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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!
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.
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.
Not what the darkside wants.
That's for sure. I just literally got off of the phone with Comcast complaining that my service is getting "intermittently" interrupted. Now, lets be clear, I am running torrents. But lets also be clear that without P2P, hardly anyone would want their crappy high speeds as slightly lower speeds are intolerable for web surfing and Youtube. Me seeding the Knoppix DVD for 2 days leaving my PC on all night isn't kosher when Knoppix is legal. (electricity costs $$$)
They tried to blame my router, but I occasionally get spotty service when it is just my modem. I refuse to go without the router for more than a few days since I obviously bought it for a needed reason. I just couldn't get over the fact that Google (images) wouldn't pull up thumbnails, yet when I go to Speedtest.net, whoa the turtle turned into the hare. So I called them since I know what is going on. They deny there is issue on their end, and want to send a tech to my home and when they don't find a problem charge me $30. I go back inside after my 35 minute call and go to pull up Google.. slow again. I go to Speedtest.net, and now everything works. So I call them back up and they are going to send a tech to my home Friday and even credit me back if they find issue on my end.
Is it just me, or is it a conspiracy, brother man? I just refuse to believe all the trouble I have had is a coincidence. But please, I would love evidence that I am wrong. I want a decent service provider that doesn't let you go since you use what you paid for. That is why I called them back.
I want to find another provider if they don't make it right, and we know there is little chance of that. But what is my option? AT&T, the "Your world delivered, to the NSA." company as the only alternative in my area.
So for a recap, I have issues usually after running torrents even at times without the router, and going to Speedttest.net is like a super pill that clears it up. For the moment, and I use that loosely.
What would you do?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
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
This sig has been distributed under the Creative Commons license.
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
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.
You just violated their terms of service for posting obscenities on a public forum.
Enjoy your dial-up.
"or too" --> "or two". I need some sleep...
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
If it is happening even without the router, it is a bit suspicious that visiting speedtest fixes it. However, your router may be causing problems on its own, many cheaper routers can fill their NAT tables while torrenting.
If you've got a router that can adjust the length of time an entry is in the table, shorten it down to a few minutes.
/agree
I read the paper with increasing incredulousness.
While we were unable to review the Switzerland logs, mostly due to our failure to coordinate between volunteers’ time to run the scripts, Switzerland assisted us in finding some interesting conclusions. We left a server to seed a .torrent file of a public domain video; our volunteers downloaded and uploaded the file again and again, looking for potential interference by the ISP or RST packets. We were unable to produce any substantial results or conclusions regarding traffic, mostly due to Switzerland’s interface.
So they didn't get anything from Switzerland...
The Glasnost tests appeared to be more rigorously done, but 8 samples is a very low population, and there appeared to be no control.
Plus the out-of-context:
However, after a massive number of attempts, we found out that another user is seeding our torrent, from the IP address 212.235.15.36 and not from the libTorrent Client we used (screenshot, screenshot ). We found a mention of such IP address in an Israeli Hardware forum describing it as one of Netvision’s caching servers (HWZone, 2009).
And no attempt to ascertain and eliminate alternative causes for the results.
Oh, and the spelling mistakes.
Like Kickasso said...this is worthless.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
I found a similar thing and it seemed to be related to the number of http connections. If you have one (i.e speedtest) it is fast. If you have about 10, it slows right down (beyond what you would expect) and stays down. Torrents create many http connections at high numbered ports (check with netstat) so it should be easy to see where limit is with your particluar ISP.
I bet the Dutch are somehow involved.
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.
Try switching off the firewall in your modem. I had problems with sites with a lot of images and it turned out to be the modem firewall that caused the issue.
wot no sig
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.
Do those clauses even have any legal validity?
Do those clauses even have any legal validity?
They may or they may not. Does it really matter when 'upholding your Rights' in court costs tens of thousands of dollars and takes years to resolve?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
It's Comcast, I'm sure of it. I have the exact same problem while torrenting. If I open everything up (i.e. set utorrent to auto upload and uncapped download), on good torrents I can hit my bandwidth maximums for about 15-20 minutes and then my connection dies. The first couple times it does this, it'll come back online within a few minutes, but if the torrents go back up to full bandwidth usage... boom within a couple minutes I'm back offline again. After 1 or 2 times like this, the connection just stays "off" until I reset the modem (not the router, the modem. It's not a router issue).
It isn't an issue with the number of open connections, because if I tweak the bandwidth usage to limit upload stream to 32kbps and download stream to 384kbps, but don't change the number of open connections allowed, I can torrent for a week straight with 0 issues. If I push that upload stream to 64kbps or that download stream above 400kbps, problem returns.
I'm convinced that comcast is monitoring the bandwidth I'm using and shutting me down whenever I actually -use- the bandwidth I pay for, for more than 10 or 15 minutes. Makes me laugh whenever I see one of their "comcast extreme 50" signs. The only people I can think of who would want that kind of bandwidth on a regular basis are the same people that comcast is trying their best to stifle.
You bet your ass it does. I wonder if there is someone who can say IAAL and tell us if no one challenging EULAs after so long can make them defacto "legal"? (Since they are understood.) I am sure there are some principals in law like this, but would they apply? Lets setup a fund for a single person and put our feet down. I would donate half my cable bill and get cut down 90% in speed to help "invest". (which is what would happen, from $42.95 at 6 mb to 34.95 at 1 mb... Bastages! I was going to do it until I found someone another ISP, but I would never get anything with it cutting off like it is. I may do it anyhow.)
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
wonder if there is someone who can say IAAL and tell us if no one challenging EULAs after so long can make them defacto "legal"?
It matters, but sometimes not fighting a case is the best strategy. Consider the Heller 2nd Amendment case that challenged DCs gun ban.
Human Rights activists had to wait for just the right person to use as the perfect example as a 'wronged person'. You could have theoretically picked anyone in DC to use as the example, but with any soft of flaw they would have been flayed in the media and the case might have turned out differently.
And that is a SERIOUS problem. What would have happened if Heller were slightly less of a boyscout? It is possible that the case would had been dropped before going to the Supreme Court, or even worse, it could have gone the other way. If it had gone the other way, then in simply trying to defend your Rights, you would have actually harmed them almost irrevocably.
What if Heller got most of the way there, then couldn't afford to pursue his appeal? He would be out tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and STILL wouldn't have ended the infringement of his Rights.
You are right that you have to defend your rights or you will lose them. (Consider the terms 'Unusual, or Reasonable'. Those are defined by our current society, and thus the importance of defending what we have is reinforced.
However, it is my opinion, that defending those rights through the courts is an option that many people no longer have due to the lack of access to the judicial system. (money)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
No go, I don't like having a firewall running on Windows since it slows it down. I rely on the hardware firewall of my router. Also, it clears up when I go to speedtest.net... so it isn't the router.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
If you have NAT running on your router then that will stop most nasties. Switch off the router firewall as a quick test just to prove me wrong.
My symptoms were identical to yours. Speed tests were fine but some sites with many images failed to load properly.
wot no sig
However, it is my opinion, that defending those rights through the courts is an option that many people no longer have due to the lack of access to the judicial system. (money)
I would agree, and I think I have a solution for that, the only obvious one that I can see. File anyway. Help others to file and fight. When the courts have to deal with thousands of court cases then they will have to take "appropriate" action. If we do anything less, perhaps we are "asking" for what we get.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
I will try it next time it happens, but I still don't see why going to speedtest.net will allow a tab in Firefox that is stalling on images.google.com to load up just as soon as I go to speedtest.net in another tab. I have TabMixPlus set to show the loading percentage on the tab and I can watch it finish as I load up Speedtest.net. Go back to the Google images tab, and thumbnails are fully loaded.
Still think it could be the firewall?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
I can't pretend I understand it fully but it was something along the lines of multiple requests for images ending up looking like SYN flood or similar so the firewall blocked it. The speedtest is on a different IP so wouldn't be affected.
At the time, I was fully convinced it was something to do with my ISP but as I was at a good one (newnet) and nobody else was having issues, it had to be down to me. The strange thing was I had two different routers which did exactly the same thing. Switch off the firewall and all was fine.
Good luck with sorting this out. It was a very frustrating problem for me.
wot no sig
As other people said, it could be the NAT table is filling up. Try the firewall thing first, if that doesn't fix it, get a better router, or build your own with pfSense. I use pfSense on Comcast in the Philadelphia area and I have absolutely no problems with pages not loading.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I'm convinced that comcast is monitoring the bandwidth I'm using and shutting me down whenever I actually -use- the bandwidth I pay for, for more than 10 or 15 minutes.
Comcast has openly admitted to throttling bandwidth of users who use their cap for 10 to 15 minutes.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
I'd have been surprised if they DIDN'T find anything.
Obviously, that's what I'm getting at. Freedom of speech is freedom from having the government interfere on your ability to express an opinion, not the right to have it published by a company. The right to speak freely is not impeded when a company doesn't wish to publish you.
The rest of your post is more pointlessly flowery language. Commercial interests are not a "devolution" or "circumvention" of anything.
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
Are people really not catching on here? Your ISP throttles your connection, but if you go to a known site for testing your speed, they drop the throttling and prioritise the traffic. That way, though you suspect or deduce that you're not getting what you've been promised, the moment you check or are asked "to check" by your ISP, you find there's nothing wrong.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I am, it's obvious. I even had the "supervisor" on the other line try to say that as a third party website it "can't be" biased.
I told him, "First off, that is not true. If you and I know of these sites, we both know IT does and frankly I do not trust Comcast with everything I have been through to not show a bias. Especially when I have experienced it.
Second (here I slap him with logic) you are right, it should not be biased. So why am I able to go to this site and then everything pulls up, and yet before I do nothing does?
When you possess the truth, most of the time you just have to turn their argument around on them, like they try to do to you. Just flip the script back. But this is where he says he wants to send a technician, and I refused to pay for it. After the same thing happening immediately with even Google not pulling up, and I go to Speedtest.net and it miraculously works, I called them back and they said they would send one out for free.
I couldn't really argue that, and I want it to cost them. Just like it is costing me. So now, for no good reason as best as I can tell, they are sending someone out here to try to find fault on my end for an intermittent issue, or "block syncing" I think he called it.
Today, my router stopped responding to it's IP in the browser. I was looking to try the nat fix above. So, I tried hibernating and restarting the PC. Internet was still on and I said screw it I am not going to reset it again if I don't have to. Just now (already dark outside) the router did respond to the browser.
Now all of this leads me to believe that it "could" be the router. But I just have this gut intuition that it isn't the "sole" cause. I think they are doing things that are confusing the router possibly. Anyone have anything on that? I know that they have been busted sending fake dropped packets and disconnects and such. Perhaps it is a type of DOS attack?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Oh, and I forgot to add, been continuing to do the Speedtest.net thing to get the Internet back going ALL day... I haven't run torrents in awhile though, which pretty much proves it is related to the issue since my router is now responding, without reseting it. Should I be OK with Ubuntu and Firestarter on default, with NAT off to test the above person's theory?
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
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?