Slashdot Mirror
Comcast Helps Fix Pirate Bay Connection Problems
MagusSlurpy writes "Far from blocking The Pirate Bay, Comcast was just one of several ISPs on which TPB was unreachable today. Comcast reached out to the torrent site, and its engineers provided technical support, eventually determining that the connectivity issues stemmed from a reverse path filtering issue at an intermediate ISP, Serious Tubes Networks."
So are all the people who bashed Comcast gonna man up and admit they were acting like bitches and eat their crow?
The Pirate Bay isn't exactly a possible source of revenue, so Comcast wouldn't have a good reason for throttling it, even if it soaks up bandwidth like a spark-gap transmitter.
But Netflix? You have to wonder if Comcast would send the network engineers out first, or the bill collectors.
Comcast has nothing to gain by blocking The Pirate Bay, and plenty to gain by helping address the filtering problem. By addressing, and helping to fix, the problem, Comcast has gained a little positive karma in the online community. By blocking The Pirate Bay, they'd only be buying more bad PR, while not actually doing anything to address the problem of torrent bandwidth usage. After all, block one torrent site, and users will just use another site.
Why are you surprised? Do you think Comcast wants people to start pointing at them during net neutrality arguments, when their merger with NBC is still so controversial?
Palm trees and 8
more like undermines comcast's business model, if you can't download phat warez why would you need a 5, 7, 10, or 15 megabit pipe? i have cheap ass-dsl 1.5megabit and i pay 30 bucks for it, i just play games and web browse online, no torrents so i don't need cable internet.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
That's who fixed this.
I guarantee you that, just like in television and telephony, *once you get to the actual engineers*, they're really nice, sane, helpful people, who want to give you what you want to get, and are paying good money for (as long as you, yourself, are sane -- this is why there's 3 tiers of triage before you get to one).
But their job is not to worry about content, it's to worry about transport.
And, by and large, we don't.
Oh grow up. Now that they helped customers in an issue that wasn't related to them at all and really wasn't such a big deal, you can't even take back your words and admit they did a good job. I'm pretty sure comcast has some clever slashdotters working for them too, just like I'm quite sure out of 80k Microsoft staff and out of 25k Google staff some of them most likely hang around here. If you can't even admit your mistakes, at least thank the likely fellow slashdotter who probably helped getting it working while you did exactly what now?
To their credit, they don't listen to what random customers tell them to do over a support line. Even if they did listen to you and it ended up fixing the network, that'd be a dangerous precedent to set. This isn't a personal attack against you btw, sorry if it came across like that.
I can appreciate that they don't know me from Adam and I don't expect them to take my advice about how to fix the problem, but when I tell them my cable is out, I don't want to hear "No, it isn't."
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Between Netflix, VOIP, and tons of commercials, Cable TV has been taking a hit in the downturn in the economy. They need to keep their Internet subscribers. This is more important to keep their triple play customers. Between FIOS and other competition, their market is seriously eroding.
The truth shall set you free!
and vote the story down?
no?
why not?
how much time a day do you spend reading slashdot?
now how much time to do you spend in the recent queue voting down crap stories?
now, how about if i asked you to pay me to do this? would you pay? no?
that's what i thought.