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BitTorrent and End to End Encryption
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Feb 06, 2006 05:18 PM
from the end-runs-and-other-oddities dept.
from the end-runs-and-other-oddities dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As ISPs like Shaw and Rogers throttle their bandwidth to counter the growth of BitTorrent, BitTorrent developers are fighting back with end to end encryption. Oddly enough, Bram Cohen, the original brains behind BitTorrent, doesn't support this direction. Is there really anything he can do about it?"
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BitTorrent and End to End Encryption
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Encryption isn't the solution we need, or want.. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://kafene.org/ | Last Journal: Monday March 13 2006, @10:40PM)
Re:Encryption isn't the solution we need, or want. (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs are happy to lose those customers.
Re:Encryption isn't the solution we need, or want. (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://xearix.com/)
Re:Encryption isn't the solution we need, or want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, except that in this case, you're not paying the ISP for the water but for the capacity of the pipes. The water is coming from sources outside of the ISP and thus isn't a scarce resource. In fact, when you signed up for your pipe-service, you understood that you were paying for the maintenance and capacity of the pipes, which is often claimed to be "unlimited", but upon having them installed, you notice that the same pipe is feeding both your home and your neighbor's home, and their neighbor's home.
you were the first type of customer, wouldn't you be annoyed if you found out you were paying the same as the second type? Wouldn't you expect them to pay more, or perhpas face some restrictions?
If the first type of customer gets upset at the second type of customer, then they should also get upset at buffets that charge the same amount of money to every customer regardless of the amount that they intend to eat. But then, that is the whole concept of a buffet, isn't it? You enter into an agreement with the provider knowing that you are getting a service that you value appropriately enough to pay for. If you think you should be getting a better deal because some people consume more per unit price than you do, then nothing stops you from trying to make your own arrangements, but if the business is not willing to enter into such an agreement with you, then you are free to find another who will. This is the market place at work, and how other people choose to spend their money has no impact on how you should choose to spend yours.
Your buffet example reminds me of a story... (Score:5, Insightful)
Needless to say, the poor restaurant owners were not real prepared for a dozen 250+lb college students to come in and eat many platefuls of food, and the owners were not very happy. They asked them to leave, and when they said "no, it's a buffet, we are just eating 'all-we-can-eat'", the owners called the cops on them.
Well, the cops showed up, and listened to the complaint, and talked to them. And decided against the owner! "If the sign says 'all-you-can-eat', you can't kick them out just because they can eat more than you want them to eat."
Not really applicable to the topic, but just seemed an appropriate anecdote. Not only internet companies want to cut off people who use over the average!
Encryption won't work anyhow (Score:5, Insightful)
My connection is severly throttled by my pathetic aDSL upload speed, but that's another bitch entirely.
Re:Encryption won't work anyhow (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.jsyncmanager.org/ | Last Journal: Friday September 21, @03:50AM)
And how is the ISP supposed to be able to detect the difference between encrypted and non-encrypted binary data? What detection routine do you use to detect between, say, encrypted BitTorrent data, unencrypted VOIP data, an FTP file transfer, and random data?
Traditionally, you can filter the ports -- but nothing prevents software from changing what ports it uses, and there are several applications which can handle a dynamic port exchange. How barring just blocking or filtering on specific ports, how do you detect that data is encrypted, when the purpose of encryption is to make the data appear to be random to an outside adversary?
Yaz.
Re:Encryption won't work anyhow (Score:5, Informative)
Even in the case of changing ports, this is easily detected. I work for a medium sized broadband ISP, and we extensively use the layer7 module for iptable which detects flow type based off of a "fingerprint" of traffic; a fingerprint simply being made up of several unique characteristics of a particular packet type.
Re:Encryption won't work anyhow (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://paperlined.org/)
As TFA notes: encrypted or not, you're still pushing a massive amount of upload and download traffic. That in itself is enough to get noticed.
Second, the more data there is to analyze, the easier it becomes to distinguish noise from data.
Third, Again as TFA notes, if a lot of connections are being made, they can analyze the first chunk of data sent by both sides. If it's an unencrypted connection, you'll see a roughly consistent set of data being sent across at the beginning. If even the headers are encrypted, and you use BitTorrent a lot, eventually it will be pretty obvious.
Re:Encryption won't work anyhow (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://jambarama.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @03:06AM)
Bit torrent has the problem of opening a lot of connections (the larger the torrent storm, the more connections). While each of these connections to other seeders/leechers may only be passing small amounts of information, they tend to take up a lot of the routers memory (especially for very slow connections that stay open even though they don't pass much if not any information). This kills a router. You might not ever notice it at your own home but having a lot of people on torrents can take drop a router, and make the internet slow for all of the other users using your ISP.
While I don't agree with the actions of these ISPs I thought others might want to know other reasons for throttling this type of bandwidth. As for breaking this throttling your options is very limited. Most ISPs use a layer2 packet shaper, which has the ability to determine the actual content of a packet regardless of port. This is quite common these days.
As far as I know the only real option to get around it requires that you have a server outside of your ISP's network. If you have such a server or a friend somewhere with a nice fast connection (up and down), you would need to set up a tunnel. On top of that you would most likely need to setup a secure tunnel to avoid the packet shaper from understanding the packet data. You can do this using an SSH tunnel, or you can try to setup a site to site VPN tunnel (both of which you would want encrypted). Doing these things is not easy tasks and requires a fair amount of knowledge concerning the way networks works. There are several how-to's discussing how to setup a VPN tunnel and/or SSH tunnel.
Like I said these are not for the novice. It would however be a great opportunity to learn quite a bit more about networks than even the more network savvy people. Chances are most people are just going to have to live without torrent, or switch to a provider that doesn't throttle torrent activity.
To answer "anonymous reader"'s tag question... (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://andrewwitte.com/)
Wrong Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday November 28 2005, @12:21PM)
Re:Wrong Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 30 2006, @10:21AM)
Lots of DSL ISPs (Was: Re:Wrong Solution) (Score:4, Informative)
(http://davidsimmons.com/)
Keep in mind that in many areas, there are lots of ISPs that can provide you with DSL service. This service is provided by either 1) using the telco's DSLAMs and ATM networks to connect your home to the ISP (the most common method), or 2) using ISP-owned DSLAM equipment co-located at the central office (Speakeasy/Covad, various local ISPs). If you're just using the telco to move your bits across town to the ISP, I doubt the telco is going to bother traffic shaping your data.
I mention this because I think a lot of people don't realize there are more DSL options than just the local telco's internet service. When you go to the telco's home page, they certainly don't go out of their way to let you know about this. There are lots of small and regional ISPs that would love to have your business.
The biggest problem you might encounter with DSL is that many telcos require you to subscribe to phone service before they'll allow you to subscribe to DSL. I know this is definitely the case in BellSouth territory. I've heard that you used to be able to get a "dry copper" (i.e. "alarm circuit") DSL line to an ISP in BellSouth territory (a friend of mine used to have this sort of hookup in Oxford, Miss.), but they've since put an end to that. Where I live (Denver, Colorado), the telco (Qwest) does offer "Naked DSL" so you don't have to bother with a landline if you don't want one.
I have DSL with a local ISP who runs their own DSLAMs in my neighborhood, and it works out well.
David
Re:Wrong Solution (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.uberm00.net/ | Last Journal: Monday January 19 2004, @09:27PM)
On a more practical note, use port 1720 (used by Rogers' own VoIP digital phone service, so they can't and don't deep packet filter it) and if that doesn't work (remember to restart your client and forward ports accordingly) try BitComet [bitcomet.com] with the encrypted header option. Worked fine for me after a bit of fiddling.
Also because (Score:5, Interesting)
Like here on campus, we would prefer not to tell people what they can and can't do, however bandwidth is finite. We cannot afford to buy gigs and gigs of bandwidth just to allow people to P2P all the time, at least not without a tuition hike. The solution is to use a packet shaper, which puts P2P at a lower priority than other traffic. Usually, the line isn't maxed so P2P works as normal, however if the connection is slammed, non P2P traffic gets prefernce.
Works very well, P2P works and is generally very fast, and other traffic doesn't get bogged.
However, if it starts hiding from the packet shaper, things may be made a bit more compulsory like "You will make no use of Bittorrent unless it is for an approved research project. Failure to comply will result in a referal to the dean of students and possibly expulsion." Now I'd hate to see it go that way, but it will if it there's no reasonable way to keep P2P from clogging the network.
WRONG assumptions. (Score:4, Interesting)
They are well within their rights to ensure that everyone paying a certain price is given the same level of service. They're rolling out FIOS here. It can handle 622Mb/s and at $50/month, you get, basically, 1% of that. To not have to implement some kind of QoS throttling on your bandwidth-hogging butt, they'd have to run a separate backbone to every 100 houses and, guess what, that would cost a ton of money. So, voila, tiered pricing.
Deal with it.
The Goodness of Open Source (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://search.imoou.com/)
Isn't this what Open Source is about? The ability to make changes to a software to suit one's need? And if there are enough users, followers, developers and contributors (see Ubuntu from Debian), the new branch because a thing of its own.
So the day Bram opened his code, BT is subject to the same kind of treatment and only users can decide which way it will go.
Aren't there cases where someone compiled a BT client to act like a seeder with high ratio but is an ultimate leecher?
when asked about this, Brahm said, (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What does this even mean? (Score:5, Funny)
"Is there really anything he can do about it?" (Score:4, Funny)
Sniffing shape-able streams (Score:5, Interesting)
"...a wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports."
Sounds like a call to camoflage the traffic as several pipes between peers. Not just one tcp/ip connection, but several, with a jitter function to pick which pipe is used at the moment so it does not look consistant
Here's my take on the whole Bram Cohen thingy... (Score:5, Insightful)
BitTorrent and Who? (Score:5, Funny)
Who is "End", and why are they partnering with BitTorrent to end encryption?
What are ISPs selling? (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone should sue [insert favorite ISP here] for bait and switch. If what they're providing is 4mb/256K burst speed, with lower rates for continuous, then that's what they should say in their advertising. This is hardly a far cry from the shady camera outfits online (i.e. PriceRitePhoto). You pay every month for a service, and the service you're actually provided differs greatly from what you thought you purchased.
Asymmetric connections (Score:2, Insightful)
Who are "Shaw" and "Rogers"? (Score:2)
(http://www.thebrickt...assacre/jg21_11.html | Last Journal: Tuesday December 20 2005, @06:19AM)
Is this in the USA? I'm used to things like Comacst, MSN, Time Warner, Qwest, Pacbell, SBC, etc.
What regions do Shaw and Rogers serve? Does this BitTorrent discrimination affect many people?
Re:Who are "Shaw" and "Rogers"? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.loconet.ca/)
Does it affect a lot of people? You bet.
Of course he can't do anything...directly. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, also like LT and most other major project figureheads, he holds a certain amount of political sway. His disapproval may be enough to keep some developers from pursuing certain paths. Of course, not everyone will care about what he thinks, but he does have SOME power.
BitTorrent's image (Score:2)
(http://assambassador.com/)
Re:BitTorrent's image (Score:5, Insightful)
--LWM
As a Rogers customer... (Score:5, Interesting)
I appriciate that Bitorrent constitutes a gargantuan proportion of network traffic. I appriciate this is a problem.
However, the reason that I feel this is unfair, which nobody seems to have mentioned yet, is that Rogers customers are limited to 60 GB of transfer total, both ways, each month. (Unless, of course, you upgrade to the $50 account + modem rental which is 100 GB). If you exceed this limit, it's not just a matter of waiting until next month -- it is a matter of having your account shut down.
I think it is fair to do one or the other, but not both. I once wasted three days trying to figure out why Bittorrent wasn't working, only to find out it was thanks to Rogers. This was just as they had started shaping network traffic so I had no furious posts on message boards to turn to for the origin of the problem.
Sadly, there is no alternative to Rogers for high speed access in my area. It's Rogers or dial up.
statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if he just pulled this out of his ass or something. Not only does my ISP traffic shape BT, they also block all the common ports that trackers use (you can change your client's ports easily, but the tracker owner has to change in this case).
There have been actual studies showing P2P traffic represents over 50% of consumer ISP traffic. An ISP would have to be stupid not to shape P2P.
Why not just use IPSEC? (Score:2, Interesting)
This would keep the connection and communication private, and they could run the standard BT protocol on top of IPSEC. On top of that, ISPs won't shape IPSEC down like Bit torrent traffic - because they would anger corporate VPN users.
ebob
Oddly? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Oddly? As a submitter you ought to at least RTF you link to. Mr. Cohen gives rational reasons why he thinks it is a bad idea to try obfuscate BitTorrent traffic, namely that it is unlikely to avoid traffic shaping, just because you use encryption.
If you don't like that your ISP is traffic shaping, try another ISP. (yeah I know, some people only have one ISP in their area)
--
Regards
Peter H.S.
Cohen is naieve (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course, the ISPs that do traffic shaping where bittorrent is treated like something akin to a medieval plague ship are cooperative, professional, and beneficial?
Individuals pay ISPs to carry data. While I'm sympathetic to ISPs that limit the quantity of data that an individual can receive or transmit per period of time (face it, pay-for-use is not unfair), I'm not sympathetic to ISPs that decide what type of data that individual can receive or transmit (excluding clearly malicious traffic).
Cohen ignores that many of these ISPs have localized or regionalized monopolies and that they don't want to accommodate P2P users. The users are probably in the top 5% of traffic usage, so there's no incentive to accommodate their desires, but there's the obvious desire to keep their monthly ISP payments, hence draconian shaping policies.
Cohen also ignores that encrypting the traffic has merit. "[A] wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify then one which uses fixed ports. I can think of at least a few applications that look like this. It's called a remote desktop (whatever the protocol, but especially if it's not X Windows based) or remote office over VPN. People use it to telecommute. People would be VERY ANNOYED if that traffic was shaped like bittorrent traffic. Companies use it to connect branch offices. Companies would be VERY ANNOYED if that traffic was shaped like bittorrent traffic. Unless the shaping software is distributed widely enough and close enough to the end user to "see" that they have 20-40 VPN-like connections to the network, I fail to see how you definitively differentiate between the two.
Opera and BitTorrent (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2006/02/06/ [opera.com]
That's the wrong question (Score:2)
What matters is, is he right in that, at best, it won't make any difference, and at worst, it'll harm torrents overall? From the article:
His third point is that it'll screw ISP's that cache bittorrent packets to boost overall performance.
I don't take much truck with his 4th point but his other points sound like sensible objections.
ISPs (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Tuesday October 24 2006, @07:52PM)
I'm a Shaw BT user (Score:5, Interesting)
With cable you still share a certain ammount of bandwidth with the people on your trunk, espescially on the upstream. Unfortunately some people are bandwith hogs. I see this as protecting me from the guy down the street with the warez fetish more than anything else.
Has anyone found themselves unable to use BT because of this?
Encryption or obfuscation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Encryption here is just a mean, they don't care if the ISP sees WHAT they're sharing, they only care that the ISP recognizes that they ARE sharing (and throttling their connection accordingly).
I find the argument agains the tracker taking care of it quite silly. The guy from uTorrent says that the ISP would simpy find or modify the packet saying that obfuscation is wanted.
I would guess the ISP would just throttle all encrypted traffic going to random ports before it starts identfiying specific packets. They're as justified to limit it to BT as they are to do it with all unrecognized traffic.
BT is costing them a large amount of money so they start to throttle it. That means that they're not going to sit idly and not respond if it becomes obfuscated/encrypted.
I don't think it's an arms race that BT can win at all. If the ISP wants to limit the amount of bandwidth you're using, they will limit it, one way or another. For example, the ISP might throttle everything after a threshold per month is exceeded.
That's the main point that Bram is making, and I find it difficult to disagree with him.
traffic shaping my ass (Score:2, Interesting)
once you get 100% of the torrent all incoming connections are closed
WTF on shared secrets? (Score:2)
(http://autopr0n.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 06 2005, @01:30AM)
Unless the infohash was sent over an already encrypted connection, it could be snooped, and if used for an encryption key could be found.
I don't know what the guy thinks about DH key exchange, but once per connection is not a very big deal. (Although I guess with BT you connect to a lot of different machines, hmm... Also I suppose if all you want to do is obfuscate the protocol.)
Finally, I disagree that it's easy to block 'stuff that looks like line nose'. The ISP will have no idea what it is, and there's lots of encrypted information out there, like SSH/SCP, etc. If they just put what they couldn't figure out at the lowest priority, it would piss a lot of people off.
Finally, why not mask the traffic as gziped HTTP, which probably gets the highest priority.
Closed source! :( (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://slashdot.org/~Spy+der+Mann/journal/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 10, @01:50AM)
What are the options? (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANts_P2P [wikipedia.org]
http://www.haxial.com/products/kdx/encryption.html [haxial.com]
You can have safe, smart and easy to use options.
My only fear is that isp's will change from a "pipe" to the outside world to a sub set of http, ftp, news ect.
ie no more networking for end users at home.
inevitable (Score:2)
Eircon are a bunch of bastards (Score:1)
Encryption is overkill (Score:2)
(http://trypticon.org/)
Encryption (Score:1)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
Not due to some 'lets hide our traffic' thing, but just out of common sense in todays world. Nothing should be 'open' at this point.
I remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's right, 1, as in uno.
Now people are whining about 60-100?
How much warez are you fools downloading anyway?
The fact is that at the end of the day ISPs pay for bandwidtch per byte. I say charge people that 'need' >100gb per byte more then the rest of us.
This isn't a new problem. As long there's been broadband there's been people that absolutely, positively, MUST saturate their entire bandwidth 24/7/365, and these people cry bloody murder when someone tells them they can't.
Bittorrent just happens to be the way that warez junkies do this today. Think about it. If you're shaw/rogers, and you see that 90% of your bandwidth usage is bitttorrent packets being sent by 1% of your customers, what would you do?
Re:I remember... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.jamdeaf.org.jm/)
They can't have it both ways. If they advertise it as a flat rate / unlimited, people are going to use it that way. If some people are using more bandwidth than others, then have your price reflect that. Then people will be a little more frugal in their downloading.
Just keeping the flat rate and prohibiting people from using their connection for what they want just makes people angry and is just stupid.
olde europe (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.footballfans.tv/)
Here in ireland im currently on 3mbit NTL cable (soon to be upgraded to 10) with 40GB cap which is not enforced, i download over 100gb monthly
so pack ur bags and move back to the old world!
Sign of things to come... (Score:2)
Not the first time... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if this will turn out the same.
The problem when the ISP is a Content Provider (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem with Rogers is that they are primarily a content provider - they offer cable television, pay per view tv, a chain of video rental stores, plus cell phone services, and now, VOIP. They also own the coax coming into your house and provide broadband access on it. Technology like BT, which is used primarily to traffic in movies and television shows impacts the demand for their traditional services while cutting into the profitability of their ISP services. Clearly the media monopoly side of the business is going to win out against the concept of providing unfettered Internet access.
I don't like the look of this brewing arms race. (Score:3, Interesting)
To get around ISPs throttling bt, the program should adapt it's ports and protocol negotiation so that it looks like other services (html, VOIP, etc).
Making bt fully protocol-adaptive would be take away all traffic shaping control from ISPs. Their response to this would likely be to look for high upload traffic from users and firewall off the users to stop all incoming connections.
There are counter-moves to this (client-mode bt), but an arms race between users and their service providers is going to be messy and one-sided (they write the T&Cs).
I think it's better that users should vote with their wallets.
Supplier of the infamous traffic shaper (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://print-bingo.com/ | Last Journal: Monday August 04 2003, @12:43AM)
FWIW, for those who aren't traffic shaped yet, don't be surprised if you are next if you are on a cable ISP -- the nature of the shared network means that the throughput gets choked for everyone when the upstream traffic gets too high (and ACKs get delayed). DSL providers don't really care about upstream as much, they worry more about total traffic which they can throttle in other, cheaper, ways.
BitComet (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://2130706433/)
Rogers... (Score:2)
The statement in the article couldn't be more right about how they shape. A 100MB torrent with 800 odd seeders and 100 leechers and a good swarm speed starts to trickle in at 1-2KB/s off and on... If it works at all. Isn't that a bit excessive? Fine- throttle down to 40KB/s. Fine, make a pool of a few tens of Mbit and share that amoungst all BitTorrent. Do something reasonable rather than cut people off entirely.
They would have never even been noticed if they brought the 385KB/s or so that I normally get on their basic service down to 150-200KB/s. Even 50KB/s... but they took it to the extreme and have no interest in fixing it.
Not only that, they LIE to customers. They tell customers nothing is wrong. No shaping is being done (meanwhile inside sources say that a nice order of those Cisco traffic shapers was purchased 8mo ago or so). With good PR, admiting what's happening and why, and maybe peopel wouldn't be pissed off.
-M
Transfer limits per month? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.skintube.com/)
It sure seems like all you folks in North America are getting a seriousl wallet raping by the telcos/cablecos.
Here in Japan (and I'm sure it's the same in S. Korea), we don't have any such tranfer caps. Bandwidth is also a non-issue here with 50MB ADSL and 100MB (up and down) FTTH. Also, the pricing is quite reasonable and ususally comes bundled with VOIP services. Some providers even offer TV over IP (Softbank BB).
Japan and S.Korea are living the broadband pipedream that North America had dangled in front of it but never got (until GoogleNet shows up, seeing as they are buying all the remnants of that pipe dream - unused dark fiber).
The fundamental problem with protocols... (Score:1)
It's Crap! (Score:2)
They have recourse other than throttling the user who pays for that bandwidth - and I do pay for it. That is what my bill says. Frankly it has more to do with the fact they are rolling out phone service over the same infrastructure and they are asking me to subsidise it by throttling my bandwidth.
So, yes, I will use encryption and guilt-free until they give me the premium back I pay over regular service.
What the ISP Wants... (Score:2)
(http://www.weigel-mohamed.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday August 13 2006, @09:36PM)
And customers want to do P2P.
But... traffic flowing OUTSIDE of the ISP costs the ISP more money. Even if a file is available WITHIN the ISP, the P2P application may well decide to do something silly -- like download it from Russia. Which ends up costing the ISP a LOT more money.
The problem is current P2P applications. They do not (generally) discriminate peers based on IP network addresses. Just "ping time" or somesuch measure. The ISP then uses a shaping appliance: NOT to "throttle" P2P traffic, but to connect up P2P users and keep them INSIDE the ISP network as much as possible.
This has the result of (1) possibly improving the users speed, and (2) saving the ISP money.
"Encrypting" the connection would be a very BAD idea, as the traffic can no longer be controlled this way. A better approach would be to create a "P2P Mesh Discovery Protocol" as an official RFC.
As long as the ISP doesn't have to look at the data, they will be happy to provide such "P2P" acceleration services.
(As usual, I may be completely full of it, and YMMV, etc.)
Ratboy
PS. Rogers didn't block BitTorrent -- not for me, anyway. And eMule also works just fine.
Use Speakeasy! (Score:1)
They have never throttled BitTorrent or blocked ANY ports. Their support staff are local and well-trained. I've had one unplanned outage in 2.5 years and it lasted 15 minutes.
Rogers (Score:1)
(http://www.madtorrent.com/)
Things like throteling is their plan to cut costs, they recently disabled access to new groups and now this. Fortunetly there are easy ways around it like used reserved ports like 1090 and bitcomets encryption.
Traffic shaping can be a good thing (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Thursday March 30 2006, @10:04PM)
I'm fortunate to have a 10MBit symmetrical connection from my ISP, soon to be beefed to 100Mbit. I also know that the ISP is shaping some P2P protocol traffic of which bittorrent is one. However this ISP realizes who it's customers are and that someone ordering 10MBit internet access is probably going to use it to some extent since they didn't go with another provider offering less capacity. So, the ISP has a pretty good infrastructure in place with good peer agreements with other ISPs. Now, even though they have a fairly well developed infrastructure they will run into extreme peaks and must be able to manage dataflows so that the main internet services are available to their customers (telnet, SMTP, VOIP, HTTP/S, SSH etc.). So they use traffic shaping to simply assign lower priority to P2P traffic.
This behavior is totally OK with me and I wouldn't have it any other way. Certain services are more time critical than others and I wouldn't like them to be affected by the huge P2P clogs in the network. On the other hand, since they just re-prioritize the packets I know that my P2P transfer rate will be good enough (the remaining capacity of the network when the essential services are cared for).
This solution works great when you have an ISP which continually beefs up their backbone, but would pose a problem if you have a cheap *ss ISP which models their backbone capacity only for the (by them considered) essential services.
So, in short, if you have an ISP which do cater for your specific customer type, then traffic shaping can be a good thing for you as well as your fellow ISP customers. Traffic shaping isn't all evil, that's all.
Beg to differ with Bram (Score:1)
(http://lphys.chem.utoronto.ca/)
Ignoring the encryption issue for the moment, the primary problem with your argument is that you're assuming a rationality and a level of technical expertise from the ISPs that simply doesn't exist.
1) The simple fact is that "end-users" cannot work with ISPs, period. Rogers & Shaw are both shaping bittorrent traffic, they've received many complaints about this, lost clients & gotten lots of bad press but their stance has not changed. The shaping is there to stay & this means that for users of their networks your protocol is useless for ANY purpose. Bittorrent is dead, deceased, pushing up the daisies. If this spreads then any and all bittorrent-related technologies are useless so you'd best find another line of work.
2) These traffic shapers are stand-alone hardware boxes the the ISPs purchase from Cisco & stick into their network configurations. They're not simple tech & they aren't easily configured, if at all, by the ISPs themselves. They're also buggy as hell. Rogers' collection of shaping-boxes decided that iTunes Music Store traffic was peer-to-peer and as such killed it. So to presume that the ISPs will be able to analyze 'random traffic' and shape it dynamically is a little far-fetched.
My point is simply that though you may now think that encryption and & obfuscating packets is pointless, you have yet to provide a functional alternative other then 'work with the ISPs'. The death knell of bittorrent has sounded & you might want to worry about that a little bit.
cjm
does this mean bittorrent has failed? (Score:1)
Re:On the other hand... (Score:1)
False dichotomy.
Re:North Continent (Score:4, Insightful)
I work at an ISP. We pay $50 per meg per month measured at the 95th-percentile of our monthly usage. We can use our bandwidth in essentially any legal way, and we get a pretty rock-solid SLA for our money.On the flipside, our providers should not go bankrupt supporting the service we buy.
I buy cable broadband at home. I pay $40/month flat rate and I agreed to a pretty restrictive AUP that allows no servers or P2P applications on my end of the connection. I could violate the AUP, like I'm sure many do. But if I did, I would not whine and complain when my ISP addresses the issue. Oh yeah, if I paid at home what I pay at work, I would be paying about $120/month for internet access. But then I could use P2P...whoop-dee-do!
Networks are very, very expensive. If my broadband provider doesn't stay in business, I won't be able to use P2P--or any other 'net application.
Re:Argh (Score:1)
I think Sloppy's making some valid points. If users piss off their ISPs (eg. by making it harder for them to cache bittorrent), then why should the ISPs help them? Realistically, it's a small group of people using a large amount of bandwidth. No doubt the ISPs would be happy to lose heavy bittorrent users..
Re:Argh (Score:2)
Re:I love these "ISP pay per byte" (Score:2)
All non-tier-1 ISPs pay the big boys for transit of their traffic based on 95/5 metering. Rogers and Shaw are not Tier-1 ISPs [internetpulse.net].