Comcast Makes Nice with BitTorrent 161
An anonymous reader writes "In a dramatic turn-around of relations, cable provider Comcast and BitTorrent are now working together. The deal comes as BitTorrent tries to put its reputation for illegal filesharing behind it. The companies are in talks to collaborate on ways to run BitTorrent's technology more smoothly on Comcast's broadband network. Comcast is actually entertaining the idea of using BitTorrent to transport video files more effectively over its own network in the future, said Tony Warner, Comcast's chief technology officer. '"We are thrilled with this," Ashwin Navin, cofounder and president of BitTorrent, said of the agreement. BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. It was important that Comcast agreed to expand Internet capacity, because broadband in the United States is falling behind other areas of the world, Navin said. Referring to the clashes with Comcast, he said: "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."'"
huh? (Score:5, Funny)
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But seriously this just means Comcast is going to work with the bittorrent folks
to put tighter than ever controls in place. They'll shape traffic to prefer the comcast
servers and peers to those same peers or any others talking to non-comcast servers.
They way they can claim to be embracing p2p traffic while actually throttling anything
they don't like.
Using comcast peers (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised more ISPs (particularly foreign ones where bandwidth is pricey) haven't looked at ways to bias traffic to share internally. I know i talked with some ISP in the UK and tried to convince them to let their cable modems run much faster but to apply the traffic caps at their network boundary. Unfortunately it didn't seem practical to do that on that scale at that time.
If comcast were to double or triple the upstream available when staying within their network then i'm sure p2p tools would start exploiting it.
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Perhaps part of the reason is that last mile bandwidth is scarcer than backbone bandwidth, so an ISP doesn't save as much by encouraging its customers to share with each other (backbone bandwidth saved, last mile bandwidth remains the same) as it does by discouraging them from sharing at all (backbone and last mile bandwidth saved)?
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ADSL2 ISPs do go at full speed but they have good pipes and you also get net at full speed.
That being said, I sync at 1.5Mbit on a 512k plan.
Havent figured out what thats about yet.
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This is actually what you want, to some degree, and it's already been happening for quite some time. For example, Akamai has been placing servers between or within network boundaries in order to bring the content closer to you. It's all to speed things up.
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Really, submitter posted this story 5 days too early.
But seriously this just means Comcast is going to work with the bittorrent folks
to put tighter than ever controls in place. They'll shape traffic to prefer the comcast
servers and peers to those same peers or any others talking to non-comcast servers.
They way they can claim to be embracing p2p traffic while actually throttling anything
they don't like.
I wonder if the MPAA will have a server.
This just makes it easyer to monitor bittorrent users so they can be sued.
~Dan
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon you can expect to get false 404's on port 80 if you've used "too much" of your "unlimited" bandwidth...
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I've been seeing these on
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Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're still lying bastards! (Score:2)
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No, if they stop lying, they become just bastards. Or perhaps we can spend more time on "incompetent bastards" with the "lying bastards" out of the way.
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Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
In an ideal world, you could do whatever you want with your connection, but this is the real world, where bandwidth is expensive, and ISPs would rather not be the ones paying to feed your free porn addiction
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Half a loaf is bad when you are thirsty. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds more like, "sorry I got caught" than sorry:
BitTorrent traffic will be treated the same as that from YouTube Inc., Google Inc. or other Internet companies, he said. ... "We are not happy about the companies' being in the limelight."
No one caught doing something wrong is happy about the attention but they need to admit what they did was wrong not because a company was involved but because it harmed their customers. The above makes it look like they think they still have the right to block traffic their customers want. Beware of special deals like this.
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There is probably more to it. Might be they will target P2P users in a different way, like nabbing music and whatever else sharers. Also there might be a fear that unless a deal is struck with Bit Torrent, the technology will be pushed underground where it will become even more difficult to monitor and control.
the water is still wet. (Score:5, Interesting)
All that "more to it" is the problem and Comcast needs to be clear about network freedom. They can rig all sorts of schemes to make BitTorrent a traffic cop or to be some kind of traffic cop but none of that is appropriate. Comcast needs to do it's job, which is delivering bandwith. Everything else is bad for them and leads to real censorship.
All of this nonsense about "unauthorized reproduction" and single file copies being a criminal offense represent a tremendous and wrong expansion of copyright laws. Copyright disputes should be a civil matter of who deserves money earned from works. Copyright protection of restricted files violates the limited time provision of the Constitutional establishment clause and the whole point of copyright is to insure a rich public domain. Censoring the press (aka the internet) in order to enforce this new and unwholesome copyright idea violates yet another portion of the US Constitution.
Money that can't be earned in a free society is money that should not be earned. It would be better to live without mass produced entertainment than to live without a free press. Comcast and other ISPs should be at the forefront of the battle to preserve network freedom. As long as they insist on port blocks and traffic shaping, they are an enemy of freedom.
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...the whole point of copyright is to insure a rich public domain.
The point of copyright is to isure the incomes of copyright holders. Only the public domain wants to be a rich public domain, if you get my drift. To ensure an abundance of beautiful music and software in the public domain it is necessary to remove the industrial process from the artistic process. Artists should be paid for the time they spent creating a work, or paid a one-off for it, just as it always was, and imitating that art should be considered to be nothing more than flattery.
It's not the US in
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Now, I support net neutrality in the sense that no one should be able to block/shape traffic based on source or destination (everyone should be treated equal), but I also think that traffic should be allowed to be shaped in tiers based on WHAT it is.
Bit torrent traffic, video downloads, whatever....should always be lower on the priority scale then from http/port 80 traffic and email. I know at one extreme this can fuel an argument "well the ISPs just don't want to deliver bandwidth" and I agree with that.
That's stupid. By allowing Comcast to prioritize traffic in that way, you leave open the door to them downprioritizing it (or voip) in favor of their offering and basically gutting any freedom you thought you had. Comcast: deliver bandwidth, you wankers, and leave us alone.
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And I could just as well ask that question in the other direction. Neither of has have a moral right to demand being prioritized when we are paying for the same service.
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O RLY? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
Me: "Is there a limit on bandwidth usage?"
CR: "No."
Me: "So I'll never be cut off no matter how much bandwidth I use?"
CR: "If you disrupt other customers' service with your usage, you will be cut off."
Me: "How much bandwidth would I have to use to disrupt other customers' service?"
CR: "There's no actual limit."
Me: "But if I'll be cut off for using enough to disrupt other customers, you must know how much it would take to do that."
CR: "There's no hard limit on bandwidth usage."
So... there's no such thing as too much... but I'd better not use too much.
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That's probably because the bandwidth usage needed to disrupt things for other users changes depending on network usage. At 2am when nobody's doing much, you may be able to run full-bore without bothering anyone. At 6pm when usage is starting to peak, running at even 50% solidly for an extended time may cause slow-downs for lots of other people.
I implement variable bandwidth caps myself. Connections get marked based on current bandwidth, and connections that are using lots of bandwidth for extended periods
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The problem is, they don't know what X Mbps is. What they'll likely do is when load gets to the point where its interrupting service to other users, they'll start cutting off the ones with the highest amount of usage. Its not a set Mbps that they'll cut people off so they can't give you a number or time. Its done arbitrarily by network load.
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Even the limits you want him to give are subject to change. Your node may be sparsely populated now, but in 6 months it may get a lot more subscribers and usage that wasn't a problem before becomes problematic. Or they may have to split your node, so usage that's disruptive now may not be a problem anymore with only half the users on each of the resulting nodes.
I ran into this with a dial-up ISP. They wouldn't tell you how much continuous dialed-in time would get you in trouble, since it changed as they ad
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If you get more customers, buy more capacity.
BAANNNGG!!!! SPLLAAATTTT (Score:3, Funny)
Even though I had hoped that bit torrent would become the ISP's friend, I had not expected the devil himself to be one of the first to cozy up... WTF?
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As it should.
Heavy users (typically the younger crowd who typically don't have landlines) are precisely the demographic that Comcast targets.
The situation is not unlike the media companies complaining about widespread piracy when the category of people who regularly pirate music and movies are the media company's best customers. You think, for example, someone over 40 buys or watches the same number of movies? Or would even consider buying the same number of new CDs?
Good to see that
Re:BAANNNGG!!!! SPLLAAATTTT (Score:4, Insightful)
proving once again... (Score:2)
1.) excommunicate
2.) ???
3.) cooperate!
Jacking off into a hat (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Jacking off into a hat (Score:5, Funny)
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What on Earth made this article make you think of that???
... damn dude! You win the prize for oddest analogy I've seen this week.
Is wearing spooge-filled hats something which comes up in your life?? That's just such a hugely bizarre analogy I'm stunned by it!
I mean
Cheers
all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:5, Insightful)
BIG HINT: This is probably why they started throttling bittorrent traffic to begin with.
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:5, Interesting)
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A company who hand picked bittorrent packets and conspired their own customers IP traffic can do anything.
Bittorrent is a great protocol but Bittorrent Inc. isn't really loved. uTorrent users stay with OUTDATED clients just because they don't trust to Bittorrent.com Inc.
Anyway, I was dow
Re:all bittorrent traffic, or just BitTorrent, Inc (Score:2)
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It should be noted that one can bypass comcasts crappy seeding-only blocks by running tracker traffic through an external proxy. Encryption of the individual p2p connections doesn't
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As you may or may not know, Australia has had issues with having decent links out to the rest of the world for some time. (Partially due to us having to pay for traffic in both directions, where usually most international links will only pay for incoming on either side, and with the population disparity, that winds up being expensive for us.)
I was talking to one of the guys in their web services group, and I made a remark abo
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But how would they discern the difference
BT Inc. could provide hashes of official torrents to Comcast. If the handshake doesn't send an approved info_hash, Comcast throttles.
Money? (Score:3, Interesting)
BitTorrent the company, not the protocol (Score:5, Interesting)
BitTorrent Plugin Detects ISPs Raping Your Torrent (Score:5, Interesting)
http://gizmodo.com/372442/bittorrent-plugin-detects-isps-raping-your-torrents [gizmodo.com]
Of course, a peaceful solution such as this agreement is always preferred, as it enlightens more and more people about the true nature of BitTorrent, and opens up the doors for more and more ISPs to do The Right Thing (tm).
first off.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Could Make P2P more palatable for CDNs (Score:4, Interesting)
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note : IAC
Useless article (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Comcast-BitTorrent dispute has been a cause celebre among Internet advocacy groups and others who called for greater regulation for an open Internet, citing Comcast."
I fail to see how greater regulation would ever be the solution. It was regulation that made Comcast's monopoly possible in the first place, allowing them to pull idiotic stunts like traffic filtering. No company in a competitive environment could ever get away with that, because users would simply switch to another provider. Greater regulation is definitely not the answer. Instead, the government should be keeping its claws out of the economy in the first place.
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The Hollywood studios howled that their business was being destroyed by g
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This is laughable. A director signs a contract with a studio, which agrees to exchange their property (money) for the director's talent. If
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Yes, that is correct.
"So why any sympathy for them now?"
Past rights violations do not justify future rights violations. The laws that have made these violations legal should be nullified by the courts, and compensation should be awarded where applicable. The same should be done for any such laws in which the legislature interferes with the economy (which is pretty much any law propos
Clarification (Score:2)
To clarify from my last post, I am not saying we should sympathize with them. I am saying increased regulation is the wrong approach and will only prop up past methods of rights violations and increase future violations. The enforced legislation that brought us to this point - the only way a monopoly could persist - should be wiped out.
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No
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It was an imperfect system, but probabl
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It was regulation that made Comcast's monopoly possible in the first place
Huh? Where have you been for the last 20 years? Which regulations are responsible for Comcast's monopoly? The '98 telecom deregulation act? Oh, wait...
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The only thing that can stop them is force, and currently only the government has it in its head that it can violate peoples' rights through force and not expect any repercussions. As you try to answer the above questions, you will uncover the laws and regulations p
agnostic (Score:2)
Bittorrent Inc., NOT bittorrent protocol! (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue is Comcast underinvesting in its infrastructure to the point where nodes meant to serve 400 residential customers are serving up to 700 (as confirmed to me by a tech who came in for a service call). In fact, Comcast actually INCREASED it's dividend to shareholders this year, meaning that instead of investing its increased profits into its own network for the benefit of its customers, it paid out to investors since the stock price is stagnant and it hopes they will plow that dividend back into Comcast shares.
Without investing in its infrastructure Comcast will continue to use underhanded tactics to scrimp and save bandwidth costs on a seriously overburdened network, to the detriment of its millions of customers. Complain loudly enough to Comcast and threaten to switch providers unless their service improves - ultimately that's the only way to make it change course to a customer-centric business model, which ultimately is the only way for it to stay in business.
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(And to forestall the question, dial-up and satellite Internet are not alternatives -- the former due to throughput, the latter due to latency.)
Really, really creepy (Score:4, Funny)
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What does comcast get from this? (Score:2)
Unless bittorrent has sold out, the way kazaa and napster have... *sigh*
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Comcast is making some sort of deal with the company, hoping people will assume they're playing nice with the protocol. And yes, the company can sell out -- but the protocol can't. Nothing BitTorrent, Inc. can do will make a dent in The Pirate Bay, other than Comcast being nice to BT Inc's torrents, and still throttling TPB torrents.
I like-a to say (Score:5, Interesting)
This certainly is unexpected.
First off, Comcast is going to stop blocking or filtering or slowing down bittorrent traffic. That's bittorrent the protocol, not BitTorrent the company. From TFA, "We are working hard on a different approach that is protocol-agnostic during peak periods." Protocol. Not just torrents sanctioned by BitTorrent, Inc., but any torrents whatsoever.
Second, what seems to be even better, is that Comcast is going to be increasing throughput to its customers. "Internet Capacity" as stated in the summary doesn't really make sense, unless it's referring to an IPv4-IPv6 changeover (-1: Pedantic), but if that means what I think it was supposed to mean, then it's great. However, is it an increase in last-mile throughput, or overall throughput? Or both? Because overall throughput would simply mean that if your neighbors are torrenting, your connection isn't slowed down, whereas last-mile throughput would only increase your peak speed when no one else is downloading anything. It seems like last-mile throughput is generally already maxed out with today's (yesterday's?) technology, namely, cable, at around 6Mbps, and the bottleneck is in the shared line.
What I'm saying is that both should be improved. The shared line should be made so that everyone could attain peak throughput at all times, and the peak throughput should be about 10x-20x what it is now. That's right. The bottleneck should be in our own Cat5 cables or 802.11g networks, not imposed on us by our ISPs.
Of course, ISPs won't willingly provide this (it costs precious $$$s), but for what we're paying ($50 a month, or $100 with TV, which amounts to $1,200 a year) it kinda seems like we deserve it. Telecom companies are required to put most of their profits back into their networks, but I don't think ISPs like Comcast, which operate over cable, are. Maybe they should be. Seems like it might help.
Of course, most of that was just my incoherent rambling about one aspect of the state of technology in the US (don't get me started), so if you were expecting that to be meaningful, well, just forget what you read.
The next step... (Score:2)
That is: Either give your users truly unlimited service, or cap that at some value, in units we understand.
See, Comcast did ban people at one point for using "too much" bandwidth. They eventually did clarify what "too much" was -- it was a certain number of songs, photos, videos, or emails (different numbers for each). In other words, it was in units of "whatever the fuck we feel like."
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Comca$t is our $aviour (Score:2)
Notice the Fine Print, please... (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a Good Thing, IMO, and I'm happy to have been proven wrong (I thought the P2P vs ISP war was going to heat up further.)
However, a guess: it may be a consequence of improved traffic shaping: they are already starting to prioritize short connections ("Speed boost", which is being very heavily advertised in this area).
You don't NEED to do RST injections if you can take the 1% heavy-users and traffic shape them down to a reasonable level when there's congestion. RST injection is very crude traffic management compared to the alternatives.
It also allows the ISP to deal with the cost externalities indirectly, because now the 90% don't complain as much about bad performance when they want to surf the net.
Finally, there is NOTHING in this that says they have to treat BitTorrent UPLOADS as special, just "not different from youtube".
Comcast has repeatedly claimed that they are only killing "leeches/seeds", flows which upload vastly more than they download. If Comcast instead just shapes all large uploads, this will have effectively the same effect, without the visible political repercussions.
Likewise, if ALL ISPs agressively shape uploads, this kills the P2P business model nearly as sure as anything else.
Also, the lack of topological awareness does hurt BitTorrent, as well as the lack of cacheability. If the ISP is able to say that
a) BitTorrent-type protocols can stay in my local loop and
b) These flows are ones I CAN cache without being sued
BitTorrent type flows become far less objectionable.
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BT is bulk traffic, so it's really not a big deal if it has a lower priority than other packets, AS LONG AS no extra throttling is done. That is to say - If BT runs fast during offpeak periods when no one is using the network, but slows down significantly during peak times of the day
Cobblers. (Score:2)
BitTorrent the company is NOT BitTorrent the protocol.
This is much like the MS Gambit of saying that that as there are other OSes then they do not have a monopoly. It is like the **AA saying that their own pet DRMware internet services exist so they cannot be against music on the internet. It is like drugs companies saying that even though the patents have expired they still have the copyright on the name and
I call BS, bigtime here, enormously (Score:2)
The phrase is : I'll believe it when I see it.
So I would not believe even for an instant this is anything other than trying to get people off their backs a little as anyone who found out about it has been majorly pissed off. Really, this is comcast, they have a reputation of doing shady and stupid things. Would anyone logically expect them to just turn a new leaf anytime before they have competiti
awesome! (Score:2)
I was right & thought on first run movies on B (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=497516&cid=22848256 [slashdot.org]
I wouldn't be surprised if Bit Torrent and there partners threatened ComCast, maybe with a boycott or civil action.
I now predict that Bit Torrent or it descendant will obsolete BlueRay and Cable for recorded video content distribution, Even 1080i HD
Now not to tangent too much:
In the short term BlueRay will clearly kill off DVD, DVD-R, and HD-DVD had already just died.
I just talked yesterday with the only BlueRay
BitTorrent CEO reveals future Comcast strategy (Score:2)
Translation: Comcast will soon introduce bandwidth-limiting on port 80 too.
Of Course They're Nice Now (Score:2)
What they said. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure they have said anything but it looks like nothing good if they want to make a special deal with a single company [slashdot.org]. If they want some good attention, they can unblock ports and dedicate themselves to network buildouts. The core issue is one of network freedom. Without freedom, the internet is no better than cable TV.
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Laws are neither good nor evil. It's a persons perspective that attaches good and evil. It is also worth bearing in mind how laws are created and how they are enforced. In short, the law is not there to protect you but to cage you.
'User Privacy?'
There is no such thing as privacy the sooner people understand this the sooner you can see what a childish concept it is.
'You are in prison and don't know it.'
The size of the cage is limited by the size of your mind. If you wish to be caged then you
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'Good Laws?'
Laws are neither good nor evil. It's a persons perspective that attaches good and evil. It is also worth bearing in mind how laws are created and how they are enforced. In short, the law is not there to protect you but to cage you.
Almost. Good and Evil are subjective concepts, which means they can potentially apply to anything that interacts with people. There have definitely been both good and evil laws.
'User Privacy?'
There is no such thing as privacy the sooner people understand this the sooner you can see what a childish concept it is.
It's absurd to say something doesn't exist when it actually does. Do *you* have anything that you've kept private? If you do, how can you possibly say it doesn't exist?
'You are in prison and don't know it.'
The size of the cage is limited by the size of your mind. If you wish to be caged then you will be.
I'm not even sure what to make of this one. How is merely "thinking" going to change the "cage"? The only way I can think is via Orwellian "the cage is freedom" sty
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I like how you can't even have a reasonable discussion with yourself.
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No (Score:5, Insightful)
This is still comcastic censorship, corporativism and licking the media mafia's asshole. Keep boycotting Comcast.
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I wouldn't be surprised if this "turnaround" is in direct relation to a behind-the-scenes "bit of advice" from the FCC.
Comcast still hasn't said they won't mess with your traffic, only that they're working with this company for their own ends.
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first even people like me discovered by enabling encryption and DHT Bittorrent works, just slower with comcast blocking,
second the FCC dinged them hard over the Bittorrent blocking, they said the FCC had no power to regulate but Comcast is a cable company and sooner or later they'll need something the FCC does have authority to regulate so why piss off the Pope,
third Verizon announced a modified version of a Bittorrent client just the other week the gives preference to cheaper low-hop i
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Re:I think I speak for all Comcraptastic Customers (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh dear. I guess they do have the big picture. I can see it now: all Comcast users must keep a background application running while using their network (or have bandwidth severely throttled on a per MAC address instead of per packet shape) and
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Sony put a rootkit on some CDs.
They pulled it of, and made nice.
Sony put a rootkit on some thumb drives.
They pulled it of, and made nice.
If a company does something sleazy once, they are likely to do it again. This is why I avoid Sony and Comcast.
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