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)
78 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
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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.
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