AT&T Denies Resetting P2P Connections 112
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.'"
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no reset for me (Score:3, Interesting)
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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
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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.
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Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:5, Interesting)
Any chance ? (Score:2)
Chances are less than slim that they'll get all these things right:
So don't hold your breath. If they can tell what hosts you are communicating with, they can determine everything else. The
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http://www.tech-faq.com/tcp-sequence-prediction.shtml [tech-faq.com]
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It's ironic that in America, the country that much of the basis for the Internet hails from, seems to be regressing in Internet access. In Eastern Europe, more and more people enjoy fast and unthrottled connections, and ISPs don't care how many gigabytes of traffic you pull in each month. One ISP I know in Romania helped alleviate demands on its network by setting up a DC++ server where people could share films and music with people from the same city, not by penalizing customers.
Everything is falling apart in America!!!! Especially our infrastructure.
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:1)
they were doing anything with the P2P folks until
the numbers started coming out stating otherwise.
Now that the evidence is mounting and the FCC has
their spotlight on them, they want to be all
apologetic and use the " Lets all play nice "
card.
Hell, AT&T won't even admit they run a dedicated
fiber line over to the NSA folks. It'll take
full blown immunity from litigation before they
EVER admit to that one.
Make no mistake about it. The people are not going
t
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:1)
Re:America descends into the dark ages of broadban (Score:2)
I'm sure nobody in Romania cares what impact file sharing has on American jobs.
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.
Re:Confirmed? I think not. (Score:1)
Did Vuze ever confirmed that P2P connections created resets? or its just the reset count from the plugin?
This study doesn't show anything but network quality. Furthermore, since so many networks have peering agreements with each other and your data flies around between them readily, it barely judges network quality.
Furthermore, they aren't sampling anything but P2P traffic, there's no sampling of something benign like web traffic or gaming traffic. If there was some sort of control group involved, I would be more convinced. But the fact is that there isn't.
Using this methodology, one could produce a study say
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This study doesn't show anything but network quality. Furthermore, since so many networks have peering agreements with each other and your data flies around between them readily, it barely judges network quality.
What I don't get is I thought the RST packets in Comcast's case were generated by Comcast grabbing the list of peers from you during your communications with the tracker, then sending RST packets to each of the peers you're trying to connect to, aborting your connections with them. The goal being to prevent you from seeding.
So isn't it actually more important to know, for each user, how many RST packets are forged as coming from their IP and sent to other users, not how many are received by each user? That
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Comcast has admitted to sending false resets, so, no surprise, they are on top of the list. In fact, they are not only on top of the list, they're nowhere else. This is to be expected with a systematic interference with traffic.
HOWEVER, if you look down the list, and I mean, WAYYY down the list, you'll find that ranked at #101 (out of 108)... is
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That's interesting, because if you actually read the summary you'd know that they are actually 25th on the list, 13th if you remove all of comcasts doubles. So no, they're not quite seventh from last.
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If AT&T, Comcast, etc continue to sell more bandwidth to customers then they can provide (yes oversubscription is necessary but if they're at 80% during busy times then they should add more bandwidth and never reach saturation) instead of just bumping the s
As an AT&T customer (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm less worried about Middle Eastern terrorists. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I'm less worried about Middle Eastern terrorist (Score:3, Interesting)
I like verizon (Score:1, Interesting)
Verizon w
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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.
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.
At least they're learning... (Score:1)
at least they're now figuring out that it's a frowned upon practice. Even if they ARE doing it, they are best off hiding it. Well, that's going to do quite a bit to help The Net Neutrality movement if/when the truth comes to light.
Far, Far beyond "screwing the customer" (Score:2)
If they don't give a shit about OBEYING THE LAW, why the hell would they care about Customer Service?
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.
AT&T just has poor service (Score:1, Interesting)
It's unfortunate that in the cheap end of the "broadband" segment ($30/mo for phone line + 768k/256k
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Dropping the link layer (and as far as TCP is concerned, a PPPoE connection is the link layer) does not result in RST packets. RST packets are sent on purpose by one end of a TCP connection to close an existing connection.
Dropping the connection without closing it results in a TCP connection hanging in TIME_WAIT, waiting to time out.
If there are spurious RST packets on a network, the provider will have to give a good explanation. Yours won't do, and if AT&T can't come up with a better one, they have o
IP violations? (Score:1, Funny)
In the past, AT&T has defended Comcast's throttling practices, and said it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations.
I'm KEEPING 12.308.1.273, I don't care how many IP rules it violates!
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Real IPs look like this:
563.mushrooms.100_.7043-3.sin(x).^_^
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Thats not an ip
S010600062506ff15.fm
is an ip.
If it wasn't intentional... (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't use them as an ISP, but since they're in charge of the local infrastructure--well, let's just say that every time it rains I have to put up with a 60 Hz hum on my phone line for a week or two. Even after several service calls. For the last 3 years. (Typically they wait a few weeks for the problem to go away before they attempt a response.)
And yet they persist in calling me, trying to get me to use their DSL service which works over the same line. I don't k
AT&T CEO admints to poor network (Score:1)
AT&T Lying like a Rug (Score:3, Informative)
Coincidence? I think not.
Steven
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DSL modem lock up during heavy usage (Score:2)
Now, whenever I have a P2P Torrent going a day or more, I know my connection is going to lock up completely anywhere from 20 to 28 hours into the process. The only solution is to hard boot my DSL modem. It then happens again, about once a day, until I stop the torrent.
Coincidence? I think not.
I had this happen regularly with my router (linksys). Since home routers are so cheap, I ended up replacing it, and never had it happen again. So I can't say whether the lock-ups were caused by hardware, firmware, etc., but I can say that in my case it wasn't the ISP.
Your sig (Score:2)
Improve P2P with P4P. Learn more! [pandonetworks.com]
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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.
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No other sources that use internet access were used at all, so I suspect that you try not to find magic ways to deny traffic.
Why was vuze accurate? because it only watched traffic coming in off azureus. You don't need more details than that, so yes, it can prove anything about whats going on.
If
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I suggest you try not to assume all vuze facts are incorrect. I happen to be in an area where the reset rate was 50-75%, and to ensure accuracy I did nothing more than download a torrent via azureus and then seed it.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that I assumed that all Vuze's facts were incorrect. In fact, I'm assuming that all of their facts are correct, because I have no reason to believe otherwise. And because it's pretty obvious how Vuze can count and collect TCP resets. So while it's nice that your testing on your PC showed that their reporting of TCP resets was fairly accurate, that doesn't have anything to do with the issue I raised.
What I pointed out is that capturing reset rates alone can't prove that y
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However, why would it not be fairly accurate to see that "x ISP is doing a significantly larger than normal amount of resets" = they might have something going on with their resets?
Additionally, its not like comcast or any other ISP wants us to see said data or would let us, so where else can it go?
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Sorry for misreading what you said then.
However, why would it not be fairly accurate to see that "x ISP is doing a significantly larger than normal amount of resets" = they might have something going on with their resets?
Additionally, its not like comcast or any other ISP wants us to see said data or would let us, so where else can it go?
I think that it would be entirely reasonable to say that "customers of x ISP see a significantly higher than normal rate of resets = the ISP might have something going on".
To go further than that, you'd want to do (as another poster suggested) a more detailed data collection and analysis. That could help determine who's doing what.
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.
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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. All you can do is compare the number of RST's and compare them to a baseline like when you're downloading a multi-gigabyte Linux
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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
They don't need to (Score:1)
Spam
P2P
2 people refreshing COD4 servers simultaneously
According to the ATT&T technician I spoke with this is "intended" to protect the network against spam. So really, there's no way to possible log how many times this happens to people on the client side. If too much traffic passes through your 2Wire, it will reset until you basically get so frustrated you decide P2P and looking for COD4 serve
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i used to work tech support for sasktel, who also use 2wi
What I don't understand... (Score:2)
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From what I understand common-carrier is about not prioritizing anything over another and not checking the contents of what is passing through your network. This applies to postal service and telephones. By doing this they effectively are given immunity when it comes to criminal prosecution. This is why when the first mail bomb happened you didn't see anyone tryi
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Perhaps it's time for a grass-roots class-action lawsuit?
1. Common carriers aren't supposed to monitor.
2. AT&T (Comcast, etc.)
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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
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Perhaps not today, but perhaps you missed this article [slashdot.org]?
Yes, that article about AT&T was all over the news.
The point I was making is that while many people think that traffic shaping has something to do with ISP's not liking specific content, or not liking "piracy," the actual reason that ISP's are doing traffic shaping related to p2p is driven by bandwidth consumption exceeding their capacity, not by content/copyright issues.
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I don't understand. If it's strictly a bandwidth issue, why don't they do traffic shaping for all bandwidth regardless of protocol?
They do. There are (AFAIK) four basic strategies for managing bandwidth:
- Let lines saturate, then drop random packets.
- Prioritize traffic within capacity based on protocol. For example, give the most time sensitive VOIP and streaming protocols highest priotity, then HTTP, then P2P. This seems good in theory, but in practice the distinctions aren't so clear (e.g. p2p streaming), and it opens the door to all sorts of issues.
- Rate limit users based on protocol-agnostic rules (e.g. data transfer volumes).
-
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IANAL.
AT&T probably does NOT send RST packets..... (Score:2)
I have a hunch Time Warner does this too (Score:3, Interesting)
Must be true - its been officially denied (Score:2)
> 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.'"
Interesting that they're denying something
also interesting that they're effectively saying "could be, couldn't say for sure".
What I don't und
Why not just filter the RST packets client side? (Score:2)
These issues can be solved easily by filtering those packets.
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
(Please correct me if the command isn't entirely correct.)
It might fix the entire problem, it would be worth a try.
Don't flame so soon (Score:2)
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From a network standpoint, it's doubtful that they're the originating host. The packets are forged, therefore anybody can forge them (because it's already not from the true source, right?). There are many, many, many routers on the Internet and any one could send a reset.
Perhaps the spillover 5% is from connections to Comcasties? If Comcrap is already willing to forge id
AT&T wants to Minimize Potential Lawsuits (Score:2)
AT&T said it wants to monitor its network traffic for IP violations.
They only said that because there is nothing to be gained from telling the truth, namely that the really don't give crap about IP as long as they are not sued and their customers continue paying for their Internet service. They probably care somewhat about bandwidth, but that is a separate issue from intellectual property (IP). Corporations care about profit and whatever else they say must be viewed through the profit lens because it is probably being said (or spun to put it more precisely) in service of t
My brilliant idea (Score:2)
If the big networks like AT&T are honestly troubled by the use of torrent - which according to some reports is something like 90% of all internet traffic - it seems that the best technical solution would be to install distributed torrent nodes and predictively cache files in closer proximity to their destinations.
They could outsource it to Akamai... just a thought.
RST Packets on comcast (Score:1)
FAIL! Not resetting solely P2P connections. (Score:1)
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