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Comcast 'Blocks' an Encrypted Email Service: Yet Another Reminder Why Net Neutrality Matters (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker, writing for ZDNet: For about twelve hours earlier this month, encrypted email service Tutanota seemed to fall off the face of the internet for Comcast customers. Starting in the afternoon on March 1, people weren't sure if the site was offline or if it had been attacked. Reddit threads speculated about the outage. Some said that Comcast was actively blocking the site, while others dismissed the claims altogether. Several tweets alerted the Hanover, Germany-based encrypted messaging provider to the alleged blockade, which showed a "connection timed out" message to Comcast users. It was as if to hundreds of Comcast customers, Tutanota didn't exist. But as soon as users switched to another non-Comcast internet connection, the site appeared as normal. "To us, this came as a total surprise," said Matthias Pfau, co-founder of Tutanota, in an email. "It was quite a shock as such an outage shows the immense power [internet providers] are having over our Internet when they can block sites...without having to justify their action in any way," he said.
By March 2, the site was back, but the encrypted email provider was none the wiser to the apparent blockade. The company contacted Comcast for answers, but did not receive a reply. When contacted, a Comcast spokesperson couldn't say why the site was blocked -- or even if the internet and cable giant was behind it. According to a spokesperson, engineers investigated the apparent outage but found there was no evidence of a connection breakage between Comcast and Tutanota. The company keeps records of issues that trigger incidents -- but found nothing to suggest an issue. It's not the first time Comcast customers have been blocked from accessing popular sites. Last year, the company purposefully blocked access to internet behemoth Archive.org for more than 13 hours.
By March 2, the site was back, but the encrypted email provider was none the wiser to the apparent blockade. The company contacted Comcast for answers, but did not receive a reply. When contacted, a Comcast spokesperson couldn't say why the site was blocked -- or even if the internet and cable giant was behind it. According to a spokesperson, engineers investigated the apparent outage but found there was no evidence of a connection breakage between Comcast and Tutanota. The company keeps records of issues that trigger incidents -- but found nothing to suggest an issue. It's not the first time Comcast customers have been blocked from accessing popular sites. Last year, the company purposefully blocked access to internet behemoth Archive.org for more than 13 hours.
there's "more people" listening to the bits transmitted between comcast and this encrypted email provider than there was before this mysterious 'outage'.. which serves as a reminder that encrypted communications on the web aren't safe from everybody.
We don't know if this was on purpose or by accident. Since it's comcast people seem to want to think the worse.
And Obongo ain't gonna save you
Shit, Slashdot goes down for 10 days at a time with zero explanation from the risibly-named "DevOps" DeVry dropouts who pretend to understand 1990s era PERL.
A minor outage of an obscure web provider who may have -- according to your scare story -- "hundreds" of users on ComCast is now proof that ComCast is systematically violating net neutrality?
Back to the moron zone with Slashdot after its latest outage.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
This isn't an NN issue. It's more likely due to incompetence at Comcast.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
...that which can't be explained by ZDNet.
As in, why Comcast would even care. Geez, you'd think these people have never heard about the Internet. It isn't a series of pipes, you know!
When contacted, a Comcast spokesperson couldn't say why the site was blocked ...
Everyone knows you call Comcast Customer Support to get answers.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
When I use Comcast, I use a VPN.
An ISP has to disclose any traffic shaping. The fact that Comcast would not comment shows to me that it was a mistake. Net neutrality hasn't even expired yet but even if it did, this still would be illegal without disclosure if done intentionally.
The headline "Comcast 'blocks' an encrypted email service: Yet another reminder why net neutrality matters"
followed by "Now imagine your favorite websites getting blocked by your internet provider in the name of net neutrality."
Does TFA present substantive information supporting this conclusion?
Does TFA itself make the leap of asserting Comcast blocked Tutanota?
Yet there is the headline and intentional smearing and weasel conflation of Comcast and Net Neutrality to fit pre-ordained narratives and stoke outrage.
Absolute favorite part in context of TFA is this amazing snippet:
"It doesn't really matter if it was a purposeful block or a technical glitch," said Pfau. He argued that the net neutrality repeal will "harm competition immensely"
What if I wrote an article with the headline:
Zack Whittaker committed burglary and punched a small child in the face.
In the body of my article stated Zack Whittaker was in the neighborhood when the crime occurred and random people on reddit think he might be responsible.
How would Zack Whittaker feel about that?
...what can be explained by incompetence.
Maybe the site was only partially blocked. Which raises the question when can we know a site is actually wholly blocked...
As of right now, lack of Net Neutrality has not resulted in widespread website blockages, except for bandwidth heavy video streaming websites. If major websites engage in widespread blockings, Republicans will change their opinion of trustworthiness of big ISPs.
This will be an interesting situation. I've worked in networking for more years than I would like to say. And the mantra is: The network is broken. There is a number of reasons this connection could have had an issue and it has nothing to do with blocking traffic. DNS services, multiple routes converging, new hard installed, there is a number links in this chain. I just want to see now how many times this will come up. What will an ISP have to do to "prove" there is no blocking? Would you trust what they say anyway? Maybe a new (or old) engineer just pulled off a stupid, cause that never happens. Looks like some serious finger pointing and maybe some finger wagging. Maybe some always lawyer enriching class action lawsuits!! The possibilities are endless.
Sooooo, I'm not defending Comcast or whatever ISP will be put in the spotlight, but the internet is a big place and ISPs don't own all the services out there to get from a home connection to a single website.
BGP is a complex routing protocol, that not only relies on you getting it right, but all the intermediate hops between you and and other particular site.
"Blocking" a target service at an ISP, which is hauling a huge amount of data is actually technically difficult and costly in terms of infrastructure - simply putting a packet filter into a single router is not something you can do when you have a high capacity distributed network.
The most likely explanation is a dropped, or mis-advertised BGP route for either comcast or the target & this could happen at any point along the route, or even a typo at another provider no where in the path could have done it (China took over all the routes for Google a few years ago, Dodo in Aus screwed us Telstra's routes for a day through gross incompetence & many other examples)
This kind of issue is exactly what this looks like, it's difficult for those affected to diagnose & looks to the customer like filtering. The network engineers would have eventually tracked down the source of the issue, then had to contact the offending parties (not easy to do), convince then they've screwed up & get then to fix it. They probably didn't bother to communicate the cause of the issue with helpdesk, which is typical for a large organisation like this.
Critical thinking: what does comcast have to gain by filtering that route out, it certainly wouldn't have been easy to do & it was restored in a relatively short period.
Yes! This type of abuse is wrong and something should be done about it.
This is monopolistic behavior. If Comcast had to compete with anyone (WHICH THEY DO NOT!) they would never be able to get away with this sort of behavior.
Look, we've been down the road of more and more regulation before. How well did that work to prevent the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe? How about the Housing Market collapse of 2008/2009? I know setting up a group of regulators who big business can easily cozy up to makes you feel like you are protected. But it's just an illusion.
You have the opportunity here to appeal to something that Trump HAS signaled he may be willing to do -- break up monopolies! And it would achieve everything you want. But instead people get stuck on their one solution that they refuse to let go of. After all, they are spending tons of energy fighting for that solution. How wrong would they be if they just gave up?
Do it. Give up on Net Neutrality. And you will realize that you have eager and willing allies in the Conservative and Libertarian voting camps that would love to get behind your cause to end this type of abuse.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
This is good advertisement for them too. They are on Play Store.
kudos
Jut ran into an issue today with accessing state.gov web sites. Determined it was a DNS issue. When I switched my DNS server to 8.8.8.8 (google), the site was available from my browser.
Ended up on the phone with support for two hours trying to convince them it was their DNS server issue, and not my browser, router or modem issue.
This is just Comcast being incompetent. They have issues with their own email and have plenty of DNS issues that block sites. If people were smarter they could find solutions like switching to a better DNS provider like Google or Open DNS. But let's blame the government and net neutrality because that will solve our problems. Comcast had many issues like this with neutrality in place so Comcast's incompetence will always be there.
That's all. Getting ready to block what they want. Comcast doesn't have the best reputation anyway.
One of the ISPs that I use, LUMOS, consistently gives me timeout errors whenever I attempt to reach Slashdot through them. Another ISP lets me through.
It would sort of be hard to report the problem if I only had access to one ISP. Perhaps a website like Google ( which the ISP can't disconnect intentionally or otherwise for long ) should set up a problem reporting page. Anyone would be able to go to it, enter a URL, the error which the browser is reporting, and the name of their ISP. The site would record that info along with a time date stamp.
Then anyone ( most notable the websites themselves ) would be able to enter a URL and see the errors reported for that site. Thus web masters would get a heads up when people are having difficulties getting to their site.
This is shoddy reporting at best. Hiding behind the quotes on "block" is below cheap shot level. Where are the useful questions? Were any other sites affected? Did anyone take a traceroute anywhere? Why do any work when you can pull in clicks with a sensationalist headline and spurious conclusions?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
But the kind we had was just a way for government to seize control.
A one page law could be written by congress defining that companies can't censor or throttle or block. Surely a 300 page self proclaimed power was over the top.
The same with ACANAC Internet Service Provider from Ontario.
Last year started to stop my emails with PDF attachments, providing a message with a "link" to release from "quarantine", link which never worked. It was easy to manually access the original provider and study online my billing info.
This year it removed encrypted TAX documents and modify original message asking itself if it is "DANGEREOUS?" but saying the attachment was deleted since it is not authorized to keep it (???) meaning that somehow it is authorized to censorship and remove my correspondence.
The "webmaster" did not answer my questions about how to release messages, technical support said they cannot help if internet is working even the massages comes from they the messages should be SPAM (???) but the originals were in "quarantine" (???).
Using their website feedback form I got a replay that that box is not monitored and I have to call their support services.
Finally a full circle of confusion.
The tax documents were sent by surface mail, but since they come from Texas, in 10 days still not arrived.
What is happening not about "security of content" (they can read it), what is happening with the "security of delivery" of correspondence ?
I presumed this is a Federal Crime to intercept, destroy or erase somebody else correspondence.
So the poster provides an article where users aren't sure whether a site is online, blocked, or unavailable for any of a myriad reasons. The poster is just certain that some vague bureaucratic wrangling would have prevented it. The experience described resembles what I see on my own corporate intranet, but sure, classifying the internet as a utility would have prevented this from occurring.
to point out the obvious. Whatever the problem was, it wasn't because of "Net Neutrality" legislation. Or if Comcast weighs more than a duck - then Net Neutrality matters!
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
That's stated by James Bond the 1964 Goldfinger film. I see no indication of it being named "Fleming's Razor" or that the original author (Ian Fleming) wrote the line, though it has been quite some time since I read that book.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
How is everyone on Slashdot so blindingly retarded?
How do they at the same time see themselves as 'smart'?
Yeah, I know. I coined the term. I've heard it referred to elsewhere as "Goldfinger's Law".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
For 12 hours, Comcast gave itself a black eye. Then it stopped.
No thumb-fingered bureaucrats necessary.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.