Comcast Admits Delaying, Not Blocking, P2P Traffic 287
haibijon writes "The executive declined to talk in detail about the technology, citing spammers or other miscreants who might exploit that knowledge. But he insisted the company was not stopping file transfers from happening, only postponing them in certain cases. He compared it to making a phone call and getting a busy signal, then trying again and getting through."
Sure, Comcast. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Laughable concept, post-dating (Score:4, Funny)
Back in the olden days, when people used to write checks, a friend of mine used to make his phone bills payable to "Adolf Hitler" and "Ayatollah Khomenei" and they all went through, every one of them.
That's because they both work for the phone companies
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Speaking of canceling your service, it sounds like a good time to talk alternatives. I, like many people here I'm sure, want a service that gives me the following:
"Postponing..." (Score:5, Funny)
*Sigh of relief*
Re:"Postponing..." (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Postponing..." (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not delinquent in paying my bill (Score:5, Funny)
Cool (Score:2, Insightful)
But enough of my whining, Prison Break was on last night...
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He compares it to a phone call.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He compares it to a phone call.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, and tell mom to buy another case of Mountain Dew, I'm running out.
Re:He compares it to a phone call.... (Score:5, Insightful)
By the way, you get charged each and every time the courier drives on the Comcast toll way, even when the additional traffic is as a result of their, fraudulent actions. The actions are fraudulent because, it is costing you in additional computer time, in additional energy usage, in your lost time and of course additional traffic charges (all traffic counts especially when unlimited, ain't really unlimited).
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Hardly. How often does your power go out because there simply isn't enough to go around? I know we have blackouts occasionally caused by this, but it'd be like yo
Makes me wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm pretty sure that equipment already exists which can do that for encrypted bittorrent traffic.
Re:Makes me wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that it matters for the moment. Comcast can't currently afford to intercept all SSL connections, inspect the certificate to see if they can forge it, and proxy the connection just to do packet inspection.
Furthermore, I think you can prevent that. Essentially, create a new "CA" key whenever you create a
Sounds like a fun project, actually, assuming it doesn't already exist.
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"That sounds like a lot of work. I think I'll just use another ISP. :P"
I believe that is what Comcast wants. With fewer folks like you on their network, their average bandwidth consumption per customer goes down, and they have to process fewer DMCA letters.
I know, I know -- we all only use it for Linux distros -- but you see my point.
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I think you could make the legal argument that presenting a message as coming from a certain IP address is fraud, but I've been shouted down on that one before. Not by lawyers, mind you, just by a fellow IANAL.
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No need for that:
Require all users to add and authorize Comcast's cert.
Proxy all SSL/TLS connections.
Block all other encrypted traffic.
What? Why would they need to "join" bittorrent i
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And/or they buy a device like the netenforcer http://www.allot.com/ [allot.com] which the manufacturer claims can throttle torrent traffic.
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If all ISPs did this, and advertised the percent cap...ok, my pie in the sky just fell on my head.
Re:Makes me wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's what this is. An attack. QOS would just slow things down, this kills. I don't mind QOS. I do mind active damage.
It's time to take p2p to the next level - implementing some of the concepts of the old freenet (the encryption part) and make the traffic unidentifiable. Maybe move it to UDP and make it look like DNS. Or Skype.
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I doubt people could easily use ssh for bittorrent, since lots of people are on networks that don't do what comcast does, so if your seed isn't using it, you're screwed. Needing to use ssh would probably kill bittorrent.
I'm not an expert on encryption, but it seems to me they mig
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Why wouldn't you mind QOS? My traffic gets my speed damnit.
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2. Develop a basic comprehension of the goals of QoS.
3. Re-evaluate your position.
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Instead of a snide remark, if you want to explain why I am wrong, I will listen. However, my point is that I do not understand why my connection should suffer in any way. It seems to me that if you are prioritizing someone else's packets, than they are sent instead of mine which makes my connection slower, at least at those times.
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What the Comcast rep is describing in the article sounds like QoS - Any time there's a queue in a router somewhere, BT traffic goes to the back of the line. The end result is that if the network is being heavily used for other more latency/bandwidth critical uses, BT slows down, but if you use BT at 4 AM when no one else is using the network it'll be nice and fast.
What Comcast is actually doing is forcing connections to close if they have certain traffic patterns, regardless of whether or not the n
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Technically this means they are lying to the customers using BT. And the purpose of their lying is financial gain.
But isn't this the definition of fraud? Why is nobody going to jail for this?
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The idea f this being a cat and mouse game should be absurd , they should stop mangling any data and design capacity to handle this issue. Move on to docsis 3.0 and then keep the uploads where they are , maybe see if bonding upstream channels are possible to loosen the network up a little.
The
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http://www.sandvine.com/products/p2p_element.asp [sandvine.com]
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I feel sorry for your friend. Https is done over port 443 not 80. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS [wikipedia.org])
Every https webisite I have tried to view over port 80 has given me an error. https://www.bankofamerica.com:80/ [bankofamerica.com]
Merely delaying the packets - beyond the TTL (Score:3, Insightful)
What, you were transporting critical medical records via Torrent? and someone died? Too bad - we were preventing you from pirating movies / music / software.
See, the problem here is that they cannot know what is being transported. The protocol by itself is not bad. If that were the case, they'd have to block TCP/IP - as all bad things over the net come through via TCP/IP - of course - all good things come that way too....
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Yes like my porn, and that order for my new wife.
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If an hospital wants mission-critical business-grade broadband, then I doubt it would get a consumer broadband subscription to Comcast. In any case we don't need to make examples up, Comcast disrupts Lotus Notes traffic, encrypted VPNs, and Skype phone calls. So if you're an employee whose workplace heavily depends on those technologies, you should probably switch out of Comcast and get DSL if you want to be able to work fr
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If a carrier doesn't have enough bandwidth to give each of their customers what they've paid for, they need to increase their capacity, not short their customers.
Don't spew contractual garbage either. If they sell someone 7Mbit down, 1Mbit up, they'd best have the c
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If a business needs sustained bandwidth, they get a T1 or a bundle of T1's, they dont get residential grade broadband that is a shared pipe wit
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Burst spped? how often? once every 72 hours? the rest of the time at 1Kb/sec? what does that mean?
Cable is shared all the way to the house. DSL is shared to the switch, then dedicated to the house.
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If one or two people using their full bandwidth capacity are saturating the pipe, then the provider is probably overselling their bandwidth quite a bit over that 100% mark. Probably closer to 200 or 300% oversell. Again, there's the profit maximization, while they say "fu
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Many games that people pay hard cash for high-bandwidth connections use these for updates. Restricting this flow for a particular transport means that there will be something new for the *gasp* piraters to use that is better, faster, harder to isolate than torrent streams, while the legal uses of these streams are choked out
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Delaying, not blocking my check? (Score:2)
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First Class or Coach? (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds a lot like getting the camel's nose into the tent. Once it's established that there are two or more "classes" of information, and those classes can be treated differently, there's endless opportunities to make some customers "a little more equal" than others. And charge them a premium, of course.
I'm thinking of an airline that's planning to ensure that if you fly coach, your bags will be the last ones off the plane.
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I've noticed this behavior (Score:2, Informative)
Not that I agree
False advertising? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You share the service with others. If BT degrades the experience for others it will be throttled back. If you want max speed schedule your gigabyte downloads for off-peak hours. This is not rocket science.
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I don't get what you're driving at. What's the point of getting maximum speed for your download if you have to schedule that download to happen several hours later? If I start a download now and it takes an hour to complete, am I worse off than if I start it 4 hours from now and it takes a few minutes?
To use our much abused and beloved car analogies: I could drive to work in 10 minutes instead of 30 if I
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Comcast is still lying -- and not just about this (Score:5, Informative)
As has been noted in numerous places, Comcast isn't just forging RST packets to disrupt P2P traffic -- they're also doing it to disrupt Lotus Notes traffic...which makes the "we're doing it to stop the bad guys" excuse a transparent lie.
Moreover, disrupting P2P traffic will have no effect on "spammers and other miscreants", as they have far more sophisticated, self-organizing C&C methods already deployed. (No doubt having anticipated that use of traditional P2P would leave them vulnerable to such countermeaures.)
But the truly galling part is that Comcast continues to repeat the same big lie they trotted out years ago: "We take the spam problem seriously". This is utter nonsense, of course; spam emission levels from their network continue to steadily increase, as they have for half a decade, to the point where their only serious rival for the #1 spot on the world's list of top spam-sending network is Verizon.
So what this episode tells us is that Comcast has the capability to monitor and modify traffic, but only chooses to do so when it might affect their profits -- not when it might could the unceasing flow of abuse outbound from their network.
Re:Comcast is still lying -- and not just about th (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny though, they did not trim the fat. Lots of middle management still there that really are not needed.
Me thinks Comcast is circling the toilet bowl. still on the outer edge but we all know the spiral is a logarithmic one.
I'm waiting for the next round on the CableTV side (oh yea it's coming!). I have a bunch of friends there
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Excuse me while I go find a goatse link to get that image un-etched from my brain.
Lets be realistic (Score:2)
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Do let us be realistic.
The cable companies have tens of millions of customers who would be out there cheering if the Geek's gigabyte traffic in ISOs were put on the back burner, the graveyard shift.
Just shy of the bullseye... (Score:5, Insightful)
At least, that's the way it works for a huge portion of Comcast's service area, including large swaths of Chicagoland.
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Or, whenever you try to use your phone to find a competitor, they disconnect the call. Over and over and over.
Is this the future of of ISP competition? Active interception and disruption of competitive traffic? No effort policing your own traffic?
Technically they are blocking (Score:2)
Should have used tubes... (Score:3, Funny)
He should have said "its like a set of tubes its just that P2P traffic is heavier so it sinks to the bottom, and as everyone knows with rivers they flow slower at the bottom so we aren't delaying them its just that P2P traffic is like a Pike, its a heavier fish that swims at the bottom while the normal internet stuff is like a salmon at the surface. Pike also eat cute little ducklings so P2P is evil"
nothing new for canadians (Score:2, Interesting)
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and if you don't like them, you can easily switch to someone else (Access, Sasktel, and i believe a couple other small guys in Regina and Saskatoon) for DSL without caps, though possibly a
A Low Tech Load Balancer? (Score:2)
I do understand that many people might have bad experiences with the Comcast broadban, but I really like Comcast where I am. I have several VPN tunnels setup across multiple offices which is very nice and stable. Also, most of the time there speed is outstanding as long as my traffic shaping is good on the outbound side.
Problems also with OpenVPN related to this? (Score:2)
From my desk at work, it continues to work flawlessly.
From my mother's house it has worked flawlessly in the past, but on the last visit it didn't. It seemed to have MTU problems, in that I could do simple DNS lookups, and I could SSH into one of my home systems over the VPN. But the moment I go to move any quantity of data, it freezes up. I tried the suggested OpenVPN MTU fixes and they didn't work, though
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As a Comcast customer... (Score:2)
Either way I've never had this much trouble with the service. Comcast is really putting the squeeze on.
Bad analogy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
A better analogy for comcast to use would be something along the lines of we are promoting identify theft by pretending to be the recipient and closing your connection so we can redirect the traffic and steal whatever you are downloading
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why is the limitation such a secret?? (Score:2)
Dear Sirs (Score:2)
If you would, please help ensure the prompt delivery of these packets to ensure prompt payment.
Thank you
J.Q. Public
member:
The obvious solution (Score:3, Funny)
Oh..that's right...there aren't any other major providers in your area....
Forged RST Packet Traffic Shaping (Score:3, Interesting)
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Comcast could still *block* the connection, but then they'd have to be using some kind of statefull firewall, which is much more expensive and doubtful to be worth the bother.
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Both the m0n0wall and pfsense FreeBSD based routing projects support enough packet classification in their traffic shaping rules to do exactly what I described. The firewall rules themselves however do not so one of the first things I tried was creating a very long delay queue in dummynet (m0n0wall fo
Legal action? (Score:2)
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 and isn't necessarily doing anything illegal. (WoW patches, Linux distros etc)
The President didn't veto the bill... (Score:2)
This is just utter bullshit. If you postpone traffic for a long enough time, it's going to time out. Just like not signing a bill within 10 days kills the bill, but without the official veto. A pocket veto is a pocket veto, regardless of who is doing it.
I have a better idea for Comcast (Score:2)
Then you will be able to provide your customers with enough bandwidth to satisfy the market demand, including bandwidth optimizing file sharing technologies like Bitorrent.
What's that you say? You can't comp
More Bandwidth Used (Score:2)
Bad Analogy (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of getting a busy signal, the party you are trying to reach is already on the phone, thereby denying you the ability to reach them.* This is more like you try to call someone and get the "all circuits are busy" message, then try again and get through. The point is in the example he used, the reason you can't connect is because of the answering party, not your phone company. Which closer to what is happening. And getting the "all circuits is busy" message is a sign of too little capacity, and considered poor service. Which is really what's going on at Comcast, too.
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* We'll ignore CallWaiting, and the fact most phone companies let you have two calls running at the same time, alternating between them. Heck on some can combine them into a conference call on the fly.
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No, most slashdotters realize that you are doing all you can to fight global warming...
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Actualy, ATT roll out is not important for most of the US as it hasn't hit our state, city, neighborhood, street, house yet. It's about as important to this as the rain in New Orleans or the fires in LA. It just happened to be near the same time frame.
The real issue is the new version of Ubuntu came out. The server mirror overloaded. My download died at 80%. I used the mirror because Bit-torrent would have take
Re:Interesting (...speaking of FIOS) (Score:4, Interesting)
pool-70-104-193-136.nrflva.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-170-157-58.dllstx.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-178-175-162.washdc.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-180-67-156.tampfl.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-187-176-23.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-227-130.bstnma.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-247-31.nycmny.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-245-74-238.prvdri.fios.verizon.net
pool-71-251-69-183.tampfl.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-64-87-227.dllstx.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-66-1-223.washdc.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-75-227-248.bflony.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-90-121-2.ptldor.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-94-19-223.phlapa.fios.verizon.net
pool-72-95-136-185.pitbpa.fios.verizon.net
pool-96-229-80-50.lsanca.fios.verizon.net
That's a mail server with one user. Production mail servers with tens of thousands of users typically note 5000-10000 such systems every day.
So from here, it appears that new FIOS rollouts are being 0wned nearly as quickly as they're connected, and that they're staying 0wned. I'm sure the spammers are quite pleased with the quality service provided by Verizon et.al.
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MS investes in cable TV. Ubuntu Gutsy is due out. They recomme
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My Bit-Torrent test was clocking at 0.3k. Dial-up is faster on a modem. Using a mirror was 2 orders of magnitude faster.
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The natives were happy when they got beads and trinkets, too.
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"Then next year the bill only goes up $1 over our current plan."
Wow. Less channels for only $1 more per year. Where do I sign up?
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What about games, Comcast advertises how great gaming is on their network
Alth
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I completely agree to the terms of service. Now let them enforce it and try to stop my complaints. They can kick me off anytime they like and apparently from the ToS, for any reason.