get DSL in faster than they wanted it put in.
Greed is job #1 in the USA.
And that is why we are about to fall out of the top 20 on
net access world wide when we should EASILY be #1.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
At least where I live, there are special laws in existence guarding the transfer of mail, and they are *special* and as far I can tell *exclusive* to postal mail, and I'd think that the U.S. has similar laws. So no big surprise that there is nothing going on with your mail, but an ISP is obviously not bound to these laws.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
That's equivalent to saying "here is some electricity, but you can only use it to power your stove. If you use it for your air conditioner, you're violating our ToS and we'll cut you off"
It makes absolutely no sense.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Similarly, overselling is also common in shared web hosting (e.g. dreamhost and all the other $5/month hosting services) and telephone service. While nearly all cell plans allow for "unlimited night and weekend" calling (and some now even offer "unlimited everything"), and many POTS services allow for "unlimited local calling", were people to try to use these services for 100% of the time they theoretically could, we'd find that existing infrastructure wouldn't even remotely be able to handle it.
Hell, airlines and hotels overbook all the time.
Sorry, grandparent post, but overselling is in no way unique to ISPs.
So pot-smokers and people who exceed the speed limit lead us down the road to anarchy?
if so, I must take up weed and speed immediately.
After you sold it to me, it's simply criminal to then say
No, that would be a civil lawsuit.
(ianal, tinla, sorry to nitpick)
Absolutely - The Gvt instpects every package that traverses their facility.
Ultimately, consumers are expecting to get everything for nothing. The ISP's caused this in the early days of marketing, but the bottom line is that a 6 or 10 mbit connection that is rated for continuous usage is well beyond what most individuals are willing to pay.
The job of the ISP is and always will be to smooth the peaks and valleys of demand so that it will fit onto the smallest amount of upstream bandwidth. Routers and pipes are very expensive. The goal is to minimize the expense and spread this across many customers. Due to technology, you are getting much greater individual peak capacities, but the aggregate capacity has not grown nearly as much.
If you really want a constant 6Mb pipe that will run at full capacity 24x7 and you live in suburban america - you should be prepared to pay $1500 to $2000 per month. Consumers are responsible for this state of affairs just as much as they are for Detroit. Everyone is complaining that Detroit hasn't invested in high-mileage technology, but 24 months ago, how many people voted for an SUV instead of a Corolla? The big 3 followed the money. The same has happened with bandwidth.
So, nearly 100% of .torrent traffic is piracy and oddly enough - an ISP can get sued for NOT stopping it, or it you hold up medical data, or if you interupt someone's 911 VOIP call. ISP's must have the ability to shape traffic. Finally, any legitimate use of .torrent (Like Blizzard.net) is a terrific use of the technology and operates on bursts like any other legitimate stream.
The USPS reserves the right to inspect mail... sorry.
http://www.usps.com/websites/depart/inspect/usc18/
Because I'm a bit egoistic, like most people, except fanatics? I don't use BT, although I do see the value in it - I just don't really need it. As long as it uses TCP it doesn't cause me much harm. I think arbitrary caps on a protocol are not ethical and a breach of contract, so I side with BT, even if some of the uses are disputable (IP law is blown way out of proportion, harming fair use, but there is something wrong in getting everything for free on the day of release). Maybe I could get a slightly better connection if TCP BT was capped, but I'm not willing to support this solution for ethical reasons. But in an arms race you have to look out for collateral damage. UDP in BT will affect my daily, TCP-centric use of the net. Why should I support that?
This is actually important. If Joe Sixpack starts seeing its connection slow down to a crawl, hears that BT is the cause and sees a dramatic change after strict UDP caps are introduced, then instead of not caring, he will be against Beat-Tow-End, or whatever that thing is. What then?
It's hard to side with protesting masses, when they burn tires right under your window. BT just rolled out the tires in all corners of the Internet and is looking for matches. Yes, it will be noticed by those who don't use it yet. No, they will not be supportive.
"Don't meter then. Sell them a realistic line speed."
Great...Now we are going to have to pay more to steal things for free!
I'd pay extra for the guaranteed allotted bandwidth.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Interestingly enough you are actually defeating your own argument....
You see you can connect an air conditioner so long as it has been verified to only consume so much amperage.
If you want to use an air conditioner that uses 200 Amps, you can bet your ass that the electricity company will come and visit you quite quickly. They will ask, "ok so why are you using 200 Amps?" What gives. And if you say, "none of your business", they will reply, "ooops sorry no electricity for you..."
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I'm sorry but the "Bittorrent (or video, or pr0n) is going to kill the internet" BS is touted in the US about as often as Wall Street Hit's up Washington for their allowance. I don't mean to troll here but honestly I'm growing weary of the FUD.
To the ISP's of the world. If your tubes fill up, Build/Buy/Design bigger ones. (Oh and I don't want to hear about how large the US is, Canada is larger has more space between cities and does a better job of getting true broadband to people than we do.)
Perhaps we would be better served by trying to find ways to accommodate the uses of the net, instead of spreading fear, and sticking our heads in the sand, while the rest of the world passes us by.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
If using UDP on BT will slow the rest of the nets to a crawl I don't want that either. There is a simple answer. BT doesn't have to resort to such tactics if the ISP's stop their dirty practices. All they have to do is stop. They are the oppressors in this situation. Users are just fighting back in whatever way they can. It's either fight or give up. Backing people into a corner is never a good idea. It makes them do things out of desperation.
Balderdash!
If everyone gets to pick and choose which ones they want to abide by and not, then that becomes anarchy
Actually, during the earlier years of the internet, this was exactly what we had. And it worked great.
If my ISP is selling me unlimited internet and they decide not to deliver, I want a rate cut.
I think you should argue that you should pay for the share you're getting. If you get bandwidth limited by a constant k, but paid for unlimited bandwidth, it would only be fair to pay a limited part of an unbound whole:
lim_{n \rightarrow \infty} \frac{k}{n}
(i.e. 0)
Lies! You know a girl!?
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I didn't realize i was griping, but i'll address your points one at a time here:
Commercials yes i realize they make money from the commercials, why don't they just make their own torrents which include commercials? Personally i wouldn't mind a bit, it's not the commercial-freeness of the shows i see online that i like, it's that i can get an entire series all at once and not have to worry about missing an episode.
No TV/Radio/Internet without advertizing? I agree on the TV and the Radio, but i pay for my internet with cold hard cash, without advertising, there may be less content, but advertising has nothing to do with my internet connection, or are you saying that they subsidize the internet with advertising dollars that they make from cable?
Higher Prices yes, perhaps for some the prices will be higher, however if they were to offer many tiers of bandwidth then the prices might actually be lower (assuming that all programing and internet were through one connection) Here's an example. i use an average amount of bandwidth, and watch relatively few shows on cable, so adding the cable shows to my internet bandwidth would not really affect it much, for others however, they might not use the internet much and instead chose to spend countless hours watching some inane completely mindless utterly ridiculus cable programming (such as ESPN) for them, adding the cable would drastically increase their bandwidth and therefore they would have to pay more for it.
Other countries? first, i mentioned absolutely nothing about other countries, but what you say is probably true, and the reason for it is likely that the technology originated in this country therefore since it's been around awhile we now have an antiquated system whereas newly connected countries can put the highest quality systems in right from the begining. its the same reason why there are more cell phones vs landlines in Iraq than there are here. it costs money to change the systems, but at some point you have to do it if you are going to remain competitive.
I don't know where you live, but I can use electricity any way I want, how ever much I want.
The limitations are not from the electric company, but the buildings own infrastructure. Glass fuses are pretty old school. Probably not a good idea to have 3 computers plugged into the same outlet. But if I decide to run my own mini datacentre with AC and humidity control, in my own apartment, the electric company can not say anything.
A sudden spike in electricity usage is also not grounds for termination, but it can be grounds for a search warrant due to marijuana hydroponics, but that mostly applies to homes. And even then, if police discover you growing tomatoes instead, there is nothing the electric company can do.
Of course, if you're running a hydroponics growing operation, regardless of what you're growing, your electric bill will be pretty high. But hey, if I transfer 500gb of data in a month, my internet bill should be kinda high too.
I think the trick here is to find the right balance between dollars and bits and turn the internet into a utility. $1 / gigabyte is NOT a good balance. $0.10 / gigabyte might be. That's $50 on that month if I downloaded 500gb.
These are numbers pulled out of my ass here, but in my non-expert opinion, $0.10 to $0.20 / gigabyte of data transferred seems like a good rate, maybe ontop of a small set monthly rate for speeds. $5/month for 3mbps, $10/month for 8mbps, + $0.10/gigabyte transferred.
That seems fair to me.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Have you heard about banks? You are entitled to the amount of money written under your name in the bank. The bank will have no problem if some people will try to take a large portion of their money, but if many will do it it will collapse.
I've never heard of banks being laughed out of town...
Good utility analogy. It's time to stop pretending bandwidth is not a utility.
On the upside, I just fininshed my month of "one extra DVD-at-a-time" thanks to the settlement.
Netflix just needed to update thier customer agreement. If they had a clear rule like "if you send a DVD back the same day you get it, we'll pretend we didn't receive it until the next day" then they would have avoided the complaints and lasuits.
This is the problem wit the ISPs too, of course: for the most part, they won't tell you what the rules are.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Does that give the Post Office the right to screen my mail and packages for things it considers not worthy of delivery? The real problem is the way the ISPs are selling their service. It needs to become utility pricing $10/Gb or something similar. All the other utilities manage to price their service based on usage, it's time for the ISPs to step up.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
I thought that UDP had less overhead than TCP, so how is it worse, exactly, the article is very vague. If the ISPs Can't supply the bandwidth they have on the label, then its there fault, not the application developers fault, that the rest of the users cannot access the internet? Sure they will need to use more money, but it wouldn't hurt anyone except the CEO if they invested more into bandwidth.
O.o
That is right, we paid the evil slimy bells 200 Billion in
US tax payer money and they ran off laughing and gave us nothing.
C'mon now, that was just a proof-of-concept excercise for the bailout.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Of course, your post office argument is invalid as well...
OP suggested that anyone caught using uTorrent with the UDP setting turned on should have their internet disconnected. While that's probably a little bit extreme, it doesn't correspond to your argument about the post office opening packages. OP isn't suggesting that the ISPs run DPI on the packets. More accurately, it would be checking the "shipping label" - who's sending it, who is it being sent to, and how is it being sent. That is significantly different from looking at the contents of the package itself.
BitTorrent claims it is actually trying to reduce congestion.
Ask your friends in Phoenix or Las Vegas about their water situation. Yes, they pay for what they get, but there's also a sort of required community baseline behavior to not overload the resource itself.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
And that doesn't happen in civilised countries, basically, ever (short of storms bringing down lines). What kind of government would survive if it allowed 'brownouts'?
Commercials yes i realize they make money from the commercials, why don't they just make their own torrents which include commercials? Personally i wouldn't mind a bit, it's not the commercial-freeness of the shows i see online that i like, it's that i can get an entire series all at once and not have to worry about missing an episode.
Because they'd get nowhere near the exposure. Advertisers want specific people to view their ads. It's not generally the people who would download the ads for entertainment.
No TV/Radio/Internet without advertizing? I agree on the TV and the Radio, but i pay for my internet with cold hard cash, without advertising, there may be less content, but advertising has nothing to do with my internet connection, or are you saying that they subsidize the internet with advertising dollars that they make from cable?
Most websites make revenue from advertising. No advertising, no revenue, no website.
Higher Prices
They're effectively doing that with bandwidth caps and penalties. And people are complaining to high heaven.
Well, normally not, but if you start shipping thousands of boxes full of lead bricks to Alaska in priority mail flat rate boxes, they would put an end to it eventually.
what sig?
By "reducing the value of bandwidth", do they mean "cutting into our profit margins by actually using the bandwidth that we only promise because we are sure you won't use it"?
Because screw that.
Did the ISP really give you 10mbps? Can the ISP even guarantee you that?
They can't, and so they're limiting users so they can guarantee a reasonable level of service to everyone without raising prices.
Before you cry about what they advertise and sell to you, try reading the terms and the fine print, not just the big stupid number. They're almost certainly not selling you a constant 10mbps pipe.
Before you say you're being victimized by your low-usage neighbors, imagine a truly fair Internet billing scheme: in addition to a low general periodic charge people are charged per bit, probably with some bits more expensive based on time of day. Maybe we come up with a pie-in-the-sky way to request low-latency packets and charge more for them, too. This way you as a heavy P2P user would probably pay less per-bit by using the cheapest times possible, but your overall bill would still be a lot higher because you use the network more. Currently Grandma down the block (assuming her computer isn't in a botnet) is subsidizing your torrents.
Now, I think a "fair" scheme like this would have some negative effects: the clamp-down on people and companies doing innovative things and contributing a lot to the Internet community is the biggest one. Another is that people that get viruses or otherwise wind up downloading a lot could wind up with enormous bills, and the effort spent disputing and explaining them would be unjustifiable, considering that the subsidizers aren't the ones threatening to leave. So I don't exactly recommend anyone implement this idea.
I might suggest to heavy P2P users that if they want to leave their computers on all day generating Internet traffic that they ditch their crummy consumer-level ISP. They're basically using commercial levels of traffic, so if they want commercial-grade service guarantees they should choose their ISP accordingly. More expensive? Absolutely. You get what you pay for.
uTP was explicitly stated -- by its developers -- to be an end run around providers' reasonable network management practices, and Richard is absolutely correct when he notes that it could cause severe network problems. In fact, Ricard understates the case, because he neglects to mention one extremely important point. By switching to UDP, BitTorrent will not only compete with VoIP and some video and audio applications but also with DNS. This could well be catastrophic, because DNS (domain name service), as ISPs know all too well, is a "critical path" protocol in virtually every application. If DNS is slow, EVERYTHING ELSE that users do will also be slow. Remember, most network applications, including Web browsers, have to stop and wait -- unable to do anything else -- until they resolve one or more domain names. So, they'll hang frustratingly if DNS packets are dropped due to congestion. And what underlying transport protocol does DNS use by default? UDP. (It can use TCP as well; however, it does so if, and only if, it has a lot of data to transfer. And TCP, due to its complex handshaking and "slow start" flow control, is much less efficient and much slower.) So, what we're talking about is not just congestion but sand in the gears of the entire Internet. Also, because uTP does not conform to any explicit congestion management protocol that could detect congestion BEFORE packets are dropped, the only way it would be able to detect congestion in the network would be after packets were dropped. Which means that by the time it did anything -- IF it did anything -- to mitigate the congestion it caused, it already would have damaged the network. Finally, do you actually trust P2Pers -- who already, in the vast majority of cases, are brazenly engaging in illegal activity -- to be courteous to anyone? There's no honor among thieves, folks. YMMV, but personally I wouldn't want to be on the same cable segment with someone using this new version of BitTorrent.
The other advantage is I don't have to wait for the local broadcaster to pich up a show and decide to screen it when I am not home.
The downloads I get are better quality than the terrestrial coverage I can get, and I download over night and watch when I want to in the week, or on my phone when catching the train to work, etc.
This way I never have to worry about accidentally catching an episode of Suvivor when what I was really looking for was Mythbusters. 8)
It makes plenty of sense.
You're subject to be cut off by your power company if you use too much power. For example, running large motor devices for a long time will cause them to cut you off, because your circuit and your neighborhood's circuit probably wasn't set up for you to be running large and very high power demand devices. There have been people cut off for running machine shops, plant growing operations (not necessarily for illegal substances..), etc.
The reason it isn't protested about is that it happens to so few people.
If everyone used the maximum amount of power that their houses could support, the power infrastructure would melt down. There's simply not enough electrons or metal.
Moving to a pay-per-demand system wouldn't be a bad idea, however, it would be abused. You'd end up paying Aussie bandwidth prices for a helluva lot smaller amount of bandwidth than you'll get today.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Last I checked, the USPS still asked if you were shipping anything dangerous, flammable, or perishable. They also employed a team of postal inspectors to handle cases of fraud, abuse, and other illegal activities taking place in the postal system.
So, yes; they do have the right to screen your mail.
Well, this would be akin to opening all my mail and deciding that certain things should not be delivered because they didn't feel like it. Just give up; it's a stupid practice.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Not in my country. We don't have the regular blackouts you seem to have in the USA.
Says who? nobody picks the life they're born into.
With the world in the state it's in, it may take as long as 29 years to be able to afford to move out of the country you're forced to live in.
If when I was born I had a chance to read and understand all the laws in every country, and then got the choice to go and live where I wanted, I wouldn't have stayed here.
But you don't. In this day and age, there's countless people that can't stand how things have "always been".
There also aren't any stupid copyright restrictions. I live in Australia, and most of the services I've tried (paid or free) give some notice about being unable to access the video because I don't live in the USA. Australia has several copyright treaties with the US which basically makes their law valid here, but they still aren't accessible.
OTOH, BT is accessible anywhere, and can be easily viewed on any computer, MP4 player or streamed to a TV by an Xbox, etc.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
You've got physical limits in the wiring almost certainly less the 200A.
Try to hack on those limits too hard and you bet your ass you will get cutoff.
Data isn't the same as power, the analogy only goes so far.
As I understand it most 'Hogs' are given the chance to upgrade to 'business class' service and refuse.
TOS agreements should be clear about hogging and how much discretion the ISP has. Just like power rate tiers should be clear in the power companies TOS.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Terrible analogy. Electricity is metered. There's a reason most utilities are metered. It seems like no one on slashdot understands that it fucking costs money to provide a utility. You can't have a reserved 10Mbps connection for fifty bucks. You just can't, if everyone was guaranteed their full bandwidth simultaneously internet access would rise by an order of magnitude.
So overselling capacity is essential to the model, assuming you don't want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for your internet connection. Another option would be to meter usage, this would put an appropriate market force in place. But when Comcast tried this in a test area they were roundly condemned.
Bottom line, there is a choice...oversold capacity, metered usage, or you pay a fuckton more for a reserved slice of bandwidth.
The ISPs started this war, I say bring it on.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Clearly you've never rented with utilities included.
Ah, you won't get any disagreement from me about the ISP aspect -- they have no business inspecting the packets and should be taking a hands-off approach. They should be clearly setting the terms of the service (peak and average bandwidth) and throttle or reject usage above this limit.
I was just saying that the post office isn't necessarily a good comparison. They certainly should be opening/rejecting anything which will cause physical harm to the carriers or recipients (letter bombs and the like). I'm less pleased with the law enforcement allowances (that's a loophole which can be too easily exploited), but it's there nonetheless. (And, I have to admit, the postal inspectors are rather successful at their mission. They keep a low profile and use discretion, which is a lot more than one could say about many other law enforcement agencies.)
The post office is a private industry, not the Government.
It's an agency wholly owned by the United States Government, and the top management are all Presidential appointees. In what sense is that "private industry"?
And the brethren went away edified.
That's equivalent to saying "here is some electricity, but you can only use it to power your stove. If you use it for your air conditioner, you're violating our ToS and we'll cut you off"
No, it's more like saying, "Here's some electricity and some water, use it for what you like, as long as it's not illegal. If you use excessive amounts of water, we might investigate you for breaching water restrictions*. If you use excessive amounts of water and electricity, we might get suspicious that you've got a hydroponics setup and tip off the police."
If the terms of service say you can't use the service to do certain things (whether for legal reasons or otherwise), and you DO those things, you're violating the contract you signed. If you want to run a server, pay for a business plan that allows you to.
You do not have the right to do whatever you like. Read the fine print.
*There are currently water restrictions active in most states of Australia - and rightly so, considering the severity of the drought we're in.
It's not a bug, it's a lepidopter!
Using UDP in BitTorrent can't make that much of a difference.
It's only natural to move BitTorrent to UDP, considering that the bulk file transfers don't have the "session" nature, and also that Bittorrent already has to deal with transmission errors. Let's cut the fat...
The main problem with TCP is managing the memory of the non-ACKed transmitted packets, and the flow control is intended more to share the machine's connection with other TCP connections, than anything else. TCP doesn't know about the Internet, about "congestions"... The "Congestion control" of TCP Reno, Vegas, etc, is more of a kludge than can and should be enhanced. Using UDP we can even create more conservative policies to prevent congestions.
The bandwidth available to each machine is controlled by the gateways and routers, by the ISPs between the bitTorrent and Skype users, deciding when to drop the packets. The way routers can decide that, and consequently implement a certain QoS to its clients, does not depend on TCP or UDP use, the packets will be allowed and dropped just the same.
Now think about this: if UDP had this problem, of taking up band irrestrictedly, it would not just cause havoc on the Internet, it would first cause problems to the other UDP connections in the machine itself!! If UDP really had no flow control at all, it would consume your own machine's bandwidth before causing a "congestion" problem way up in the network. Last time I checked, it's the OS who tells the programs when it is ready to receive a new package, and never the other way around. There is sure SOME kind of limitation to UDP in any OS, even if it's nothing as sophisticated as the Renos around.
Flow control is not "congestion" control. What TCP has is congestion fear, and not control. It doesn't control it's fear yet... We need extra protocols to handle QoS properly, for the routers to tell the clients when are congestions going on the network... IPv6, MPLS and RSVP now!!! The ISPs need to put their money on these new technologies, and not blame the users to use the network exactly the way they are supposed to: just using as much as they can. The routers can drop the packets whenever they like, and that's they way TCP/IP works... Enforcing QoS up in the middle of the network, and not asking the users please to hold on.
You are right, it is not up to me. But it certainly is up to the ISP.
I cannot see why ISP should (or would) not limit high users more than low users. Therefore those who use it for VoIP should not even notice if there is congestion, after all VoIP takes very little bandwidth.
Your buffet analogy is good - I am certain the owner does think those who eat little and fast are better customers than those who eat several hours and a lot. As I am certain ISP thinks about those who turn on their ADSL routers only rarely and use it very little.
It is interesting to notice the "capitalism" point, because I personally do not fully believe in it. That could (therefore would) lead to the situation where one VoD company would get good bandwidth (on some ISP) and the others would get shitty.
I agree that it makes no sense, however the electric company used to do exactly that:
"When electricity was first introduced into the household, it was primarily used for lighting. At that time, many electricity companies operated a split-tariff system where the cost of electricity for lighting was lower than that for other purposes. This led to portable appliances (such as vacuum cleaners, electric fans, and hair driers) being connected to the light fitting."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_AC_power_plugs_and_sockets
UDP and IP multicasting go well together for transmitting the same data to many hosts ... couldn't it help reduce the torrent traffic after all?
Well, see, that's a different thing than traffic shaping. If you are arguing in favour of caps, I am in agreement with you. I have no problem with an ISP - or a restaurant owner - saying you get this much for that amount. I just don't want my ISP saying you can't use a certain protocol or you're getting throttled.
They can even say only so much during certain hours if they like. As long as they spell it out clearly in their contract exactly what you are paying for that's fine, and fair.
You talk about VOIP, and how that should be looked upon favourably because it uses little bandwidth. Well, suppose your ISP (who may also be a Telco in a lot of cases) offers a VOIP service as a value add? And they decide to "shape" your Skype traffic, so the QOS is lousy compared to their competing service, to make it more attractive. Is that also "up to the ISP?"
If we allow them to throttle our traffic based on content or protocol, we've traded our free and open Internet for AOL.
I don't care why you're posting AC
This would be mitigated if ISPs blocked port 25. Although I am not in favor for a stringent no exceptions policy...
Imagine if you had to ask for port 25 to be unblocked for you... Most of the people making the request would know how to handle their machines, but then again, but it's a slippery slope (on the other hand, Grandma certainly does need some help securing her Windows box).
It may make absolutely no sense... but it's their ToS, and their right to be as eccentric as they wish, just as it's your right to use the electricity for senseless things if they don't ban it.
They get to propose conditions on the agreement, and we get to refuse the agreement if the conditions are too dumb. Such is the nature of free exchange.
The post office moves your property around.
The ISP shuttles around signals which cannot be owned.
Not to mention that a private postal system would have every right to require the ability to inspect the contents of every package as part of the agreement. Don't like that arrangement? Find yourself a different postal system.
Same with ISPs.
It's their business and their property. Who are you to tell them what they can and cannot do with it while expecting preservation of your own property rights?
You cannot just block BT because a few also use it for piracy
What about if the vast majority of people use it for piracy?
Wow, that's like taking hostages, and saying it's the cop's fault when you shoot them.
The number of TCP sessions *makes no difference at all* to an ISP - assuming they are not doing deep packet inspection of course. Apart from that case, all IP packets are routed, with no inspection of the TCP header, so there's no way the number of sessions could make a difference.
If you want to use no. of TCP sessions as a weak indicator of P2P activity, go ahead, but BitTorrent developers will develop workarounds (maybe this is one of them) - ultimately everything may end up as encrypted UDP traffic that's really hard to traffic shape even using DPI.
I generally agree that you get what you pay for - there are shared pipes all over the place, so if people use BT 24/7 and fill their DSL/cable access link, they should expect to pay more than people who simply do email, surfing and occasional video clips. Traffic shaping and usage caps are just different approaches to making behaviour fit the costs of running the network.
Yes, I do have 10,000 sheep. But this land is common, I have a right to let them all graze there if I want to.
Sorry, your internet connection is part of the commons? Mine is paid for privately, and I can graze all the fuck I want on the paddock that I rented FOR GRAZING.
not quite. ISP's arent the police and shouldn't have the powers that come with policing citizens.
Balderdash!
Just out of vicarious interest, how long would you expect downloading an 800MB, heavily-seeded DVD rip to take at those speeds?
shame the ones I know dont dress like they do. Lowest common denominator -- what ever gets them by.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
And that doesn't happen in civilised countries, basically, ever (short of storms bringing down lines).
You might want to expand on "civilised countries" here, so we can tell how much of an ass you're being.
What kind of government would survive if it allowed 'brownouts'?
Electricity supply is privatised (typically with negative results) in many countries. Hardly something the Government has a huge amount of control over.
Bandwidth is and always has been priced according to average usage. No ISP in the world has ever had enough transit to cover the full bandwidth of even 25% of it's customer's total combined link bandwidth, and that doesn't mean they're ripping off the customer; it's simply indicative of the fact that customers do not need to be filling their link all the time in order to find it valuable.
That said, the sky is not falling. If bandwidth demand goes up, ISPs will (and do) deal with by providing two options:
1. Maximum total monthly downloads with per-Mb charging or a hard cut-off thereafter.
2. Higher prices for unrestricted connections.
Bandwidth gets cheaper every year and does so more quickly in the face of high demand, so whichever you choose it shouldn't be too painful.
I understand your frustration and agree with you. However, have you ever had a commercial electric account? My experience with commercial electric has been that if you use the electricity in a certain manner...say, turning on three air conditioners at once, you will be pushed into a higher rate bracket because you are deemed a heavy demand on the system. I wonder if a system like this would work for ISPs and consumers alike?
... not real time. So at least 37 people posted before you and that's as far as the moderators had got since publication. Sometimes I have to wait overnight to see how others have responded.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
You have chosen to live in a society
No, you're born into it, and randomly moving away isn't always an option.
c++;
when those 10 guilty persons set free cause suffering to countless other innocents
When that happens we'll lock them up. What's so difficult with that?
c++;
will happily disconnect bittorrent using customers, as thats the most profitable path to take. For people like me, I'll simply lose internet due to lack of competition (that is the result of the free market in my location).
All the isps need to do is to periodically disconnect the top one percent of customers based on bandwidth use.
*laughing*
No, the Presumption of Innocence has nothing to do with the discussion above.
Read for context next time. Here's a hint in case your scroll-wheel is broken:
"You can't blame your wife for stabbing you in the face when you keep locking her in the bedroom."
"Using your stupid analogy, this would be more like threatening to raze the entire city to the ground because no one intervened to stopped the wife"
So letting those "innocents" get hurt to protect *one* other is just the price those "innocents" pay?
They'll just gonna shrug it off and pretend everything's OK?
When we could have locked them up before hand, and had only one innocent suffer?
Cute.
There's no way ISPs are selling more (how is it called? Link width? Connection speed?) than they have, is there?
The technological solution has been there for 10 years already, the ISPs/vendors are just too lazy to utilize it. It's called DiffServ.
All you need is to classify your traffic into 3 classes and use separate queues for them, with strict priorities:
- High Prio - <= 1% of the end user's theoretical maxed out traffic
- Medium - <= 10% of the theoretical traffic
- Low Prio - the rest
Games & VoIP would go into High Prio (Low Delay).
Anything unqualified (Web browsing, e-mail, etc.) would be Medium (good enough for Interactive traffic)
BitTorrent and big downloads would be Low Prio (Bulk).
The traffic itself can be classified by the applications on the socket interface.
You would be surprised to hear that some of it already happened even before DiffServ - eg. Telnet/SSH on Linux labeled it's traffic as Low Delay before ages.
Anyway, the max. percentages can be easily enforced by re-labeling any user's traffic to a lower class if it exceeds the percentage on a daily/monthly average basis. So the end-users and application software vendors clearly have the incentive to comply and not to abuse the system.
That's it, and you have the fastest possible delay for gaming, reasonable performance for browsing, and you can utilize the surplus resources for bulk transfers at virtually no effect to the other traffic.
It's all old, available and proven technology, just start using it please...
All it needs is ISPs wanting to cooperate instead of negligence.
If we used Explicit Congestion Notification on top of it (also a technology that has been available for 7 years), there would be almost no congestion at all. All the pipes would be fully utilized, yes, but without congestion.
Actually, instead of a technological solution a rather easy and fair business solution is also available - instead of capping the already existing unlimited users, offer a discount to the users who volunteer to be capped.
The only blackouts I've seen in ~20 years on the intertubes (since before it was a public network) was due to cable cuts, router or power failures, or routine maintenance (oh, and the two weeks I had no service after Northpoint disappeared overnight - incidentally, my part of the lawsuit was finally settled - 7 years later).
This is all a bunch of fear mongering. The protocol isn't the issue, it's throttling it, and there's no reason you can't throttle UDP. In fact, UDP doesn't guarantee delivery, so if there's too much UDP on the fat pipes, just start tossing packets at random - who's gonna know (ok, if you do too many the WoW players might complain, but lag happens, right)? ISPs can start tossing packets for anyone abusing their network and if asked could claim the packets never arrived. It's not like there are records of UDP packets moving through a network.
People have predicted the backbones would collapse for years and guess what? It's never happened (completely, at least - I recall one backbone had a failure for a couple of days, but I wasn't on that one, however some major sites were).
Your airline analogy breaks down when you think about constant traffic. For it to work, the airline would have to [only] sell monthly, "all-you-can-fly" tickets. You pay a reasonably low fee, say $100/month, and you can fly anywhere you want, anytime you want. It works fine if each of us fly once a year, but when some guy decides to fly back-and-forth to Australia each day, then they would have to say, "During peak travel times, you can only fly once per day/week/month" or something.
See, what you're not getting is that the choice to make a victim suffer (though that may not be the primary motivation) is the whole reason the act is criminal. By your standard, society as a unit should act criminally in order to prevent crime. Great folly lies along such paths, with the folly being completely obvious to anyone who remembers that authority figures are people with unpure motivations, just like the 'criminals' you're so worried about. And tell me, would you be willing to see your son locked up for life because of society's erring on the side of incrimination? Would you still feel safer?
Umm, no, that's not true. So long as you have 200 amp service, you can use 200 amps 24x7, any way you want.
The quote I replied to had no such reasoning behind it.
"Better ten guilty persons escape"
Keyword: Escape. They've been found guilty. In the context of the posts prior to that, the only logical assumption was that the poster intended nothing more or less than the release of all who have been found guilty, as an innocent may be among them.
Such a suggestion is ludicrous, no mater how you spin it.
You're just making that up, and it makes no sense. The "core of the Internet" can regulate TCP traffic and UDP traffic precisely the same way, by dropping packets. And that's exactly what it can and will do with no changes.
The "core of the network" treats each packet as its own universe. It looks at the source, destination, and perhaps packet size and type of service, and that's it. It doesn't care if it's TCP or UDP.
I know, right! The ISP hijacked the connection I was paying for, and got all upset when a way was found to get what was mine back.
That IS what you meant, right?
I can assure you I am not making it up. Routers and other network devices typically don't drop UDP packets because UDP end points don't respond like TCP end points which halve their bandwidth whenever a packet isn't delivered. It's also hasn't been necessary to drop UDP packets because traditional UDP applications are typically small bursts of data or low/fixed bandwidth applications like VoIP and online gaming. Now this is all about to change when you get a huge bulk transfer application like BitTorrent which accounts for a significant portion of the Internet's traffic.
Hard to prove that, but even so it cuts out legit use of BitTorrent.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I'd rather have them use technology to solve a social problem, than use laws to classify it as something else completely.
If they say so clear in the contract, then so be it. I just have a huge problem with companies or people weaseling out of contracts they advertised and received good money for.
If they can quantify their "reasonable use" clause to something both parties can agree on beforehand AND objectively measure afterwards in case of a dispute, fine.
But spare us the ISPs that bet everything but the farm on their use patterns and then cry foul when they don't match the customer's.
"Routers and other network devices typically don't drop UDP packets because UDP end points don't respond like TCP end points which halve their bandwidth whenever a packet isn't delivered."
That's simply not true. Routers and other network devices typically treat UDP and TCP precisely the same.
"It's also hasn't been necessary to drop UDP packets because traditional UDP applications are typically small bursts of data or low/fixed bandwidth applications like VoIP and online gaming."
Nevertheless, they've dropped them the same way they've dropped TCP packets. They do this simply because there has not been (and still is not) any good reason to treat TCP packets differently from UDP packets.
"Now this is all about to change when you get a huge bulk transfer application like BitTorrent which accounts for a significant portion of the Internet's traffic."
Nothing will change. The traffic will be UDP instead of TCP, and routers won't care one way or the other, just as they never have.
The only devices that will be affected are unusual "invasive" devices, such as those specifically used to throttle P2P.
The problem with bittorrent, is that it's MORE convenient than watching TV the old fashioned way.
Chuckle. Yeah, I know what you mean.
The problem with electricity, is that it's MORE convenient than eating dinner in the dark after cooking it over a firepit.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Two points:
The ISP sees that you are accepting connections on port 80, assumes that is a web server, points to the 'no servers' clause in the T&Cs, and after a month they are no longer your ISP.
When you look at the pattern of connections to port 80 for a web server vs a BT there are at least two glaring ways to quickly see that this is not normal web traffic so the "80 Hole" is not much of an effective disguise.
No, routers do not treat UDP and TCP the same. Richard Bennett is a network architect and I trust his assessment of the situation more than I trust your's.
And they have in very rural and metro areas but not as much as they should have in the rest of the country. So let's say in my opinion they are half to blame on this front.
The problem is that p2p rapidly consumes all of the available bandwidth. Even if the capacity had been increased a thousand fold, in six months to a year we would be right back at the same problem where we were before.
But I have seen people argue that they the average users would still use the same amount of bandwidth, but I do not think so. There would be more flash and streaming video on the internet. There would be more people using VOIP, NetFlix, downloading movies and TV shows from iTunes, the Xbox video market place, the PS3, and there would be more people downloading video games.
Soon we would be right where we started where the average users would again be complaining that they not getting a fair share do to the massive increase of p2p bandwidth. The average users would no longer be content with simply email and web browsing when they had 'new improved faster internet' and would expect all those other things I outlined to work flawlessly.
UDP is a very bad protocol to use for mass transmission. There is no built-in feedback loop.
Not having built-in congestion control does not necessarily make it a bad protocol for bulk transfer.
I could see timestamps being used to figure-out latency and bandwidth instead of TCP window sizes changed based on packet loss. This could be much nicer for routers.
Also with a simple approach one socket and UDP port could be used per client. This would make it a whole lot easier for the OS and NAT.
Richard Bennett never said that Internet core routers do not treat UDP and TCP the same. You are misunderstanding what he is saying.
I am not asking you to trust me over Richard Bennett. I am asking you to not misrepresent Richard Bennett's argument.
*Your* statement -- "The client application can't know about congestion in the core of the network, so it breaks control at the core of the Internet where there's less management. If you read the article fully, this would have been apparent." -- is a misrepresentation of Bennett's argument. In fact, the client can know about congestion in the core of the network with UDP the same way it does with TCP, by inferring congestion when there is packet loss. TCP's congestion control is implemented by the endpoints, not the network core. (With the exception of ECN, but that's so rarely used that it doesn't really matter.)
Yes, he has said that UDP is treated differently than TCP, and it makes sense to treat them differently. I know the man we have spoken by phone and in person. It makes no sense to drop UDP packets since it doesn't produce a response from the end-points.
The reason you drop TCP or UDP packets is not to produce a response from the end-points. It's because the link is congested and you simply can't carry all the traffic. Well-behaved applications, both TCP and UDP, respond to packet loss by reducing their bandwidth consumption.
"I know the man we have spoken by phone and in person."
Well, you've now set the bar impossibly high. In order to satisfy you, I have to refute a claim to which I have no access based on evidence and argument to which I have no access.
The truth is, so long as a protocol layered on top of UDP detects congestion and responds with appropriate backoff, it will be just as Internet core friendly as TCP.
"The reason you drop TCP or UDP packets is not to produce a response from the end-points. It's because the link is congested and you simply can't carry all the traffic"
You do it for both reasons, but the FIRST reason you do it is to get the end-points to voluntarily backoff first before you reach a point of crisis. That's the whole point of Random Early Detection which is to get the clients to backoff before the network gets completely saturated in which case really nasty things happen. Routers drop packets before they reach 100% congestion not to trim the bandwidth; but to get end-points to back down.
There's another good reason to do this because it balances out the load between single-flow TCP applications. When a TCP end-point backs off to 50%, it's giving a new TCP flow a chance to take up the slack and speed up until the two TCP flows reach a state of equilibrium. UDP end points lack this behavior.
As for Richard Bennett's claim that UDP isn't generally dropped by routers, this is the reason he is concerned about this change in BitTorrent. This will force routers to start dropping UDP packets just like TCP packets and it will have a bad affect on other UDP applications that have a good reason to use UDP e.g., they're low/fixed bandwidth or they only send short/small bursts of data which means they benefit by bypassing the overhead of TCP. Bulk file transfer applications shouldn't be bypassing TCP for UDP and even if BitTorrent is well intentioned, such a large change could be risky for the Internet. That's the whole point Bennett is trying to make.
The quote I replied to had no such reasoning behind it.
"Better ten guilty persons escape"
Keyword: Escape. They've been found guilty. In the context of the posts prior to that, the only logical assumption was that the poster intended nothing more or less than the release of all who have been found guilty, as an innocent may be among them.
Such a suggestion is ludicrous, no mater how you spin it.
Here's a wiki entry on the quote in question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formulation
You can agree or disagree with it, but it's a principle closely tied to the presumption of innocence in the US judiciary system. Benjamin Franklin was reported to have stated it as "it is better [one hundred] guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". Bismarck and Pol Pot are said to have believed the opposite. I'll take good ol' Bens' version, thanks all the same.
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
There is nothing wrong with metering, having a plan capped at 5/15/20/50GB etc a month and having the speed reduced after that (to 64KB per second and with an option to pay extra for more GB of downloads at the plans usual speed) is what is generally done here in Australia.
It works out better for both the ISP AND the customer as you pay only for what you require and don't subsidize those users who download vast amounts and the ISP can more easily determine how much bandwidth they need to add depending on how many new clients they have signed up under which type of plans (eg light or heavy users).
This way the ISP can also not complain about the amount you have used as you have specifically paid to use that amount and so you don't end up with this ridiculous notion of trying to reduce the amount your customers are using.
Advertising as Unlimited and then complaining about people taking you up on that offer is the ISP's fault and they need to stop doing this and set pricing levels at reasonable limits which obviously will increase as requirements go up.
"There's another good reason to do this because it balances out the load between single-flow TCP applications. When a TCP end-point backs off to 50%, it's giving a new TCP flow a chance to take up the slack and speed up until the two TCP flows reach a state of equilibrium. UDP end points lack this behavior."
You have this completely backwards. TCP endpoints can only detect congestion through packet loss on the connection. UDP endpoints are free to back off for *any* reason, including but not limited to packet loss.
Because every TCP connection is basically independent, you cannot use information gained from one connection to backoff on another. With UDP you can.
A UDP application can backoff as aggressively as TCP, less aggressively, or more aggressively. Nobody yet knows how BT will rig its backoff algorithm.
They've hinted that it will backoff even more aggressively than TCP does, using congestion information from one connection to increase how severely they treat congestion information from other connections.
They've also hinted that they'll rig BitTorrent to act *in* *total* much like as single TCP connection, rather than like hundreds. This is good for the user, as using BT won't make his web pages and games get 1/100th of his bandwidth but 1/2, like they should. But it's also good for Internet's core, as one BT client looks more like one connection than hundreds there too.
"As for Richard Bennett's claim that UDP isn't generally dropped by routers, ..."
I don't even see where Bennett claimed that. And I've counter-claimed that routers generally treat UDP and TCP precisely the same. I believe this is a mis-statement of Bennett's claim. Can you cite any public claim of his to this effect?
I think Bennett was simply assuming that their motive was evil -- to get around congestion control -- rather than benign -- to fix a defect in TCP that it treats each connection as the distribution unit rather than each application. (Which is bad when an application with 100 connections tries to live on the same connection as one with two.)
"'There's another good reason to do this because it balances out the load between single-flow TCP applications. When a TCP end-point backs off to 50%, it's giving a new TCP flow a chance to take up the slack and speed up until the two TCP flows reach a state of equilibrium. UDP end points lack this behavior.'
You have this completely backwards. TCP endpoints can only detect congestion through packet loss on the connection. UDP endpoints are free to back off for *any* reason, including but not limited to packet loss."
Looks like you misread. I said routers drop packets (before total congestion), TCP endpoints detect and react by cutting speed in half which gives slower TCP streams a chance to rise to equilibrium.
"Because every TCP connection is basically independent, you cannot use information gained from one connection to backoff on another. With UDP you can. A UDP application can backoff as aggressively as TCP, less aggressively, or more aggressively. Nobody yet knows how BT will rig its backoff algorithm."
Yes it can backoff; if the routers dropped UDP packets the same way they dropped TCP packets. But they don't, so there's your problem.
"Looks like you misread. I said routers drop packets (before total congestion), TCP endpoints detect and react by cutting speed in half which gives slower TCP streams a chance to rise to equilibrium."
I understand that, and I agree with this. However, this says nothing whatsoever about UDP. In this case, the exact same thing will happen with UDP. The routers will drop the packets early (because they do not treat UDP differently from TCP) and the UDP endpoints will backoff (because they will be programmed to do so).
"Yes it can backoff; if the routers dropped UDP packets the same way they dropped TCP packets. But they don't, so there's your problem."
Yes, they do. At least, they should. RED is not as effective for UDP as it is for TCP (as many UDP flows are not responsive) but that is not a good reason to exempt UDP from RED just because it might not be responsive.
If there are people out there who exempt UDP from RED, independent of any QoS indication that the packets are precious and not in limited internal networks where it is known that UDP traffic is precious, they should fix their networks.
I agree, it is possible. Not even very difficult - the lack of need for retrasmissions, packet ordering etc. makes it much easier to implement than full TCP. That is not the problem I was thinking about.
The problem is the combo of lack of built-in, system level congestion control, open source and egoistic users. With TCP, whatever you do, the protocol limits you. The most you can do is use multiple connections - a bit complicated and still only giving relative advantage. You can get more than your fair share of bandwidth on a path, but you can't dominate it.
With UDP "playing nice" depends on application-level limits. Before deploying something like that (we're not talking about a niche application here, this is a huge share of todays traffic), rigorous tests should be run to verify how this protocol interacts with TCP. However, even supposing that everything works fine and the new BT works as intended, how long will it take until we see a fork, with the limits turned off? Of course, a single client built like that will not be a problem - other nodes won't let it reach full speed, unless the authors make a mistake, but if it catches on... It makes sense for the user - you can get a lot more speed. Then the web will become slow, mail will trickle and every user will bitch on every possible forum about ISPs not increasing bandwidth enough, while downloading the newest game/movie/whatever at 10x the speed he should. More bandwidth will just mean faster BT transfers, with no change to WWW etc.
So, in fact, this is VERY difficult to implement properly. BT must not only make sure that they get the congestion avoidance right and leave enough room for TCP, it must also make sure that any client with a modified protocol will be unable to connect to normal peers at all, to block the adoption of any BT-on-steroids. Even that is easy to circumvent by using a "dual-protocol" client.
I expect this change to backfire. You don't - fine. We won't know until after the fact. Still, I think that BT should stay on TCP - the solution to the problems is forcing ISPs to act fairly. How to do that, or if it's even possible in less than a decade is a different question, but I don't think switching to UDP will do the trick.
You're entitled, of course, I just believe it is insanely shortsighted.
Your examples however, are absurd.
1st: Bismark and Pol Pot also did not believe in a peer jury or a modern criminal justice system. Thankfully, we do.
The odds that we will cause an innocent to suffer are thus greatly reduced from the likes of Bismark and Pol Pot.
2nd: Let *any* guilty (found as such by a jury of their peers) persons go free, on the grounds that there might be some small chance they *may* be innocent puts at risk other innocents. Countless innocents if you go with Good ol' Benjy's "100's".
We have a criminal justice system for a reason. It is not perfect, but it is a *far* cry from Benjy's quote, Bismark, or Pol Pot.
I'll take our current system over any of the above, thankyouverymuch. :)
You're entitled, of course, I just believe it is insanely shortsighted.
Your examples however, are absurd.
1st: Bismark and Pol Pot also did not believe in a peer jury or a modern criminal justice system. Thankfully, we do.
The odds that we will cause an innocent to suffer are thus greatly reduced from the likes of Bismark and Pol Pot.
2nd: Let *any* guilty (found as such by a jury of their peers) persons go free, on the grounds that there might be some small chance they *may* be innocent puts at risk other innocents. Countless innocents if you go with Good ol' Benjy's "100's".
We have a criminal justice system for a reason. It is not perfect, but it is a *far* cry from Benjy's quote, Bismark, or Pol Pot.
I'll take our current system over any of the above, thankyouverymuch. :)
Ok. I'll try to get you to understand this one last time because I hate to see someone so misinformed, and since you haven't devolved to ad hominem attacks, maybe you'll actually listen.
What you're not getting here is that we *have* and *are living under* a judicial system (when things work as they should) that takes Bens' quote as a cornerstone of jurisprudence. That's a major reason *why* there's a presumption of innocence, trial by a jury of peers, and our modern justice system with its' other protections that you laud so highly. Without the principles and ideas embodied in that quote, none of that would exist.
"Guilty", in the context of the quote, refers to those that have committed a crime for which they go unpunished, or those who, though guilty of committing a crime, are found guilty by lapse of due process to which they are entitled or other miscarriage of the enforcement and prosecution of the laws under which we live in accordance with the rights affirmed in the COTUS and the BOR.
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that it is better that guilty persons go free who would otherwise be imprisoned, if to convict and imprison them would require violating the rights so affirmed to all in the COTUS and BOR. Otherwise, if it's OK to violate *this* persons' rights because, well, he's really really bad, then it's simply a matter of defining-down to reach the stage where the government may violate anyones' rights for most any reason or no reason at all.
If that's the kind of system you desire, there are plenty of places in the world still where individuals have no rights. You're welcome to live there. Don't attempt to remove *our* rights in some misguided attempt to "get ALL the bad-guys".
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So, in order to argue with me you are taking the quote completely out of the context it was used in the original post I replied to?
Well...that explains why we are completely unable to come to terms. ...but then you had to go and accuse me of trying to take away the rights of others and imply I should go live somewhere else.
How quaint.
So.. A persons rights are only valid if they agree with you, and because I took the quote as posted, in context (and not the context you apply to it), I no longer deserve to live in this country?
*laughing*
Ahhhh... One does have to admire the hypocrisy.
Believe me. I have a bit of knowledge regarding our judicial system, its many flaws, and its many strengths. I've tried to impress upon you and others in this thread that I was replying to the poster, and _his_ use of the quote, in the context of the thread, and more specifically, the original post in which it was quoted, *not* in the context in which it was originally used. This has apparently been repeatedly ignored.
So please, do me the honor of sparing us your ego-stroking "informing the mis-informed" condescension. This is not a schoolroom, you are not a school-marm, and I am no longer a student.
So, in order to argue with me you are taking the quote completely out of the context it was used in the original post I replied to?
The context it was used n was quite clear. That you've chosen to deliberately take it out of the context in which it was said (in response to another post) indicates you are either back pedaling or were simply looking for an argument. That you have no other reply than "but I meant something else because he meant something else!" when the original meaning was clear is specious.
So.. A persons rights are only valid if they agree with you, and because I took the quote as posted, in context (and not the context you apply to it), I no longer deserve to live in this country?
*laughing*
Ahhhh... One does have to admire the hypocrisy.
The claim you make that I said anything about where you "deserved" to live is a strawman. I made no such statement. I simply offered the possibility that you might find another system more to your liking. Likewise, I also made no claims or statements pertaining to your rights or their validity. Another strawman.
*shakes head & sighs*
My points stand and I'm done here.
Good day, sir.
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
...and I quote:
"If that's the kind of system you desire, there are plenty of places in the world still where individuals have no rights. You're welcome to live there."
I repeat:
"You're welcome to live there"
The implication being that such a person is *not* welcome to live _here_.
If that's not the implication you intended to make, you should have chosen your words more carefully.
You points would stand if we were discussing even remotely the same thing. As you've once again chosen to ignore the context completely, I concur.
We're done here.
This article and many like it are just attempts to distract attention from a more fundamental issue. Why is Moore's law essentially almost null and void when it comes to provisioning of internet bandwidth? How do things need to be organized so we get the same sort of benefits in this area as we get in such diverse areas as printer performance, large flat screen monitors, processor speed and capability, memory cost, hard drive capacity, etc?
The only area of this part of the economy that seems to be mystified by the idea of Moore's law are the monopoly and duopoly ISP's. Qwest proudly proclaimed they would guarantee a certain level of bandwidth without price increases for some number of years. Are they kidding? Their costs keep dropping toward zero per bit and they think they are being generous because they will restrain themselves by not increasing prices! What a load of crap.
Nobody thinks bandwidth is cost free (see below for some details). What is clear to anyone involved in digital electronics for the past fifty years is that except for monopolies and government interference the price for a given level of service will always be dropping precipitously. The fact that it isn't for internet access is evidence that there is something rotten going on.
About that cost free issue it is worth noting that even for things that are not free, like roads, it does not make sense to make every road a toll road. The same sort of idea may make sense for a modest and increasing level of bandwidth. The FCC will be considering exactly this topic in the near future. The free lunch for fat cat monopolists may be in some danger.