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.
skul what? (Score:5, Funny)
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You would think they don't understand the concept of "Average". so I explained it to them.
And now that I think about it, you are right.
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Re:skul what? (Score:5, Funny)
I believe that's known as "Shitcock's Razor".
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Maybe it's their new hookup instructions? (Score:5, Funny)
Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:5, Informative)
-- begin bunch of shit ---
Thank you for contacting Comcast Cable Mark.
Thank you for writing to us in response to reports about Comcast's
efforts to manage peer-to-peer traffic on our networks.
Mark, we have posted new FAQs on our Web site making clear to our
customers the steps we are taking to protect the customer experience for
all of our customers. You may access content related to this issue in
the FAQ section of http://www.comcast.net/ [comcast.net]
First, and most importantly, you should know that Comcast does not block
access to any Web site or application, including peer-to-peer services
like BitTorrent. Our customers use the Internet for downloading and
uploading files, watching movies and videos, streaming music, sharing
digital photos, accessing numerous peer-to-peer sites, VOIP applications
like Vonage, and thousands of other applications online.
Mark, we have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a
good Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage
our network so that you can continue to enjoy these applications.
Peer-to-peer activity consumes a disproportionately large amount of
network resources, and therefore poses the biggest challenge to
maintaining a good broadband experience for all users, including the
overwhelming majority of our customers who don't use P2P applications.
It is important to note, however, that we never prevent P2P activity, or
block access to any P2P applications, but rather manage the network in
such a way that this activity does not degrade the broadband experience
for other users.
Mark, network management is absolutely essential to provide a good
Internet experience for our customers. All major ISPs manage their
traffic in some way and many use similar tools.
Comcast believes we have a responsibility to our customers to provide
this service. Network management helps us perform critical work that
protects our customers from things like spam, viruses, the negative
effects of network congestion, or attacks to their PCs. As threats on
the Internet continue to grow, our network management tools will
continue to evolve and keep pace so that we can maintain a good,
reliable online experience for all of our customers.
I understand you have some questions about Comcast's policies. You can
view all of the Comcast Subscriber Agreements and Policies by visiting
the Comcast Online Customer Support Center at http://www.comcast.net/terms/subscriber.jsp [comcast.net]
On this site you will find the Subscriber Agreement, the Acceptable Use
Policy, and other policies relating to your Comcast Service. You can
also view our Privacy Policy Statement at http://www.comcast.net/privacy/index.jsp [comcast.net]
Links to the Privacy Statement and Terms of Service are located at the
bottom of every page at www.comcast.
-- end bunch of shit --
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:5, Insightful)
So, they are not even coming close to telling you the truth!
How exactly sending RST packets to peers doesn't fall under "prevent P2P activity" I don't understand.
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It looks to me like Comcast is trying to mislead people into believing that they're saying:
But if you read the words carefully, you can see that following bullshit interpretation is a possible (albeit not the most likely) interpretation:
Which is fully compatible with the observed behavior of their tam
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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.
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Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:5, Funny)
bunch of shit, Mark.
Mark, bunch of shit.
bunch of shit.
Mark, bunch of shit.
bunch of shit. bunch of shit.
-- end bunch of shit ---
But you've got admit, it's pretty cool how they address you by name throughout this carefully composed, personal email response made Just For You.
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Yes, it's impressive how Comcast has turned the art of lying to one's customers into a fully automated process.
Re:Straight from thier lawyers mouths (Score:5, Funny)
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It is important to note, however, that we never prevent P2P activity, or block access to any P2P applications, but rather manage the network in such a way that this activity does not degrade the broadband experience for other users.
Their technical excuse (see this George Ou blog post [zdnet.com] .) is that this is true - with current modems, cable cannot handle the number of simultaneous transmits required by, for example, torrent uploads. Like Ethernet on a shared wire, they say, cable modems send out requests to transmit on a bus, which can collide repeatedly and require lots of retransmission attempts, which apparently causes runaway queuing problems.
Personally, I don't really care whether the excuse true or not - I don't have empathy for
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That site used quite a bit of bandwidth in VOIP and VPN traffic too. Never once has an issue with it.
But, I guess a question might be, if their excuse is true, then why isn't time warner having the same issues and doing some of the same things. I havn't heard of ti
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The weasely bastards....
Notice the:
"but rather manage the network in such a way that this activity does not degrade the broadband experience for other users."
IOW, they are degrading YOUR (P2P) experience, but not the other, obedient (l)users.
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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 p
It's not blocking per se...it's worse! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's not blocking per se...it's worse! (Score:5, Insightful)
They are illegally interfering with their customers' service
Since you've been modded up to "5, insightful"- would you care to tell us what is illegal about it? Extra credit for references to specific federal or state laws or regulations.
And, more specifically, if it is illegal, why this is (supposedly) pushing Congress towards net neutrality laws?
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Like you however I am interested in hearing what statutes would apply... I'm just more convinced that those statutes are out there.
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.
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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.
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And yea, I know what it was doing, the problem with using analogies is that you can never be exact enough to represent something as true as it really is. But we have fraud, the denial of service that comcast advertises when they sell the service and the reasons for the denial is because of Comcast, not any third party.
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Currently it is only violating net neutrality principles and is only a tort violation. So legality tends to depend on the judge. I come down on the side that is not QoS and patently violates net neutrality. So to me it is illegal and if I were a judge I would strike their actions. The reason it is pushing Congress is eno
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"The duty to carry does not mean that a carrier is never justified in refusing to provide service. It is well established that "if goods are not of the character that the carrier transports he may refuse carriage." Gorton, Supra at 109. Yet, the reasons for refusal are very limited and related to potential damage to other's goods, or to unreasonably high risks for the carrier in its capacity as insurer, or are beyong the reasonable capaci
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would you care to tell us what is illegal about it?
I don't know about the OP, but my argument would be that they're advertising an "Internet" connection, but violating RFCs left right and centre. If I purchase Internet service I expect it to behave as advertised - i.e. comply with the protocols which define how the Internet behaves. Anything else seems like fraud to me.
NY Sec. 190.25 (Score:3, Informative)
A person is guilty of criminal impersonation in the second degree when
he:
1. Impersonates another and does an act in such assumed character with
intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another;
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(1) consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice;(2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
I think inserting RST packets into the data stream would violate rule #2, and if the content is legal they are also violating rule #1.
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It's their network; they can send or not send whatever packets they want.
They can also just cancel your account.
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That's a firm 'maybe'. It's not a real stretch to apply a law like criminal impersonation to this. (see above thread) The problem would be to get a decent AG to actually file the charges. It would be much easier to just file a fraud lawsuit and turn it into a class action.
Ryan Singel at Wired has some notes about this as well. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/09/are-comcasts-al.html [wired.com]
Should be shot (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It is fine for them to drop packets. It is a dick move, of course, when they sold people the bandwidth and don't let them use it, but TCP/IP is designed to deal with packet loss, and treat it as congestion. Fragrantly violating the network standards that allow communication between different networks to interoperate is literally trying to destroy the internet, and cannot be tolerated.
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Quality of service is important, so just to ensure that their service is up and running, we should ping -f -s 10000 it, don't you think?
***
In essence, Comcast is executing a denial of service attack on their customers' traffic with a third party. That traffic does not belong to them; they merely carry it. Isn't this illegal under some sort of computer-sabotage law?
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Why would it be illegal? It's their wires. It's not even a contractual violation. You signed an agreement with them which specifically prohibits you from sending P2P traffic and allows them to take any steps they like in order to protect their network.
If you want to do P2P file sh
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A more sophisticated thing to do might be to see what sort of email virus scanning they have and saturate the CPU on that, by sending
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I think we might have had the same guy install our cable! Tell him I said 'hi', next time you see him.
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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.
Silver lining? (Score:2, Insightful)
If there's one thing Congress and the rest of the Federal government have proven time and time again it's that the only thing they're good at is spending money. Everything else they try to do (ie. all the stuff they spend the money on), they can't help but fuck it up. Never heard the phrase, "Good enough for government work"?
If you're in favor of Ted "Series-of-Tubes" Steven
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I think the interstate system, the university system, the Park Service, the management of national forests, public libraries, and a lot of other things work pretty well, and don't mind
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The quality of graduates is only as poor as the quality of entrants; as a TA, I've seen some *serious* dumbshittery among some of the undergrads. Some of them are brilliant.
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I know you were pointing from a website that listed those but I don't think it is fair to account afford-ability with either of them.
Just because the student doesn't have to pay for them, doesn't mean they aren't being paid in some way. It only means that certain people will get a privilege that other won't. I couldn't get the pell grant or any other federal funded grant because My parents wouldn't submit their financial information for me. I didn't even live wi
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That sucks that your parents screwed up your ability to get a pell grant; the assumption that parents' have their children's best interests at heart is taken for granted by the people doing financial aid, and sadly it's not always the case. This is a flaw in the system.
Does this still prevent you from getting a student loan?
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Yea, It sucks. It was also almost 15 years ago so things were a little cheaper but so was the average income.
For some reason, I don't understand why they need your parents information when you aren't living with them or if they refuse to pay your tuition. They more or less don't have to do anything after your 18 and in some cases, you can be emancipated at a younger age. There are probably a lot of kids who are cut off for similar reasons. It is like they
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Re:Silver lining? (Score:4, Informative)
Net neutrality was the rule of the land until just recently.
It is not something new, it is a return to the way it was only a few years ago.
In 2005 the SCOTUS ruled [wikipedia.org] that broadband internet was an "information service," and not a "telecommunications service." Thus freeing broadband ISPs from the laws that have enforced "network neutrality" for telephone service for decades.
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The monopoly situation is sort of built in from the ground up and proving rather difficult to get rid of.
Define Net Neutrality (Score:3, Insightful)
Define "net neutrality". I don't want high-level goal oriented stuff. I want to know exactly what such a law would look like because frankly I'm skeptical that any net-neutrality law wouldn't just be full of vagueness, unintended consequences or be so limited as to be useless.
Just saying "make the networks fair" doesn't make a good law, but that is all I've heard from the NN people. I want to be behind NN, but I can't as long as it is so ambiguous.
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.
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Don't make it spam-specific. Make it possible for the consumers to opt-in to very specific and clearly defined filters -- that is, if it claims to filter spam, it will not also filter bittorrent. And make sure that's opt-in, not opt-out, so that unless people are specifically requesting some sort of filter or shaping, they don't get it.
But yes, it is pretty easy to defi
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The real ambiguity... (Score:2)
The real one goes: ISPs shall be neutral with respect to network traffic. This is really, really, ridiculously, ludicrously simple: you put a router between your customer and the Internet. You do not put any firewall or packet shaping rules there.
There's a lot of ways to be more specific and less possible to poke legal holes in it. But that's the part of it that's as simple as, fo
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You would have to add that they cannot discriminate any peer traffic based on a payment other then a standard minimum generally in use for all peer providers.
Peering is the concept of routing your information over networks that don't belong to you or the recipient of your data in order for it to get to the in
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Unfortunately, that probably isn't the way it is going to work either.
What I would be worried about is the $399 ISP bill, long before I worried about Comcast getting some money from Google.
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1. All backbone providers must allow other providers to connect to them on a naked pipe.
2. All providers must use standard protocols*.
3. Providers may only throttle data/bandwidth based on protocol, not orgin/destination.
*I'd leave defining "standard" up to ICAAN, with these additional rules:
1. The protocol must be open - anyone can see how it works
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let's grant that what they say is true, and that they need to do what they're doing. Then tell us. Stop the CRAP about "We don't block bittorrent," but instead say, "For these reasons, bitborrent will cripple our network, so we're taking these steps."
Extra points on guidelines on how to set up bittorrent to not cripple the network.
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Umm, sorry to maybe enlighten you and some others, but the public Internet - as a whole - is a shared node topology. If all connections on the big "I" tried to pull all of their available bandwidth, all at the same time, you would have "Severe" congestion and retransmits, very much like the shared-node of broadband cable. Fact is ISPs build on a shared-node concept for bandwidth oversubscription. You just can't
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would be nice if Google acted as an ISP and GAVE away the service for ads... Run comblasts ass right out of business.... Every comcast Customer gets a FREE Google service for 3 years; then $15/month after that...")
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That's all there is to it.
Cogeco cable up here in Canada handles file sharing loads just fine, the problem is overselling of bandwidth and 24hr bandwidth users.
What high speed Internet providers
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?
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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."
That is a very carefully crafted response. in their response they subtly defined BitTorrent as a "site". and they're saying the don't monitor what sites you visit. that may well be true, but they are skirting the issue. likewise, they are subtly trying to redefine "Online content" to mean "http[s+]://*" and they don't filter based on *Content*, so that's true
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Of course, I was taught to double-space, so I still do out of habit.
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You cannot do a search for 2 accidental spaces. (Score:2)
The two spaces after a period method is antiquated also because it prevents you from doing an efficient search for accidental typing of two spaces between words.
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So, paragraph, line and page breaks are out too? Double spacing is a logical delimiter.
The two spaces after a period method is antiquated also because it prevents you from doing an efficient search for accidental typing of two spaces between words.
I'm guessing there's at least one person here who can do a regular expression to find accidental typing of two spaces where sentence delimi
First post! (Score:5, Funny)
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Encrypt your P2P traffic! (Score:3, Informative)
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]).
IPsec and other stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Use IPsec. Not only can they not tell what your packets mean (only where they are going and came from), but they cannot forge an RST since that also needs to be encrypted with the association key.
So they could do a man-in-the-middle attack on a simplistic key exchange done over IPsec. But that would require far more resources (they have to get in the middle of each connection) than they appear to be willing to use (RST forgery is about the cheapest form of net interference there is). So I think even minimal IPsec would bring this blocking to and end until such time as they want to invest in whatever it takes to mount an attack on IPsec. Then we just use a strong key infrastructure and end that.
If the protocol involved understood the work to be done (e.g. how many bytes to be transferred), it could also re-establish a new connection if the existing one got dropped, and resume the transfer ... until done or one end decides to not do this anymore.
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There is already a law to apply here.... (Score:2)
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Cable companies don't get that.
how is this different than other big ISP's? (Score:4, Informative)
Blocking SMTP or XYZ service kind of makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
These days, that's outbound mail, outbound SMB/Windows-networking, and all inbound ports other than DHCP-related ports. However, any customer who needs to should be able to log into their ISP account and say "I run IRC, turn on relevant ports," "I run eDonkey, turn on relevant ports," or "I run XYZ, turn on relevant ports" or even "I'm an expert and
iptables should be able to help (Score:3, Interesting)
Common carrier (Score:2)
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, an
Which other ISP's? (Score:2)
I'm a new Satellite customer (wildblue) and bit torrent appears to have
similar issues. Mainly with keeping a connection. Once BT starts to pick up speed
its like it gets disconnected and starts scraping again. Does this sound like a RST aswell?
I'm not sure if my issues are with the ISP messing with me or Satellite just having horrible latency and packet loss. Anyone know?
Just ask NetFlix... 21st century business (Score:2)
Wondering why Comcast is still doing this even after having been "outed" over the last few weeks? Simple: they don't care. If you get fed up and leave for one of their competitors, just to show them, think they'll miss you? They'll be high-fiving around the office as soon as you go. You're costing them money by maxxing out your use of the service. They want you to leave. The best way to get you to do that is to keep giving you crappy service and lying about the reasons for it. If they lose the heaviest 1% o
Re:Practices like these make me not want to give t (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you and I, who actually use most of the bandwidth advertised, make Comcast little, if any profit. If all the heavy bittorrent users followed your example, comcast may well be able to cut their costs enough (with all the bandwidth savings, etc.) that they could stay just as profitable, if not more so.
Think about it. They're already *cutting off* subscriptions of the heaviest users -- they're obviously not concerned about losing that business.
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Us "heavy internet users" are also known as "the computer guys in the family". AKA the people all those email-checkers go to for technology advice.
If comcast starts losing all of its geek users, it will soon find itself losing its profit cows as well when we tell them a better ISP to use.
BTW, anyone know a better ISP to use? Fucking monopolies.
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What they want are people who like broadband because it's always on, no dialing out, people that couldn't care about gigabytes or torrents or anything else but their browser, IM and email. That's actually the bulk of users: most people I know have probably never downloaded anything larger than an occasional Windows Update. Comcast though, rather than treating the heavy user as a legitimate cost of doing
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Yes. And the problem with that is what?
If you get a typical home user account, you're paying less than people used to pay for modem access. You can't expect to get 8Mbps 24/7 for that. You know that.
If you want 24/7 full bandwidth usage, there are other pricing plans that give you that. Expect to pay 2-3x as much.
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Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)