CRISTAROL writes "Comcast has been sued by a California resident for blocking BitTorrent and other traffic. 'John Hart describes himself as a Comcast customer who has seen performance hits when using "Blocked Applications" targeted by Comcast's traffic management application, Sandvine. In his complaint, Hart says that Comcast severely limits "the speed of certain internet applications such as peer-to-peer file sharing and lotus notes [sic]." Comcast accomplishes this by "transmitting unauthorized hidden messages" to the PCs of those using the applications.' The lawsuit comes on the heels of an FCC complaint over the same issue."
Judging from the week and a half it took for someone to come out and unscrew a filter off my line, I doubt it. Not to mention it took two different techs two visits to do it.
While I agree that it sucks they are blocking P2P apps, I will have to admit their service is pretty darn good. A few case examples:
1) My cable went out at 12am. At 1am I dedcided to give their tech support a ring. I called the number, selected the broadband option, entered my phone number and within 30 seconds I was connected to an AMERICAN technician. I told him I thought our entire cable system went out. He logged into our local node and confirmed our entire area was out.
This being a Saturday night I asked him if it would be fixed over the weekend. To my suprise he said it would be fixed in a couple hours after rolling a truck. Sure enough, I wake up at 8am and all was better.
This is about the 6 call to Comcast and every call has been answered promptly by an American and handled in the upmost professional manner. The same cant be said for SBC/ATT 1st level phone support.
2) I subscribe to their 8Mb/768Kb plan and consistantly receive 8Mb plus transfer rates. The Speedboost to 16Mb is AMAZING! I purchased TF2 over Steam and started the 7GB download. To my suprise I was receiving it at 1.5MB-2.0MB/sec and it was completed in 60min!!!! The same couldn't be said for ATT's DSL.
Sadly, I may be moving soon and out of the Comcast area. At least AT&T's DSL is cheaper than what it used to be (and hopefully the same reliability).
This is unfortunately the future of marketing and PR. Corporate advertising people astroturfing with silly comments like this just subtle enough to avoid our filters. 6 calls to support is not good service no matter how much you spin it and denigrate your competitors and use multiple exclamation points to convey fake excitement. (insightful? blech)
Wow, are you bought and paid for? Looking at the homepage and sig.., Bill.. is that you?
P2P != stealing in such a broad sense.
Many companies these days use P2P such as bittorrent to distribute files, free games, Enemy Territory, True Combat Elite, et cetera can be had via bittorrent. No stealing, all legal. This is not even to mention to sharing of Linux and other free, public domain files that can be spread freely.
We all know that only terorists use linux, and only pirates use p2p.
If you download linux via bittorent you must be a terorist-pirate.
Allahu-Akbar-Yarr!
Show me where in the fine print it says they have the right to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on my communications. In fact, it's even more ironic, because their AUP doubtless has the same clause that my ISPs AUP has: You will not forge any IP header or datagram to make it appear as though it came from someone else.
There are any of number of solutions to the problem of p2p traffic they could have taken. Like traffic shaping, QoS prioritization, canceling the accounts of massive bandwidth users, etc, etc. They crossed the line when they started forging packets in an attempt to disrupt communications.
The real problem here isn't just that Comcast is doing the filtering. Who knows -- maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt). But the most painful part of the problem to consumers is that the Comcast government-granted monopoly on the cable lines means that lots of consumers have no other alternative.
I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.
I'm not suggesting that this is the correct solution to the problem, but the thing you are describing is a "telecommunications common carrier", and extending that status to Internet access seems to be what you want.
"Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc."
We don't have to think about it, buddy...we live it.
"Blocking customers" is a useless exercise that only gives the appearance of doing anything. It's easy for spammers to get new accounts, or activate more zombie PCs.
If I use my home phone in an abusive manner, I can lose my service. A simple example would be if I bought a home phone line and send out robo-calls advertising.
Also, phone companies offer restricted numbers, unlisted numbers, and the like. It's possible to set up an account that only accepts calls from specific numbers. This doesn't interefer with their common carrier status. Presumably ISP's could work in exactly the same way.
I am Canadian though, so things could be different south of the border.
He made this same argument in another story about Comcast and stopped replying to posts when people asked him to name a few ISPs that do this.
While I'm sure there are small remote ISPs that NAT their customers by default (and by remote I mean remote... think Alaskan wilderness), it's not even close to being a standard practice in the United States and the number of people affected by it are so small that it hardly bears mentioning.
A few people have claimed that AOL does it. They didn't used to (over a
Nobody really wants ISPs to be common carriers. Part of being a common carrier is that you are required to be content-agnostic. Think about what the Internet would be like if ISPs couldn't block customers for spamming, spreading worms, DoS attacks, etc.
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column [livejournal.com] in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
Actually, I don't want any rules outside a standard RFC implementation. I want nothing of mine blocked, filtered, scanned, or anything.
I don't know how many times I had had an application break or a server stop responding properly because SBC or TimeWarner decided to block some port in an effort to slow some worm or virus. They then give you the run around when asking what happened to the port. Nobody knows and claims it must be something wrong with your equipment so you end up checking everything again to finally find out that they blocked something and it took a day or two for them to get the memo to the people that answer the damn phones. That or they incorrectly flag some traffic as malicious with their filtering software and "clean" it, resulting in a corrupt DBF file set or incomplete transactions.
It would be a different story if they gave you the ability to opt out first but historically we haven't found out about anything until something is down for half a work day or corrupt or some other situation that causes a bunch of headaches. We pay for the internet, not some cut up representation of it. We should get everything we pay for.
Phone companies can still stop telemarketers, phone threats, war dialers, fraudulent marketing, and other forms of phone abuse. They don't really want to, but they can. Especially if they are using obscene amounts of resources like spammers and DOSers do. I don't think being a common carrier would present a problem for this type of stuff. Worst-case it would require some laws to clarify (or some dumb spammer to actually sue an ISP).
And BTW, judging from most Slashdot posters, everyone does want ISPs to be common carriers.
"maybe it's really OK under their EULA and the law (which I doubt)."
You'd be correct in doubting it. IANAL, but:
Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If the violation affects a financial institution, such person shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned not more than 30 years, or both.
It would seem to be that 1) Comcast has a scheme to make money (by having less in bandwidth costs), and 2) they fraudulently transmit interrupt signals to accomplish this.
Really, they should be prosecuted in criminal court, not sued in civil court.
EULA is overridden by California law and FCC regulations. AT&T and others signed a net neutrality agreement for merging. The same applies to comcast. If they block any protocol, they get sued.
Well, when they get 100% of the money for all the services they claim to provide, they better back it up by providing 100% service for all the services they contracted to provide me. Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
Its simple and legal. Use the same arguments they use to make you pay. Non-Emotional, robotic motions to legal recourse.
What it does it matter to them, if i use torrent to download SG-Atlantis or a Linux distro.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
Going through legal channels is important, but until this makes its way through the courts (which could take a while), I don't think Comcast users are completely helpless.
What we really need is some clever client-side programming. A p2p client (or standard) that does some clever encryption, sends data hidden through other streams, etc. I'm not a network programming guru, but it seems like these programs can (or should) keep a step ahead of whatever recognition software that gets through the approval process for comcast servers.
Last night I was uploading a file to mediafire.com at about 450kbps and 3 minutes into the upload session my internet connection was cut off. So I had to restart my cable modem. Then I reconnected and went back on mediafire, tried again... same thing happened. I reconnected the modem, then I tried one last time; my internet was cut off till the next day (today). I can only express disgust for Comcast if I was disconnected for uploading a file I needed for work. I didn't call Comcast because I hate being put on hold, but I probably should have verified if it was really them that cut me off. It's just weird that it happened 3 times during an upload session which used some bandwidth.
Do the users of comcast have a limited amount of bandwidth usage per account and do these 'hidden' messages count towards this bandwidth usuage? I think these are important questions as it would result in the customer being charged for a service they did not receive.
The 'hidden' messages are spoofed (by Comcast) TCP RSTs (pretending to be sending packets from the bitorrent peer) which essentially stop the traffic until a new TCP session is built. Comcast calls it "delaying." Sounds more like a denial of service attack.
While not directly affected by Comcast's filtering policy, I for one hope this guy wins and sets a legal precedent on which other lawsuits against ISPs/OSPs can be based. As a student currently attending The University of Akron who resides on campus, I look forward to the day when EFF or ACLU pursues action against The University of Akron for violating student's rights in the same manner that Comcast has violated the rights of their customers. Shown here are some logs highlighted to show some of the filtering that is being done to students residing on campus. [uakron.edu] Not only is The University of Akron filtering Bittorrent traffic but also HTTPS, SSH, VPN, IMAP, NTP, and as well as many others that I may have missed. This filtering is not only intrusive to students that require secure access to remote resources, but is also counter productive to new innovation. I am appalled by the actions this, and many other, public institutions have taken towards the treatment of students and their rights online.
For reference, the 130.101.239.250 address shown in the logs is that of my server. It is on 24 hours a day so feel free port scan it if you like. I suspect you won't be able to determine which ports are open due to all inbound traffic being blocked by the University as well.
Sandvine is a local company here in Waterloo, Ontario. It has been a high flyer and a media/investor darling of late.
The local newspaper had an article [baheyeldin.com], which I blogged about a few days ago, on Sandvine's technology and how it is involved in the Comcast debacle.
Can Comcast block spam? I mean, I'm just wondering. Because it seems like the end result of this line of argument is to give spammers a precedent that says "You must deliver our spam."
Ok, those in the know feel free to point out errors and omissions in this BUT:
Wouldn't it be in Comcast's better interest to allow p2p on their own controlled network? As opposed to the apparent blanket "slowdown" that they've effected, it seems to me that it would make much more sense to only bottleneck at the routers that are at the fringe and connecting to other networks. It seem to me that every byte they can keep "in house" is significantly cheaper than the bytes that have to be passed off. And this applies to the entire speed limiting bit.
Think of it like this. If Comcast subscribers can share amongst themselves the latest Fedora 8 distro between each other, with no speed restrictions, isn't it cheaper than having us all pulling that same multi-gig image across multiple networks?
You are correct, and that is (according to statements provided by whistle blowers) what Comcast is doing: to wit, they block any upload greater than a few megs (2MB? 3?) from within Comcast's network to any server outside of it.
The problem, however, is that people with "more legitimate" network connections than P2P -- such as the Lotus Notes mentioned in the summary, VPN connections, or file upload to public services (YouTube et.al.) are NOT going to be remaining in the local Comcast network, and their ser
Class Acion law suit? Would love to hop on that bandwagon if I could.
So you can get a coupon for two free months of Comcast internet service while Comcast continues to block legitimate traffic? Class action lawsuits are worse than no lawsuit at all.
It will be an open and shut case all right - in favor of Comcast. This guy has no legal claim upon which relief can be granted, which is the language the judge will use while throwing it out of court. You can't just sue someone because you're pissed off, you have to have some basis in law for the claim. As much as I hate Comcast, there's no law saying they can't filter stuff on their network.
If Comcast were simply prioritizing packets, that would be one thing. However, the contention is they are spoofing packets back to the clients. Think of it this way, you type in a web address and get back an error message saying the host wasn't available and that error was being generated *by the carrier*, and not the actual website. In that case, the carrier is impersonating the destination and returning false information.
Comcast claims they are not doing this, although some critics have claimed they have irrefutable proof that they are in fact doing that.
You are going to find that this applies to the expectations of what the court considers to be "an ordinary person". This is a pretty common standard and it eliminates lots of fringe stuff. A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the c
You are going to find that this applies to the expectations of what the court considers to be "an ordinary person". This is a pretty common standard and it eliminates lots of fringe stuff.
A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the concept that an ordinary person would not be misled by this.
Now try to convince a court that whatever Comcast is advertising that this extends to what you specifically want to use their service for and how they are preventing you from doing so. You are very likely to find out that your fringe case doesn't mean they have violated the law.
Except that Bittorrent is a very widely-used protocol. The fact that World of Warcraft alone uses it puts that in the realm of "the ordinary person". Said ordinary person doesn't have to specifically know they're using the protocol; if Comcast were screwing with HTTP, they would be messing with a protocol widely used by ordinary people despite the fact that most web surfers don't have the first clue what it is. We're not talking about Gopher here.
This is in addition to the fact that this mythical "ordinary person" has a reasonable expectation that when (s)he is promised high-speed downloads, that this will occur regardless of the specific technical means used for the download, and that the ISP will not take steps to deliberately interfere with this. One would also presume that the ordinary person would not expect his or her ISP to be deliberately committing what amounts to a denial-of-service attack against its customers by forging packets.
I don't think Comcast is throttling BitTorrent in the interest of stopping piracy - I think they're just throttling it because it's stressing their network too much. The don't care whether it's legitimate traffic or not, they just want to unclog their network a bit. As such, they're still a common carrier, because they're not discriminating based on the nature of the information being transmitted.
I offer BitTorrent downloads of my Creative Commons-licensed music [geometricvisions.com]. P2P distribution is crucial to me, in that it keeps down my hosting costs.
My torrents are completely legal because they're posted with the permission of the copyright holder - me.
When I was using an Eastlink cable modem in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ISP blocked me from downloading my own torrents, so I wasn't able to verify that they were working!
I think everyone who offers legal torrents, especially non-profit Open Source and Free Software organizations who provide installation isos via BitTorrent, should band together to defeat the blocking of BitTorrent downloads.
Is there a way we could file a class-action lawsuit?
No, both are important. Your job as an officer or executive of a company is to maximize shareholder value while obeying the law and business ethics. All of these things are supposed to be done. It's in a company's best financial interests to take care of their customers because that's where revenue comes from. If your customers abandon you because of your shady dealings or you lose millions of dollars in a lawsuit or the government steps in to micromanage your business, then the shareholders are going to be
Ha (Score:5, Interesting)
The article was blocked just a few seconds ago. COINCIDENCE? hmm?
About time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Damn you basketball season, damn you!
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
1) My cable went out at 12am. At 1am I dedcided to give their tech support a ring. I called the number, selected the broadband option, entered my phone number and within 30 seconds I was connected to an AMERICAN technician. I told him I thought our entire cable system went out. He logged into our local node and confirmed our entire area was out.
This being a Saturday night I asked him if it would be fixed over the weekend. To my suprise he said it would be fixed in a couple hours after rolling a truck. Sure enough, I wake up at 8am and all was better.
This is about the 6 call to Comcast and every call has been answered promptly by an American and handled in the upmost professional manner. The same cant be said for SBC/ATT 1st level phone support.
2) I subscribe to their 8Mb/768Kb plan and consistantly receive 8Mb plus transfer rates. The Speedboost to 16Mb is AMAZING! I purchased TF2 over Steam and started the 7GB download. To my suprise I was receiving it at 1.5MB-2.0MB/sec and it was completed in 60min!!!! The same couldn't be said for ATT's DSL.
Sadly, I may be moving soon and out of the Comcast area. At least AT&T's DSL is cheaper than what it used to be (and hopefully the same reliability).
Parent
Re:About time (Score:4, Insightful)
6 calls to support is not good service no matter how much you spin it and denigrate your competitors and use multiple exclamation points to convey fake excitement. (insightful? blech)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pay to steal (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Pay to steal (Score:4, Insightful)
P2P != stealing in such a broad sense.
Many companies these days use P2P such as bittorrent to distribute files, free games, Enemy Territory, True Combat Elite, et cetera can be had via bittorrent. No stealing, all legal. This is not even to mention to sharing of Linux and other free, public domain files that can be spread freely.
Go crawl back into your perfect little hole.
Parent
Re:Pay to steal (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Pay to steal (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:About time (Score:5, Insightful)
Show me where in the fine print it says they have the right to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on my communications. In fact, it's even more ironic, because their AUP doubtless has the same clause that my ISPs AUP has: You will not forge any IP header or datagram to make it appear as though it came from someone else.
There are any of number of solutions to the problem of p2p traffic they could have taken. Like traffic shaping, QoS prioritization, canceling the accounts of massive bandwidth users, etc, etc. They crossed the line when they started forging packets in an attempt to disrupt communications.
Parent
Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. ISP (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the antitrust laws might have something to say here, although it's a bit of a stretch. In any case, how can we codify the fact that providers with effective monopoly status should have an additional burden of service to their customers? I do wonder if this is bigger than limited net neutrality legislation.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for a digital generation. [nerdkits.com]
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:3, Informative)
-Peter
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
We don't have to think about it, buddy...we live it.
"Blocking customers" is a useless exercise that only gives the appearance of doing anything. It's easy for spammers to get new accounts, or activate more zombie PCs.
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, phone companies offer restricted numbers, unlisted numbers, and the like. It's possible to set up an account that only accepts calls from specific numbers. This doesn't interefer with their common carrier status. Presumably ISP's could work in exactly the same way.
I am Canadian though, so things could be different south of the border.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously?
He made this same argument in another story about Comcast and stopped replying to posts when people asked him to name a few ISPs that do this.
While I'm sure there are small remote ISPs that NAT their customers by default (and by remote I mean remote... think Alaskan wilderness), it's not even close to being a standard practice in the United States and the number of people affected by it are so small that it hardly bears mentioning.
A few people have claimed that AOL does it. They didn't used to (over a
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:5, Informative)
With all due respect, that's not really accurate. I wrote a 'Net Neutrality For Dummies' column [livejournal.com] in our local weekly, so I won't repeat myself unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that nobody minds having traffic rules. What we don't want is to have traffic rules that get selectively enforced according to the whims of a given Internet provider.
Parent
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how many times I had had an application break or a server stop responding properly because SBC or TimeWarner decided to block some port in an effort to slow some worm or virus. They then give you the run around when asking what happened to the port. Nobody knows and claims it must be something wrong with your equipment so you end up checking everything again to finally find out that they blocked something and it took a day or two for them to get the memo to the people that answer the damn phones. That or they incorrectly flag some traffic as malicious with their filtering software and "clean" it, resulting in a corrupt DBF file set or incomplete transactions.
It would be a different story if they gave you the ability to opt out first but historically we haven't found out about anything until something is down for half a work day or corrupt or some other situation that causes a bunch of headaches. We pay for the internet, not some cut up representation of it. We should get everything we pay for.
Parent
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:4, Insightful)
And BTW, judging from most Slashdot posters, everyone does want ISPs to be common carriers.
Parent
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd be correct in doubting it. IANAL, but:
It would seem to be that 1) Comcast has a scheme to make money (by having less in bandwidth costs), and 2) they fraudulently transmit interrupt signals to accomplish this.
Really, they should be prosecuted in criminal court, not sued in civil court.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:4, Insightful)
If this were not the case anyone planning a crime would incorporate...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
AT&T and others signed a net neutrality agreement for merging.
The same applies to comcast.
If they block any protocol, they get sued.
Re:Government-granted monopoly leads to no alt. IS (Score:4, Interesting)
Because, if they don't i can sue them for False Advertising, Mis-representation of merchandise involved, delibrate intent to defraud, and a raft of state laws.
Its simple and legal. Use the same arguments they use to make you pay.
Non-Emotional, robotic motions to legal recourse.
What it does it matter to them, if i use torrent to download SG-Atlantis or a Linux distro.
They can't claim to police my activities in the same way Walmart can't question a buyer of handguns in its Keene, NH store just because its store clerk felt like it.
If i were the person who sues comcast, i would send out a subpoena demanding ALL emails relating to this PLUS pull network administrators on oath to say it.
I bet Comcast would settle before going to court.
Parent
Comcast shouldnt stand in our way (Score:5, Interesting)
What we really need is some clever client-side programming. A p2p client (or standard) that does some clever encryption, sends data hidden through other streams, etc. I'm not a network programming guru, but it seems like these programs can (or should) keep a step ahead of whatever recognition software that gets through the approval process for comcast servers.
Comcast cut me off for uploading to a legit server (Score:3, Interesting)
Charging for the 'hidden' messages (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Charging for the 'hidden' messages (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Its about time... (Score:3, Informative)
Sandvine (Score:4, Informative)
The local newspaper had an article [baheyeldin.com], which I blogged about a few days ago, on Sandvine's technology and how it is involved in the Comcast debacle.
Can Comcast block spam? (Score:5, Interesting)
Tomorrow??? (Score:4, Insightful)
They want to know how much they can get away with. Stopping them now will be much better than fighting with them later!
But isn't in-house cheaper? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be in Comcast's better interest to allow p2p on their own controlled network? As opposed to the apparent blanket "slowdown" that they've effected, it seems to me that it would make much more sense to only bottleneck at the routers that are at the fringe and connecting to other networks. It seem to me that every byte they can keep "in house" is significantly cheaper than the bytes that have to be passed off. And this applies to the entire speed limiting bit.
Think of it like this. If Comcast subscribers can share amongst themselves the latest Fedora 8 distro between each other, with no speed restrictions, isn't it cheaper than having us all pulling that same multi-gig image across multiple networks?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You are correct, and that is (according to statements provided by whistle blowers) what Comcast is doing: to wit, they block any upload greater than a few megs (2MB? 3?) from within Comcast's network to any server outside of it.
The problem, however, is that people with "more legitimate" network connections than P2P -- such as the Lotus Notes mentioned in the summary, VPN connections, or file upload to public services (YouTube et.al.) are NOT going to be remaining in the local Comcast network, and their ser
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So you can get a coupon for two free months of Comcast internet service while Comcast continues to block legitimate traffic? Class action lawsuits are worse than no lawsuit at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A good precedent (Score:5, Insightful)
If Comcast were simply prioritizing packets, that would be one thing. However, the contention is they are spoofing packets back to the clients. Think of it this way, you type in a web address and get back an error message saying the host wasn't available and that error was being generated *by the carrier*, and not the actual website. In that case, the carrier is impersonating the destination and returning false information.
Comcast claims they are not doing this, although some critics have claimed they have irrefutable proof that they are in fact doing that.
As always, the devil is in the details.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A while back Toyota ran an advertisement about how low their prices were and specifically used the phrase "for a song". Someone wrote a song, performed it in the dealership and asked for their car. Now please. I believe that guy actually got a car but the courts cut the rest of the claims off pretty quickly using the c
Re:A good precedent (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that Bittorrent is a very widely-used protocol. The fact that World of Warcraft alone uses it puts that in the realm of "the ordinary person". Said ordinary person doesn't have to specifically know they're using the protocol; if Comcast were screwing with HTTP, they would be messing with a protocol widely used by ordinary people despite the fact that most web surfers don't have the first clue what it is. We're not talking about Gopher here.
This is in addition to the fact that this mythical "ordinary person" has a reasonable expectation that when (s)he is promised high-speed downloads, that this will occur regardless of the specific technical means used for the download, and that the ISP will not take steps to deliberately interfere with this. One would also presume that the ordinary person would not expect his or her ISP to be deliberately committing what amounts to a denial-of-service attack against its customers by forging packets.
Parent
Re:How about legal use of bittorrent? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:How about legal use of bittorrent? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast, however, is forging RST packets. They're taking the traffic and altering the content of it.
No legitimate QoS solution does this. Delay the content, fine. Slow the transmission rate of the content, fine.
Discard the traffic and generate a forged reply? Not fine.
Parent
I offer legal torrents, but they're blocking me! (Score:4, Interesting)
My torrents are completely legal because they're posted with the permission of the copyright holder - me.
When I was using an Eastlink cable modem in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ISP blocked me from downloading my own torrents, so I wasn't able to verify that they were working!
I think everyone who offers legal torrents, especially non-profit Open Source and Free Software organizations who provide installation isos via BitTorrent, should band together to defeat the blocking of BitTorrent downloads.
Is there a way we could file a class-action lawsuit?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your job as an officer or executive of a company is to maximize shareholder value while obeying the law and business ethics. All of these things are supposed to be done. It's in a company's best financial interests to take care of their customers because that's where revenue comes from. If your customers abandon you because of your shady dealings or you lose millions of dollars in a lawsuit or the government steps in to micromanage your business, then the shareholders are going to be
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)