Comcast blocks some Internet traffic

[RamboLiberal]

Source: MSNBC/AP

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

The principle of equal treatment of traffic, called "Net Neutrality" by proponents, is not enshrined in law but supported by some regulations. Most of the debate around the issue has centered on tentative plans, now postponed, by large Internet carriers to offer preferential treatment of traffic from certain content providers for a fee.

Comcast's interference, on the other hand, appears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

---

You might enjoy this story of a Granny who got so pissed at Comcast she took a hammer to their office and whacked a keyboard, monitor and a phone.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3750705&page=1

[Kagemusha]

1. Er, excuse me, that last sentence strikes me as odd.

Edit: Er, my last post was on frayed memory. BitTorrent uses the same TCP/IP everything else does. It takes advantage of a different method that's part of the protocol that sends an uh.. torrent of tiny bits of data rather than large continuous chunks. (See? Simple.) Aside from the slight difference in method, it's just general internet traffic. How you say, "That piece is torrent!" or "that piece is legit!" is a very fuzzy thing. I have to wonder how Comcast is managing this.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

4. Through a network appliance.

It is called "Sandvine". Not only can it perform deep-packet inspection of every packet that goes through its network, but it can also send dummy packets to the offending client. Comcast has already been caught using this to send clients RST packets, which causes the client to reset and slows the connection drastically.

Why are they doing this? Well, Comcast is incredibly well known for overselling their loops. That means that the average loop has more users on it than it was designed for. Now, they could "split the nodes", but that would result in capital investment, something Comcast habitually avoids, choosing instead to sit on a huge pile of cash(something Wall Street loves). Instead, they degrade service.

The large telecom/cable companies are now starting to nibble around the idea of charging the customer by the byte.

Oh, and do note: Comcast has just begun their second round of rate hikes this year.

[Kagemusha]

6. Thanks, that's informative, and very consistent with Comcast's poor rep.

Fascinating, in a watching-a-train-wreck way.

[Pavulon]

24. My suggestion

someone needs to write a tool that wraps this application traffic in ssl or come other wrapper that is not subject to inspection.

These assholes just force a better mousetrap.

[BanzaiBonnie]

2. My email to friends who have comcast

are VERY often rejected for spam. They are not spam, they are just regular emails.

[KamaAina]

11. Road Runner (Time Warner) has this problem as well

our office email is blocked by RR!

[Pavulon]

27. Are you using a ssl vpn

to get to your office? Networks are complex and like roads there are barriers put in by companies for security reasons.

What comcast is doing is theft, imho.

I have time warner and move MASSIVE amounts of traffic. They will send a letter every now and then but I ignore them. They cant see past my router.

Proxy servers and ssl are great ways to stay private.

[bluerum]

39. Same here. Comcast is trying to make life miserable for smaller businesses

that use the internet as a sales medium or provide internet services. The end goal of course if to gain more business by keeping net traffic internal to their own network - ie: killing the little guy and as much of the competition as possible.

[Bread and Circus]

3. hmmm... seems like they would just charge more for more bandwidth

"Comcast's interference, on the other hand, appears to be an aggressive way of managing its network to keep file-sharing traffic from swallowing too much bandwidth and affecting the Internet speeds of other subscribers."

[subsuelo]

5. and we complain about China

[tridim]

7. So when do I get my price reduction for the downgrade in bandwidth?

*crickets*

I bet they raise the price.

[allisonthegreat]

8. When I used Comcast

I always liked how fast it was. However with that said...Corporate America strikes again...

[Akoto]

9. I am a Comcast user.

It's the only cable internet provider in my area. Not to be contradictory, but I'll admit that I have been pleased with my subscription. I'm almost never without connection, the connection itself is more than fast enough for gaming and general web use, and what service calls I've had to make have always been politely and promptly fulfilled.

Granted, I don't use file-sharing programs except for the torrent World of Warcraft uses to share game updates.

[musiclawyer]

10. I may be moving soon

The optionjs I have in the new house are either Comcast internet or ATT/Yahoo DSL. I have the latter. The lines get plugged up if you leave the computer on overnight byu accident. You then need to reboot the little black box. But otherwise att/sbcglobal customer service has been very good I must say--- and for only 15 bucs a month (when bundled with their phone service. What would you recommend?

[Akoto]

19. Well ...

I don't know your situation, so I can't really give you a recommendation. :)

I pay more than $15/month for bundled service (cable and internet), but I haven't had the problem you describe. In fact, because I work online, I rarely ever turn my connection off.

[Phoonzang]

12. Man, I'm glad I ditched Comcast for Verizon Fios.

Couldn't stand that company. Now this....

[0rganism]

14. Any comments on Verizon's service?

I've heard it's fast and reliable, but subscribers have to use Verizon as their ISP. It's the only thing that has blocked me from switching over so far.

[Phoonzang]

21. I'm prettyhappy with it.

I believe you do have to use Verizon as your ISP, but it hasn't bothered me so far. I have yet to have a service interruption, and the 5 mbps download speed is actually 5 mbps unlike Comcast where you can pay for 8 mbps but actually get around 4. With Verizon's triple play deal I am paying almost exactly as much as I was with Comcast net/TV service and a Verizon phone line. Most importantly, the customer service from Verizon is far superior to what you'll get from Comcast. The people on the phone actually seem to know what they're talking about.

[mvd]

13. Well, I did notice that my Kucinich e-mails were..

going to screened mail for a while. That is no longer the case, but it would set a very bad precedent for Comcast to restrict file sharing.

[Xipe Totec]

15. Comcast blocks some Internet traffic

Source: Associated Press

Tests confirm data discrimination by number 2 U.S. service provider

NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376597/

[Horse with no Name]

16. And Comcast moved MSNBC to a paid tier

Seems like traffic isn't ALL they are attempting to block.

[Divine Discontent]

17. interesting indeed...

I can see how they'd LOVE to apply the data discrimination elsewhere

[AndyA]

18. Censorship is alive and well in America today.

We need a NEW, IMPROVED Fairness Doctrine with some TEETH to it.

We need to make sure media owners can't own too much of the media.

And we need to do it yesterday.

[junior college]

34. sounds familiar...

I'm using AT&T and I ran into this problem about a year ago. It appears that all the big ISP's are doing this now, at least in certain markets.

"Good info, thanks. I can connect to Gnutella but I "appear to be firewalled." The problem doesn't have to do with my router because I tried coming directly from my modem, bypassing the router entirely. I'm assuming, as you mentioned was possible, that my ISP is inspecting packets, identifying P2P protocols and ruining my P2P experience. Perhaps I should dump AT&T."

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=268891


...And with Comcast's numbers being on the skids recently, it isn't surprising that they would screw their customers to cut down on costs.


October 19, 2007: 02:22 PM EST
"It's been a tough few months for cable operators, and Comcast Corp. (CMCSA, CMCSK) has perhaps been dented the most by fears of rising competition and slowing growth of new customers. Investors will be watching earnings Thursday with expectations of another lackluster quarter, and eyeing spending plans for next year."

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200710191422DOWJONESDJONLINE000750_FORTUNE5.htm

[skids]

20. This is no big deal,,, there are reasons to hate Comcast but this isn't.

Comcast is the most affordable option here, if you also do want cable TV, which we do. The service leaves a lot to be desired. What really sucks about them the most, though, is their "arbitration" process they conned most of their customers into with a negative opt-out process, and the way they violate common carriage by reserving the right to suspend any user anytime.

But as far as filtering PtP protocols, I've worked on both sides of college campus links. Almost 100% of them have been doing this for years now. If they didn't, nobody would be able to browse the web because the PtP traffic would be gobbling up all the bandwidth. You can say Comcast needs to add bandwidth, and you'd be right, but they'd still have to do this because it doesn't matter how much you add -- PtP file sharing will gobble it whole.

PtP protocols are poorly designed, even GNUTella, and are absolutely the worst "citizens" on the net, save for ddos. Some of them are actually coded purposefully to ignore the "common courtesy" flow control that keeps things "friendly." Some ignore it because they are just really lamely coded and never implemented it.

Because they throw up tons of connections, all the time, they wreak all sorts of havoc with firewalls, NATs, routers, and IDS systems. They probably cost the economy billions in extra IT staff labor every year.

So when I hear PtP users complaining, all I hear is Waaah!

:nopity:

[Pavulon]

25. You miss the point

the point is that when purchasing the service they did not tell their clients "we are going to screw with you traffic to LEGAL sites" I fully expect telecoms to participate in calea and other programs but this is just a fuck you to their customers. It is about greed.

So customers can begin encapsulating all their traffic, blinding their tool. DPI cant see in a tunnel.

There are other less savory action that are legal that can lead to a collapse their core. Legal action, not hacks.

Of course this will cost them massive sla violation charges from any business class customers who suffer degraded service.

If they continue to mess with their clients they will face a backlash.

[skids]

35. No, I don't

Comcast indeed did tell its customers it was going to screw with their traffic to legal sites. Read the fine print.

Secondly, go find yourself a fantasy ISP that does not rate shape PtP. Get a few thousand of your friends on there with you. sharing the peering point uplink charges so you can afford it. Then enjoy not being able to watch any youtube videos and waiting minutes for pages to fully load. Have fun.

Thirdly, business class customers generally are not too interested in their PtP performance. I doubt any will take issue. They'll get into trouble if they are doing anything to upset major content providers, but that's about it.

Finally, even encrypted and tunnelled PtP traffic can be classified based on traffic patterns. About the only thing a PtP program can do to avoid this is to make itself behave (and use approximately the same amount of bandwidth as) a web user.

They will face backlash, but mainly because they have completely oversubscribed and DPI will fail to deliver the same effect as demand for broadband content scales, and because their tech support and grievance appeals process is a total handjob that will piss people off. Not due to their mitigation strategies. If that makes people seek out boutique ISPs well hey I'm all for that, we could use more job options.

If you want to "get back" at them, find an alternative. That's your only real recourse. You'll pay more, but it might be worth it. Depends on what you need to do. Comcast is aiming at the rank and file ISP consumer, who doesn't need anything but fast web browsing and is completely happy to hand all their email over to them. To expect them to do anything else is a pipe dream, unless and until the rank and file internet consumers wise up/get more sophisticated. (I'm not holding my breath, they seem to have been "stuck on stupid" for a decade at least.) It's like going to McDonald's and demanding a metal fork.

[Pavulon]

36. Shaping is one thing

broadly rate limiting or protocol manipulation is another. I do not use comcast. However this brings up a bigger problem. This ends the equal traffic of web traffic. Obviously there is qos that takes place that treats specific with priority(s)

Should cnn be able to pay to have its traffic get a priority?

It is just stupid.

I assure you a proxied tunnel can not be inspected by a telecom. The src-dest info in the packet is just shows the next hop. They can not inspect the payload as it is encrypted. Others sure, telco no. That wrapper is used by enterprise and a broad move against it can not tell my ssl-vpn traffic for work from an ssl tunnel that goes to a proxy server carrying bit torrent payload.

Major problem. If they are sending TCP RSTs to break my session they crossed the line. That is not rate limiting.

[skids]

37. There never was "equal traffic"

CNN (or any big company) has always had an option of placing their servers in a more well connected, less oversubscribed farm. Smaller operations sit on a podunk server farm with monthly bandwidth quotas. That's not equal. And don't even get me started on the lack of egality when it comes to running a mail server from a large provider's ISP, where everyone has you in their blacklist, versus paying for a "clean" IP.

Legislature wants to come in and say "you cannot give CNN priority even if they pay"? Fine. One of two things will happen. Either the ISP will launch a special "static content and streaming" service that guarantees really fast times, which anyone can pay to be on so it isn't a "special deal" anymore even though only CNN can afford it, or the legislation will be sufficiently broad to prevent anyone from selling anybody any kind of prioritized traffic, and will thus trash the plans of thousands of service providers to improve the quality of service their visitors/customers receive -- that is to say vonage and skype won't be able to buy into it either. The law is a blunt instrument, and one which in this case can be easily twisted to do the opposite of its intent, and which will stifle progress on improving the Internet in general by making network engineering more an excercise in litigation than a technical pursuit.

On the technical points,

While tunneling limits content inspection and can surely protect against RSTs or protocol manipulation, you can also characterize flows by their packet sizes and latencies. It's not nearly as good a view, and you'll probably stomp on other stuff, but you can crank down on people using tunnels for PtP. However, generally you don't need to, if you have per-flow bandwidth limiting, because a tunnel is offloading the problem of thousands of discrete connections per client to another ISP (the owner of the server where the tunnel terminates.) The only way to beat it if an ISP really wants to strangle your PtP is to do something so unusual that they don't have a rule to classify it. Any cookie-cutter solution distributed with clients will be eventually classified.

However, people who tunnel have to pay for that tunnel endpoint (or at least steal it from work.) I don't see any such service raking in the big bucks enough to do TV advertising like the local loop providers. Obviously people aren't all that upset about not having good PtP service.

Per-session tunnels between PtP boxes naturally are much easier to spot and the entire tunnel is vulnerable to RSTs in that case.

[Snarkturian Clone]

22. Fuck comcast.

For many reasons- not just because of this article.

[Uncle Joe]

23. I'm not really

technologically advanced, some of this sounds like Latin to me, but would they have done this, knowing they would get caught on purpose in order to create conditions to actually weaken or neutralize the freedom of the Internet?

[Pavulon]

26. No they are greedy

this is about cash. They have to pay for the pipes they use. If the pipe is to full they throttle certain types of traffic.

They can use simple or very complex methods.

[Uncle Joe]

29. This paragraph seemed puzzling to me.

"They're using sophisticated technology to degrade service, which probably costs them a lot of money. It would be better to see them use that money to improve service," Navin said, noting that BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer applications are a major reason consumers sign up for broadband."

[Pavulon]

30. That equipment

is dual purpose. Traffic shaping equipment can be used to improve a network's performance, or can be misused (in this case) to degrade service.

However there are legal ways that customers can use to cause them huge headache and expense.

[Uncle Joe]

32. But that brings me back to the question as to their motivation.

Was it to punish certain people or create an issue that could be politically exploited.

If I sound paranoid it's because I've lost a great deal of trust in the corporate media and believe they are itching at the chance to neutralize or weaken the free wheeling nature of the Internet.

I do appreciate your replies.

[Pavulon]

28. How to make them hurt...

find a corporate website with MASSIVE content, streaming media, iso files, etc. Set IE to sync up bbc, cnn, whatever.

If you are technical find an ftp site and script a get, over and over. Ftp windows (grabs as much pipe) up really well. Cant shut it off, businesses require it.

Just keep your pipe full, all the time. Have your friends do the same.

What they are doing is theft. If they dont stop their customers can make a "run on the bank" and bring down their oversubscribed network..Perfectly legal.

[Born Free]

31. I object more to the way they do it

The software impersonates your computer and the computer you are connected with at the time and sends the RST to each other. I have read the Sandvine software does not interfere if the connection is with another Comcast customer but can not confirm it. It appears Comcast is much like Microsoft, and want to lock up their system which is the only game in most towns.......If they want to restrict bandwidth, fine, then block all of it and make it known to the general public what their real bandwith is going to be before they pay for it. Comcast also now uses a so called temporary "boost" which will give you good upload speeds for about 20 seconds- this works great for all the "speed testing" sites as it makes it appear you have really good upload speed but after the 20 seconds it drops fast, in some cases with bit torrent it drops to nothing. I check with Verizon regularly for an alternative to Comcast, but Comcast is the only real choice I have at this time. Linux users do have ways to lessen the effect but it should not be happening in the first place.

[Pavulon]

33. OS is not relevant

This is manipulating basic tcp functions. However it is double edged. A customer can use a tunnel and proxy to mask the traffic type. This can not be stopped because companies use ssl for remote access and point to point connections.

As a windows user you have options that allow you to hide your traffic all the way up to legal but disruptive measures.

you too can reset connections, send packets out that do funny things.

nmap is free and is great at looking at a network..Especially from a pc you dont own..the -s command is great..

[Rosa Luxemburg]

38. There's always Verizon!

:sarcasm:

[ovidsen]

40. Comcast's "rolling blackouts"

Here in Atlanta, where Comcast has a cable tv/modem monopoly, the company is apparently rationing Internet service to residential customers. My new Acer laptop has a window in the lower right hand corner that intermittently flashes "internet service on", or "internet service off". Whether this is a feature of new Acer PCs running Vista or something that's incorporated in Microsoft's Vista itself, I can't tell you.

What I can tell you is that the "internet off" notice is most evident during periods of high traffic, sugesting that Comcast is rationing its (allegedly) insufficient bandwith to neighborhods on a rotating basis. What that means in practical terms is that I might be able to access a DU story on Bush's latest antics (when the internet is "on"), but should I try to open a link within that DU story and the "internet is off" flag appears, all I get is a "sorry, you may have mis-typed an address or a cable might be loose" notice.

No mention at all that Comcast might not have the bandwidth to meet customers needs at peak hours, so it is rotating access, not unlike Southern California electricity utilities instituting "rolling blackouts" when it doesn't have the supply to meet demand during peak electrical use hours. This is all conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were true. Needless to say, it's highly annoying when one wants to learn about a news item during "peak hours". And it's interesting to note that as I type this at a little after 1am this Sunday morning, Web service has been as smooth as silk, with nary a glimpse of that "no internet connection" advisory.

[Melynn]

41. I've notice that with Time Warner

There are certain times of the day that my TW Internet service is down. Most of the time it is during the afternoon hours......which would be peak time for Time Warner's business customers. Or at least that's my guess.