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Israeli ISPs Caught Interfering With P2P Traffic
Fuzzzy writes "For a long time, people have suspected that Israeli ISPs are blocking or delaying P2P traffic. However, no hard evidence was provided, and the ISPs denied any interference. Today Ynetnews published a report on comprehensive research that for the first time proves those suspicions. Using Glasnost and Switzerland, an Internet attorney / blogger found evidence of deep packet inspection and deliberate delays. From the article: 'Since 2007 Ynet has received complaints according to which Israeli ISPs block P2P traffic. Those were brought to the media and were dismissed by the ISPs. Our findings were that there is direct and deliberate interference in P2P traffic by at least two out of the three major ISPs and that this interference exists by both P2P caching and P2P blocking.'"
Does the Israeli Gov't care?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Not what the darkside wants.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
FWIW I heard from a wireless provider's salesperson that all of the major Internet Service Providers in Japan have a policy that after 300GB traffic per month connection speed will be throttled down.
I calculate this means that a 1Mbps video connection 24x7 would barely fit under this threshold.
1 mbit/sec *3600 = 3600 mbit/hr
3600 / 8 = 400 MBytes/hr
400 * 24 * 30 = 288000 MB/mo. = 288 GB/mo.
I wouldn't mind paying more if the companies would just stop adding all kinds of crazy rules.
The worst is the huge amount paid for access speeds which while respectable themselves, are being sold at many times the effective rate. ISPs should be required to sell unfettered access at the same rate they pay for it, plus a fixed rate (say 5-10%) to ensure market growth.
Coincidence that the http://www.allot.com/NetEnforcer is from Israel?
How gutless of the ISP to not admit it. EVERY ISP outside of perhaps the USA and Europe does it. Bandwidth is just too expensive not to. Many ISP's in Australia denied it for years, until they were 'outed' by one honest ISP who told everyone up front what they were doing.
Most of these isps try to justify their actions with the excuse that they need to restrict pvp users so that other users consuming less bandwidth can enjoy decent surfing/transfer rates. While arguably laudable, what really irks me is that these plans were largely sold to users (including pvp users) as non-capped unlimited bandwidth plans. If they wish to restrict or apply caps, they should be up-front about it. And by up-front, I don't mean burying it in the contract's fine print. These throttling and scanning attempts would likely lead to civil suits for breach of contract, fraud and/or deceptive advertising in any other industry. It's surely not a coincidence that the Israeli and Japanese ISPs referred to are actively trying to hide their actions. The difficulty is that it is difficult for individual users to challenge the actions of these ISPs who more often than not have deep pockets or a near monopoly over internet connectivity in their sphere of the world. Corporate bullying at its best.
I thought that was our Govts job (Australia) to be the official buttkissers of the US Govt and lobby groups
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And I must report it is fast as fuck and they never fuck with me. Maybe verizon is evil to the MPAA but not to the customer, don't believe the hype.
I do question the level of this research. Just as one example of sloppines: They describe checktor as "a company that’s meant to assist copyright holders," yet in the link they provide, it is very clear that checktor (a non-profit that scans torrents for viruses) has nothing to do with assisting copyright holders. In fact the page is telling copyright holders to bug off.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Surely there's some way to blame Yassar Arafat for this!
In New Zealand, Xtra offer an unlimited plan, however they do traffic management on it. Meaning if you use any P2P software your connection is slowed down to dialup speed (much the same if you go over your cap on a limited plan) for about 24 hours after the program (Transmission etc.) is stopped before it returns back to full speed.
The "study" in question was performed in an extremely amateurish, non-scientific way.
http://2jk.org/english/?p=153
Read it for a good laugh or too, but don't give it any weight because it deserves none.
http://www.torrentleech.org/faq.php#77
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3498568,00.html (sorry I can't find the english version)
This is not new and has been known for a while...
For the last year or so I've been in Israel, so naturally my ISP is Israeli.
I've spent countless hours with them on the phone trying to get around this thing. I told them bittorrent was acting ridiculously slow, but they gave me the old excuse of "not our fault, it's p2p" which I was willing to accept for a while.
Then I noticed skype started messing with me, giving me ridiculous dial-up quality sound. Fun fact, my ISP is also a phone provider.
Makes you wonder.
o hai
The Main problem is that because there are so many violations of human rights in Israel, when you violate just another one no body seems to mind..
Is there anything Israelis don't interfere with? Be it on government, business or personal level?
I bet the Dutch are somehow involved.
Moreover, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) as executed by several of the Israeli ISPs, may be considered illegal wiretapping
Okay, so DPI can be considered illegal wiretapping because you see what is in the stream? (And therefore spy on people) On the other hand what if the traffic classification was done statistically? Statistical methods doesn't read what is in the packet. So in that case the ISP wouldn't have a clue what exactly is in the traffic stream. Would that still be illegal wiretapping?
I find this interesting because there has been a lot of research of statistical traffic analysis.
You can't have everything. Internet connections are cheap because they are shared. People don't have dedicated bandwidth, they share it with everyone else. Works out, because normally you don't use all your bandwidth all the time. As such you can oversubscribe the links. You see this in offices all the time. I have a gig to my desk, however the switch in your area only has a gig back to the floor switches. Those only have a gig to the building switch, that only has a gig to the core switches and so on. However, all in all I still get blazing fast speeds on the network because people aren't all using it at the same time. Thus we can afford to roll out gig. We couldn't if we had to do dedicated bandwidth. We'd need two 10gig connections just from our switch to the floor switches, the building would probably need OC-768, maybe more than one. I shudder to think what the core switches would have to have.
Ok well same deal but larger on the Internet. So unless everyone wants to have rather slow, pricey, connections the only option is some limits to make sure people share.
In Japan, it doesn't at all surprise me that they'd have limits like this because the trend seems to be to sell connections with allegedly massive speeds with low prices. All the time on Slashdot we see stories about how in Japan you can have 100 or 1000mbit Internet for cheap. Ya well ok, here's news for you: You can't really have that. Yes the physical signaling rate might be that high, but you aren't getting that kind of speed all the time everywhere. They couldn't afford the links required for that. For that matter you generally don't even get your peak speeds except to others on the same ISP. I've seen people from Japan talk about how fast tehy get a file, but when you do the math it works out to 10-20mb/sec, same kind of thing you get on US cable connections.
Where I live at least, you have a choice to a large degree because you can buy business class connections. My cable company (Cox) sells both residential and business connections. They follow the same bandwidth tiers, though in a given tier business connections usually have a little more upload speed. However, business connections are a whole lot more expensive. Well why is that? They can't make you buy a business connection.
Well the reason is business connections don't have restrictions, residential ones do. You can't run servers on residential connections, you can on business connections. If you do too much traffic on a residential connection they'll call you and/or throttle you. On a business connection you can do as much as you like and you'll hear not a thing. The tradeoff is that max speeds you'd get for like $40-50 on a residential connection, you'll pay $120 for on a business connection.
So if you really want to pay more, look in to it because you probably can. However, don't then cry that it is in fact a good bit more. Also, you probalby don't really want ISPs selling you access for the prices they pay. High grade lines are very pricey. That is why they get that, and then oversubscribe it. They can resell it for lower cost since they have more customers. On OC-3 circuit (155mbps) to a Tier 1 provider is generally in the realm of $10,000 and up per month. Means if they were to sell you a 15mbps cable connection at "their rates" you'd be paying like a grand a month. Better perhaps that you then share with a few people and get a more reasonable price.
Given that:
1) the ISP situation is completely wacko in this country you pay first for a physical line connection (from Phone Monopoly or from Cable Monopoly) and then extra for a completely separate ISP (who are the ones investigated here) where both need extra payment for faster connections
2) the physical line companies are upgrading their infrastructure to give 50 mbps level speed and movie/TV content service and/or also provide VOD services
I would be surprised if this is NOT happening.
Israeli telecoms/utilities companies are not renowned for good value for money and there are plenty of IP-traffic related companies looking for cheap pilot installations which they can leverage as references when they go to sell in global markets.
Aside from Israelis not liking to pay for anything unless they have to, there are few legal purchasing outlets for digital content and if you want music/movies your choice is pretty much:
1) buy a CD (remember them!)
2) download it from P2P
3) have a credit card and bank account in a foreign country that does have an iTunes Music Store (for example)
29 mpg. YMMV.
Not really news... Here in Canada Bell is throttling us for quite a while now.
Just search for Bell and Bypass Throttling on google...
Indeed. But there is a solution.
I'd have been surprised if they DIDN'T find anything.
Bigger questions:
* Why would the Israeli government be less likely than ISPs to regulate P2P traffic, especially when governments are susceptible to lobby groups? "Net neutrality" is a sham.
* Why isn't an ISP allowed to regulate its own traffic? If there's a lot of P2P traffic interfering with the rest of its network, it's allowed to regulate it. College networks do it all the time.
* Why is this under "Your Rights Online?" You don't have a right to internet traffic. It's a commercial service you pay for.
If they think they are entitled to kill people because of the unprovable fantasy being they worship - do you think they give one crap about their spooks snooping on everybody else?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'm surprised to not see any comments regarding the state of access in India. There are comments regarding the US, Australia and New Zealand, but not India.
A 155Mbits line can cost as much as US$34k/month here, so the prices and speeds of consumer (and business) net connections are pretty horrific: USD$66 including tax will get you a 2mbit unlimited connection. If that provider supplies to your area.
I myself am starting an ISP and we are planning to offer the speeds which are available in Europe and Eastern Asia (read S Korea and Japan), so things like torrents are of great concern to us.
Most people get around the P2P thing by using DC++, but the last-mile ISP market is extremely fragmented (private cable-vendors "own" different suburbs of each city, and some are plainly psychotic, judging by the behaviour they exhibit towards customers - randomly unplugging cables, sabotaging cables of competitors and so forth).
Also, because of this fragmentation, DC++ servers are available only to a limited number of people, so it is really only a partial solution, and if I'm not mistaken, torrents are still king.
Regulations allow maximum contention ratios of 50:1 for consumer broadband. If everyone torrents at 2Mbits, in theory thats ONLY 70 customers to saturate a 155Mbits line.
So far, the most effective answer lies in either throttling or in data-caps. Is there another answer that can benefit the consumer AND allow us to provide an affordable, speedy service AND one that is actually useful to everyone - especially when we're paying for example $30k/month for 155mbits?
I personally would be interested to know (email your thoughts directly to slashdot.comments at-the-rate mathew-carley.com)
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Israel has to do these things because they are constantly in the state of war. One of their objectives is to prevent bombing of civilians. Think of Israel as a "democratic" military state.
Now they got pretty good at it, and US govt will be very quick to adapt their technologies and methods to institute a military state here, in US. They already adapting airport security, internet will follow.
Why do we need a military state? Are you kidding? That's the key to absolute power! Dictators (also presidents, kings), have been known to start wars just so they can institute stronger controls at home.
Orange alert, anyone?