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Comcast Blocks Web Browsing
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 07, 2008 10:16 AM
from the because-they-can dept.
from the because-they-can dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers have found that Comcast has quietly rolled out a new traffic-shaping method, which is interfering with web browsers in addition to p2p traffic. The smoking gun that documents this behavior are network traces collected from Comcast subscribers Internet connections. This evidence shows Comcast is forging packets and blocking connection attempts from web browsers. One has to hope this isn't the congestion management system they are touting as no longer targeting BitTorrent, which they are deploying in reaction to the recent FCC investigations."
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Politics: FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling 196 comments
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."
[+]
Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent 161 comments
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
Submission: Comcast Blocks Web Browsing by Anonymous Coward
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Throttling (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
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Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense to me.
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Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you mind that certain more costly foods at the buffet were laced with a chemical that would make you barf if you ate more of them than the buffet owner wanted you to eat, yet this was never disclosed and they said it was an all you can eat buffet - and then when called out on it they actually tried to defend it?
That is a better analogy.
Also, if you eat more than 100 items of food there in a month, you get banned for a year the first time, and banned for life the next time. That is like their "secret" 100 GB/month limit.
Use DSL, at least they actually get the bandwidth they advertise. Where I'm at, Embarq has always given at least the promised speed, and none of the crap some of the cable companies have been pulling.
Parent
Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Throttling (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. If we were talking about throttling.
Which we're not.
If the article didn't make that clear, this wiki link [wikipedia.org] might help.
Parent
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that ISPs are doing this is scary. The fact that customers accept it is also scary.
Parent
You CAN opt out (Score:5, Funny)
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FIOS availability (Score:5, Interesting)
How did you discover the FIOS rollout schedule for your location? I'm contemplating moving my household and I would definitely use the current/future availability of FIOS to help me choose my destination. However, I can't figure out where to look to find a map that says "This is where you can get it, this is where you can get it in 6 months, and this is where you're out of luck."
So how did you figure this out?
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Re:FIOS availability (Score:5, Funny)
"Oh, I can get 50MB/s broadband here? Of course I'd love to live under this bridge...on the train tracks....next to the paper mill...downwind of the sewage treatment plant."
Parent
Re:FIOS availability (Score:5, Informative)
See the mash-ups menu for some FIOS info.
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Re:FIOS availability (Score:5, Interesting)
After the way AT&T whined about the condition of their copper plant and how they couldn't give us DSL during the DSL rollout (because they were too cheap to fix it), this is a giant change. It may have to do with the UVERSE TV rollout I have been getting bill inserts about.
Course since it IS AT&T it will probably have too many problems and gotchas, and I will likely be trapped on DSL for the time being, since I have a grandfathered static IP.
Parent
Re:FIOS availability (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Throttling (Score:5, Interesting)
"$200 billion" telecommunications scandal
"$200 billion" telecommunications rip-off
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Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
They love to moan (especially ATT) about how they can't afford fiber, when the truth is they are too busy rubbing our billions of tax dollars all over their fat sweaty bodies.
"We already got paid, why should we invest in infrastructure?"
We need either a carrot or a stick for the telcos in this damn country. The carrot would have been making them ACTUALLY DO FTTH before giving them a big fat check. The stick would be forcing them to make good on it now or else face criminal charges of defrauding the US public, and/or fining them $200Bn.
Instead, we've chosen neither--to let them do whatever the hell they want, forever, with no consequences.
Parent
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Interesting)
They did not just sit on the money. They reinvested it in upgrades of other services such as:
- Rewiring analog lines with digital lines (cleaner phone calls/faster internet)
- Improving cell phone communications by upgrading to a digital network.
- Providing upgrades to DSL over standard lines.
- Not declaring bankruptcy during the 2000 dot-com collapse, because they had cash reserves to save them.
So the $200 billion was the *corporation's* money, not taxpayer money, and it was spent to upgrade many of the things we take for granted today (clean digital calls, ubiquitous cell availability, and high-speed DSL to the home). In my own area, I've seen my internet increase from 24 kbit/s on dirty analog lines to 53k on clean digital lines. I've seen cellphone costs drop from $60 a month to $5 a month so that even I can afford it, and in just the last few months, I got 3000k internet.
It would be dishonest of me to sit here and say the corporations have not done a damn thing since 1996.
I would be lying.
Parent
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
People are so easily lead by spin! Remember when a few of the Katrina victims used their govt-issued debit cards for nonessentials and everybody freaked? Now the whole country is receiving a cash windfall of borrowed money from the govt. and nobody cares, because it's a "tax rebate" of "your" money - even if you didn't pay that much tax in the first place, and even though govt. services are still being provided! "Freedom isn't free so I don't mind sacrificing other people's lives for it, just don't tax my capital gains or my inheritance windfall!!!"
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Monopolies, regulation, competition, and an idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course these providers have improved their services. The problem is they have not improved them quite as well as they could have. And a lot of the ways they are "improving" them focues on ways to extract more money out of the customers, rather than providing a service that increases the value to customers. Would you expect any less of a business motived exclusively by revenue growth?
One big problem is that these companies are sitting on "gold mines" that were established for them (or for the company they bought out) through exclusive monopolies on the infrastructure. Although they invested in this infrastructure, they benefitted from government guarantees of an exclusive regulated monopoly. Now, with most of the regulation lifted, they are using this infrastructure they "inherited" to gouge customers (as opposed to supplying a regulated service that would be sufficient to pay back the investment). At the same time, they know competitors are basically unable to overbuild, not because of any exclusivity, but merely because it doesn't make sense to invest in another infrastructure (because the new builder would know they could at best get 50% of the customer base).
IMHO, the people have a "lien" in that infrastructure because of having guaranteed the exclusivity in the past. That "lien" should be exercised in the form of maintaining a level of regulation on the infrastructure that permits fair, equal, and neutral use, as well as pricing that is fair and does not gouge consumers.
It's bad enough that we have such a poor service from companies like several cable companies and many telephone companies in terms of how the internet layer services are rendered over the infrastructure. If we had fair access to the infrastructure by other providers of internet layer service, then competition would at least allow someone that does a better job to offer services, if not encourage others to do better to keep customers happy.
Long ago, AT&T was broken up between local service and long distance service because at the time it was seen that long distance would be better provided through competition. This was in fact correct and it did improve long distance through better offerings, better pricing, etc. But the split wasn't quite right in terms of today's needs. What we need today for telephone and cable service is a split that separates the ownership and management of the infrastructure, and the companies that can offer services over that infrastructure. We are already seeing this point of split taking place in many areas for electrical power service. In many areas, people can contract to get their electric power from any of a number of power providers (some that actually generate power, and some that merely buy it on the generation market). This has opened up options we would not have otherwise even seen, such as greener [greenmountainenergy.com] power preferences.
What I propose is that governments in all areas support (even financially) the development of an all new fiber based infrustructure. Instead of this being a branched fiber structure like Verizon FiOS [wikipedia.org], this infrastructure install a minimum of 4 fibers from each home (maybe more for businesses) all the way to a central office connection facility. This infrastructure, including the central office facilities, will be owned by the local government (or liened or otherwise regulated by it), and operated in a fully fair and neutral way. The home owner/renter can then acquire services from any company prepared to connect service to them through one or more of these fiber circuits. Legacy/incumbent providers of information/entertainment service like Comcast, and telco service like Verizon, can make use of this by being one of these providers. They would be able to offer any services they want through that fiber connection (which is plenty sufficient for a huge amount of service on just 1 of the 4 fibers). They could even choose to subcontract
Parent
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
No, since it was a tax break, it was taxpayer money. The fact that it stayed in the corporation's bucket instead of making a trip to the feds nad back again is irrelevant.
Mostly, they've consolidated their position and worked to make competition impractical, preferrably illegal. Screw them - build FTTH, revoke their last mile right of way, and make them rent the service like anyone else who wants to.
Parent
Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't realize it's happening, and/or don't understand what articles like this even mean (but look at Brittany's pregnant sister!! OMG!)
Parent
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
In my town they are. Oh, excuse me. They are "Franchised" by the township. Huge difference, apparently. Not in practice though.
Parent
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
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How is this a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'm not specifically a network engineer, but I like to think that I'm not network stupid. To me, this would sound suspiciously like someone trying to perform a denial of service attack.
Now, I can understand being irritated at forged packets coming back as a result, but at the same time, isn't it reasonable to expect Comcast to do something to shut down connections coming from this host? Frankly, I'm a little surprised that Comcast didn't shut off the connection altogether.
Am I missing something?
Parent
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast, in many locations, is not just a de-facto monopoly, they are a de-jure monopoly. Comcast negotiates with municipalities to be the sole cable provider to community. The best situation in many of these cases is a duopoly between Comcast and the local Baby Bell. Often, for many regions, Comcast is the sole broadband provider, since the residents are too far away from the CO for DSL.
Parent
Re:Are you serious? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have heard, for example, that roadrunner in NYC needs to provide satisfactory service to customers due to it being a government created monopoly. Sure they won't mention this but I have heard of at least one person making enough noise (ie: contacting every politician within 50 miles, among other things) to have roadrunner cave in (well first they begged him to switch to dsl then they caved in).
Parent
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Informative)
Their service is terrible and unreliable and they treat their customers like shit. This makes them a slightly better option than the local phone company.
No. They are part of a government enforced duopoly. In most locations in the US only three companies have the legal right to use the right of ways that allow them to connect a line to your house. These companies are given an exclusive contract in most cases. They are:
In short, internet access options in most of the US sucks. We've already paid more per person in tax subsidies to the network providers than many other countries. Sweden, for example has slightly less population density and had a huge embezzling scandal in their national internet drive. They paid half as much per person as people in the US, have on average ten times faster connections, better uptime, and pay about half as much per month as US citizens.
The phone companies and the cable companies have lobbyists who legally bribe our politicians with campaign contributions. As a result, the good of the people isn't even considered. It is just a battle of whether a given law will give money to the cable company or the phone company. Either way citizens get the shaft.
There are numerous ones making their slow progress through the courts, usually to end in a private settlement. One might actually go through sometime this decade, but the politicians has also been working on passing laws to grant retroactive immunity to network operators for malicious, illegal abuses under the guise of national security. There is little hope.
The antitrust regulators are appointed by the executive branch. Both candidate's parties in the last two elections received huge donations from hundreds of private companies and for some reason antitrust regulators i the US show little or no interest in prosecuting even blatant antitrust abuses. (In the case of Microsoft, they had already been convicted and the new appointees, changed the punishment from being broken up, to a small fine and a pat on the back.)
Parent
Damn... (Score:5, Funny)
UK ISPs do this all the time (Score:5, Informative)
so nothing new in this here in the UK
Thankyou Comcast. (Score:5, Insightful)
However if they start screwing with http, then suddenly every Joe Sixpack will be up in arms about traffic shaping, and maybe the pressure will be sufficient to actually bring about some change.
My sincere thanks, Comcast, for bringing this issue into the mainstream.
Let me be the first to say (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure it's all bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
That being said.. spoofing addresses to return RST commands and etc. just SUCKS.
I wish DSL providers would improve their coverage. Many people don't have a choice of anything BUT Comcrap.
Read the featured article (Score:5, Informative)
2. They are using firefox.
3. The Slashdot headline is not completely accurate.
The
Reading the article I got the idea that is not exactly the case...
Re:Read the featured article (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Cancel (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, the person on the other end of the phone doesnt know or care about such issues as net neutrality. But she did ask why I was cancelling, and she did type in my response. So hopefully someone down the line will read it. But even if they dont, at least I know that my money will not be going to a company I despise.
Re:Cancel (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, the person on the other end of the phone doesnt know or care about such issues as net neutrality. But she did ask why I was cancelling, and she did type in my response. So hopefully someone down the line will read it.
Someone will probably read it. Here's your problem though - what she typed is probably something like this:
You can't bust through the customer service morass when you're dealing with people making $10/hour who have been strategically placed by their employer as a defense between you and anyone who could actually solve your problem.
Parent
They are still forging packets (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, this article seems to say that they will generate reset packets for hosts that don't even exist on the internet. This may be a kind of throttling, but it is sill FORGERY, and shouldn't be allowed at all.
Did I call it or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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comcast charges for opting out (Score:5, Informative)
Last month I called comcast to tell them I did not want to be called, mailed, or emailed by them or any of their 'partners'. I called in response to a mailing from comcast that provided a phone number for opting out. FWIW, I have been receiving junk mail (post and electronic) from comcast encouraging me to get internet service from them, despite the fact that I have been a comcast internet customer since it was RCN.
Yesterday I received my monthly comcast bill, and on the bill was a $1.99 charge for "change of service". I called comcast, since I recalled making no changes to my service in the past decade. The telephone operator said "that charge is for when you called to opt-out of the comcast and partner mailings". She quickly followed with "we can remove that charge with a credit to your next statement".
Sigh.
$1.99 is not much, and almost not worth the time calling about it. But the attitudes and practices behind the fee are what get my goat.
Re:comcast charges for opting out (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't 100 syn packets a second a bit abnormal? (Score:5, Interesting)
The methodology looks suspect (Score:5, Insightful)
Local routers defend agaist DOS attack (Score:5, Informative)
We synthetically generated TCP SYN packets at a rate of 100 SYN packets per second using the hping utility ... The IP Time to Live (TTL) field for these forged TCP RST packets is consistently set to 255
So, when new connection requests are issued at the rate of 100 per second, the first router is resetting some of those requests.
The application is issuing new connection requests at a prodigious rate. The router determines that this is beyond the capacity for the router, or perhaps beyond some limit imposed on that router by the internal network. Or, perhaps, it is beyond a rate parameter that is used to detect DOS attacks.
When such a limit is exceeded, there are a few reasonable responses for the router to choose from: It can drop random packets; It can drop random SYN packets; it can drop packets from the attacking host; or it can NAK/RST some of those SYN packets. All of those are legitimate router responses. The reset packets are not "forged". They are legitimate responses in the protocol. The primitive operation is called a "provider disconnect indication".
I don't see any problem in the protocol here. And, I don't see any problem in the router behavior. The router is just protecting itself and the network from overload conditions. By selecting to disconnect calls from a host that is using far more resource than other hosts, it is just protecting the other hosts from a DOS attack by that first host.
The title of the summary should be "Local routers defend agaist DOS attack".
How to truly beat comcast. (Score:5, Informative)
We sued comcast. What? How? Eh?!?
Check your EULA that you signed when first getting service. If you are a business customer this REALLY affects you. Their "shaping" technology actually caused a shitload of false positives on a bunch of alarms. Our sent packets to security equipment wasn't always returned so we started to get a lot of "failure to connect". Well... a lot of what we manage are fall back systems that when they come online take over for other sites.
Well... these different locations of hardware were not able to communicate correctly because they were identified as P2P. We use encrypted packets of random data to doubly ensure that it's authentic communication.
This set off a chain of events as the shaping got worse and worse. Originally we thought it was our network code. We couldn't reproduce it and noticed our satellite connection didn't have this issue.
Our amazing network engineers took 2 months to track down the issue and it was their shaping technology blocking or resetting our connections at almost a 90% success ratio. Now while we preferred having 24/7 connections to our equipment this was no longer possible unless we altered our code significantly.
So we looked at our EULA and sure enough there was no mention of interception of data and packet shaping. In fact, our contract said they wouldn't do anything without notifying and getting our approval first.
We sued. We won. Now we're waiting judgment for lost revenue, breaking of contract etc.
I STRONGLY recommend every business out there who has remote equipment that does more than "ping" for responses and are having trouble to check your Agreement. Screw cancelling your subscription. Sue the pants off of them.
We should have kept ICMP Source Quench (Score:5, Informative)
In the early days of the Internet (by which I mean 1981-1983, not 1997) there were ICMP Source Quench messages. This provided a way for routers to say to an end node "Slow Down." Back when I was working on congestion control, I had our TCP implementation (a modified 3COM UNET; this was before Berkeley got into TCP) set to cut down the size of the congestion window when a Source Quench was received. I took the position that Source Quench messages should be sent before the packet-drop point was reached, so that a well-behaved TCP should never have a packet dropped for congestion reasons.
This didn't catch on, though. There was concern that sending Source Quench messages would choke the network, since as the network congests, routers need to send more Source Quench messages. That sort of behavior creates an unstable condition. And coming up with a generally applicable Source Quench policy was hard. Eventually, ICMP Source Quench was deprecated.
Without Source Quench, there's not much a router can say to an end node about congestion. A router can still send ICMP Destination Unreachable messages, though. What Comcast ought to be doing if they want to reject a connection is to send back ICMP Destination Unreachable, Code 13 (communication administratively prohibited). That's a legitimate action by a router, and it makes it clear who's complaining. Some firewalls will send such messages, so they're not unheard of; however, some NAT boxes don't translate them properly, so they may not reach home clients.
But faking a TCP RST, or worse, sending an ACK for something that didn't reply at all, is just wrong.