FCC Hearing: Comcast Uses Hacker Techniques
Written by Ernesto on February 26, 2008Today is an important day for network neutrality, as the FCC’s Broadband Network management hearing has been discussing Comcast’s attempt to slow down BitTorrent traffic. One of the panelists said Comcast uses “hacker techniques” to manage their network.
When we first reported that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds, we never expected that it would lead to a FCC hearing, but it did. Let’s hope it’s for the better.
The second half of today’s hearing (pdf link) started with a number of network and technological experts telling us about the Internet, its history, and its makeup. Of main contention was the line between acceptable, and unacceptable traffic management.
Wise things were said, and the panelists made some good points about the unfairness of the traffic management tools that Comcast uses. There was emphasis on the TCP reset, which means that a few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops.
Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the twisted-pair system for ethernet, and its protocol, 1BASE5) targeted those opposed to any sort of traffic management in his opening statement saying, “if we can’t control network management, we’ll have to shut down the internet”. David Clark, of the MIT computer science lab, opened by saying that ISPs can either see enemies, or they can see partners, and suggesting that right now, they see the former. He, like almost all the panelists, called the current usage of Sandvine technology ‘troubling’, and said that the user should pick the Quality of Service (QoS) level, not an ISP.
Daniel Weitzner, Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Decentralized Information Group summed up bad traffic management with: “Maybe it’s a bit like the old adage about pornography ‘I know it when I see it’. In this case I know what Comcast is doing is in the camp of unreasonable. These are techniques that hackers would use to deny service to any application on the web, very similar in that regard. It might be interesting to hold a panel of security experts to talk about those kind of mechanisms, I’m certainly not one. But, forging data on the internet is probably outside of the realm of reasonable, and any standards body would deem it to be.”
However, one of the most succinct criticisms of Comcast’s actions came from Prof. David Reed, of MIT’s Media Lab, who suggested that any ISP that didn’t follow the standard solutions evolved over the last 30 years should not advertise themselves as an Internet provider, but instead as a company “offering selective access to portions of the net only”, a description many of Comcast’s customers will probably agree with.
The FCC questioner continued the panel discussion, and pointed out that one of the problems might be that there is no actual data on how busy the network was, something that, from his point of view, would be helpful in determining whether the TCP resets are a unreasonable form of network management or not.
One of the panelists (sorry, they all sound the same) immediately replied to this by pointing out that congestion was not important. He compared the TCP reset to a conversation between two people where a third party - who pretends to be one of the persons engaged in the conversation - says “Stop, this conversation is over”. He added: “I find it uncomfortable that someone in the middle is creating a message to you that appears to come from me, I have a lot of trouble with that.”
At the beginning of the hearing FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that they were willing to step in if needed. Let’s hope they will. Feel free to file a comment if you want to let the FCC know what you think of Comcast’s haxxor skills. A video of the hearing will be available within two days.
Stay tuned.
Update: Apparently Comcast has paid people to attend the hearing to keep concerned citizens out.
Previously: Lawyers For ‘Imposter’ P2P Software Threaten Open-Source Team
Next: Most Popular DVDrips on BitTorrent (wk8)
67 Responses
i just hope they get what they deserve
Forever more ISP’s pulling unreasonable network degrading will be said to be doing a ‘comcast’.
thank god i dont have any ISPs like that around.. here they upgrade if theres network congestion not messing up peoples service…
it should not be up to the isp what traffic is allowed, that is censoring. a free world depends on free internet. any step against this freedom is a blow against every human
[quote comment="298043"]thank god i dont have any ISPs like that around.. here they upgrade if theres network congestion not messing up peoples service…[/quote]
That was brought up by Mr Bennett as well. I believe he said something like ‘adding more capacity just moves the bottleneck elsewhere, and its not a solution’ he then noted that even in 100mbit networks, there is some traffic shaping going on.
yo yo yo dey be hackin us
but when we download music they start a fuss
Unfortunately Comcast is the only ISP for high-speed internet in my area, so I’m stuck with their lovely Sandvine. There is definitely a need to intervene - especially on behalf of the users who have to choose between Comcast or nothing for reasonable internet.
[quote comment="298047"]yo yo yo dey be hackin us
but when we download music they start a fuss[/quote]
Indubitably.
Augh, even if comcast are a bunch of traffic shaping asshats, they’re NOT hackers. Making that connection is just insane…
LoL Comcast has their own massive DDoS server with clients as the zombies.
Now thats funny.
FCC: fuck comcast in the ass the way they’ve been fucking their users.
much appreciated.
thanks
Best way to tell them to fuck off is to vote with your feet. Drop comcast and go with someone else. For the minority of people this perhaps won’t be possible but the majority it will be. Hit them in their pockets where it hurts.
Greedy bloody companies. If they can’t handle the traffic stop selling these fast connections.
@9: Well, the connection with hackers isn’t that insane. They’re forging TCP messages to cause a Denial of Service.
you offer the link to make comment to the fcc proceding yet i see nowhere here where a proceding number is listed therefore making your comment link next to useless where a proceding number is nessacary to comment to the fcc
yea
maybe you should read about what you want to comment on, then you would have noticed this one:
The public may file comments or other documents with the Commission and should
reference docket numbers 07-52 and 08-7 when filing by paper or submit your filing
electronically by going to http://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/upload_v2.cgi and enter proceeding
numbers 07-52 and 08-7. Electronic filers need to complete cover forms separately for each
docket because the system accepts only one docket number per filing. Filing instructions are
provided at http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/ecfs/.
Yea - its in the PDF about the hearing listed earlier
I dropped them as soon as I found out I couldn’t seed. Moved to a better isp. Comcrap fails hard.
> Richard Bennett (co-inventor of the
> twisted-pair system for ethernet,
> and its protocol, 1BASE5)
… and the straw-man argument …
Well that sucks, Idk maybe you could encrypt your traffic. There’s a guide on this site.
http://bittorrentnews.com/
Shut *down* the Internet? Wow! But I have even better proposal. How about shutting *up* your mouth and stuffing some twisted pair *up* your ass, Mr. Bennett? (And you can even use the other end as a power plug.) This is the age of optics and we don’t need neither dinosaurs nor morons around here.
Comcast are a bunch of dirty assholes who are really asking for a good fuck and I sincerely hope that FCC gives them just that.
As for the whole “traffic management” idea - no thanks. I prefer to shape traffic (which I’ve fucking paid for!) myself.
When you oversell something to the point that comcast have then blame it on the customer it’s thier own fualt.
Second dont they have the money to upgrad the network to handle what they have oversold…. NO.. that oney is for the CEO’s dont be silly :D!
Is it just me, or is the natural consequence of forging RSTs that soon many people will just configure their firewalls to drop RSTs? TCP will still basically work without them.
Hey, but in the long term, maybe Comcast will be the reason IP-layer opportunistic encryption (or authentication) is deployed.
It’s capitalism at work. The bigger corporations try to exert as much control over the resources as possible. In this case Comcast was probably told by the MAFIAA to do what they can to stop copyright infringement. Or even more disgusting, they show anticipatory obedience. That might be rewarded with hosting _the_ buy service for music and films in a future when P2P users are too scared and unnerved to share files anymore. And since most of us want to participate in cultural exchange the demand for music and such will not go away very soon. So it’s not just the next check for the CEO or the next quarterly statement for Comcast. It’s about the business models of the entertainment industry. And P2P doesn’t fit in many business model because there is not much control one could apply.
The MAFIAA overslept when P2P was born and they are out of arguments. So, they called the lawyers to hassle us. Which means we should push for changing the law. That would make the lawyers go away. By the way, they might have an interest in the whole scheme as well. Since the MAFIAA cannot sue millions of citizens they try to disrupt P2P also with technical means. If we seek technical solutions only to counter traffic regulations that just leads to an other arms race.
The argument that those who contribute to culture that we want to share need to earn a living is valid, I believe. We need to find a way to make them peers.
@9,14
So they’re hackers, just not l33t hackers.
how many rules should be bend to save a possible profit in the future of one company? i say we boycott the isps that even so much as tries to stop filesharing, thats the only reason why we buy high bandwidth to get quicker internet, if they remove filesharing then whats the point? anyway. free the internet=)
You know there is legal bittorrent protocol use out there, take Blizzard for example. World of Warcraft patcher uses it, and Comcast wants to disrupt activity on this protocol. I’m sure theres other games that does the same thing. If they are selling x bandwidth, by God they better give me every last bit of it possible if I am paying them for it. If they advertise full access to whatever, and give me only some of it, Isn’t that false advertisement? Not to mention the fact they are forging packets, etc.
I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!
Shaping traffic is not that big of an issue.
I paid for 750 Kb/s down and 65 Kb/s up.
Shape my connection so I can download at 750Kb/s down whenever I want (seeing as I am paying for that) and 65 Kb/s Up, whenever I want (Who’s footing the bill for this again?)
oh yeah, me.
You’re not allowed to look at what I am downloading or uploading. It’s my own business, none of your business.
Do I allow you to listen in on my phone conversations? No.
Do I allow you to watch what I do in my room? No.
I am in control, not you.
That is what it should be like.
@28: Saying that, it also makes way for tying an IP addy to your house. In turn the RIAA and MPAA can track you down specifically instead of having to go through them.
Although i understand all of what you are saying and I agree, what the article says is that they are interjecting in a communication just as a hacker would and hi-jacks that communication. This of itself is just what Comcast fights on a regular basis. The double-standard used here is completely unwanted.
Yes I use Comcast but with Verizon’s new FiOS system (and better upload speeds) I have more options to play with, and believe me. When i can afford it, I will be switching.
It’s a nice idea for them to help with controlling illegal traffic, but there are other reasons why one would use a P2P system. For instance sharing photos with friends, or personal music with the world. It’s just not a great tactic for any company to use to stop a P2P system.
I’ve always wondered about this, how come ISPs are always offering more bandwidth to people when they obviously can’t handle it.
I don’t want to see comcast go down. What I do want to see is the voice and power of the everyday customer (I.e. you and I) voices.
So far, the P2P community has brought an ISP Giant to a trial, so that we may fight for our right to use the web we see fit
I want ComCast to lose this battle, so they may see that they cannot control their customers. This will be a milestone for all future ISP’s who plan to one way or another throttle traffic.
Today, they are disconnecting our Seeds to our friends. Tomorrow, they are disconnecting our FTP and HTTP connections that are over xx MB in size.
Fuck You Internet-Nazis.
HACKERS ARE NOT CRACKERS
These actions by Comcast to purposely disconnect clients from their paid internet services violates a mutual agreement of internet service with their customers.
TCP Reset, which Comcast uses to disconect clients and deny customers access to their internet connection, is intrusive hacking. Comcast is swinging an axe through the internet, cutting established connections and reconnection attempts. This is malicious hacking and blatent restriction of internet access. Allowing Comcast to continue this unfair behavior would give Comcast a license to market partial internet connections, opening the gate that leads to a disjoint internet (read two internets).
BREAKING NEWS!!
Wow Comcast I think I solved your problem! Check this out..
ISPs all over the world have fair usage policies and monthly download limits. If you break these terms you can be warned and/or banned from the network. Comcast should try this out!!!
Then you can spend your money and time on developing your network rather than limiting it.
Sending an RST within your own net is not hacking! hacking is breaking into systems that are not yours, And the whole thing with denial of service assumes that you’re denying somebody a service that isn’t yours, which in this case, comcast owns, so they’re just altering the shape of their service, NOT HACKING IT.
Geeze people, get your fricking terminology right!
i hope comcast dies.
The answer to the entire solution is for ISPs to finally realize that the internet is more than just sending and receiving emails and reading simple text based webpages. Many coutries such as sweden, Hong kong, Japan as examples have already understood the future and have invested in better networks to meet the needs. Don’t treat your customers like criminals, embrace them, love them, do your best to meet the perceived needs. I have read responses from ISP admins who claim that ‘peer to peer’ is a botomless pit and increasing bandwidth and capacity is not the solution. They are realistically being negative and attempting to censor/police/limit a multi-media society. A more robust pipeline will serve everyone. Censorship is not the answer. People want a fast, friendly, free ISP provider who simply offers the internet and refuses to police the world. Copyright holders/lawyers need to respect people’s right to freedom and privacy.
A very-very despicable act i say..
visit my site http://www.japanese-antiques.net :)
NOT all torrents are illegal, in fact many trackers have a lot of legal ones and i recently downloaded a torrent of over 750 songs that was created to showcase up and coming bands. They are breaking the law even further than when we download torrents. I hope they get a lot of shit over this.
“hacking is breaking into systems that are not yours”
4tinglez, go back to your FOXNEWS you brain-less monkey. “Breaking into systems” is called intrusion. Hacking is a very fuzzy term and does not describe any specific technique, it is not even reserved to computer-related skills and has certainly nothing to do with illegality itself. Go and get some education before you try to teach others, you piece of shit.
[quote comment="298408"]Sending an RST within your own net is not hacking![/quote]
Bullshit. When I connect to an ISP, my PC (while technically a part of the ISP’s network) is still my private property. Same goes for another peer, who I communicate with. By sending either of us RST the ISP disrupts our communications and thus directly affects functionality of software on our systems (which don’t belong to ISP in any manner).
This is hacking. By definition.
ISPs can do anything they wants with their routers or servers. They can send false packets from of *their own* hosts to another. They can even burn all their hardware, who cares. But my PC doesn’t belong to them even when I’m online. And my traffic (which I pay my money for) is mine. “Shaping” it is a crime.
They don’t have neither legal nor moral right to do this.
Moving the bottleneck of the network by increasing capacity should be what they SHOULD BE doing.
CPU and other hardware component companies have been doing that for years successfully. One can view ISP as just another part of PC.
You pay for the part, you add it to your rig and you use it as much and as long as you want at max speeds if needed.
[quote comment="298426"]ISP admins who claim that ‘peer to peer’ is a botomless pit and increasing bandwidth and capacity is not the solution…[/quote]
…are just plainly lying.
There’s nothing magical about bandwidth. Let’s say (for simplicity’s sake) that some ISP has 1Gbps total uplink. Then this company can honestly sell 1024 of 1Mbps DSL connections with unlimited traffic. The very moment they sell 1025-th one, they are cheating on their clients and must be ready to face the consequences, including class action lawsuits.
This isn’t rocket science. This is elementary school math.
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
[quote comment="298343"]HACKERS ARE NOT CRACKERS[/quote]
I fully agree.
prodigydancer, you’re telling bullshit. Even good old phone lines are “overbooked”. Unlimited means no artificially applied limits throttling. What you are talking about is a guarantee. They couldn’t provide such a guarantee with a single 1 Gbps uplink and 1000 customers either.
Also you should get back to school because 1 Gbps is exactly 1000 Mbit/s that is a billion (American billion) bits per second. This 1024 bullshit applies to memory chips and absolutely nothing else. Only crooks and sociopathic assembly victims are going to claim something else. They are going to extinct eventually.
Wildblue satellite internet does the traffic shaping thing. Back in the day my 1.5/256 connection was the shiznit until one day they decided that we were enjoying our connections too much and implemented traffic shaping. This effectively made our normal pings of 500-600(pretty good for satellite) go up to no less than 1300ms. Lets not even get into how much time it takes now to browse secure sites.
Wildblue has oversold their service way beyond what it’s capable of handling. They recently launched a 2nd satellite but their traffic shaping is already implemented on it. What was once an outstanding unbelievably awesome real high speed internet connection for people in the country has just become a service for browsing the web(slowly), checking email, and downloading files.
They have a FAP of 18gb download and 6gb upload traffic per rolling 30days. This is fine for anybody so long as they don’t do torrents.
Anyway, the only thing I can see as a fix for this situation to make everyone happy is to simply offer different packages/plans. If you only need internet for simple browsing, email, shopping, and occasional updates you DO NOT need a 5mb connection. Hell 512/128 would be sufficient for them.
Then you have power users. There are many levels of power users who do everything and anything they possibly can with their connections. These people download movies, games, apps, music, and games. These people deserve the 5mb or so connections. Then there is the absolute top power hungry users with their 10mb+ connections. These I would think would be more reserved for businesses that may do VOIP, Remoting assistance, etc. An individual with top tier plans are usually up to no good anyway if they “need” that much bandwidth. These sorts are usually people downloading/uploading movies, games, apps, and possibly hacking(botnet). I’m not accusing anyone with a big pipe of hacking, I’m just saying you really don’t “need” that much bandwidth unless you are pushing some seriously big or a lot of files to and from other people.
Personally I wouldn’t mind paying more for a real “free unlimited” plan so I can game at least. Until then Dial-up is still unlimited :P haha
@46
> Even good old phone lines are “overbooked”.
Do you seriously think, that I give a fuck about that? :-) Why should I? Mind you, when I won’t be able to use the phone line I pay for, someone responsible for that is definitely going to receive a big solid object up his ass.
> Unlimited means no artificially applied limits throttling.
Oh please, don’t waste space in comments to repeat some bla-bla-bla you’ve heard from shitty ISPs who failed miserably. For me unlimited means I can use 100% of bandwidth 24/7. End of story. And when I won’t be able to do exactly this… well, I believe you’ve got the idea. :-)
> They couldn’t provide such a guarantee with a single 1 Gbps uplink and 1000 customers either.
More like fucking bastards don’t want to. They want to cheat people of their hard earned money and get away with that. Not gonna happen.
> 1 Gbps is exactly 1000 Mbit/s that is a billion
Go back to school yourself, you dumb ignorant prick. :-)
P.S. But you’ve made my day, so thank for a good laugh. I admire clowns like you. :-) Especially when you entertain for free.
Comment’d on the FCC site.
Want to get in to private torrent sites ???
http://p2ptalk.org/forums/register.php?referrerid=41
I work as a cab driver in the washington dc area, and there have been at least 20 different people calling for rides so they can sleep outside the supreme court just so they can try to get a seat. it’s sad. (calling someone now for a 30 dollar delivery of a pillow and blanket, its windy and about 31 degrees out here, they’re freezing just to get a seat, haha, by the way, it’s only 3am here)
funny thing is i have comcast, they just upped the upload to 3Mb/s without annoucing it here,and i’ve never had the problem with the throttling. maybe they thought if they did it everywhere else except where the government is that they wouldn’t be noticed. bunch of fucktards if you ask me.
i’m just glad ppl that r sharing don’t think of where internet trafic around here gets routed before going out. we have the NSA, CIA, NRO, FBI, Pentagon, DEA and ATF, NASA all in a 25 mile zone, and if you do some checking it usually hits at least 1 of them. There’s alot of shady shit in this area, if you lived here, like i do, u’d see it. the NRO has been spying on communications in this area for at least the least 12 years, i know cuz i have a family worker who works there. you should see the shit they do, it’s scary, sad and pitiful all at once.
Here in Asia, the future is looking very bright. Thanks, Japan!
——–
[Taken from cnn.com article]
…If the technology proves successful, subscribers with small dishes will connect to the Internet at speeds many times faster than what is now available over residential cable or DSL services.
The Associated Press said the satellite would offer speeds of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second.
The service initially would focus on the Asia-Pacific region close to Japan, a JAXA news release said.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2008/02/25/comcast-blocking-first-the-internet-now-the-public/
Comcast hired people off the street to fill up seats at it’s hearing so the interested members of the public can’t attend.
Comcast acknowledges paying ’seat-warmers’ before FCC hearing
By Mark Jewell
AP Business Writer / February 26, 2008
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Comcast Corp. on Tuesday acknowledged hiring people to fill seats before the start of a contentious federal hearing on how the company manages its broadband network, allowing its employees to take those seats when the filled-to-capacity hearing started.
Many people were turned away before Monday’s Federal Communications Commission hearing at Harvard Law School, leading critics to accuse Comcast of stifling debate over the company’s practice of favoring some forms of Internet traffic over others.
Full article here: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2008/02/26/allegations_fly_in_fcc_hearing_aftermath/
@53, 54
So they’re trying to cheat even now? No wonder they cheat on their customers then. This company is really, really disgusting. I hope they’re out of business soon.
@55: Unfortunately I live in an area where Comcast is the only game in town. :(
maybe someone could make an application that can be used by Comcast users.
They will download and let it running in backround as a service.
App will generate random and unreasonable TCP and UDP traffic from many Comcast users some of the Comcast server connected to internet.
They can simply fill Comcasts pipes from inside traffic and Comcast can do almost nothing, but look how its small bandwidth is wasted. They will not be able to determine which traffic they can allow and which to block.
You can propably leggaly run such a app (just a packet gen) in background and complaining to your provider that he is blocking your internet access and therefore you want to cancel your agreement :)
In the end, stoping using Comcast services is really the only simple way out….
suxks balls
@12
I’d love to switch… Comcast seems to be our only high-speed option. Yes, a few blocks down, there is DSL. :\
TALK HARD! - Pump Up The Volume (movie)
What they do is illegal, unauthorized, and unwarranted. How would we go if we decided someone else’s business was interfering with ours, so we went and disrupted it? We’d get arrested and probably jailed. They should face trial like anyone else who tries to disrupt the Internet, like hackers sending viruses. How do they keep getting away with it? A thief can’t excuse himself by claiming his victim is a thief. So I can steal from everyone I know who’s ever stolen anything, and that’s ok? Not saying that file sharing is theft; that’s just preposterous.
Maybe it’s time we started disrupting their services as suggested.
P2P offers the corporations more than what some may think, its like the ultimate market research tool to see directly what the people are sharing and and how to relate to the masses.
commiecast the disgusting corporate whore
filthy demonstration of how not to operate a business
yeah…. my ISP has nothing to do with them and they don’t exist in Canada.. yet i got constantly hacked by them…. I hope they get in big trouble . for this…impeeding isp’s and their clients…
If ComKast’Z LinEZ R s000000 KonGesTed… Why GO in 2 TeLCom VOiP BuZI???? HUUUUUHHHHH???
I agree, this is all about the sweetheart deal. One of us one day is going to find a way to cost Comcast whatever they were going to gain.
To have their internet disconnected? Comcast that is.
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