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.
Any World of Warcraft users... (Score:5, Informative)
Just wondering since WoW uses Bittorrent to distribute its patches (one example of a very legitimate use).
Re:Any World of Warcraft users... (Score:4, Interesting)
</anecdote>
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Ports aren't really the problem. If you don't forward ports, other people can't initiate connections with you - you can only initiate connections to others. That's just the way NAT and port forwarding work. If you and another guy both have port forwarding disabled, neither of you can connect to the other. If either of you have port forwarding configured, the other one can initiate the connection and sharing can commence. If you only have 10 people in the swarm, cutting out half the people due to a lack
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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.
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Encrypt Everything (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Encrypt Everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Are they allowed to do the same thing with Skype (or anything else they want) and tell the other side I want to disconnect? Where is the legal line?
Illegal forgery and defense (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because it is their network DOES not give them the right to FORGE IP packets to look as if they come from elsewhere.
That would be like a courier service forging documents from 2 people wanting to communicate saying "Stop sending documents" if they didn't want them to talk. They'd never do something that stupid, and if they did, they couldn't get out of charges by saying they were only forging documents through their service.
Forgery is illegal. Someone who had a forged RST packet sent in their name should have forgery charges pressed and sue for impersonation.
A technical defense is to block RST packets. Probably not hard to do under Linux, and likely trivial.
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: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.
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You would only have to block the RST packets on connections which are to specific ports. This can also be the case with bittorrent if setup appropriately.
At least with t
Re:Illegal forgery and defense (Score:4, Informative)
http://redhatcat.blogspot.com/2007/09/beating-sandvine-with-linux-iptables.html [blogspot.com]
That was linked from the first result (a Digg article) for "iptables DROP RST".
Dishonesty is not illegal (Score:3, Interesting)
That's certainly dishonest, but that doesn't make it illegal. They're basically lying to their customers (or rather, their customers' software). Lying isn't illegal unless you do it in connection with an actual crime. For example, you can go around telling people that you're Steven King, and not be breaking any laws.
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This should be the topic of discussion (Score:2)
While it's a nice idea in theory (Score:2)
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The simplest solution, and one that I think the web sites will eventually support (once they get over the cost for HW encryption support) is to use SSL / TLS. Thi
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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
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Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Now maybe the "net neutrality isn't important because we can trust giant corporations not to screw their customers crowd" will shut up. Of course, the people getting paid to lobby or keep those bills out of Congress won't change their mind, but maybe regular people will. And that's a step in the right direction.
This story does make me wish I was not boycotting Comcast already though, so I could boycott it for this.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, this will hurt net neutrality because everyone is getting QoS confused with Net Neutrality!
QoS is legal, and it should exist. Prioritizing classes of traffic is OK, provided the classes are generic classes of traffic (e.g., email, web, ftp, p2p, voip, etc).
Net Neutrality is compatible with QoS. What Net Neutrality proponents want isn't avoidance of QoS, but to prevent deals where if you use Windows Live Search, it comes up instantly, while if you use Google, you'll find yourself waiting a good minute for the frontpage to load up. I.e., both use the same class of traffic (web), but service is differentiated based on who can pay.
So Comcast causing Bittorrent problems is OK for Net Neutrality. But if Comcast suddenly lets Blizzard's WoW updates unimpeded while causing problems for say, Linux ISO torrents, then that conflicts with Net Neutrality.
Basically, like traffic should be treated alike. But unlike traffic may be treated differently. So if Comcast charged an extra $10 for enhanced VoIP QoS, that's OK, as long as it's for all VoIP, not just say, Vonage only, or Skype.
Net Neutrality opponents like to bleat the Anti-QoS line because it's the easiest way to spread FUD, when they really mean "Google, pay us, or we'll make your page take ages to load, while making Windows Live Search load instantly".
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World of Warcraft (Score:5, Insightful)
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Eclipse.org uses it as a distribution channel for their IDE.
I believe podcasts/netcasts (and most likely video podcasts/netcasts) make use of it as a distribution channel.
There's also linux ISOs, movie/game trailers, game demos, game mods make use of it as well.
XFire uses something similar to BitTorrent for sha
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- "America's Army" (the U.S. Army's free video game). I've uploaded over 80 GB of that alone in the past few weeks.
- Aronofsky's director's commentary for the movie "The Fountain," which was not included on the DVD release
- The Pirate Bay's "Steal This Film - Part 1", which talks about the raid on their servers
I.e.,
Encryption (Score:5, Informative)
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An alternate explanation would be that most of the well-connected peers may require encryption by this point; then you'd see the same effect even without interference from Comcast.
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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:Encryption (Score:5, Informative)
encryption is useless in this case, however, since bittorrent traffic is obvious to an intelligent packet shaper such as the Sandvine systems that Comcast uses. Bittorrent usage generates a very distinctive signature even if you just look at the volume ant timing of packets. Once it figures out you're using bittorrent, it just needs to send the RST packet, which will have the same effect regardless of encryption: Your client will think that the remote peer closed the connection.
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Informative)
Not just P2P traffic (Score:5, Informative)
I've posted this before, but it's pertinent and bears repeating, it's not just P2P traffic that Comcast is filtering. A sysadmin I know has been blogging on Comcast filtering corporate e-mail traffic as well.
http://kkanarski.blogspot.com/2007/09/comcast-filtering-lotus-notes-update.html [blogspot.com]
Hey! Mod Parent Informative (Score:2)
Subtitled: How To Lose Your Customers To DSL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Subtitled: How To Lose Your Customers To DSL (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast has decided that p2p degrades their system, for them it's more of a technical issue than a political one (though I'm sure the **AA Gestapo have been in touch with them).
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Title Inapt (Score:5, Insightful)
Registering legitimate files (Score:4, Interesting)
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Fix to comcast. (Score:5, Informative)
Almost all up to date bittorrent clients support this.
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Doesn't the very act of policing content (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hello, RIAA. I have reason to believe Comcast is allowing illegal music trafficking to occur."
It's Comcastic!
Comcast... Where? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm outraged! (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting note (Score:2)
On the other hand... (Score:4, Funny)
Question.... (Score:4, Informative)
1. What hardware/software would carriers have to use to do this?
2. Can it be defeated?
Fwiw, Rogers cable in Canada is rumored to be doing the same thing (and perhaps more). Michael Geist talks about this on his blog: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/1859/ [michaelgeist.ca]
Re:Question.... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Canadian users should file a complaint about Rogers misleading advertising with the Competition Bureau (not advising purchasers of their high speed service in their advertising that they will lower the speed of P2P apps). I have, and so have others. It really is a question or priorities and complaint volume though, and at present the number of complaints has been very few.
For anyone interested, the Competition Act [canlii.org] and there are numerous sections dealing with misleading advertising. By not advising they public they are actually reducing the speed of P2P apps, they are knowingly making a material misrepresentation to the public (Parts VI and VII.1).
You can file complaints with the Canadian Competition Bureau about Rogers, here [competitionbureau.gc.ca].
Dubious legality of forging resets... (Score:3, Interesting)
If all traffic flowed through a Comcast-controlled proxy that was disclosed, there probably wouldn't be a problem, but Comcast is actually forging source addresses on both sides with the effect of concealing their actions and fooling the parties on each end into terminating their connections at (what they believe to be) each other's legitimate request.
I imagine this method of traffic limiting could be litigated sooner or later since it affects customers who are not party to the RST-inserting carrier's TOS.
-Isaac
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This article does seem to put forth an interesting idea. I wonder if a case could be reasonably put together for Comcast impersonating its users in violation of the law.
but why..... (Score:2)
if enough people complain or walk then they will change their practices.
By the way - well spotted.
Forget "throttling," what about "masquerading?" (Score:2)
--Comcast using forgery or masquerading
--Comcast deceiving customers about its true terms of service
--Comcast hiding what it is doing, thereby giving no means to complain or give them feedback about technical problems
What would be nice (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I would love to see stats on what percentage of their users actually use bittorrent. Until someone can prove that more than 1% use it, they can use that argument and 85% of people will shout"Yeah, more bandwidth for me, screw those pirates", without realizing the legitimate torrent uses (such as linux distro rollouts, patches as mentioned before, media defender email leaks, etc).
At leas the media is finally catching on, but until we get people to realizing that it is a slippery slope that affects them, there will not be enough uproar to stop them.
So, if we could only get our hands on how many people use it... we might be able to make some noise. Until then, the average joe will say "So What?"
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But they are well within their rights to throttle Bittorrent traffic. And they NEED to.
I used to run an ISP, and I've worked at many, and let me tell you, Bittorrent traffic is EVIL. It HAS to be throttled. It's an extremely inefficient, "talky" protocol. It opens thousands of connections to every BT client (yes, you can limit the number of connections your BT client *accepts*, but those connections still have to be *routed* to you befo
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.
Legal action? (Score:4, Interesting)
On one hand, they're deliberately pretending to be the person you're communicating with (fraud?). On the other they're deliberately degrading performance of a person's internet connection (vaguely DOS-ish), a person one who isn't necessarily their customer.
Thoughts?
I don't think this is all Comcast discriminates... (Score:4, Interesting)
BTW, This has gotten worse ever since Comcast started offering VoIP.
Sending spoofed packets (Score:4, Interesting)
I just can't believe that somewhere along the lines there hasn't been a law made that makes spoofing illegal, they are claiming to be someone/something else to which you have agreed to communicate with.
Of course, if its not actually sending packets as if they came from the peer, then its a different story.
In other news: Hammer sales in u.s. up by 30% (Score:3, Funny)
This may have been considered already, but... (Score:4, Informative)
I recall that in the Early Days of the Internet, not abiding by the RFCs would get you in hot water. Especially screwing up with SMTP would do it, but even bad behaviour due to your incompetence would get your T-1 unclocked, and it would take a few calls to the powers that be to assure them that you found someone who knew what they were doing and that problem wouldn't occur again. At least not for a while.
My point is, perhaps it's time for the other Internet providers to consider requiring Comcast to not mess with traffic in this way, or sanction Comcast.
Sanctions could be as graduated as throttling at the NAPs, degrading Comcast traffic, even disconnects.
Some providers have a stake in this. If the legal Bitorrent users (WoW for instance) get a crossed hair over this, why would they not ask their providers to pressure Comcast into stopping this?
Ultimately, this may be Comcast clinging to their ToS and 'server' restrictions, and that would mean Comcast users won't be sharing out Bitorrent files. Bummer.
Another wrinkle, I wonder if Comcast sends forged RSTs to Comcast users sharing with *other* Comcast users. Intranetwork traffic shouldn't 'cost' so much for Comcast.
My theory is simple - Imagine if ISPs started throttling or denying traffic from Akamai, because of the volume... What a mess. And while Bitorrent is used for all sorts of purposes, so is SMTP. So if they think the illegal use of Bitorrent is sufficient excuse for them to deny it, why don't they throttle/deny SMTP, since simple spam is bad enough, but the emails of worms/trojans/scams also are objectionable. even arguably illegal. And certainly harmful, to users and the Internet. Maybe even Comcast.
Of course, that's not the point. Comcast is trying to avoid costs due to the volume of Bitorrent traffic that leaves them paying for NAP ports, lines to other ISPs, and routers/switches to manage all this.
In other words, they are trying to control costs by controlling usage.
One of the reasons I got out of the business pre-2000. Couldn't make a profit with my business model. Network costs were too high.
Well, another option is to surcharge high-volume users. Or charge more to afford to provide the service ostensibly advertised.
It's not often I can be happy to have Cox Cable. My Qwest DSL before just sucked, but the traffic got through.
Good luck. My bet is the best avenue is a class-action over either false advertising or Magnuson-Moss.
Been saying this for years about Cox Communication (Score:3, Interesting)
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While the cable is theirs, they have leased it - or some capacity on it - to the customer, and are now actively and purpsefully preventing the customer from using the service he has bought. While the contract likely has a clause which lets comcast terminate the service and/or alter it at any time at will, I wonder if such a clause wouldn't be ruled unconsciable; after all, it essentially states that Comcast is not really bound by the agreement
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Look, the landlord analogy doesn't apply, Interweb access isn't the same at all. Comcast sells a consumer service over its own equipment which is not a "common carrier". It's not a house. You're not just "sitting" on their service. There is a contract. Part of the contract allows Comcast to restrict ("throttle") p2p if they want. Maybe it's at the request of
Re:Common carrier (Score:4, Insightful)
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Since they usually operate under exclusive franchises dished out by local governments, it's not as simple as "ditching" them. It's not possible for anybody else to install a cable to create any kind of competition. If you're lucky, you might have DSL, but a duopoly is rarely much better than a monopoly.
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I am a Comcast customer not because I like Comcast, but because they bought out Time Warner in my city. I was a Time Warner customer not because I liked Time Warner (Though they certainly are better than Comcast), but because I DID ditch Qwest DSL for havi
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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 ma
Comcast != Common Carrier (Score:4, Informative)
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Also the original forum post from DSLreports [dslreports.com] user funchords = Robb. Notice the stuff said. I helped him investigate and can verify that comcast has been and still does this, via Wireshark. They send RST packets to you and the people you're uploading to on a random 1-18 second timer if the user is not a comcast user themselves. (It used to be an automatic 8 second timer but now they added a small degree of "randomization"...they seem to be exploring it, there was a
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It's official, cable companies are evil. Though AT&T isn't much better...
Re:Comcast != Common Carrier (Score:5, Informative)
There's not a whole lot of equipment that sends them, but pretty much every OS I've come across honors the messages to some extent. I don't know if the cheap NAT routers that many people use pass them along or not, though NAT in general tends to be fairly broken when it comes to ICMP.
If a man in the middle were to spoof ICMP source quench packets that looked like they came from either of the p2p nodes that were communicating, the effect would be that they would start sending data more slowly to each other. The connection would still be open, they just wouldn't transmit as fast as they could.
After reading the article it became clear that what Comcast is doing is much more evil. They're setting RST flags on packets (or maybe spoofing new packets in the right segment range with it set), which causes the entire connection to abort rather than just be slowed down. It could cause a lot of grief if their filter misidentifies something as p2p and starts shutting down the connections, as apparently happens to Lotus Notes [blogspot.com] traffic.
That last link has some good packet dumps of it happening.
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Indeed it is - Mod parent up (Score:2)
Re:Common Carrier (Score:5, Informative)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]: "Internet Service Providers generally wish to avoid being classified as a "common carrier" and, so far, have managed to do so. Before 1996, such classification could be helpful in defending a monopolistic position, but the main focus of policy has been on competition, so "common carrier" status has little value for ISPs, while carrying obligations they would rather avoid. The key FCC Order on this point is: IN RE FEDERAL-STATE JOINT BOARD ON UNIVERSAL SERVICE, 13 FCC Rcd. 11501 (1998), which holds that ISP service (both "retail" and backbone) is an "information service" (not subject to common carrier obligations) rather than a "telecommunications service" (which might be classified as "common carriage")."
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.
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:LOL (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing says you hate a service more than if you were to rip up the foundation of your life, career, and family just to avoid them.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:you know ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:you know ... (Score:5, Interesting)
AT&T has tried to sneak in some fiber into the area (Project Lightspeed), but continues to run into problems with deals local governments sign with Comcast. Namely, a $300k fee that villages charge new service providers and the requirement that telecom companies provide some sort of local service (i.e., local government access channels). AT&T says they're a utility and shouldn't have to pay that fee.
If Motorola's WiMAX manages to do something, they may be an option in the mid-term future. I'm not holding my breath.
AT&T U-verse is coming to Chicago soon (Score:3, Interesting)
U-verse's "Elite" Internet tier is 6M/1M. Slower downloads than Comcrap but faster uploads and only $40/mo, or $30/mo if you a
Re:you know ... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:ha (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ha (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Yea, right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
[citation needed] (Score:5, Informative)
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. ... we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for.
But somebody somewhere is uploading that data that's being downloaded. It's not magically coming from nowhere. If the trick is that the cost of bandwidth is supposed to be shouldered by the uploaders, then it's shouldered by the uploaders, and it doesn't matter if it's being downloaded by p2pers or anything.
Which you vaguely get at later in your reply, but this sort of comment is nonsense: "Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it. Nobody posting legal files thinks anything like they're "cheating"! Even if your theory is true, nobody out there knows it, so how could they think they're cheating? They think they're 'spreading the load' somehow. They're using 'available bandwidth' that's not being used for anything.
Then you say:
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Ok then. If all download bandwidth requires corresponding upload bandwidth, and p2p uses "average users'" upload bandwidth, and upload bandwidth for "average users" was oversold... then that means your argument ends up being "broadband vendors oversold bandwidth"! (Just that it's upload bandwidth, not download bandwidth like everyone thinks.)
But this all hinges on a rather bizarre claim about how bandwidth is sold (by upload bandwidth only) that does things like ignore people in the middle... it may be true but your presentation is so sloppy that it doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
Yeah, gee, I think I'll do that, since that's what your argument boils down to.
Re:Not that simple (Score:5, Informative)
I appreciate your effort to view all sides of this issue and bring balance to the discussion. Unfortunately your points are utter hogwash.
It's based on the users of bandwidth paying for that bandwidth. How do you explain consumer-only ISPs that don't host content? How do they stay afloat?
Tell me how "flat rate" equates to "noone[sic] pays". ISPs charge the cost of their bandwidth divided by the number of customers, plus a little on top for their operations.
Keep in mind that all connections have bandwidth limits, and most have monthly transfer limits. (The latter should be treated as fraud by the courts; ISPs love to shout "unlimited!" in their advertisements. But that's a separate discussion.) If you start transferring a lot, uploading or downloading, you have to get a higher-priced account or pay for the extra data transferred a la carte.
Please. If I am a thoughtless user and I create a giant 10MB dancing hamster video and mail it to my friends, and they start forwarding it around, am I "cheating the ISPs"? (Collectively, by the way... since when does everyone have to start considering the welfare of every business out there? What happened to capitalism?) The ISPs absolutely can figure out how to bill for it: charge by connection time or by quantity of data transferred. Look at business accounts; they have detailed billing for "burst" and "sustained" transfers, transfer limits, and more. What they can't figure out is how to avoid getting hoist by their own petard, after they made fun of AOL for those practices, and then repeated AOL's mistakes.
So what are those "max connections" and "max bandwidth" settings I've seen in every BitTorrent client I've ever used?
We're in agreement there. But why does your unbiased simple explanation contain numerous factual inaccuracies which all back up the terrible business practices and fraud of the ISPs?
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I mean - for example, how much money is Ubuntu losing because of all BitTorrent downloads of its latest version of Linux? Er... wait...
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But what happens is a small company starts up, gets gobbled by a larger company (Ti