Re:Deja Vu (Score 1)

It depends on the definition whether Comcast is throttling or not. Comcast is indeed killing a connection, so there is no way to say they are "throttling" the connection. But, you can't forget there is a bittorrent client running on this computer, which notices when a connection is reset and automatically tries to reconnect. Every time Comcast kills a connection, the bittorrent client tries to establish a new one; so when Comcast eventually allows a connection to live, at that point the bittorrent client continues its transfer. They are killing a connection in order to achieve the effect of delaying a bittorrent transfer until congestion dies down. It is an open question whether killing the connection even constitutes impairing the availability of data; if Comcast only does this throttling when there is congestion, the bittorrent connection wouldn't have had enough bandwidth available to do anything anyway, so there is no additional harm done.

I don't think "fraud" is really the correct word here either. If you read the TCP standard, you will notice that it only mentions two endpoints, a source and destination; there is no provision for a third party to inject a message, so there is no way for a third party to identify themselves. Comcast is simply creating a well-formed reset packet, which necessarily mentions the two endpoints, and there is no way in the TCP standard for Comcast to indicate that these packets are from Comcast rather than one of the endpoints. Is this fraud or impersonation? How about when OpenOffice writes a file in Word format; would you say that OpenOffice is illegally impersonating Word? We won't even mention SAMBA which enables a Linux file server to "impersonate" a Windows file server.