Comcast Continues to Block Peer to Peer Traffic 283
narramissic writes "A report released Thursday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finds that Comcast continues to use hacker-like techniques to slow down customers' connections to some P-to-P (peer-to-peer) applications. The EFF said that Comcast appears to be injecting RST, or reset, packets into customers' connections, causing connections to close. 'The investigators say that their tests confirmed an earlier one conducted by the Associated Press that showed that Comcast is interfering with BitTorrent traffic. BitTorrent is a protocol used to efficiently distribute the online transmission of large files, and some entertainment companies have partnered with its creators to distribute its content online. Comcast has said that it doesn't block BitTorrent, or any kind of content.'" If you're the type that always looks for a silver lining, Comcast's skulduggery may be pushing Congress to reconsider Net Neutrality.
Good for them (Score:0, Interesting)
Any legitimate distributor of content can pay to distribute it with trying to hide the real cost from their consumer. Any other use of BitTorrent is by definition illegitimate.
And in any case, users of residential internet connections shouldn't be surprised they don't get all the business features. Want a full internet connection? Pay for it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Plausible deniability? (Score:3, Interesting)
See this nonsense [comcast.net] linked from that page:
Question: "Do you discriminate against particular types of online content?"
Answer: "No. There is no discrimination based on the type of content. Our customers enjoy unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer. We respect our customers' privacy and we don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior such as which Web sites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site."
I guess that is called "plausible deniability". Comcast management apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks BitTorrent is only a web site, and clearly doesn't understand the issues. I suppose that later Comcast management can blame the denial on a confused lower level employee.
I was talking to a Comcast repair technician yesterday who came to replace a poor quality, non-functional cable modem. He was very uncaring. I suppose that is the Comcast culture. It must be miserable to work there.
You can't see it with Slashdot's HTML rendering, but whoever typed that reply for Comcast is back in the days of the typewriter. He or she used two spaces after every period. That made sense when all type was monospaced. I wonder if I visited Comcast headquarters, would I see horses tied outside?
Comcast Censoring YouTube also?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I then changed my YouTube preferences to my GMail account, and the confirmation e-mail arrived within like 2 minutes. No surprise, since Google owns both GMail and YouTube. But my curiosity was now aroused, so I changed the e-mail preferences on YouTube to my work account (I'm an open source programmer at a Big-10 university). Again, the YouTube confirmation came within like 2 minutes or so.
I logged into comcast.net under my main subscriber e-mail account today -- and deactivated ALL spam/filtering on that account. I then went back to YouTube and switched preferences back to my comcast account. It's been about 4 hours and, of course, there's been no e-mail from YouTube.
Anyone else notice this oddness between YouTube / Comcast? It irked me enough to create a little web site of it this afternoon, and post it on my blog as well (http://paulbramscher.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]).
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I don't really care whether the excuse true or not - I don't have empathy for "but my network can't handle it!". If someone buys Internet access and it is being used in good faith in accordance with spec, but the network breaks, the company should have to fix their network; the customer shouldn't need to adjust their usage. To me, it just so happens that the affected application is P2P.
I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I think they'd have to upgrade modems soon anyway to continue competing with FiOS? (Something about DOCSIS 3?) Also, I am still curious - can someone with knowledge of current cable protocols verify that the excuse is plausible?
Re:Should be shot (Score:3, Interesting)
This will lead to non-compliant network stacks which attempt to detect "bogus" RSTs and ignore them. And that cannot be allowed to happen at any cost.
Why? Just ignore all RST packets for bittotent ports, and timeout any connections. Do it at the NAT level, and you don't have to modify the OS. It leads to some extra open connections, but big deal. Comcast can just plain old block the connections anyway, the only reason they're not is because it takes more router resources than they have.
Re:Define Net Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
1. No ISP shall give preferential handling to, modify, fail to deliver, or alter the content of traffic based on either its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content.
Exception: If a quality-of-service mechanism becomes widely used over the Internet, such as setting a time-critical flag on certain traffic (online gaming, VoIP, etc.), ISP's may give preferential handling to traffic so flagged, as long as:
a) the mechanism for requesting a higher QoS for certain traffic is widely known and available, such that anyone can use it;
b) the preferential treatment given to time-critical content is given equally to all traffic claiming to need a higher QoS without regard for its source, the protocol over which it is carried, or its content;
Exception: Traffic which is clearly and unambiguously malicious may be dropped. "Malicious", in this case, means either:
a) It is intended to interfere with the correct operation and control of the recipient's equipment, if the recipient of the traffic is a customer of the ISP. This includes, but is not limited to, denial-of-service traffic and exploit attempts. However, an ISP must honor a request in writing by a customer to cease filtering inbound malicious traffic to them.
b) It is generated by a program running without the consent of, and against the wishes of, the owner of the sending computer, if the sender is a customer of the ISP.
c) Such traffic consists of unsolicited commercial email, and the customer has requested that the ISP filter inbound email to remove spam.
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:2, Interesting)
It's obvious their tech support is not read. I called and I also got a load of bull about downloads that sounded scripted. I understand about downloads, but how is that stopping my uploads?
I'm switching providers to someone who actually listens to a question before they give you an answer.
iptables should be able to help (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not blocking per se...it's worse! (Score:5, Interesting)
I looked but couldn't find the a law on a federal level but saw a few state laws in passing that include using the Internet to commit fraud and causing the interruption of Internet services in that act. Now suppose that their interference can be considered defrauding you of services they sold you and suppose that interfering with the data streams was the method for doing this, even though it is on their network, I imagine something could be twisted enough to apply.
I look at it this way, Suppose you purchased a printer that printed 20 pages per minute. Says so right on the box and on the printer itself. Now, when you get home, you find that you have to buy the turbo module at a cost more then the printer in order to get that advertised performance. And when you complain, they tell you that it is done this way to protect their supply network. What sort of laws apply? Suppose that you have to feed the paper manually one sheet at a time and push a button after it is started without the turbo module which could be similar to having to monitor and restart your torrent or whatever.
Now, what sort of laws would apply, would they be criminal or civil in nature, and seeing how comcast is a regulated entity, is there a state oversight organization that fields complaints already. In ohio, the public utilities commission has some oversight of time warner I think. I have used them in the past to help get complaints again Cell phone providers taken care of. I think it probably is illegal in some way under some laws. I just don't know the specific ones or if I am correct in that assumption. But the oversight necessary might already be there.
Comcast sells the Internet, not some Internet like service. Their willful failure to deliver reliably might not sit well with local regulators either. At minimum, they should be forced to be honest and up front about their tampering with P2P applications before you purchase their service. and where there are no other options because of Comcasts government granted monopoly, there should be a way around it.
I'm not terribly worried about this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Other DSL providers will naturally begin try and use the fact they don't interfere with the internet as a selling point. Assuming this happens, the only places that may be affected are any in which Comcast has a monopoly by being the only source for DSL.
My only fear is other DSL providers will see that Comcast is getting away with tactics like this, and try to pull the same stunt. For that reason, I honestly hope Comcast gets sued bigtime over this. Comcast needs to be made an example out of.
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:4, Interesting)
It's when you go to make an upload connection to another peer. BitTorrent wouldn't work at all (uploading or downloading) if Comcast just shot your upload connections down from the start; instead, they kill it after 30 seconds. I've timed it hundreds of times, from the time I announced to the tracker - it's always almost exactly 30 seconds. Unless you hammer the tracker with manual announcements or have a client that's smart enough to reconnect the peer "just to see" if it "really wanted to reset", you can't upload more than for 30 seconds at a time without either hammering the tracker, or taking excessive measures (it's been discovered that reconnecting the client as if it were just announced, upon being dropped, while causing somewhat odd client behavior, will work around the problem).
This is a serious issue if you're a member of invite-only torrent sites where you don't get to download unless you've uploaded enough; it's also a serious issue if a lot of Comcast customers happen to use your BitTorrent-distributed product.
The "quality assurance" cover is completely bogus - that's not what's going on. First of all, they're not hampering my upload speeds, they're dropping the connection completely after a set amount of time. How, exactly, does my uploading stuff on BitTorrent affect other customers' experience? Increase the bandwidth bill maybe, but that's not what's going on... they could easily throttle the speed down, but that's not what they're doing.
I used to work for an ISP. Uploading doesn't hamper other customers' experience - downloading does. I think it's more plausible that they're being paid to screw up private BitTorrent trackers.
Re:It's not blocking per se...it's worse! (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets look at what happens with WoW updates.
Lets say that you're one of the first one's trying to do a WoW update, so your updater (which uses bittorrent) contacts Blizzard's servers. Comcast then sends you a packet pretending to be from Blizzard saying that Blizzard doesn't want to talk to you.
That's forgery.
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good for them (Score:1, Interesting)
BitTorrent and a DDOS are practically indistinguishable - which could easily be the real reason behind the behavior seen on Comcast. BitTorrent is probably just triggering automated anti-DDOS measures. If you've ever tried to use a network at the same time as someone else was using BitTorrent, you'd be glad Comcast was blocking them.
I, for one, am glad Comcast is blocking BitTorrent. Some of the "free content" crowd might be annoyed, but the people using the Internet for legitimate purposes will at least be able to use it. It might not be "true" Internet access, but I'll take "working" over "impossible to use" any day, regardless of what some geeks who refuse to pay reasonable market value think.