Comcast Blocks Web Browsing

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."

Throttling

Throttling wouldn't be so bad if you could just opt out of it. The ISP providing my home Internet connection throttles your performance by default, but if you visit one their website, you can change the settings to unthrottled, and then upload and download gigabytes and gigabytes of music and films each both with no problem. The ISP figures most people aren't going to bother changing their settings, but the people who really love file-sharing are still free to do so.

Re:Throttling

On my service provider's homepage, it takes a half an hour for me to just find the place to pay my bill, and it moves every couple of months. If such an option is available, I doubt anyone has ever actually found it to activate it! (Luckily, I don't have comcast, and am in a rare area with two cable providers, the OTHER of which is comcast, so I'm hoping RCN won't pull this crap because they actually could lose customers and are already second-place.)

Re:Throttling

Why should you or anyone opt out? If they can't give you the bandwidth they promise you in your contract - they shouldn't have advertised it as such in the first place.

Comcast: we hate our customers

Does Comcast have a death wish? It sounds like something out of Dilbert.

Re:Throttling

Throttling wouldn't be so bad if you could just opt out of it.

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.

Re:Throttling

The ISP providing my home Internet connection throttles your performance by default, but if you visit one their website, you can change the settings to unthrottled

Wow... so you have to explicitly opt-in to receive the service that you paid for? You have to know about this throttling, visit a specific page, and flip a switch, in order to get non-degraded service. Is that even legal?

The fact that ISPs are doing this is scary. The fact that customers accept it is also scary.

The ISP figures most people aren't going to bother changing their settings, but the people who really love file-sharing are still free to do so.

Which seems kind of strange. The "problem users" are those savvy ones who transmit tons of data, who are the same ones who will probably change this setting. What's the point in throttling the non-savvy users who just do light web-browsing anyway?

You CAN opt out

Just use gopher.

FIOS availability

Fios will be in my town by June,

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?

Are you serious?

How come they still have customers? Are they a de facto monopoly? Where are the class action lawsuits and the antitrust regulations then?

Re:Are you serious?

Because the people are saving with their $99 for Internet/phone/cable deal!!!! Bundle and save today!!!!!!

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!)

Re:Are you serious?

"Are they a de facto monopoly?"

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?

People who, when reading "forged packets", do not form a picture of counterfeit plastic bags in their heads are a small, albeit vocal minority. Comcast seems to have found the way to kick them off of its customer rolls by self-selection (the more /. stories stoking the outrage, the better), thereby only retaining the sheep. Good business plan, as I see it. Bully for them. The antitrust and legal issues can be sorted out, I would assume, by changing some verbiage in the customer agreement and allowing some sort of so-called oversight from the benevolent government.

How is this a bad thing?

We synthetically generated TCP SYN packets at a rate of 100 SYN packets per second using the hping utility...In this section, we present our network traces that show the network behavior while the TCP SYN packets are being sent. All traces were collected during peak usage hours (7-9pm local time).

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?

Re:Are you serious?

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.

Damn...

...I wanted to have First Post but I had to find an available proxy to get through my ISP's traffic shaping technology

UK ISPs do this all the time

Eclipse in the UK, since taken over by Kingston Communications, will packet shape you so hard, that even if only downloading a linux iso from p2p at 33kbps,they will disrupt all your connections, such that web browsing becomes a pre broadband experience. Don't use p2p and all plays nice again.

so nothing new in this here in the UK

Thankyou Comcast.

When ISPs were just targetting the minority of users who use P2P (and then under the excuse of stopping piracy/ thinking of the children/ protecting us from terrrists) there would never be enough backlash from their users to stop this kind of abuse.

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

NOT COMCASTIC

Read the featured article

1. It is a darn good read. Concise, short and to the point.
2. They are using firefox.
3. The Slashdot headline is not completely accurate.

The /. headline had me thinking one thing - but reading the article clarified my one knee jerk reaction: "You cannot browse the web - at all!?"

Reading the article I got the idea that is not exactly the case...

Re:Read the featured article

Ah, you must be new here. All *I* got from reading the /. headline was 'Comcast are evil, fire insults at will.'

Cancel

Im tired of Comcast pulling stunts like this too. So today I did something about it. I cancelled my Comcast service. Completely cancelled. And when I called to cancel, I let them know exactly why.

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.

comcast charges for opting out

This is a bit off-topic, but it does have to do with comcast.

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.

I wonder...

I wonder what Comcast's network would look like if they spent as much money improving bandwidth as they apparently do "shaping" (damaging) the traffic already on their wires.

Isn't 100 syn packets a second a bit abnormal?

Sending 100 syn packets per second to an invalid internet address... that would seem like a big red someone stupid is trying (or testing) a DOS syn attack flag to any ISP worth their salt. They basically were trying to create 100 outbound connection attempts per second for an extended period of time, I would be more annoyed if the ISP didn't catch something like that, only need a few hosts to build up a nice syn attack and overrun someone's tcp stack.

Did I call it or what?

To me it seemed rather obvious: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=501572&cid=22882416 [slashdot.org]