Comcast Confirmed as Discriminating Against FileSharing Traffic 532
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast has been singled out as discriminating against filesharing traffic in quantitative tests conducted by the Associated Press. MSNBC's coverage of the discovery is quite even-handed. The site notes that while illegal content trading is a common use of the technology, Bittorrent is emerging as an effective medium for transferring 'weighty' legal content as well. 'Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user. Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer -- it comes from Comcast.'" This is confirmation of anecdotal evidence presented by Comcast users back in August.
Encrypt Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
World of Warcraft (Score:5, Insightful)
Subtitled: How To Lose Your Customers To DSL (Score:4, Insightful)
Title Inapt (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Then when the people we use as an alternative to Comcast start to mess with us, just
DROP them too.
Simple market response.
Comcast... Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yea, right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Illegal forgery and defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Also probably very silly to do. And won't work unless both ends of the communication are doing it.
Re:Common carrier (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Encrypt Everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead if all traffic being encrypted along with taking lots of otherwise unused cpu and perhaps Bandwidth. Lists of ip address that are suspect will have their packets dropped at random instead.
The fight isn't on any technical means, it's more on a political means.
So in the end, encryption while a good technical work around. Is escalating the fight. This isn't what we should be fighting for, we should be fighting for common carrier status, and for the people to have more rights then corporations.
If a corporation isn't able to get customers without coercing people into it. Then that corp isn't serving the people as it should and shouldn't be propped up. (other words they need to change their business modal)
Lets make this a I want my rights back instead of a fine I will just encrypt my traffic fight.
Re:Illegal forgery and defense (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it might work for a while until you ran out of memory for tracking state of all the connections that never close.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Common carrier (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Against the TOS (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm not allowed to send emails anymore - I'm "serving" them to an SMTP server.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Then when the people we use as an alternative to Comcast start to mess with us, just
DROP them too.
My choices are literally dial-up, Comcast, or nothing. And dial-up and nothing aren't really options because I often have to VPN into my office from home.
Ah yes, simple market response. I can choose any broadband provider I want, as long as it's Comcast.
Re:Yea, right (Score:5, Insightful)
- Offer a huge bandwidth that most people won't use
- Some will use it, costing us more than we charge, but that's overwhelmed by increased business by people who want the bandwidth from the ad while not actually using it
But then this happens:
- Whoops! File sharing is a Killer App that many people are using.
- On average we are now losing money.
Of course, the proper course of action is to alter their contracts (after the current ones expire) to charge more money for more use, perhaps in various rates. Yes, that will drive people to other companies who don't do this...who will also lose money.
Let the market figure it out.
Anyway, wouldn't generating fake signals to alter the operation of your applications be illegal? That's above and beyond throttling or blocking (gray enough as it is.)
Re:Against the TOS (Score:1, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what the TOS are, because a TOS can't supersede the law.
Re:Registering legitimate files (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the entire premise of a man-in-the-middle attack - give both sides false keys, but hang onto the false keys and the real keys yourself, then encrypt/decrypt accordingly with appropriate keys in each direction to keep them oblivious to your presence.
Taking a stance like "well at least we still have encryption," rather than fighting for your rights is extremely dangerous. People keep saying "they aren't a common carrier, so they're within their rights."
What the hell? When is it within a carrier's rights to WILLFULLY LIE ABOUT OR MODIFY the correspondence or transmission they've been entrusted to carry?
If the US postal service opened your mail and scribbled out sections of your letters, would you still feel so copacetic about things? I know I wouldn't....
This is a step towards being subjugated exactly like China.
Step 1) Comcast imposes "totally legal" restrictions on internet traffic.
Step 2) United States Government makes deal with Comcast to be sole provider for govt networks.
Step 3) Congress passes legislation to help put other providers out of business.
Step 4) Comcast becomes primary provider in US.
Step 5) Government officials give kickbacks to Comcast to regulate "perfectly legally" what internet traffic is allowed to pass.
Step 6) The US is adopted by a loving family, with an older brother named communist China.
Okay, so it's a stretch.... but this IS the beginning of a violation of rights. There is no shortage of evidence that the constitution was created to protect people from violations such as this, EVEN if you've agreed to it!
Why do you think we don't allowed indentured servitude anymore? It was a contract that was entered into willfully..... The law is there to PROTECT people from jackass people/companies like Comcast who try to decide that it's within their rights to violate peoples' rights, just because the law says they can.
To quote the declaration of independence.
This is exactly a situation where if what Comcast is doing is "legal" it's time to enact some legislation to ensure that this kind of completely unethical behavior (which SHOULD be illegal) never happens again.
The law is(read: SHOULD BE) there to protect you and me, not big business. We have a congress, and not a king, for just this sort of situation.
Help me Obi-wan Kenobi(read: voters of the USA). You're my only hope.
Re:What would be nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction... they throttle in order to get the 15% back and resell it to more users, without having to upgrade existing infrastructure.
Re:you know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:2, Insightful)
This of course ignores the reality of barriers to entry, both on the business side (in the way of fees required to operate, etc), and on the personal side (I'd rather not quit my job in order to be an ISP startup, just because Comcast is awful).
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast thrives in broadband because in many regions it is your only choice. You can't get alternative cable modem ISPs and DLS is not always available. Market forces are unlikly to effect them much.
Need a new protocol for torrents (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Common carrier (Score:3, Insightful)
As I mentioned, DSL is an option here. Qwest owns the lines. And I already employed the suggested vote-with-your-dollars strategy because they suck. So what would you have me do? Keep switching back and forth between them every month? And by the way, DSL requires doing business with Qwest because they own the phone lines, so the dial-up option doesn't change anything.
My point is that you act as though its a free and open market and gee-golly if someone doesn't like how they do business we can just find another provider -- and that's bull. Two providers does not add up to consumer freedom of choice. It's not helpful to excuse a company's bad policies by noting that one can "freely choose" equivalent or worse options. You're saying that because Comcast is still the more palatable of two rotten providers, whatever level of service they provide must be okay then, right?
Great. And if I don't like eating dirt, I can always eat shit instead or just go hungry. Lucky me.
Temporary Workaround (Score:2, Insightful)
#Replace 6883 with you BT port
BT_PORT=6883
#Flush the filters
iptables -F
#Apply new filters
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
#Comcast BitTorrent seeding block workaround
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
#BitTorrent
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m udp -p udp --dport $BT_PORT -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited
ipfw add deny tcp from any to any {bt port} in tcpflags rst
Re:Any World of Warcraft users... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called UPnP. Most home routers speak it, and most decent BT clients use it. It's convenient, and not really a security risk if your router's smart enough to not enable it on the WAN interface. Sadly, some actually do.
Re:Yea, right (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a common misconception some people seem to have. Not following an avenue or course of action that would result in increased profits is NOT THE SAME as losing money. It's making less money. Losing money would be having to spend more than you made, and we both know that's not what's happening. It's a typical "investor class" mentality to look at not making money the same as actually losing money. There's something to be said for making a little less money, but also offering a better service. Human decency is what I'd call it. Poor business sense might be what someone else calls it. Go figure.
Re:ha (Score:3, Insightful)