Slashdot Log In
AT&T Denies Resetting P2P Connections
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Apr 26, 2008 08:14 AM
from the it-was-the-one-armed-isp dept.
from the it-was-the-one-armed-isp dept.
betaville points out comments AT&T filed with the FCC in which they denied throttling traffic by resetting P2P file-sharing connections. Earlier this week, a study published by the Vuze team found AT&T to have the 25th highest (13th highest if extra Comcast networks are excluded) median reset rate among the sampled networks. In the past, AT&T has defended Comcast's throttling practices, and said it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations.
"AT&T vice president of Internet and network systems research Charles Kalmanek, in a letter addressed to Vuze CEO Gilles BianRosa, said that peer-to-peer resets can arise from numerous local network events, including outages, attacks, reconfigurations or overall trends in Internet usage. 'AT&T does not use "false reset messages" to manage its network,' Kalmanek said in the letter. Kalmanek noted that Vuze's analysis said the test 'cannot conclude definitively that any particular network operator is engaging in artificial or false [reset] packet behavior.'"
Related Stories
[+]
AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop 272 comments
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for 'Transitory Digital Network Communications' — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content' but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. 'As the world's largest gatekeeper,' Wu writes, 'AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.' ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu."
[+]
Competitors Ally With Comcast In FCC P2P Filings 220 comments
crocoduck writes "Right before the deadline passed for filing comments in the FCC investigation of Comcast's traffic-management practices, telecoms and other cable companies submitted a slew of comments defending Comcast's actions to the FCC. 'Just about every big phone company has filed a statement challenging the FCC's authority to deal with this problem. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all submitted lengthy remarks on February 13th, the last day for comments on the proceeding (parties can still reply to comments through the 28th). "The Internet marketplace remains fundamentally healthy, and the purported 'cure' could only make it sick," AT&T's filing declared. "At best, the network-management restrictions proposed by Free Press and others would inflict wasteful costs on broadband providers in the form of expensive and needless capacity upgrades — costs that would ultimately be passed through to end users, raise broadband prices across the board, and force ordinary broadband consumers to subsidize the bandwidth-hogging activities of a few."' P2P fans have also weighed in."
[+]
Technology: Vuze Study Exposes P2P Throttling By Canadian ISP Cogeco 117 comments
urbanriot writes "Despite a growing number of complaints on the popular North American consumer broadband site BroadbandReports, employees working for the Canadian cable internet provider Cogeco have publicly denied interfering with torrents on their network. However, a recent plugin put out by the Vuze team exposed Cogeco of being the second worst ISP globally, of those tested. So far, Cogeco has failed to respond to these findings, but recent coverage from the mainstream media and Michael Geist may prompt them to finally admit to their controversial practices."
The report by the Vuze team has some interesting information about other ISPs from around the world as well. Prior to this, Bell Canada was taking most of the flak in Canada for traffic management.
[+]
Technology: Beating Comcast's Sandvine On Linux With Iptables 316 comments
HiroDeckard writes "Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do TCP packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice may be a thing of the past as it's been found a simple rule in the Linux firewall, iptables, can simply just block their reset packets, returning your BitTorrent back to normal speeds and allowing you to once again connect to all your seeds and peer. If blocking the TCP packet resets becomes a common practice, on and off of Linux, it'll be interesting to see the next move in the cat-and-mouse game between customers and service providers, and who controls that bandwidth."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
America descends into the dark ages of broadband (Score:5, Informative)
no reset for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:no reset for me (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you run a business class router and have configured it to log incoming RST packets, you haven't seen any resets in your router log because they are not logged.
The typical Linksys/Netgear/D-Link/whatever NAT "router" found in most homes most certainly won't log incoming RST packets.
Regards,
--
*Art
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:2)
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they have ... once or twice a year you hear about raids by ORDA (Rumanian Intellectual Property Rights Office), networking equipment confiscated and hefty fines paid. Quite the same rate as in US, considering that Rumania is only 22 mil.
What is different: real competition in the market. About half of the home connections are managed by small companies with a few thousand to some ten thousand customers, and the rest is split between three big guys with cable connections and three with wireless connections, one of which is the former state telecom company. Competition is so big that you can have at least four or five offers at the same time in the same location: Romtelecom, one EVDO/CDMA network with reasonable bandwidth, two G3 networks I never used but heard good things about quality of service, one of the big cable tv companies (there are two, but they avoid competing with each other) and at least one of small companies.
The small companies usually have bittorent trackers and DC++ hubs. I think they can afford to pay the fines, but cannot afford to lose customers.
Parent
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Confirmed? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Confirmed? (Score:5, Informative)
For example,
37 users on Telecom Italia France using ASN 12876 experienced a median of 2.53% RST messages;
27 users on AT&T WorldNet Services using ASN 6478 experienced 13.97% RST messages;
24 users on AT&T WorldNet Services using ASN 7018 experienced 5.35% RST measages;
40 users on Comcast Cable using ASN 33668 experienced 23.72% RST messages.
One thing you have to remember is the forged RST packets is a man-in-the-middle-attack, the Vuze plugin connected on a AT&T connection doesn' know if the RST came from AT&T at ASN 6478 , AT&T at ASN 7018, Comcast or Telecom Italia France.
Parent
As an AT&T customer (Score:5, Funny)
Denial (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic principle of greed you try to do as much that is legally and ethically grey; and then deny it until you are finally dragged kicking and screaming into court.
Blame Canada, hackers and trends :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
provide a better means for addressing such questions."
That the computer worlds version of a closed door human rights meeting for despots and dictators?
Just tell your consumers the truth Charles, you missed a decade of upgrades.
If it wasn't intentional... (Score:5, Funny)
AT&T Lying like a Rug (Score:3, Informative)
Coincidence? I think not.
Steven
Chuck's right (Score:5, Informative)
Vuze's test only counted reset rates, so it can't prove anything about what's going on. At most, it could suggest areas where it might be productive to do more investigation.
Someone, please write a decent test (Score:3, Interesting)
This approach to testing is stupid. One correct approach is to record all the packets sent and received at both ends of the connection, then compare them after the session. Any unexpected packets are bogus.
There are some routers that will generate bogus packets through out and out bugs. The Sveasoft Linux software for Linksys routers had that problem a few years back. If you had more than one or two packets queued for the air link, some of the packets would get garbled. Most users never saw this, because they were connecting to the Internet via a low bandwidth link. In that mode, you can't saturate the air link, and you never build up a transmit queue. We were doing big downloads from a local file server to a local client, with no traffic to the outside world at all. (We were using this for a robot vehicle, with long debug logs and code updates being transferred.) An FTP connection wouldn't work for more than about fifteen seconds. It would stall, retransmitting until the connection timed out. We finally put packet sniffers on the links and found out that TCP packets were being garbled by the "internal firewall", even when it was supposedly turned off. The garble wasn't random; it occurred in a repeatable way that made each TCP retransmit fail.
In 2007, I found a transparency problem with Coyote Point load balancers. This one would mysteriously block connections. If you made an HTTP connection through a Coyote Point load balancer, and sent an HTTP header with a "User-agent" string ending in "m" but not containing another "m", and the HTTP header contained no additional fields, the load balancer would not pass any TCP packets to the systems behind the load balancer. This turned up on a site where I know the people who run the site, and we did packet dumps on both sides of the load balancer to confirm this. Coyote Point parses HTTP headers with regular expressions, and I suspect that, somewhere in the built-in rules, someone wrote "\m" where they meant to write "\n". In a typical non-response, Coyote Point suggested we upgrade the load balancer. I pointed out that Coyote Point's own site had the same problem.
So a good network transparency test for end users would be a useful tool to have around. The existing tools tend to be part of protocol analyzers, and assume the user knows TCP/IP/Ethernet down to the bit level.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Like Comcast they can forge packets on BOTH sides of the router if they were doing it and therefore you'd get RST packets on both sides. Therefore merely comparing the output on both sides is not enough to determine if forging RST packets is occurring.
You need to log, at each end, what each end is both sending and receiving. Then compare the results. Unless you installed a stateful firewall or a proxy server, there shouldn't be anything in the middle changing the packets. If there is, it's useful to k
I have a hunch Time Warner does this too (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Real IPs look like this:
563.mushrooms.100_.7043-3.sin(x).^_^
Re: (Score:2)
Thats not an ip
S010600062506ff15.fm
is an ip.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been VERY happy with FIOS. We've had it for over a year now and I have had one 3 minute outage in all that time. That was during a horrendous storm last Summer.
Re:I'm less worried about Middle Eastern terrorist (Score:3, Interesting)
Why consumer ISP's manage their networks (Score:3, Insightful)
... is why ISPs want to be in the business of monitoring their networks for certain content. Aren't they supposed to have common-carrier status (which, AFAIK, is supposed to mean that they're agnostic about and not responsible for the traffic on their networks)? Why do they want to spend money on engineering and PR damage-control for all this if they could just ignore it?
They don't. I've never heard of any ISP who's monitoring their network for specific content, because it raises all sorts of legal questions.
The reason that ISP's are starting to manage traffic it is due to capacity issues - changes in user behavior (e.g. viewing high quality video online, p2p) dramatically increase the bandwidth consumption per user, causing demand to exceed available bandwidth.
Given that demand exceeds current supply, and expanding capacity is time consuming and expensive, some ISP's app
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)