A quick look at our web-analytics further revealed a bump in people searching Google for “thepiratebay down”.

The majority of these people showed up as Comcast subscribers, which led us to conclude that something is up with the connection between The Pirate Bay and the Comcast network.

This morning we wrote an article on the issue, mentioning that The Pirate Bay was trying to find the origin of the problem.

The report didn’t go unnoticed by Comcast either. In a response to the issue Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast, told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

As stated in the original article, we never suspected an intentional blockade, but something was clearly wrong. Luckily, Comcast is there to help The Pirate Bay get back on track.

Comcast has reached out to The Pirate Bay and set aside resources in case the BitTorrent site needs it. “I can have our engineers work directly with them to assist,” Jason Livingood told TorrentFreak.

Initially The Pirate Bay team suspected that Comcast might be filtering PMTU responses, but Comcast looked into this and ruled it out. At the moment The Pirate Bay team is looking at other possibilities, but Comcast is confident that they’re not causing the problem.

The Pirate Bay team prefers to keep the exact location of their core hardware somewhat of a mystery, and some of this network magic may conflict with Comcast at the moment. It’s expected that, with or without help from Comcast, the issues will be resolved soon.

Update: Right before we finished this article, Comcast users were able to connect to The Pirate Bay again. The issue was reverse path filtering in a Tier1 network Comcast traffic went through.

Comcast reached out to Serious Tubes Networks, who deliver transit to The Pirate Bay, and they were able to correct the issue.

“Comcast emailed our NOC about their users complaining about not reaching The Pirate Bay. We resolved the issue and TPB can now be reached from ComCast,” the CEO of Serious Tubes Networks told TorrentFreak.

Indeed, Comcast Cares, but the problem was fixed without their direct help.

Source: Comcast Offers Help to The Pirate Bay, Problems Fixed

Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.

Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.

Further tests show that the blockade is not DNS related. What is actually causing the issue is uncertain at this point.

Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.

TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay team who confirmed that there’s a significant drop in visitors from the U.S. They are currently investigating the issue to see if there’s anything they can do on their end.

When it comes to BitTorrent blocking, Comcast already has quite a reputation. In 2007 TorrentFreak broke the news that Comcast was actively blocking BitTorrent traffic. Comcast initially denied, but later admitted its wrongdoings.

Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking fueled the Net Neutrality debates and eventually resulted in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. A class action lawsuit was settled by the ISP who reserved a $16 million fund for affected subscribers.

In the light of all the previous legal issues it therefore seems unlikely that Comcast has ventured out on its own to block The Pirate Bay website.

When there’s more information available on the current issues we’ll update this article. In the meantime Comcast users can access the site through Anonymouse and other proxies.

Update: It appears that a subset of Rogers users in Canada have problems accessing the site as well, same with some Optus users in Australia. However, this doesn’t appear to be as widespread as with Comcast.

Update: Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

Update: After affecting only Comcast users for about 15 hours, The Pirate Bay seems to be inaccessible pretty much everywhere now. The Pirate Bay team is looking into it. (Update: one webserver died, should be back for most people who are not on Comcast now).

Source: Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay

The whole Comcast debacle ignited a discussion about Net Neutrality and eventually led to the FCC’s national broadband plan which was released last month. Today, the Court of Appeals overruled FCC’s decision in the Comcast case, with three judges stating that the commission doesn’t have the authority to require ISPs to keep their network neutral.

After appealing FCC’s decision in favor of BitTorrent users, Comcast has finally got the verdict (pdf) it wanted. Although it seems unlikely that the ISP will pick up its old habit of preventing BitTorrent users to seed files, it could in theory do so.

The Court of Appeals ruling states that the FCC did not have the power to regulate ISPs network managing practices, which leaves the commission with two options. It could appeal at the Supreme Court, or it could ask Congress to give it the powers it wants and/or needs.

The latter option will pose potential problems for the likes of Comcast, with the FCC potentially asking not only for powers to deal with this particular case, but for greatly increased powers to regulate the entire sector.

For BitTorrent users on Comcast and other US Internet providers there are uncertain times ahead.

Source: Comcast Can Block BitTorrent Again, Court Rules

It therefore came as a surprise when we found out that three major US ISPs – Comcast, Cox and Warner Cable – have been funding research which aims to help copyright holders track down and gather evidence against BitTorrent pirates more efficiently.

Unlike most of the ‘passive’ BitTorrent tracking tools that are in fashion today, BitStalker uses an ‘active’ method through which they can actually prove that the BitTorrent client associated with an IP-address is sharing files. Where the passive methods wrongfully accuse 1 in 10 downloaders, BitStalker promises to avoid such false positives.

The researchers who developed BitStalker further claim (pdf) that their tool is much more effective than the current competition, as it would allow copyright holders to get information on 20 million BitTorrent users for a bargain price of $12.40. What remains unclear, however, is why three large ISPs are interested in funding this project.

It is no secret that the RIAA has been pushing Comcast, Cox and other ISPs to take stricter measures against copyright infringers, including the ultimate sanction of terminating customers’ Internet access. However, thus far the ISPs have largely maintained their neutral position as information carriers.

Whether the funding of BitStalker’s research is a signal that this may change is open for speculation. Another argument for ISPs to join could be that they want to protect their customers from receiving copyright infringement notices in error.

Regarding the BitStalker method of tracking BitTorrent users, we can say that it is not as revolutionary as the researchers portray it. TorrentFreak spoke to several people who are currently operating the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet and none of them was impressed by BitStalker’s technology.

If BitStalker is indeed implemented the large scale monitoring will have to be executed from thousands of IP-addresses. Most trackers have rules in place so that one single IP-address will be banned from the tracker if it connects to too many torrents.

Similarly, if BitStalker was put on a cloud service like the research suggests, it wouldn’t take long before these IP-ranges would appear in block-lists, rendering BitStalker useless.

If we add to this that BitStalker’s active BitTorrent tracking method will require users to be ‘connectible’, which a large percentage of users aren’t, this means that it will result in many false negatives. The researchers report that they could only connect to less than half of all available peers, which might be caused in the main by the connectability issue.

Whatever the motivations are for Comcast and the other ISPs to fund this project, the good news is that less people will be accused of uploading something they haven’t. Whether BitStalker will really be that more efficient depends on one’s definition of efficiency. For now, we doubt that it will result in a global BitTorrent crackdown.

Source: Comcast Funds BitStalker Anti-Piracy Research

Their decision to prevent BitTorrent users from sharing content over their network has sparked the Net Neutrality debate, resulting in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. One of these suits was settled last month.

Comcast agreed to put $16m into a fund to pay BitTorrent users that were affected by the ‘network management’ which made it impossible for them to share files after their downloads had completed.

Each of the affected users can now claim their $16 in damages, but those who do are required to state to the Court, under penalty of perjury, that their use of BitTorrent “was for lawful purpose consistent with applicable copyright and other laws.” This required statement came as an unpleasant surprise to many affected Comcast users.

“Am I supposed to be able to remember everything I downloaded during that period, and be cognizant of the copyright status of those items not only then, but now?” one worried Comcast user told TorrentFreak. “I certainly do not think that sixteen dollars is enough incentive to possibly suffer the penalties of committing unwitting federal perjury.”

Other Comcast users will have to agree with this assessment, simply because it is often not clear when one is violating copyright law. For example, there is still a large portion of BitTorrent users who think that downloading a TV-show that they could have watched for free on TV, is not a crime.

It wouldn’t surprise us if a large portion of the $16 million fund is left unclaimed because of this required statement, saving Comcast a significant amount of money.

That leads us to the question why was included in the first place. It somehow suggests that Comcast was attempting to stop copyright infringement with their throttling practices, aside from the network management purpose it served. Maybe they just want to hang on to their money.

Whatever the motivation to include this option, it is completely irrelevant to the case itself. Comcast has never used copyright infringement as a justification for stopping BitTorrent traffic, so the lawfulness of the traffic should not be an issue.

Source: Comcast’s BitTorrent Settlement Excludes Pirates

In one of the class action suits that were brought about from the long-running incident, Comcast has now agreed to settle, meaning those affected may be eligible for compensation.

About two and a half years ago, reports surfaced on what appeared to be the throttling of BitTorrent connections by Comcast. The throttling, first discovered by Rob Toplowski, was confirmed by TorrentFreak, and was first reported in August 2007. Other news agencies picked it up later, especially after tests by the EFF and Associated Press confirmed events and included reports that other network based activity was also affected.

Comcast long-denied any wrongdoing, but a leaked memo revealed that the company went as far as instructing its front-line staff to lie about the issue. Then the FCC got involved and things deteriorated. At a hearing at Harvard, Comcast packed the venue with people they bussed in, but it didn’t stop the BitTorrent throttling practice being termed a ‘hacker technique’.

Eventually, some assurances were made, and the FCC ordered Comcast to stop using Sandvine. Meanwhile lawsuits had been filed. One of these, Hart vs Comcast of Alameda, attained class action status, and there is now a proposed settlement.

Comcast has agreed to put $16M into a fund to pay BitTorrent users that were inconvenienced by the ‘network management’.

The downside is the size of the settlement. If you qualify, you can receive a maximum of $16, yet still Comcast refuses to accept it did anything wrong. The administrators of the settlement have set up a website to deal with questions about the case which can be found at www.p2pcongestionsettlement.com

It’s not hard to imagine that some customers will feel this doesn’t go far enough, and undoubtedly the discussion on this topic will continue. For the affected Comcast users there is still time to decide how to proceed – the deadline for claims is August 14th 2010. Meanwhile, network neutrality remains a pipe dream for most people.

Source: Comcast To Compensate Throttled BitTorrent Users

Dave Satz wrote in to inform us that one of his friends was served with a DMCA takedown notice a few weeks ago. His friend, John Aprigliano, had allegedly downloaded a CAM release of “Cadillac Records”, without ever having heard of the movie. Although these takedown notices are just a formality and intended to scare the recipient, John decided to contact his ISP and ask for clarification.

After four calls to Comcast support the truth came out. The infringement notice was forwarded to the wrong person because the MAC-address of John’s old modem was still linked to his account. The Comcast techs eventually corrected the mistake, but this case yet again shows how inaccurate takedown notices can be.

Of course, this is just an exception, without any serious consequences. But what if John had lived in Ireland or New Zealand? He could have lost his Internet connection because of a mistake like this. Not to mention that if Comcast doesn’t screw up, the companies that collect the so called evidence might – it wouldn’t be the first time.

The RIAA is currently trying to get ISPs all across the world, including Comcast, on board for their “three-strikes” or “graduated response” scheme. Earlier this week ZDNet reported that AT&T and Comcast are seriously considering teaming up with the RIAA later this year to hunt down illegal filesharers. Let’s hope Comcast has fixed its administration by then.

Source: Comcast Labels Innocent Customer a Movie Pirate

Comcast was slapped by the FCC last year for a similarly unfair treatment of BitTorrent users, but Cox managed to get away relatively unscathed, even though it was using the same TCP RST packet forging techniques. Cox has no intention of stopping the traffic slowdowns in 2009, it will just use different methods.

In February, Cox will trial a brand new throttling scheme that aims to slow down so-called “non-time sensitive” traffic when the network is congested. This includes all P2P, FTP and Usenet traffic. Although Cox announced the trials – which will start in Kansas and Arkansas – on its website, details are scarce.

For one, Cox does not explain what the definition of a congested network is, how often its users can expect to be throttled and more specifically, at what times of the day this is likely to happen. Secondly, it is currently unknown what measures Cox will actually take, and what applications will be used to slow down its customers.

Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, is also concerned with Cox’s new plans. He said in a response to the news, “The lesson we learned from the Comcast case is that we must be skeptical of any practice that comes between users and the Internet.” Indeed, network neutrality is at stake – again.

“The information provided by Cox gives little indication about how its new practices will impact Internet users, or if they comply with the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement. Cox customers will certainly want to know more about how the company is interfering with their Internet traffic and what criteria it uses to discriminate,” Scott added.

It is really disappointing to see (some) ISPs using “network congestion” as an excuse to slow down users of P2P applications using expensive traffic shaping devices, particularly as this “congestion” doesn’t seem to deter them from taking on more and more customers.

Instead, they should invest in their network infrastructure. Five years from now the demand on the network’s resources might be a ten fold increase from today’s levels. They can close their eyes and wish, but that wont make BitTorrent and other high bandwidth applications go away.

Source: Cox Suckers BitTorrent Users with More Slowdowns

We’ve wrote before that ISPs are looking for new ways to manage their network by introducing bandwidth caps and metered plans. Although we’re not in favor of it, we have to applaud Comcast for being open about it. Most other ISPs have similar policies, limiting their unlimited services, but they seem to get away with it. One of these ISPs is Qwest, one of the larger Internet providers in the western United States, who forces customers to accept an invisible 250 GB cap.

Qwest’s approach is quite aggressive to say the least. When customers reach the magic limit, their web traffic is is redirected to an “excessive use” page. The page informs the customer that they “noticed extremely high usage” on their Qwest Broadband account. The notification blocks all HTTP access from your computer, making it impossible to access any website. In order to proceed and release the block on your system, customers must acknowledge notification on this web page, and agree to a new service agreement.

There are no other options, no personal phone calls, no further explanation what acceptable use is, or how customers can track their usage. The new service agreement, dated August 12, 2008 (pdf), allows Qwest to limit your use in any way they see fit, and even terminate your service when the customer exceeds the (invisible) limit again. Note that Qwest does not specify how much bandwith customers are allowed to use. They only state (pdf) that “normal” subscribers use 1-3 GB a month (oh really?), and that 40.000 – 80.000 typically sized MP3 downloads is considered to be excessive use.

Comcast’s MP3 limit 250 GB limit comes down to 62,500 4 MB MP3s, so it is safe to say that Qwest has a bandwidth cap that is similar to Comcast – 250 GB. Unlike Comcast, excessive use is not specified anywhere in the service agreement, so customers can only guess, and hope that their service will not be limited or terminated out of the blue.

One of the affected Qwest users, who tipped us off, told TorrentFreak: “Since Qwest holds a monopoly in many areas, they can continue to reduce allowed bandwidth usage as they add new users while not adding new infrastructure. Such radical bandwidth limitation will have a chilling effect on further evolution of the Internet. If people can’t get bandwidth, then they can’t use bandwidth intensive services such as YouTube and Netflix. We may never know what the future could have been.”

Indeed, as we have said before, ISPs should think ahead. To most “normal” customers 250 GB may sound as a lot of bandwidth, but this might be totally different in the future. Making an online backup of your harddrive is pretty much impossible with a bandwidth cap like this, so will HD-streaming. It hinders innovation while it’s ignoring the real problem. ISPs should invest in their network instead, but I guess it’s not only the entertainment industry that finds it hard to adapt to technological change.

Source: Qwest’s Unofficial 250 GB Data Cap

The FCC’s final decision came exactly a year after we first reported on the issue. Initially, Comcast flatout denied that they were slowing down BitTorrent users, but after AP confirmed our reports, mainstream media picked it up and the FCC got involved. FCC argues that Comcast’s actions are unfair because they specifically target BitTorrent, not any other protocols.

Good news right? So BitTorrent users will soon be able to download at blazing speeds again? Well, not really. A neutral net wont stop ISPs from slowing down their customers. Now they simply have to slow down everyone – and that’s exactly what their plan is. Comcast already said that they will move on, and throttle bandwidth hogs at peak times when needed. On top of that, they are enforcing a monthly bandwidth limit, not hesitating to disconnect people who use more than they should.

Comcast is taking these measures under the “reasonable network management” flag. However, what is reasonable now (if it is), might not be one or two years from now. The problem is that the ISPs are the ones who decide what the limits should be, meaning they can pretty much do whatever they want.

Several ISPs have already started to experiment with new tools to prevent customers from using too much bandwidth. Comcast will slow down all heavy bandwidth users, and Time Warner Cable is testing metered plans, where users will pay for the bandwidth they transfer. Worrying developments, to say the least.

Some might not see a problem with metered plans. We pay for water and gasoline in pretty much the same way. This is indeed true, but there’s also a danger in metering the Internet. It will restrict innovation (heavy bandwidth apps), and the use of high bandwidth video streaming may become something for the elite.

One thing is clear, BitTorrent users will be the main targets of these new “business models”. It was therefore surprising to see comments from Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer of BitTorrent, on these initiatives. “I think what Comcast and Time Warner Cable are doing is a great first step,” Klinker told Cnet. “It gets ISPs out of the business of deciding which applications are important and which aren’t. But there are enhancements to the peer-to-peer protocol, in particular, that can make it easier on all ISPs.”

Net neutrality is not the Holy Grail though – a neutral net is useless if it’s slower than a biased one. Klinker agreed on this, and told us that he doesn’t think that these new business models, or network management practices, are a good long term strategy. “This is a step in the right direction because ISPs are indeed making their networks more “neutral” without new legislation requiring them to do so,” he told TorrentFreak. “But make no mistake, bandwidth caps and metered plans are bad for the Internet and could stunt the adoption and growth of all broadband services.”

Network expert Robb Topolski, who was the first to document Comcast’s unfair network management practices, thinks that ISPs might experiment with new network management tools, but that these wont stick. When we asked him whether he thinks the FCC ruling will lead to more bandwidth caps and metered plans, he said: “If it does, then something has gone wrong with competition. Customers clearly don’t want metered plans and bandwidth caps. There might be some ISPs that experiment with these, but I don’t see it happening.”

Let’s hope Robb is right. Of course, we applaud the FCC ruling, but we have a strange feeling that ISPs will continue to fight their customers for a while. They should, of course, move on and invest in the future. BitTorrent is here to stay, files will get larger, and more bandwidth intensive services will surface, really.

Source: Comcast vs. BitTorrent, What’s Next?

Regardless, Comcast is not the only ISP that is throttling. As was revealed in the stats from Project Glasnost, Cox is also throttling heavily. So, while some are popping the champagne corks over this victory, others are still working hard to keep our ISP’s honest, and ensure that their customers are getting what they paid for.

The latest of these, is a project called Switzerland by the EFF. Still in very early alpha, it’s an attempt to not just detect sandvineing by an ISP, but other forms of throttling as well. Unlike Glasnost, which uses a central server and known torrent streams to detect activities from the ISP interfering, this will use a more decentralised method, where peers running Switzerland swap information about the packets they send to other Switzerland users, in encrypted data packets sent via a central server. In effect, it’s a checksum of torrent activity sent via a 3rd party. As Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the EFF, and developer of Switzerland puts it “Alice and Bob are exchanging packets, they connect to a neutral server (Switzerland) to arbitrate between their different views of the packets”.

When asked why the EFF started this project, and why they believe a neutral network is important, he told TorrentFreak: “There were several reasons why we started the Test Your ISP project, and designed and built Switzerland. One reason was pragmatic: we were trying to run systematic tests of the interference that Comcast was deploying against P2P networks, and we decided that the only sensible way to do that was to build an automated sensor network. So we set about doing that.”

“The bigger picture, of course, is that without transparency the Internet won’t remain the amazing open and innovative thing that it has been,” Eckersley says. “And EFF’s mission is to make sure that the Internet stays open and innovative. We need to shine lights into the dark corners of the network, and make sure that ISPs aren’t setting themselves up in some control room and saying “protocol A okay, but protocol B doesn’t fit with our business plans, so let’s give it second-class treatment or stop it from working entirely.”

Some might worry that the client might open up people to being monitored by anti-p2p companies or other undesirables, using the system as another method of verification, but there is really no way around it. The simplest method to avoid that is, in Peters words, “avoid exchanging copyrighted files between Switzerland clients. The copyright risks are probably lower if you run your own Switzerland server, but it’s still going to keep logs.”

The question of what the FCC will do about these other ISPs and their traffic management is one to ponder. Our inquiries on this matter have been acknowledged, but not replied to at the time of publication.

Source: EFF Tool Hunts BitTorrent Throttling ISPs

“Comcast surreptitiously installed receiver packets to keep people from using file-sharing programs when it promised it wouldn’t,” Alyson Foster, an associate at the law firm Gilbert Randolph alleges. “Of course the competition is fierce in telecommunications, but they were trying to get an unfair leg up.”

Robb Topolski, who is now the plaintiff in the nationwide class action lawsuit against Comcast, told TorrentFreak at the time: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

These reports however, were soon picked up by the mainstream press, and eventually led to an investigation by the FCC. Two weeks ago, the FCC announced that it will order Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. FCC chairman said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

It is now up to the federal court to decide if Comcast’s BitTorrent users deserve to be compensated, and whether the company need to stop their misleading advertisements. Foster said the amount of the damages has yet to be estimated, but the alleged damages are expected to exceed $5 million.

Source: BitTorrent Users Seek Compensation from Comcast

Kevin Martin, FCC chairman told AP that Comcast’s BitTorrent throttling is “arbitrary”, and that the company had violated the principles of the Federal Communications Commission. Martin said that Comcast slows down BitTorrent users independent of the amount of traffic they use, and that the company failed to communicate their network management practices to their consumers.

Indeed, a recent study by the Max Planck Institute showed that the company had misinformed the FCC and their users. Comcast has always argued that BitTorrent upstream traffic was only blocked during periods of heavy network traffic, this turns out to be a lie, as the study showed that they blocked BitTorrent upstream traffic 24/7.

The FCC has announced that it will take appropriate action against Comcast, and the ISP will be ordered to stop interfering with BitTorrent traffic. Comcast has said before that it will invest in its network capacity and stop slowing down the traffic of their users, but these were all false promises.

Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press who filed the complaint with the FCC is delighted with this outcome, and said in a response: “Nine months ago, Comcast was exposed for blocking free choice on the Internet. At every turn, Comcast has denied blocking, lied to the public and tried to avoid being held accountable. We have presented an open and shut case that Comcast broke the law.”

“The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers. This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money,” Ammori added.

It is to be expected that – if the pipes are really congested – Comcast and other ISPs will have to step away from the all-you-can-eat plans they have been offering for years, now that people are actually using bandwidth they signed up for.

Source: Comcast Ordered to Stop BitTorrent Traffic Interference

This morning many people will be celebrating as reports circulate that in the last few hours Comcast has been the subject of a hacking which defaced its homepage (mirror here).

The hackers appear to have changed the Comcast DNS/WHOIS records which were pointing at a non-Comcast address. Although back to normal now, for a while the records displayed this data:

Administrative Contact:
Domain Registrations, Comcast kryogenicsdefiant@gmail.com
Defiant still raping 2k8 ebk
69 dick tard lane
dildo room
PHILADELPHIA, PA 19103
US
4206661870 fax: 6664200187

Technical Contact:
Comcast Corporation kryogenicsdefiant@gmail.com
1500 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19102
US
215-320-8774 fax: 215-564-0132

Record expires on 24-Sep-2008.
Record created on 25-Sep-1997.
Database last updated on 28-May-2008 23:48:08 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS21.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.190.11
NS22.WORLDNIC.COM 205.178.144.11

A Comcast employee said: “The servers are fine and are reachable if the DNS server you are using is pointing to the correct place. As far as we can tell, the hack was a one shot deal, not an ongoing event.”

There are reports that concerned users telephoning to inform Comcast were summarily disconnected, with a level of panic centered round the security of the Comcast email system with reports that the hackers were picking off Comcast user’s usernames and passwords. As yet, this is unconfirmed.

Others claim they were treated politely by Comcast and told to use a temporary site in the meantime, located at http://beta.comcast.net/a/. The Comcast forums also went down and then started diverting to http://www6.comcast.net/a/.

There are rumors circulating that the group responsible for the hack previously targeted Justin Timberlake and Hilary Duff.

More on this story as we get it.

Source: Comcast Hacked in BitTorrent Throttling Payback?

Last week we reported on a new and reliable tool that tests whether or not your BitTorrent traffic is being limited. The tool is developed by the Max Planck Institute, who have released new data today. The findings reveal that the BitTorrent connections of half of Comcast and Cox’s customers are being cut. In addition, the data shows that these practices take place 24/7, disproving Comcast’s earlier statement to the FCC

“Comcast’s network management practices (1) only affect the protocols that have a demonstrated history of generating excessive burdens on the network; (2) only manage those protocols during periods of heavy network traffic,” Comcast wrote in a filing to the FCC last February.

This is far from the truth. As can be seen for the graph below, there is little difference in the percentage of blocked customers throughout day. Furthermore, the data shows that there is also no difference between weekends and weekdays. BitTorrent is simply blocked all day long, no matter how busy their network is.

The Max Planck Institute tested the connections of 788 Comcast customers, 494 (62%) experienced a slowdown of BitTorrent traffic. Comcast is not alone though, well over 50% of the Cox subscribers that participated in the study were also throttled. The good news is, other ISPs don’t seem to restrict BitTorrent traffic on a wide scale.

Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, said in a response: “Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its customers from using popular applications — despite the FCC’s investigation and widespread public outrage. And worse, the harmful practice appears to be spreading through the marketplace.”

After being pressured by the press and thousands of upset customers, Comcast has announced that it will stop targeting BitTorrent transfers, (somewhere in the future) and promised to invest in its network capacity. For the time being the company will continue to throttle BitTorrent users.

We have asked the FCC for a response, but they had not yet responded at time of going to press

Source: Comcast Lied to FCC, Blocks BitTorrent Traffic 24/7

The new tool developed by the “max planck institute for software systems” can be used without having to run your BitTorrent client, and compares BitTorrent traffic to regular traffic. On top of that, it will give you more information than the Azureus plugin does.

“The goal of our Glasnost project is to make access networks, such as residential cable, DSL, and cellular broadband networks, more transparent to their customers,” the Glasnost team writes. We couldn’t agree more of course, as we have said many times before.

The way it works is pretty straightforward. The Java applet developed by the Glasnost project uploads and downloads data via BitTorrent for a few seconds, and compares that to your regular download speed. It detects if your ISP is limiting all BitTorrent traffic, or just traffic on well known BitTorrent ports. All in all this tool should be able to tell you whether your ISP is messing with BitTorrent traffic or not.

Please keep in mind that the degree of traffic shaping varies a lot between different ISPs. Some ISPs only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day or do not throttle until the customer has exceeded a certain data threshold, others only slow down traffic in specific regions. More advanced tools have to be developed to detect these methods.

Thus far, over 5,300 users have performed the test, and the preliminary results show that at least 10 ISPs in the United States are slowing down BitTorrent. We asked the researcher for some more details (names) but we haven’t heard back from them. However, on their website, they promise to provide more detailed results later, once the code is peer-reviewed.

We encourage you to do the test, if the test results show that your ISP is limiting BitTorrent traffic, please let us know. We will add a lits of offenders at the bottom of this article.

1. Comcast, USA

Source: Test: Does Your ISP Slow Down BitTorrent Traffic?

Apparently, everything in the Comcast garden is rosy these days, with previous arch-rival BitTorrent now working things out together over afternoon tea. However, not everyone is celebrating.

In 2007, Robb Topolski discovered and documented the Comcast interference, informed TorrentFreak and we published an article which ignited the whole debate. It’s safe to say, he’s been following this one closely.

Here are his thoughts on the Comcast / BitTorrent reconciliation:

—–

I’m probably a key figure as to why we’re all talking about Network Neutrality again. I was having a problem uploading on Gnutella in early 2007. I tracked it down to Comcast using Sandvine-injected RST packets. Blog stories led to press stories which led to independent confirmation. And here we are today. Peace and harmony? Probably not.

Today Comcast and BitTorrent seems to have solved world hunger — and I’d love nothing more than to be optimistic about it. But I cannot be. As they say on Slashdot — show video, or it didn’t happen. This deal is treachery, relies on how much we can trust the word of Comcast, and leaves the public interests out in the cold.

I think it’s strange that anyone believes a word that Comcast says. This is the Comcast that:

1. Told the FCC in 2005 that they would not degrade traffic in order to convince the FCC that network neutrality regulations were not needed.

2. Started degrading P2P traffic the very next year, and failed to tell anyone what they were doing.

3. Used a system that utilized forgery, and successfully placed blame on the other peer instead of Comcast.

4. Denied it when caught.

5. Then changed their story when the denials were not believed, but still never came out and said what they were doing.

6. Then they justified their actions by throwing their other Cable-Internet brothers and sisters under the bus with their “they do it too!” defense

7. Then stealthily changed the AUP days before an FCC filing where they referred to the new provisions.

8. When the changed AUP started getting press attention, they stated that a prominent story on Comcast.net alerted millions of visitors of the change and accused Marvin Ammori of crying wolf. (Google cache proved that nothing alerted users to the changed AUP until the day after the press started asking questions.)

9. Then they packed the Harvard FCC hearing.

This company has not demonstrated that you can trust its promises, nor can you believe its assertions. Comcast just used BitTorrent Inc. as a tool to try and defang the FCC.

BitTorrent Inc. is a content provider. Vuze, who actually DID make a complaint and petition to the FCC, is a competitor. Neither BitTorrent, Vuze, nor Comcast represents the interests of 12 million Comcast users nor the The Internet Society nor the public. And this middle-of-the-night deal was made without their input.

Nothing has changed. The RST interference continues. It was a wrongful act. BitTorrent Inc. has no right making a deal with Comcast allowing it to continue to commit wrongful acts until it finally decides it is ready to stop. The correct relief is to stop the interference immediately and to FULLY DISCLOSE what it did and to accept responsibility for those actions. (Even today, Comcast’s Policy VP refused to answer questions about the interference.)

Their word is worthless. Until the interference stops, I have no reason to believe it will. Until either meaningful competition returns to broadband, or until sufficient government regulation enforces Network Neutrality, we have no reason to think that this agreement will last through the night.

Robb Topolski

—–

TorrentFreak confronted Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent Inc. with Robb’s comments, and he told us: “We decided to collaborate with Comcast because they agreed to stop using RSTs, increase upload capacity, and evaluate network hardware that accelerates media delivery and file transfers. We’re at the beginning of the formal collaboration, but Robb’s work was instrumental to identify the offending practice. We need him and the community to keep an eye on ISPs across the world.”

“Our work with Comcast will benefit all P2P development because Comcast has agreed to manage traffic at Layer 3 (the network layer) rather than Layers 4-7 (the protocol/application layers). This is a core component of the neutrality debate,” he added.

As always, time will tell…

Source: BitTorrent Inc. + Comcast = Love, Peace, Harmony…Not!

Comcast’s chief technology officer Tony Warner said: “Rather than slow traffic by certain types of applications — such as file-sharing software or companies like BitTorrent — Comcast will slow traffic for those users who consume the most bandwidth.”

Comcast hoped it could quietly interfere with its customer’s BitTorrent activities without getting too much attention. Unfortunately for them, their actions didn’t go unnoticed, and during August last year we broke the news that this ISP does indeed mess with its customers internet connections.

Comcasts actions sparked the debate about what “reasonable” network management practices are, and this eventually resulted in a FCC hearing last month.

It now seems that Comcast saw the light, and wants to invest in more Internet gateway capacity after all. BitTorrent Inc. announced today that it will work together with the ISP to optimize their software, so that it puts less stress on the network.

Ashwin Navin, president of BitTorrent Inc. told TorrentFreak: “We are happy that Comcast is increasing the upload capacity on its network and that they will stop sending TCP resets to BitTorrent clients. We plan to jointly test how ISPs can better address the large volume of P2P traffic and share our research with all ISPs and application developers. This is a huge win for the Internet community as a whole.”

Still, Comcast will continue to throttle heavy users, who actually use the bandwidth that was promised to them in their contracts. It is to be expected that Comcast and other ISPs will have to step away from the all-you-can-eat plans they have been offering for years, now that people actually start to use bandwidth they signed up for.

Source: Comcast Teams Up With BitTorrent and Promises Net Neutrality

“We at Vuze (Azureus) decided there was something important you can do to help elevate the debate,” says Jay Monahan, General Counsel at Azureus. “We created a simple software “plug-in” that works with your Vuze (Azureus) application to gather information about potential interference with your Internet traffic.”

The main purpose of the plugin is to gather factual data on which ISPs are throttling with BitTorrent, and to what extent. Already there is an ever growing list of bad ISPs available at the Azureus wiki, but the data from the plugin will make their case even stronger.

When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, Azureus was one of the first BitTorrent clients to introduce a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. However, this was only the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers.

Unfortunately, BitTorrent encryption doesn’t work against the more aggressive, and ever evolving throttling applications. Even though there is a Comcast proof BitTorrent encryption in the making, it is always easier to use political means to stop ISPs from messing with our traffic in the first place. The plugin is listed at Azureus’ Sourceforge page if you want to help out.

For the paranoid BitTorrent users among us, Monahan guarantees that the data will be sent anonymously. “Be assured that sharing this data with us does not involve disclosure of any of your personally identifiable information. We will aggregate the data and may talk about it or disclose it publicly, but no data about any specific user will be disclosed as part of this effort.”

Source: Help Azureus to Fight BitTorrent Throttling ISPs

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Comcast, as their customers started to realize that this ISP wasn’t giving them what they paid for. As a result, Comcast are now being sued and annoyed users formed a coalition to challenge the company to try to claim compensation. All of this is on top of a FCC hearing which deemed that Comcast uses ‘hacker-techniques’ to interrupt BitTorrent traffic, techniques which are employed via the traffic management ‘solution’ from Sandvine. Essentially, the Sandvine system allows Comcast to inject forged reset packets into BitTorrent transfers which makes seeding impossible – good news for ISPs who don’t want to give their customers the bandwidth they paid for, but bad news for BitTorrent, and even worse news for supporters of Internet neutrality.

However, it is the very fact that Sandvine allows ISPs like Comcast to disrupt their customer’s activities which prompted the recent Federal Communications Commission hearings. The FCC warned Comcast that it will not allow it to disrupt internet traffic, which is of course a major concern for other ISPs considering investing in the Sandvine system. According to a G&M report, it is this hesitancy over net neutrality issues, coupled with problems major telecoms companies are experiencing when trying to refinance their debts, that have hit Sandvine hard. A survey by financial services outfit Canaccord Adams suggest that the top 40 global communications companies are all currently extremely wary over capital expenditure.

After achieving astronomical growth of 42,000% in just 5 years, Sandvine is really feeling the pressure as on the Toronto Stock Exchange its stock fell a massive 42%, to a low of $1.55. The company already predicted lower performance and revised its revenue estimates back in December 2007. Unfortunately these predictions were still too optimistic as the company has announced that the actual revenue this year is likely to be a further 20% lower than the revised figures. Sales for the first quarter will be $8.2m, an 88% drop on the previous year while full year revenue is expected to be around $80m, down from the December 2007 prediction of $110m.

All this adds up to an annual growth of 15%, versus last year’s growth of 132%.

At best, that means annual growth of just 15 per cent, compared with 132 per cent a year earlier.

Dave Caputo, Sandvine’s President and Chief Executive Officer said in a statement: “We believe that the delays have come about for a variety of reasons, ranging from unique customer-specific circumstances to economic conditions, making operators pause before executing on their approved budgets. We can’t dictate when customers make their decisions, just influence whether they choose Sandvine – and we remain as confident as ever in our ability to do that.”

With BitTorrent developers hard at work creating Sandvine-busting code, time will tell if Mr Caputo’s confidence continues into 2009.

Source: BitTorrent Throttling Company Sandvine Sees Sales Down 88%

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.

Source: FCC Hearing: Comcast Uses Hacker Techniques

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

Back in August we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast’s actions. On Wednesday, Comcast explained their BitTorrent interference to the FCC in a 57-page filing. Unfortunately they haven’t stopped lying yet, since they now argue that they only delay BitTorrent traffic, while in fact they disconnect people, making it impossible for them to share files with non-Comcast users.

In short, the Comcast interference works like this: 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. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to.

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference (video) on a regular BitTorrent connection. In this case, the reset happens immediately after the bitfields are exchanged. Evil? Yes – but there is hope.

The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according to the proposal.

“This extension directly addresses a known attack on the BitTorrent protocol performed by some deployed network hardware. By obscuring the ip-port pairs network hardware can no longer easily identify ip-port pairs that are running BitTorrent by observing peer-to-tracker communications. This deployed hardware under some conditions disrupts BitTorrent connections by injecting forged TCP reset packets. Once a BitTorrent connection has been identified, other attacks could be performed such as severely rate limiting or blocking these connections.”

So, the new tracker peer obfuscation technique is especially designed to be a workaround for throttling devices, such as the Sandvine application that Comcast uses. More details on the proposal can be found at BitTorrent.org, which aims to become a coordination platform for BitTorrent developers.

TorrentFreak talked to Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. who has some of his employees working on the new extension. He told us: “There are some ISPs who would like people to believe that “slowing down” BitTorrent or “metering” bandwidth consumption serves the greater good. Consumers should be very weary of this claim.”

“In recent months, consumers enjoyed unprecedented participation in the political process thanks to the ability to upload opinions and feedback in the YouTube presidential debates. Musicians, filmmakers and artists are finding ways to connect with their audiences across the world thanks to MySpace and BitTorrent. Students are engaging with interactive learning tools in their schools. Which bandwidth intensive application will banned or shaped or metered next by these ISPs? The creative spirit of millions has been ignited, and our need to participate, to communicate will not be silenced.”

“The US government should encourage ISPs to innovate and invest in their networks,” Ashwin said. “Permitting them to interfere or interrupt in the communications of consumers, to protect ISP profit margins, would be a tremendous set back for our country and economy, when we are already slipping behind the first world (UK, EU, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc) in its broadband capacity.”

We wholeheartedly agree with Ashwin on this one, as we’ve said before. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

The new protocol extension is still under development, but the goal is of course, to get it out as soon as possible.

Hang on…

Source: BitTorrent Developers Introduce Comcast Busting Encryption

BitTorrent throttling has been going on for a few years now, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. The traffic shaping methods used vary from ISP to ISP. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day, or throttle in specific regions. Others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding, or even downloading .torrent files.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. If it really is that big of a problem, be open about it, and let your customers know what they can and cannot do.

Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections – a company that happens to manufacture traffic shaping devices, lists some of the possible solutions ISPs can implement in order to cope with the “BitTorrent problem”, which he wanted to share here.

1.) Ask for voluntary cooperation.

One recourse would be to ask customers to scale back on torrents, or to use them at night or another time when network usage is low. There is plenty of precedent in the Green movement to recycle and to reduce carbon footprints. So why not a campaign to scale back BitTorrent usage ?

The downside: Can you imagine a service provider sending a letter to its customer base outlining the technical limitations of allowing unlimited BitTorrent applications, and then asking for some voluntary cooperation? Me neither. Perhaps someday, but for now providers are viewed as a profit-driven adversary by most customers.

The upside: Seems to have a warm, fuzzy, feel-good ring to it.

2.) Keep connections within the providers network.

This is the method currently practiced with help from a popular product provided by Sandvine. The basic idea is that on a large provider network there are enough BitTorrent hosts that a client need not leave the provider’s network to retrieve content.

The downside: Consumers are suspicious of providers looking at their data to make determinations on what type of traffic it is. The consumer may also not get good results if the bulk of the content were located outside their providers network; for example, if a user were to download a file that was popular in Europe, the number of servers hosting it on the Comcast network might be limited.

The upside: Consumers are still freely able to find most BitTorrent content. Providers greatly reduce connections and exchange costs with other providers.

3.) Usage based quotas.

With this method a service provider will charge much higher rates when a preset amount of data usage is exceeded over a calendar month.

The upside: This method is unobtrusive in that the provider need not look at a customer’s data, only their total usage. Experience with university residential networks has shown that once quotas are announced users voluntarily reduce their peer-to-peer or BitTorrent usage.

The downside: More complex billing detail and customer service to resolve disputes. Large providers will still compete by marketing their service as unlimited. Despite the rants about BitTorrent being a resource issue, it is still only a small percentage of total customers that use it.

4.) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.

The upside: It’s simple and fair to implement. Providers already set rate caps on Internet speeds, so this is just a rate cap on connections, very similar and easy to swallow for the consumer.

The downside: When users reach their allotted connection limit, all traffic on their link slows down.

5.) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.

The upside: It works.

The downside: It’s most likely not economically sustainable. Without some other form of mitigation, the public’s appetite for content appears insatiable.

6.) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.

The upside: It moves an unprofitable customer off your network and onto a competitor.

The downside: Customers begin to despise you.

Here at TorrentFreak we have discussed some of these alternatives before, and in the long run there is really only one solution that is acceptable. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

Art Reisman told TorrentFreak that that there are two solutions that make sense to him: “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates, if it can be kept simple! Second is to limit customer connections as a resource.” Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prices are reasonable. The second option of limiting the number of connections only looks like a temporary fix though.

What do you think?

Source: Decluttering The Tubes, Solutions to the BitTorrent “Problem”?

Here’s one of Bennett’s conclusions taken from the article: “It’s acceptable for Comcast, as a matter of reasonable network management, to employ TCP Resets to prevent BitTorrent doing harm to the web browsing, standard file downloading, and VoIP sessions that are the typical behavior of the Comcast customer.”

This is of course a non-argument. The fundamental problem is that Internet providers offered flat-rate all-you-can-eat broadband access without considering that some users would actually use the offered product at full capacity. The providers’ tradition of selling a product at a ten-fold, known as overbooking, is starting to cause them trouble now companies, artists and their consumers start to utilize the benefits BitTorrent offers. But, is that the consumers’ fault?

Comcast, and other ISPs advertise with certain upload and download rates, conforming to simple DOCSIS capacity numbers. However, they miscalculated and found that there is more to the Internet than browsing, gopher, and email. Heavy-users broke their excel return-on-investment predictions and marketing campaign promises. Their flat-rate offers simply became too popular for the capacity that was bought and installed.

Maybe Comcast should start 2-new services “newb Internet”, designed only for emails, and “regular Internet” aimed at every single other person in the world who used the net for more than sending a text-only emails. That should make things more transparent.

Now they are whining and manipulating heavy users to undo the flat-rate contracts, instead of investing in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users do not slow down the Internet experience of others. They simply use the capacity they bought and show that the network capacity planning department screwed up.

There is one quote from the Register article that I agree with though: “Everyone who’s argued with religious fanatics has seen them dig in their heels and flail when confronted with challenges to their belief systems.” But the ISPs are the fanatics here, not the EFF who stands up for network neutrality.

Why?

I see a parallel with the entertainment industry here, clinging to business models that are outdated. Comcast should move on and invest in the future instead of throttling and interfering with the traffic their customers paid for. BitTorrent is here to stay, the files and the number of heavy users will only grow. Don’t fight your customers, think ahead and adapt!

Source: Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling Acceptable? Not Quite!

Jon Hart, a Comcast subscriber from California couldn’t take it anymore and decided to take legal action. He filed a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday and demands that Comcast stops the BitTorrent traffic interference. In addition he wants Comcast to pay him, and all other Comcast customers in California, damages for not giving him the “crazy fast speeds” they advertised.

Threat Level asked Comcast for a response to this news, but the spokesman put them off with his default response: “Comcast does not, has not, and will not block any websites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services”. Semantically speaking they are totally right, they don’t block any applications or websites, they do however, actively disconnect peer-to-peer connections, making it impossible for many users to seed files on BitTorrent.

Hart is not the only one taking action against Comcast, the people behind SaveTheInternet have also formed a coalition and plan to demand $195,000 for all the customers who are affected.

Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. The application is installed at the cable modem termination system and breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds. This means that Comcast is not simply slowing down connections, they actually disconnect peer-to-peer transfers.

We wish Jon all the best, let’s hope justice will be served. In the meantime, here’s an article that explains how to bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent interference.

Source: Comcast Sued Over BitTorrent Traffic Interference

However, it didn’t stop there, a few weeks ago the Comcast story got renewed attention when the Associated Press published a test that again confirmed our initial reports. That really got the ball rolling – a memo leaked in which Comcast support was instructed to lie about the throttling issues ( the memo leaker is still being hunted down). Additionally Comcast told their employees that they can be fired if they don’t keep their mouth shut and to top it off Congressman Rick Boucher has even told Comcast to stop interfering with BitTorrent.

By now you would expect that Comcast would admit that they are messing with the BitTorrent connections of their customers, but they aren’t. Here’s a chatlog we received from Michael, a Comcast user who tried to get some more information on Comcast’s alleged BitTorrent interference. Seems like the Comcast support team is still in the denial phase.

user michael_ has entered room

Michael>
Does Comcast interfere with legal Bittorrent traffic?

analyst Stephanie has entered room

Stephanie>
Hello michael_, Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Chat Support. My name is Stephanie. Please give me one moment to review your information.

michael_>
Hi Stephanie, how are you?

Stephanie>
Thank you for contacting Comcast. I can answer your question today.

michael_>
I would greatly appreciate that.

Stephanie>
Comcast respects our customers’ privacy and we don’t monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior, such as which websites you visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site.

Stephanie>
Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent.

michael_>
I’m not asking if applications are blocked. I’m asking if applications are interfered with in any way.

Stephanie>
We don’t monitor specific customer activities on the internet.

michael_>
But you must know the policies of your own company? Does Comcast actively engage in any interference of any protocols or applications?

Stephanie>
As far as I know, no.

michael_>
Who could give me a more definitive answer on the subject?

michael_>
I contacted technical support because I had assumed that you would know the technical details of Comcast’s network, such as equipment or software used to interfere with network traffic or applications used on your network.

Stephanie>
We rarely disclose our processes for operating our network for compeitive reasons and to protect against network abuse.

michael_>
You had told me you do not know definitively if any interference is occurring. Could you put me through to someone who would know that answer?

Stephanie>
As I have said, we rarely disclose processes for operating our network but we also do not monitor specific customer activity. As well, we are not blocking access to any applications such as BitTorrent.

michael_>
Maybe I’m not explaining myself clear enough. I use bittorrent to distribute custom linux distributions to my friends and colleagues. However, I find that I cannot seed these files. Is there any interference being caused by Comcast that could be causing this issue?

Stephanie>
We would not be blocking peer to peer access.

michael_>
It’s a “yes” or “no” question.

michael_>
Could my inability to seed be interference caused by Comcast?

Stephanie>
As I have said, we are not blocking peer to peer access.

michael_>
You are not answering my question though.

michael_>
Comcast is not blocking peer to peer connections, but is it interfering with the ability to seed torrents?

Stephanie>
The answer is no.

Stephanie>
I have confirmed this with a support agent, as well.

Stephanie>
Did you have any other questions for me today?

michael_>
No

michael_>
Have a good day

Stephanie>
Thank you for contacting Comcast Live Support, have a great day!

Stephanie>
Analyst has closed chat and left the room

The good news is that there are several ways to fight back and get BitTorrent up and running again. In this article summed up some of the workarounds that reportedly solve the throttling issues.

Source: Comcast Support Continues to Lie about BitTorrent Interference

Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. It breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user inside your community boundary. According to some Comcast technicians, who were brave enough to tell the truth, these Sandvine boxes are installed at the cable modem termination system. As a result, it is virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any neighboring Comcast users.

The good news is that there are several ways to fight back and get BitTorrent up and running again. Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert summed up some of the workarounds that reportedly solve the throttling issues.

What is working

1. Quite a few Comcast users report that forcing protocol header encryption completely eliminates the problems. This is the easiest solution since most BitTorrent clients support encryption. Please note that simply enabling encryption is not enough, it has to be forced. More details on how to do this can be found over here.

2. Another successfully workaround is to run BitTorrent over encrypted tunnels such as SSH or VPN. BitTorrent over SSH works, but it will cripple the servers of the SSH providers if you plan to use it permanently. A VPN service such as Relakks or VPNTunnel is a better option, and it is worth a few bucks.

3. Comcast prevents seeding, if you’re on a private tracker, and want to share as much as possible, an easy solution is to lower your download rate. When downloading, make sure that you have met your uploading goal by the time that the download completes. The easiest way to accomplish this is to set a download rate slower than the uploading rate. This of course is not an optimal solution because your download will never be faster than you upload speed.

4. One of the best options, if possible, is to switch to another ISP.

What is not working

1. Some people suggested that setting your firewall to drop RST packets could be effective, however, this is not the case. The RST-messages Comcast sends go in both directions, ignoring the RST on only one side creates a useless half-open connection.

2. According to most reports, enabling the Lazy Bitfield option in your BitTorrent client doesn’t solve the problem either

3. Reporting the issue to Technical Support. No explanation needed here.

4. Grab a hammer, visit the Comcast office, smash a keyboard and knock over a monitor. This might sound like a great alternative but apparently it only results in jail time.

I would advise affected Comcast subscribers to play around with these alternatives, some solutions that work for one person, might not work for another. Do you have another solution that is not reported here? Let us know in the comments!

Source: How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling

Moxie, a Comcast customer who replied to a post on Silicon Alley, points out that when you log your network activity with an application like Wireshark, you’ll notice that Comcast servers start sending reset messages as soon as a download is finished, exactly as we described it.

With Wireshark in the background run your BitTorrent application. Wait until completed and watch Wireshark, notice when it finishes seeding Comcast servers send out a reset command every second to your computer noted by the highlighted red line in Wireshark. It is 8:30 pm Monday pst and Comcast is still resting my BitTorrent connections. Maybe the PR guy didn’t get the email from the VP of Networking.

It might be that not every Comcast customer is equally affected, but a significant percentage is. Not only the 10+ users we talked to before we first reported this issue, but also hundreds of additional commenters here on TorrentFreak, and elsewhere. Some users even captured the throttling in progress on video (download), and anyone has to agree that this does look very suspicious.

More evidence comes from Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert with more than 25 years of experience, who first wrote about this issue on DSLReports. He told TorrentFreak: “We have had two Comcast techs confirm Sandvine in use, but neither confirmed or denied its connection with the RST interference. For me, seeding is possible. I can reach my upload speed limit, but there sure is a lot of interference. Since your article came out, I too have received many reports of seeding being impossible. I’m not sure if it’s regional, or what!”

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference on an unencrypted BitTorrent connection. In this case, it happens right after the bitfields are exchanged

Nevertheless Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said in a response to Light Reading: “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic”. He might be right here semantically speaking, they are not throttling anything, they just kill all outgoing connections when a clients starts to seed a file. But the fact is that Comcast is making it impossible for (at least some) customers to share files with non-Comcast users over BitTorrent.

Luckily there is a fix for this problem, and we know that at least two BitTorrent client developers are including this fix in their next update.

Source: Comcast Wrongfully Denies Interfering with BitTorrent

Unfortunately, these more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented by simply enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users. Some users report that they can still connect to a few peers, but most of the Comcast customers see a significant drop in their upload speed.

The throttling works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in the swarm the Sandvine application sends a peer reset message (RST flag) and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to. Only seeding seems to be prevented, most users are able to upload to others while the download is still going, but once the download is finished, the upload speed drops to 0. Some users also report a significant drop in their download speeds, but this seems to be less widespread. Worse on private trackers, likely that this is because of the smaller swarm size

Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn’t help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution. More info about how to setup BitTorrent over SSH can be found here.

Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and ISPs made it pretty clear that they do not like P2P applications like BitTorrent. One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague – a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

Customers on the other hand like to fully use their connection, and don’t agree that traffic shaping is the correct solution. One reader commented: “If you pay for an internet connection, that’s what you should get from your ISP — an internet connection. Not a connection that will let you browse the web and check email, but little else. If an ISP has issues with the amount of data a customer is transferring, then the ISP needs to address that issue with that customer, and not restrict every user in one class of traffic.”

I guess this battle will go on for a while and I would advise Comcast users to try setting up a VPN connection to get around the traffic shaping, other users who find out that they are throttles might try BitTorrent encryption first, that seems to work quite well in most cases.

More details about the Sandvine application can be found here.

Source: Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible