http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Comcast-Data-Discrimination.html
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Comcast-Data-Discrimination-Tests.html
Not a lot more I can say, other than argghhh!
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
This is old news man, that's been happening for at least 3 months now.
Clinton Popovich
Systems Administrator
Nauticom Internet Services - An NPSI Company
2591 Wexford-Bayne Road, Suite 400
Sewickley, PA 15143
Tel: 724-933-9540
Fax: 724-933-9888
Email: crpopovi@nauticom.net
Web: http://www.nauticom.net
I love how the framed it as "data discrimination". Let's just be
honest... 99% of it was illegal traffic taking up far more than their
fair share of bandwidth.
I agree, they have been doing this in select locations for some time. I
live in Atlanta and have seen this happening for about the 3 months, but I
have friends in the suburbs that have (or had) no issues. I imagine they
have been deploying their traffic shaping in more and more headends. Here
is some actual operational details:
It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to
throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with
new peers after a few seconds if it's not a Comcast user. This makes it
virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without
any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few
peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their
upload speed.
The throttling works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone
in the swarm the Sandvine application sends a peer reset message (RST
flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a
relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can
upload the file to. Only seeding seems to be prevented, most users are
able to upload to others while the download is still going, but once the
download is finished, the upload speed drops to 0. Some users also report
a significant drop in their download speeds, but this seems to be less
widespread. Worse on private trackers, likely that this is because of the
smaller swarm size
Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms
of traffic shaping, it doesn't help in this specific case.
Comcast is making no effort to determine if the traffic they are blocking
is legal or not. No one blocks all web traffic because some sites have
illegal content or questionable/undesired material.
Personally I think this is inappropriate behavior for an ISP and I hope it
causes a mass exodus of Comcast customers.
-Scott
"Argghhh" that they are doing it?
Or "argghhh" that people are just now figuring it out?
And did you "arrgghhh" when rate limiting became commonplace about, oh, 1865? 
Content is irrelevent. BT is a protocol-person's dream and an ISP
nightmare. The bulk of the slim profit margin exists in taking
advantage of stat-mux oversubscription. BT blows that out of the
water.
Cheers,
Joe
Who are we to say what is illegal traffic... I mean they could be
downloading anything from p2p not just mp3's.. don't get me wrong I HATE WoW
but it uses bittorrent to decentralize its updates.
Clinton Popovich
Systems Administrator
Nauticom Internet Services - An NPSI Company
2591 Wexford-Bayne Road, Suite 400
Sewickley, PA 15143
Tel: 724-933-9540
Fax: 724-933-9888
Email: crpopovi@nauticom.net
Web: http://www.nauticom.net
John C. A. Bambenek wrote:
I love how the framed it as "data discrimination". Let's just be
honest... 99% of it was illegal traffic taking up far more than their
fair share of bandwidth.
With the remaining 1% being Linux ISOs.
I wonder what happens to these network police appliances (Sandvine, Packeteer etc) when the P2Ps implement encryption and tunnel it all over 443/tcp?
I didn't know that you doing something illegal with your application made it OK to block my use of it.
Also, what _is_ my "fair share of bandwidth"?
Well, as far as I'm concerned WoW can burn and get blocked with the
rest of the bad traffic because they are externalizing their
maintenance costs on others. They should pay for the bandwidth to
update their own software.
I was hearing complaints about this months ago...
Regards
Marshall
3:20pm Patrick W. Gilmore said:
And 84% of statistics are made up on site. If it is illegal it is not your right to judge and punish. We have courts for that. As for limiting my bandwidth, if you have a problem with my usage you should state it in a policy and not discreetly forge RST packets.
Since when did private companies no longer have the right to regulate
their own property?
I must have missed the Amendment...
(Yeah, ok, I exaggerated the 99%)
It’s not a matter of them not being able to do what they want, it is their lines after all, as it is more along doing it in a manner that is a little more civil. Sending RST packets in ongoing streams is just down right rude and I dare say a form of forgery.
>
> I love how the framed it as "data discrimination". Let's just be
> honest... 99% of it was illegal traffic taking up far more than
> their fair share of bandwidth.is there really anyway to really know how much of it was
legit/legal/illegal??
Nope. And BitTorrent is trying to be very legit; see, for example,
http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/10/08/brightcove-fox-paramount-tech-cx_ag_1009bittorrent.html
Besides, legal issues should be dealt with by the legal process. If
nothing else, there one has guarantees of due process and the right to
contest the charges.
Also, I'll channel Sean Donelan now: "ISP's... damned if they do,
damned if they don't" It's a funny world out there(also, how is it that Comcast is getting dinged on this but BT or
other carreirs doing similar 'rate shaping' for p2p traffic are NOT?)
Personally, I see a big difference between rate-shaping and sending
RSTs. (I suppose you could view RSTs as allocating 0 bps, but that's
not a helpful distinction.)
That said, I don't approve of other carriers sending RSTs, either; I
simply happened to see the articles on Comcast today.
--Steve Bellovin, Steven M. Bellovin
They’ll just monitor for streams that utilize large portions of bandwidth for extended amounts of time and throttle all.
Mike Lewinski wrote:
I wonder what happens to these network police appliances (Sandvine, Packeteer etc) when the P2Ps implement encryption and tunnel it all over 443/tcp?
Most vendors claim to be able to look into the payload and determine that it is p2p traffic instead of http/https traffic. I know I have looked at several of these vendors myself, and most of them did not have hardware that was even safe or reasonable to deploy, as certain traffic would send the unit's CPU towards 100% with only a measly 1 megabit of traffic. I personally eliminated on of these vendors from consideration this way.
Sandvine seemed to have a pretty decent hardware solution when I was still in that space 2 years ago, with only a few concerns. I'm sure that they have vastly improved. They were also less "religious" about 99% of the internet traffic being p2p, like some vendors were.
Still, while I support the ISP's right to manage and shapre traffic, I still think this is a poor tactic. This is like your telephone company hanging up your call, regardles if the content of the call was a drug deal, a call to grandma, or a call to e911. It's just not morally right.
-Sean
Sorry about the double post.
(Please respond only through the list)
At this point in Internet evolution, if you're squeezing out the
pennies on bandwidth by filtering the user experience without the
applicable knobs to choose, you are wasting all of our time.
IIRC, TOR helps get around such "tools" as Sandvine, etc;
http://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en
Best,
Marty
To the *other* cable broadband service provider in the customer's locality, right?
