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)
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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.
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