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ISP's War On BitTorrent Hits World of Warcraft
jfruhlinger writes "Canadian Internet users have the prospect of a metered Internet looming over their head, and now World of Warcraft players who use Rogers Communications as their ISP are encountering serious throttling. The culprit seems to be Rogers' determination to go after BitTorrent. WoW uses BitTorrent as a utility to update game files — something most users probably aren't even aware of."
I'm sure a lot of us saw this coming. Back when I was living in some apartments, the only broadband was a cable company (Ygnition) that does apartment complexes, etc. Little choice for broadband providers. So I went with them. Their TOS forbid bit torrent by name. Thankfully, it was either an empty threat or they knew enough about what was going on to ignore WoW update traffic.
No... no it's not.
Just because a large portion of the world has shitty internet, doesn't mean everyone should have shitty internet. It's only funny in the sad/pathetic/hopeless sort of way... just because they let it happen doesn't mean we do. If everyone else drank urine, and we drank water... we'd protest when people started pissing in our faces too...
I'm fine with universally limited bandwidth, ie: Xk/s down, Yk/s up... but throttling specific uses of it is retarded... from 00:00 to 18:00 I can download "normal" things (HTTP, etc) at 1.7MB/s (which also used to apply to torrents), torrents are limited to about 350k/s... between 18:00 and 00:00 it's limited to 120k/s... which isn't terrible, however whichever way my ISP chose to implement it, fucks up everything else at the same time (even if I haven't downloaded any torrents), it turns my cable connection into noisy WiFi... websites that take a few attempts to connect, occasional messenger disconnects, etc. It was "unlimited" for years, till about 2 weeks ago.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with that either, except they still charge the same price for basically half the connection. No real alternatives either except to rent a higher package from the same ISP (to get speeds that the current plan says it provides), or switch the ISP which also means switching the connection to WiFi, or Satellite... both of which are useless, regardless of whatever arbitrary speed in some other country may be.
(I'm a UI AddOn developer for World of Warcraft. I also work on anonymous P2P software, and actively research and develop censorship evasion techniques. I do not work for Blizzard.)
You are mistaken. So, in fact, are Rogers (and so also were Virgin Media UK). This is a fault in their traffic classifiers.
These traffic classifiers actually see the normal connection to the WoW servers as "P2P traffic" simply because it's encrypted and it can't recognise it - that's right, they're throttling everything they don't explicitly recognise, and they haven't whitelisted traffic to the Blizzard servers (which is silly, because the IP addresses are well-known). This is the same issue that hit Virgin Media when they tried a similar "throttle everything we don't recognise" policy, and the simple solution is to stop being such an asshat by doing that.
At worst, only the web-seed (a single outbound HTTP connection to Akamai) remains connected in current versions of the Blizzard Launcher while you actually play; in particular it closes the upload connections. It does that to save your ping, and the connection remains open if you are still streaming content while you play - but that's all Akamai HTTP traffic, not torrent. If your bar is green, when you close the launcher, even that closes.
Recognised VPN traffic is also detected and they've tried to throttle it on Rogers, according to my data.
The trouble is that they probably don't realise that this kind of thing, and the kind of (closely-related) incredibly sophisticated censorship system in place in, say, Iran, is simply a driver for the development of network protocols that lack the usual traffic analysis markers you'd use to classify and censor, throttle or prioritise them, and in turn, the wrapping of those protocols in steganographic network transports. Want to make your connection look like SSH, or TLS? No problem. HTTP? Sure. I can make it harder to recognise with less computational power than you'd need to try to recognise it. Go ahead, spend millions - won't help against a mimic function. It increases the overhead a little, but not as much as throttling or blocking affects it, so in the long run, all you'll do is choke your pipes more, because you're being an asshat.
Please, if you're going to manage traffic, shape it sensibly. Prioritise, don't block or throttle. Have enough overhead to allow people to use the internet how they wish, and use easy, sensible traffic shaping techniques to increase the performance of the network for everyone, by reducing buffer bloat and latency for quick protocols, supporting ECN properly, letting uTP be nice to you, but do have enough network backbone to allow the traffic to flow. Spend the money on more bandwidth. Or things are really going to suck for you in the coming years - because if you can't play with your toys nicely, we'll take them away.