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RCN P2P Settlement Is Not Even a Slap On the Wrist
Ars covers the settlement of the RCN P2P throttling class-action lawsuit, which lets the company walk away without admitting guilt, without paying affected users, and without any meaningful restraint on their network management practices. "[The] settlement is due to be finalized on June 4. ... The case has largely flown under the radar. Yesterday, a notice ... was issued that alerted RCN customers to the settlement, and one Ars reader was aghast at the terms. Those terms provide nothing for users affected by RCN's practices. Instead, they require the cable company to change its network management practices. These changes are in two parts. ... These cessation periods would be retroactive. ... A moment's math will tell you that, when the settlement is finally approved, one cessation period will already have ended and the other will be ending soon. Once both cessation periods are over, RCN is allowed to implement whatever throttling regime it wants. Given that a federal court has just removed the FCC's authority to regulate network management, RCN appears to have carte blanche to single out BitTorrent and other P2P traffic for special throttling attention after November 1, 2010."
Stop waiting for big-daddy government to do something.
Jews make the laws.
Jews are the lawyers.
Jews have the money.
Jews have the power.
I think we all know what the problem is here.
I bet you can get signed up for some other internet service before Nov. 1.
Go to any well known torrent site, sort by seeders, and argue that p2p is used for legal trading.
You geeks are like ostriches with your heads in the sand.
Even if a bunch of people don't like it, the two parties in the case obviously came to this conclusion. I also have to admit that if it is their service they can do whatever they well please with it, obviously they need to state that when you buy the service, which I'm sure they will now. I hate the fact ISP's don't have enough competition as the next person, my only hope is that if a company does begin throttling demand for another service will increase, as demand increases... supply increases in the form of another ISP. I know personally I've been stuck with one cable company for a long time, but just recently recieved a letter form a local phone coop asking if they can lay fiber to my house for internet and tv service. Hell yes I said... it's just going to take time.. but I have faith a free market system will work it out.
we only download all the music we can, like Cmdr Taco hisgreatness.
RCN used QoS techniques on their network, which is expected. They weren't filtering BT or P2P per se. I'm not completely sure what this is in regards to, but I've never seen them as the big bad that Comcast was.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Horrible service that goes out frequently. Useless phone customer service. Refusal to issue refunds for non-functional service.
I'll never ever ever use them, ever again.
I didn't even know they were so non-net-neutral, but it doesn't really surprise me.
Illegal Immigrant Dark Net
Seriously, we have all these illegal messicans here constantly breaking into construction sites and stealing cable. Can't we pay them to splice them up and bury them in ditches?
I'm quite sure we could lay more cable in 1mo than Comcast has in the last 5 years.
The Supreme Court did not take away any FCC authority to regulate network management; the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC never had such authority in the first place. In fact, the judges specifically asked the FCC where that authority came from but the FCC has no answer.
Think about it. If everyone just flat out boycotted doing anything for even a week. If an entire nation stopped going to work, if they just ate whatever was in their fridge and spent time taking walks, talking with their friends, and just flat out relaxing, what the hell could corporations do besides finally realize they can't bend us over and rape us?
The mere notion of not checking the internet, not watching TV, and not buying corporate crap on a daily basis. That's what's keeping us from having any control. Maybe a small fraction of the country elects to avoid every corrupt corporation like the plague. Maybe. Maybe a large percent of the population would avoid these corrupt corporations if they had a choice. What remain is that enough people don't give a shit about anything except for living their consumerist lives. So long as that >50% of the population continues to let corporations do whatever they want out of sheer willful ignorance ("I'd do something if I could, but in truth I'd never dream of selling my ipod, let alone not buying a Big Mac every week!"), corporation will continue to do whatever they want. So long as it's profitable to the congress folk, those corporations will get away with bloody murder.
I just don't know how much more I can take before I lose it.
I am not familiar with the US market, but will tell you what it's like in the UK.
One of my previous ISPs decided to introduce throttling on different services using deep packet inspection to implement it. Their priority was for websites (port 80) and POP3 email. Everything else was throttled, in particular P2P services, and VoIP like Skype. However, by strange coincidence, the ISPs own VoIP service was NOT being throttled.
As the company had to issue new terms of service you had to agree to because of the throttling, I left without penalty, and actually told them they were a bunch of shysters who were more interested in saving money that commissioning more capacity (they actually oversold the network and could not keep up). If you can, the only way to teach these companies is to leave them.
Sure, the ISP has grown, but that's on the backs of new users who don't know any better, and would think that different internet services were just that slow all the time.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Won't someone think of the Lawyers? Without Class Actions like this they would likely be severely under paid by millions of dollars.
As a current RCN customer for 3 years now, I must say their service has been way better than other Chicago area providers I have tried in the past.
With that said, as long as they aren't dropping protocols on purpose or QOSing them to intolerable rates, I don't mind. In my 3 years of service I have never had an issue with P2P on RCN's network. Things like VOIP, HTTPS, HTTP, POP3/IMAP, SSH, etc are way more important than P2P will ever be in terms of traffic priority. Torrents, legal or otherwise, finish when they finish, no big deal. Services like VOIP don't have that luxury of dropping lots of packets.
If you don't like it get Comcast, DSL, or Clearwire.
The courts sided against the FCC, so what laws or TOS did RCN violate?
I am not disagreeing that Washington is owned by the lobbyists.
I am not disagreeing that their is too little competition in the broadband industry.
But when the FCC lost I am surprised RCN didn't tell opposing council to f-off.
ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE!
Jews, also known as kikes, hebes, hymies, yids, gold niggers, oven magnets, hook noses, sheenies, swindlers, criminals, "firewood", and Arabs in denial are a subhuman species of reptilian extra-terrestrials and adherents to one of the world's oldest major religions, called "Judaism", otherwise known as "The Worship of Money" or "Eating Arab Babies".
Judaism was the world's first master race theory. The Jew religion teaches that Jews are the Chosen People of God and that there is a sacred mystical quality to Jew DNA. In olden times, Jew prophets would, under the command of YHWH, frequently lead the Jews on genocidal rampages against neighboring populations, and even today Jew leaders often cite Jewish religious ideals to justify their ongoing genocide of sandniggers. Judaism ironically found its mirror-image inversion in the anti-Jew Aryan racialism of the Nazis.
Despite only being 0.22% of the world's population, Jews control 99% of the world's money. Not only do the Jews control the world, but also the media, the banks, the space program, and LiveJournal's porn communities and Gay communities. All Jews possess the following features: an extremely large nose, fake boobs, curly hair that reeks of faggotry, one of those gay hats, a love of coke, a law practice, a roll of money, a small cock, or shitty taste in dental hygiene.
Jews invented both Communism and Capitalism. Karl Marx, of course, was a Jew, which was why he understood money so well, and in fact he was converted to Communism by another Jew, Moses Hess, the actual founder of Zionism, who ghost-wrote Marx's The German Ideology. Capitalism was created when Christian Europeans threw away their morals and decided to embrace Jewish practices like usury (see: John Calvin). Jews were the first group to create a sophisticated banking system, which they used to fund the Crusades in order to pit Christians and Muslims (both adhering to religions derived from and controlled by Jews) against each other to kill as many people as possible in a macabre human sacrifice to YHWH.
The Jew banking system was based on fraud and lies, so when it inevitably collapsed, the Jews just pwned as many people as possible by unleashing the Black Plague on them. Later, Jews economically controlled medieval Venice (the first modern maritime trade empire), and then crypto-Jewish merchants economically controlled the Spanish Empire, including the slave trade. Openly Jewish bankers orchestrated the Dutch Empire and founded Jew Amsterdam (later Jew York). Later the Dutch Jews moved to London because they thought it would be a better base for a global empire, and actually brought a Dutch nobleman, William III, with them, who they installed in a coup d'état (more like Jew d'état, amirite?) as new King of the British Empire. For hundreds of years, Jewish bankers controlled global trade through their bases in Jew York City and London. European colonialism was, through its history, essentially a plot whereby Jews could gain control of gold and diamond mines in poor countries and increase their stranglehold over the global economy.
Jews also enjoy slicing up baby penises for fun, some even enjoy sucking them. See below.
Jews also created Jew search engine Google, so now they can find all Jew information on Internets.
Some suggest that we should use Jews instead of dogs to sniff out large amounts of concealed cash or anything else worth smuggling at airports due to their sensitive Jew noses. Obviously, this is a horrible idea, because the pay is bad, and the dirty Kikes would probably form a union and demand moar money, thus increasing the burden on taxpayers everywhere.
I have no idea why you think that. Who is better? In Chicago, it would be tough to beat them.
They could invest billions of dollars to setup their own infrastructure or switch to IP by carrier pigeon.
I expect that you will find out pretty quickly that you will want special bittorrent pigeons to separate the traffic from the ones carrying email and web. :)
Cry me a river...
Oh noes, the ISP does not want me to use their service to illegally obtain music, movies, software and pr0n.... whaaa whaaa
Get over it. You are not freedom fighters. You are no better than a common filthy thief. Buy the things you want instead of stealing them. I know on /. that is a crazy concept.
You're comparing the U. S. of A to EUROPE? You must be one of them there Socialists.
Signed,
Mainstream America
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
How about a community internet coop? Set up kind of like the farm or financial coops?
You are an owner of the coop and your monthly fee is for the maintenance of the system?
If we all stopped paying taxes, the Corporations would go broke . . .
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
One big reason the US internet providers are overpriced and suck-ass is because our government mostly allows them to monopolize on a per infrastructure basis. Their reason being that "if we pay to install it, we should milk it for all its worth without fear of competition". This doesn't foster competition with better providers, it just allows them to do whatever they damn please. Until that changes, none of the providers have much to fear; since you only have a handful of providers that monopolize their own infrastructures without fear of competition, they make the rules that favor their shareholders.
If Comcast (or whatever ISP) had to compete on the same lines (not including DSL), they would have actual competition with things that matter most to the consumers like service and price. And even if they lease out the infrastructures to other providers, they still have control of it, meaning they can make it prohibitively expensive for other competitors to have any way to compete with them in a somewhat fair manner.
It's all about the bottom line. I'm all for capitalism, but only in a truly free market. Right now that's not the case.
hmmm...
I've been with RCN for years and I can't say I have any problems with my torrent throughput, but then again, I never use the default ports. I'm not saying that I'm an expert, but I do know that my own non-scientific comparative testing showed a major throughput difference between using the default BT ports and a randomly selected port in the higher range.
If someone can prove me wrong, or explain why I am - I am certainly open to learning.
Given that a federal court has just removed the FCC's authority to regulate network management,
Gah! That is not what happened!
The supreme court upheld their authority to regulate network management. The problem was that the FCC ">didn't make their network neutrality principles as official rules. They didn't follow their own paperwork, so they didn't have the power to sue over it.