Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent

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."'"

Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc

[ashridah]

My understanding of their BT filtering is that they're sniffing the tracker traffic in order to determine which connections to cut. Since any internal use of BT would be to known trackers that they run themselves, I'd assume that it would be relatively easy to add exclusions to the filters to avoid blocking "legitimate" traffic.

It should be noted that one can bypass comcasts crappy seeding-only blocks by running tracker traffic through an external proxy. Encryption of the individual p2p connections doesn't cut it, you need an encrypted tracker stream as well.

This would point heavily to the tracker being the telltale

Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc

[}{avoc]

But how would they discern the difference

BT Inc. could provide hashes of official torrents to Comcast. If the handshake doesn't send an approved info_hash, Comcast throttles.