Comcast Blocks Web Browsing 502
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."
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
CableVision is doing the same (Score:1, Insightful)
It disrupts BT, P2P distribution, and even Tor when just being used as a client! At first it works, then connections slowly die off and new ones cannot be opened. It happens most aggressively during prime-time, but it also is done any-time-of-day. Fortunately the telephone still works as it's UDP based...once they start filtering that, it'll only be a matter of time until someone dies because 911 doesn't work.
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.
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Throttling (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that ISPs are doing this is scary. The fact that customers accept it is also scary.
Re:Thankyou Comcast. (Score:1, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with protocol-neutral throttling. Inevitably, some people are going to draw excessive resources on the network that ruin it for everyone else (tragedy of the commons). Yes, everyone trots out that line about "paying for X bandwidth a month," but ISPs are always careful to state that it's "up to X bandwidth," and if you really want a guaranteed amount of bandwidth that isn't being subsidized by the majority of users, you need to be paying for a $100+ business-level service, or start cutting back on 24-7 torrenting.
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?
I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did I call it or what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The methodology looks suspect (Score:5, Insightful)
Television (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are you serious? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Throttling (Score:2, Insightful)
(e) The service provider must not modify the communication selected by the Internet user [512(a)(5)
I say, deny Comcast Safe Harbor!
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.
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
Case in point: I visited my aunt and uncle a few years ago. While I was there my uncle asked me to find out why their 280K DSL was so slow. A speed test showed they were getting 80K, and a quick check of Task Manager showed KaZaA was running. Turns out their 14 year old daughter was file sharing. While she was savvy enough to use P2P apps, she really doesn't know squat about networking or broadband technologies. To her, computers and the Internet are an appliance, just like a toaster, but more fun
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.
Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:3, Insightful)
People in those neighborhoods also tend to be the types that will pay for triple play packages they probably don't need. Landline service, cable TV service with all the fixings and the fastest internet service they can afford. They are hugely profitable for the tel/cable-cos.
By contrast, I've never gotten priority treatment or pricing from either Time Warner or Verizon. Some people at Time Warner barely bothered to hide their contempt for me because I wouldn't let them talk me into buying cable service -- I've got the network stations and that's it ($5.99/mo), which I wouldn't even have if I could get decent reception with antenna. Ditto for Verizon as I only have dry-loop DSL service with them, though they've never wasted as much of my time trying to sell me stuff I don't want as Time Warner has (some TW reps refuse to take no for an answer).
Misleading Advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:comcast charges for opting out (Score:3, Insightful)
For the low low price of... (Score:3, Insightful)
* for the first 6 months, then only $199.99 each month thereafter
Besides their apparent sadism by implementing filters and such (same RIAA/SCO business model, just change "Sue customers" to "prevent from using what they paid for"), Their advertised offers always have very tiny fine print, hidden in the margins and borders of the mass mailings, mentioning that oh yeh, the price quoted above in the bold 1000pt font is good only for a couple months before we double or triple it, and you are still locked in to us for a year! That is the main reason Im staying away from them. Besides, I got higher up/down bandwidth AND static IPs (something else comcast WONT do) for a MUCh cheaper price from DSL Extreme [dslextreme.com]</happycustomershamelessplug>. If you sign up, feel free to use me as a referral (username there same as here).
tm
Re:Comcast: we hate our customers (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense to me.
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
Weasel talk.
ISP's DO promise bandwidth speeds.
Are they the Service Level Agreements?
No, but if that's your point you're WAY off: using "no SLA" does not equate to "no guarantee"... lack of an SLA only means it's "undefined" what they will do in terms of CREDIT if there is service degradation.
Comcast is violating FTA, FCC and even USPS directives about false advertising.
Really all Comcast needs to do here is stop forging packets, and employ a REAL traffic shaper. They are within their rights to do so PROVIDED they cease being misleading: Just tell the consumer your PEAK bandwidth depends on availability, but you are guaranteed XX bandwidth. That's something every ISP should do, because it is SO easy (and tempting) for an ISP to over-sell by a large degree.
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.
Re:Throttling (Score:4, Insightful)
Customers don't accept it because they don't understand the first thing about how communications networks work.
The fact that there is nowhere near perfect information and that last mile access is usually a natural monopoly (if not a statutory one) in most places, the free market will not work as advertised.
Re:Throttling (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Reasons to throttle (Score:3, Insightful)
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!!!"
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
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.
Re:How is this a bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
service is perfectly acceptable.
Comcast is *forging* packets, effectively claiming that the
destination does not want to talk with you rather than admitting
that it is Comcast that does not want to support this connection.
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever the source of the money, they NETTED a huge windfall. The government took an action that made their bank account balances $Billions higher than those balances would have been otherwise. Do I really care about the semantics of that? I admit that I don't.
And to say that oh look, they did all these things with that money...I say it's not enough. They would have done DSL anyway. It is a profitable service. Upgrades to DSL are already paid for by the money I piay for DSL. The same way upgrades to the cell phone network are paid for by the large sums of money I pay for cell phone service. And I really doubt you get very much for your $5 per month cell phone. I still pay $60 a month.
Also... Please explain to me, if they spent so much of that $200Bn on these fabulous upgrades, why our office, located in San Francisco, can't get get DSL OR cable. This is the 3rd most populous city in California and AT&T couldn't be bothered to put a DSLAM less than 17,000 feet from this location, right in the heart of the city? I think patches of "Dial-up or T-1" should not exist in a city of this size, if ATT was actually investing their giant windfalls (AND the money we pay them) in something besides fattening their own wallets.
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
And if everyone on your street got the $6000 standard deduction and you didn't, that would be fair because the government can give them discounts on taxes beacuse it wasn't their money anyway, regardless of whether you had to pay more? If the government set up standards for all people and companies to follow, then didn't apply them to all companies and people, but exempted certain people based on how much they were given in campaign contributions, would that be fair? I don't think anyone is arguing that the money actually belonged to the taxpayers and was denied from being written as a check to each and every taxpayer. I think the sentiments are such that it isn't fair for some specific companies to receive benefits different from other companies and citizens. As such, they were "given" money in the form that they were singled out to not pay taxes they would have otherwise owed. Changing the tax rate for everyone isn't a gift, but singling out one business or industry for benefits is a gift to that company. In many cases, they essentially paid the taxes, but were sent checks back from the government, much like gifts are.
Re:Throttling (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, they give you the bandwidth all right. It's a properly working connection mechanism that isn't working.
What Comcast is doing is like a telephone company promising you free telephone calls, and then faking a busy tone when you try to use the service.