f13.net

Slashdot article (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/18/1138224&from=rss) about Comcast throttling BitTorrent, as originally noted here (http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/).


So will this affect Blizzard, make them actually do it right by their players? Or is this related to something different?

(I thought it best to post here because no other popular MMORPG I know of releases their patches in this method... though I welcome more examples).

It would seem Cox started doing this.

Yesterday.

I noticed while downloading :nda: which uses bittorrent DNA.

That's to say, Dq, something else will be using it soon.

No. They'll just ask more sites to host their standalone patches while they don't bother to host any of them themselves. They could write a real launcher/patcher program like just about every other MMORPG uses but robust networking stuff has proven to be beyond their capabilities.

I've only used bittorrent once or twice but a lot of people use the hell out of it, I imagine they could lose quite a few subscribers over this (provided they have competition in the area... :sad_panda:).

What do people get with bittorrents? Am I missing out on some facet that I shouldn't be here?

Damn near every app on my computer (you think I'm paying the real cost of Photoshop???) has probably been obtained via Bittorrent.  Of course, I do my fair share of buying, but I'll readily admit that I'm a filthy pirate who has no compunction about downloading music, apps, etc.  Games, I treat differently.  I will torrent a game if there is no demo readily available.  I will torrent a game if it's old and not available via Steam, Direct2Drive, etc.

In short, it's a convenience.

So, bittorrent's primary use at this juncture is piracy?

There are legal downloads. Try

http://www.vuze.com/app

http://www.publicdomaintorrents.com/

In effect, yes.

The legitimate uses are far exceeded by the less than legitimate uses at this point.

I'm annoyed but not too stunned by bittorrent being throttled. It really does just works the hell out of networking hardware and uses a shitload of bandwidth (wasn't a majority of internet traffic worldwide revealed to be bittorrent recently?), so ISPs wanting to QoS it to death so people can actually browse websites kinda makes sense.

BT is inferior to USENET in every way, with the exception that complete fucking retards can use it. With newsgroups you actually have to find out the address of your ISP's news server, or god forbid, subscribe to a premium service (well worth the $20 a month). Torrents are slow, a pain in the ass, and rely far too much on other people keeping the stuff available. I'll take USENET any day of the week, stuff remains 100% available for up to 3 months depending on the group and I can easily download a solid 16-20 gigs a day.

Torrenting sucks shit and is for retards. I wholly endorse anything that will make the technology impossible to use.

Bittorrent is kind of handy when no one is uploading what you are looking for. Usenet is fine for top 10 stuff but anything old, cult or obscure, or all 3, is usually easier to go look on bittorrent sites.

What sort of stuff do you download from usenet groups?  Besides porn, I mean.  I haven't even looked at usenet in a few years.

Can you get tv shows?

You can get pretty much anything from USENET still. Typically brand new games/filezzz hit USENET and IRC before they hit BT.

So, lemme get this straight.  Those who want stuff for free, like not paying $20 for a CD, should instead pay $20 to get on Usenet and pirate it?

Yep, sounds like something a retard would do.

Yes, Pretty much anything on TV/HBO is available in varying degrees of quality within 24 hours, the lower end but entirely watchable stuff starts showing up in as little as 30 minutes after the show ends. You used to be able to get SVD encodes of shows like Buffy, Angel, and Firefly  before they actually aired because people could get the wild feeds to the stations, though the industry fixed that a few years back. Fansubs of anime and manga are another huge category. Current run movies are another thing, and if you know what groups to look in you can find encodes from screener DVDs and overseas shops doing the localization. Sometimes though you can only find the in-theater cam stuff though. There are many robust ebook groups that cater to different categories from tech manuals to rpg and tabletop gaming books. You can get entire CBT courses as there are several groups devoted to those. If it's something that can be digitized, it IS on usenet someplace.

Pretty much it's all pirate booty, but pretty much anything is available if you know the group name. Most popular groups have a .repost group for older items to be reposted in. Items considered classic/must have are usually reposted continuously so that they're usually available if you have a premium news service. There are websites out there that list posts and what groups they're in that help allot. They're not completely comprehensive, but they're a big, big help for an inexperienced user. The biggest problem is that some of the categories "wander" from obscure group to even obscurer groups to avoid spam and sporgers, though that's mostly limited to the Porn categories.

I disagree on some stuff being harder to find Phred... There are some very specific groups for some really obscure shit, and people are usually very good about posting requests as long as people aren't obnoxious about it. The same stuff you might be able to find a torrent for but nobody has it available to share. Or even worse, you spend a week and a half getting what you want to trickle in and then it turns out to be a Burl Ives .avi that someone has not only renamed but is incomplete on top of everything else. I may have had bad luck, but so far out of USENET, old school P2P, and torrents, I've had nothing but good experiences with USENET.

And don't even get me started on Blizzard's patcher.

1) You don't need to pay for it at all if you don't want. It's part of any basic internet service.

2) The pay service provides a 3 month retention instead of the 3 or 4 days that an ISP typically has.

3) For the $20, you have the ability to download items with pretty much infinite value. Seriously. With a 3 month retention, you could download $100,000 worth of stuff in a week. $20 to get as much of whatever you want with no real limits is a pretty good deal even for a broke-ass pirate kid. Your comparison is pretty fucking stupid really. It's much more like the different between paying $20 for a candy bar or paying $20 to go into a grocery store and eat anything you want, whenever you want, and as much as you want than it'slike  paying $20 for a CD or paying $20 to pirate a CD.

The only recent source I found says that a full feed is over 2TB/day (http://www.readnews.com/usenet.php?view=wholesale), so no it's not.

And really, not only copyright infringement, but paying someone to facilitate it? That's what the author gets for turning the other cheek?

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

You should really, really edit your entire post to say something like "I love Bob" before I get home and can respond properly.

About the only legal uses of BT for me are OpenOffice and the occasional fansub.

That said, all I need to do is download the .torrent and my BT client is set-up to automatically download files, prioritize certain ones (say, TXTs and NFOs), and move them to another folder on completion. In comparison, IRC (well, XDCC) and USENET are fucking hassles (tiny chunks .rar1 through .rar9000, when I can only download 5 at a time is the definition of infuriating).

Ease-of-use isn't just for the benefit of the retards :roll:.

Fansubs aren't legal, thet're just not discouraged as they're used by the industry as a barometer for the viability of licensing a show.

As far as lots of tiny rars, you're either making that up or the poster is a clueless nub. Or you could have been the nub and not had a reader tht combined multipart posts. a DVD9 encode that's almost 8gigs doesn't need split up into much more than a hundred parts, and that's mostly for ease of posting. If someone was willing to do it, they could post the whole thing as one file and it would be fine. Regardless, wether it's in 1 rar file or 9000, extracting it is simply doubleclicking a file - not quite the draining hardship you make it out to be. Beside, depending on what you're getting, a lot of BT stuff is rared or zipped anyway. And you're ignoring the whole acquisition time thing. With Usenet, I can get 4gb that's split into however many rar files in about an hour or two, as opposed to the days, weeks, or months it may take with BT - assuming enough people keep the file you need up long enough for you to get it.

See, the thing is, it isn't actually easier to use, it just pretends to be and people believe it. It's really a much bigger hassle to use on a regular basis, and is completely inferior in every other aspect. It's truly a horrible, pointless technology. But it's trendy and hip.

I agree with what bob's saying here. Before the usenet feeds my provider uses went to shit it was 1000 times easier to get stuff than through BT.  Not to mention BT's been throttled on my provider for at least the last 4 years, while Usenet isn't, because so few people use it.

Most folks problem is they use something like Outlook or Outlook Express.. which are really, really crappy usenet clients. Particularly since they don't support y-encoding (last I used 'em at least) so you can't download most of what's posted these days anyway.

Bullshit.  Even good newsgroups usually only have a 90 day retention rate, and finding older/rare shit can be a real hassle.  I'm glad you feel you're supahleet because you've mastered .PAR files  :roll: but that doesn't make BT useless.

Quite frankly, I'd rather just do one search on a tracker site and then wait for the long download than hunt through broken/strangely named shit in various alt.bin newsgroups.  If you have some patience BT works out just fine.

I can't heap enough scorn into the written word to adequately respond. You are every thing wrong with internet forums. I'm sure the 2-second google search you did on "usenet access" or whatever  yielded them as the top result, but so what? Big shock that a search for usenet access turned up a pay news server. Guess what. basic usenet access is free. It's part of any basic internet service. Your fucking ISP has their own news servers that you just connect to If you have an ISP, you have free, basic usenet access. Granted, most ISP's have poor news service nowadays, but it's good for getting your feet wet. Here, here's a minifaq:

[Q] How do I get to my ISP's news servers?
[A] You put the server address in the box labeled "News Server Address" in your newsreader.

[Q] I need to know the server address? How am I supposed to know that?
[A] It's usually in your ISP's FAQ or support page. If not, call their help desk and ask. Or you could just try the standard "news.serviceprovidername.com" that it's named 99% of the time.

[Q] That's amazing! When did ISP's start offering this?
[A] Since the internet. You didn't hear a special announcement because it's always been that way and you're supposed to know it. It's like their mail server. Hohaho, it's a lot like their mail server actually.

[Q] They have a mail server too? Is it googlemail?
[A] Sure, why not.

[Q] If my ISP has this for free, why are their premium news services?
[A] Your ISP news service will only keep posts around for 2, maybe 3 days at most, and many times has spotty completion rates for multipart posts. Pay services have retention times that run into 2 or 3 months, and have 99.9% completion rates. Really, the only time you have an incomplete post on pay services is if the poster has a problem on their end.

As far as copyright infringement, that's a whole other can of worms. To sum up my attitude, f#@%k them. Various entertainment industries have lobbied for copyright laws to be overboard and blanketing, and gotten the changes passed - as well as had multiple software and hardware technologies hobbled or outright killed. I refuse to acknowledge their authority, and quite frankly they've lost. They can change their business model to match reality or die the death of any lumbering industry that refuses to adapt and modernize.

I'll get to Gulp's after I get some sleep.

Wow bob, you're so cool. Clearly the fact that you find usenet to be better means that another, different, completely viable and practical method of file distribution should be obseleted. My hat is off to your infallible logic.

For what it's worth, my ISP (Sympatico - one of the major Phone company DSL guys) discontinued its basic Usenet service about a year ago and even before that it was crappy. What few .bin groups it carried at all had retention of only a few days. From what I understand some anti-kiddie porn group discovered the nasty stuff you could get on newsgroups and went on a campaign to have them shut down with the major Canadian ISPs. Somehow they must have missed the rest of the Interweb. :)

This is good info to have though. Sympatico doesn't throttle torrents at the moment and my account is so old that it's grandfathered in without download caps. But if that changes it sounds like it'd be worthwhile to pay a few bucks to get access to a well run Usenet server.

Hearing of your sad stories about American ISPs make me chortle with glee as I stroke my piracy-approved Korean connection.

This kinda veered right off being about Warcraft, didn't it ?

I just want to say that if I would theoretically download myself some US series to watch over here since the series are not on out TV yet, I would grab the torrent files the morning after it aired in the USA, go to work, and after work I would have all of them sitting on my computer to watch. So, IF I would do such a thing, the days and weeks waiting time implied here is quite inflated.

At weekends when I don't work and wait for the actual file to finish it usually is two to three hours for one 45min episode. Would be, I mean.

Um, yeah.

What Tebonas said.  One day delay.  There when I get home.

Wow, the elitism is flying thick in here. Angry.bob's living up to his name.

Bittorrent is a great invention, and, assuming you can follow a very detailed wiki page, you can set up port forwarding on your NAT and get connections working properly. You just download your favorite bittorrent client and go to town. The same is true with getting usenet configured -- you need to get your local usenet server, if your ISP has one, or pay for something like usenext, and then download a newsgroup reader like newsbin pro or galaxy that does spam filtering and post aggregation, find your choice newsgroups.

Once both are set up, getting more of the latest movies, games, music, and amateur pornography to drown Texas is still just one or two clicks away from awesome. Which to use depends on your ISP and what you are looking for.

Think of usenet as dipping a cup into a moving stream of the latest goodies -- if you miss the window, it's gone forever. That means you check it a few times a week to see what's new -- ISPs will only keep things a certain time, generally a week on minimum to 90 days on the outside, and many ISPs (like mine) limit downloads to Xgb/month. Mine's 10gb/month with is not a lot, so I don't use it much. Usenet is also good if you have a very high download but really shitty upload.

The other issue with usenet is the encoding format -- you'll have to download about double the amount of data you are expecting, but generally this isn't a HUGE deal since you are often connected directly with your ISP and you're downloading from your maximum download rate to a few MB/second. This is generally faster than bittorrent.

Bittorrent is more like taking a sampling of water from any water source in the world. It's a hell of a selection, but you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes, there's one guy with tin-cans and string and you could try for days to get something and still fail when he goes offline. Generally the more popular stuff (the key here, like usenet, is new stuff) is well seeded and you'll be able to download anywhere from 1x-2x your upload speed. For me, I'll generally get ~400k/second. Needless to say, I use bittorrent.

Not like it matters; Either way, modus operandi is to turn it on, go to bed and wake up with goodies.

With all this said, there is no reason one is 'better' than the other -- they are different. Can't we all just get along and agree any method of taking bread out of intellectual property creationist kid's mouths is a good one?

Real Men use mIRC and troll the fileserves.

/duck

Why is someone names Arrrgh the only person that linked to legal downloads?

I didn't think it was necessary. We're all educated here and know the difference between content and a content delivery device.

When the legal way to do all this becomes just as convenient, I'm there.

Until then, fuck those fuckers for hating on the fact I'm in Korea.

Playing the merits of Usenet and BitTorrent off against each other is odd. Usenet retains posts only as long as your news server is set to retain them (generally a matter of weeks) and relies on user requests and responses for anything older. BitTorrent retains stuff indefinitely, as long as someone is seeding it.

Also, this way of using the ancient Usenet is essentially a hack - converting binary files into ASCII posts and downloading/reassembling them into binaries. It works well, but it relies on people to run large-scale premium servers, which ultimately will make it an easier target for entertainment industry lawyers than BitTorrent. They don't need to care about Usenet so much, because it's not as accessible to newbies so it's not as widely used.

Re paying $20 for a CD vs paying $20 for access to a premium Usenet server - it's not like that. If you spend the $20 on a CD, you've only bought access to one CD. Access to illegal downloads gives the user every CD ever. So you can have the ones you'd otherwise pay for, plus the ones you sort of like but wouldn't pay for, plus everything you ever missed in the past, plus look up and try anything else you happen to take an interest in. For the same $20.

Same with movies and TV. You can have all the movies you've ever wanted to see, all the TV series you missed and more. For next to nothing.

It's illegal and fucked up because it rips off the artists, but there is definitely a huge draw for people to have access to Usenet and BitTorrent.

I would have suspected Usenet existence would have been a target goal of $BigTelcoISP already. Though it is true Usenet not recognizable as public internet to the public. Mention of the word Usenet it just results in befuddled gazes at even my office, lest other family members…

BitTorrent bites the big one.

Just tried to download something.

Got this for my effort:

That's _just_torrent_spy_.

And like 2 week old news.

I found out my ISP (Insight) is turning over the lines to Comcast on new year's. Here's to hoping something gets done before then...

Not likely even though it's possible that what they are doing is illegal. But if you are technically inclined you can put a firewall in front and reject Comcast's attempts to screw up your connection.

Jesus.  BT beats the fuck out of usenet in about every way.  If you want to get faster download speeds, just get into a membership site that requires you to log in (like demonoid or the somethingawful break offs).  Its not hard, its still free, I always get fast download speeds, and pretty much infinite selection.  There is absolutely no reason to deal with usenet for anything unless you absolutely need to get anime fansubs the day they come out or something.

Why do you have to turn every thread you post in into an elitist clusterfuck bob?  Be it internet, cell phones, movies, table top games, or how you keep repeating in the politics forum your wish to violently kill everybody in the US who doesn't agree with you and rape their children. You always start out by bitching about how much smarter/better/faster/stronger you are than whoever you are bitching about.  Is it really so hard to just give your opinion about something and not insult the intelligence of everybody else who doesn't agree with you?  Have some nice meaningful debate without the mindless vitriol?

He wouldn't be very angy then, would he?

One reason I stay away from the politics forum.  It brings out the mindless trolls.  I like discussion, not froth, thx.

The bob level of the WoW subforum is right about where I like it, at about 0.5%.

Though I dont agree with him on much else about usenet though he is right, in most cases it should be way faster if the news server is on your ISP's local net. No vaguarities of internet crap to go through. This is not always the case, especially with smaller ISP's who lack the skills and finances to set up their own news server and often farm it out to other larger companies but unless your ISP enjoy's perfect connections to the rest of the net all the time (ya right) then a local usenet server should in theory be way faster than you'll ever get out of bittorrent.

I can't even imagine what you are thinking here. How is a firewall going to protect you from rate limiting in your ISP's router?

Google on:

Comcast RST packets

(no quotes)

Given recent threads, one can only imagine that Comcast could find out that kind of denial and then just yank your fucking connection.

:(

Holy crap. Read the article and they aren't just rate limiting but totally fucking with the tcp conversation. There appears to be some debate on whether filtering RST packets would work or not though. One note I read said it would likely have to be implemented by non-comcast ppl as well as comcast's customers.

They aren't. They aren't doing anything except blocking a few ports like 80 and 25.

How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling:

http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-bypass-comcast-bittorrent-throttling-071021/

I read that story a couple of days ago and it pissed me off.  I'm referring everyone I can think of to the TorrentFreak article.  Thanks!   :heart:

Just a note. I used to run the news servers for a Canada-wide ISP, PSInet Canada, before they bankrupted themselves, and from what I saw the newer news software was not set for weeks or days of retention, but was based on how much disk space you assigned. Cyclone, which was just catching on back them, had what they called news routing software that used this model. So you'd assign your alt.binaries.* tree to a 20 gig partition and the software just automoatically cleaned out old posts when you filled the disk. This beats the hell out of being paged at 3AM because your news server has shut down because of lack of space on the disk, and thus was quite popular with most news admins who had other responsibilities that would get them paged at 3am without having to deal with a news server. My first month as a sysadmin at a local ISP I accidently mistyped a command line and deleted every news post newer than 5 days on the disk instead of older than 5 days. Easy to do at 3am.

Cyclone was also an easy sell to management, at least at our company, where I showed how we could surplus out about 4 or 5 sparc 20's (state of the art back when I was working) per data center.

Sounds like you could have done that with a shell script, but I have to assume Cyclone did other things besides just storage management.

At least with the servers I ran it was usually necessary to use human judgement as to when and what do delete. Besides it's only 1 line, so other than late night fuckups it was easier to type find -file * ./spool/al/blah | xargs rm or something. My unix is rusty after 10 years. The first news server I wan was on a SCO box with a silly small  partition limit (4g or worse) so any part of the spool could lock down the server.

Besides I was so new when I nuked all the new messages my script might have done it too if I'd tried writing one at the time.

And ya Cyclone did a lot more than spool management If you are really interested, google Highwind Software or Cyclone News Router. There was a freeware implimentation from the Community that did a lot of the same things but I forget it's name.

I lol'd at Bob's post. Personally, I use both. Torrents for primarilly TV shows I've missed. I'm not going to go buy an entire season of a show for $90 if I haven't sampled a few episodes first. And yes, I do buy seasons legit - Deadwood, Sopranos, Family Guy, Red Dwarf - as a few off the top of my head. I also occasionally torrent movies that I highly suspect might be worth watching once but are not worthy of actually buying the dvd. If I really like a movie, or want to support a movie maker, I usually buy it.

Usenet - yes, I pay for a premium service. About $10 a month I think. It's great for music, especially older stuff, and it's still the number one source of free porn on the webs. What can I say, I'm single.

I joined my very first MMoG Guild on Usenet - the PAG. Ah, memories.  lol

Are there any, um...Legit, purposes to a news server?

Sir Brucing people.

I disagree


with what you said.

You probably typed "find . -type f -mtime -5 -exec rm -f {} \;" instead of "find . -type f -mtime +4 -exec rm -f {} \;"

Ya I did. Except my boss used to tell me to pipe it to xargs rather than spawning an rm for every deletion.

Sure, err at least there used to be. Most communities like ours originally resided on Usenet. The original UO newsgroup was actually very huge in its day, and I imagine there are quite a few communities still going strong. Binaries really only make up a small percentage of the overall number of newsgroups out there.

Another story about it. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071023/ap_on_hi_te/comcast_data_discrimination)  They've dropped the "no we're not doing anything" lie and have replaced it with a "we're only delaying it" lie.

I'm sorry. I'm having trouble getting upset about this. Frankly, the vast majority of torrenting is used for illegal downloads. (and Wow. ;) ) So, I'm supposed to feel bad that Comcast has decided they are tired of some of their network traffic going to pirating? Sure, they lied about it, and? They probably figured if it got out the pirates would find a way around it or something or that it would be blown out of proportion and misunderstood.

It has more implications than piracy prevention. It's been carefully explained; It's the same reason they don't sniff for child porn -- either they are a simple carrier, or they do filtering and shaping and are legally liable for it (and legally liable for anything else that gets through) and thus become a content provider.

There are also concerns about filtering or blackholing competing businesses, comcast slowing down or eliminating traffic to www.comcastsucks.net, or having a third party pay them to do the same to their competitor. As much as I hate to say it, it's sort of a slippery slope argument -- if they chose to filter/slow down one thing, at a whim, there is nothing in place to stop them from slowing down anything they choose.

It's one of the reasons people fought so hard for a non-tiered internet. More info here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiered_Internet).

What's really odd is that they already are absolved from any issues with what their customers download under the Communications Privacy Act, iirc or whatever that law was that went in under Clinton(Digital Millenium act?). Why would they work so hard to get themselves back in a situation where they might be accountable again? The first ISP I worked for didn't even carry alt.binaries due to legal issues until that law and a similar one was passed in Canada. It was a small Mom and pop shop and who wants to try to sleep nights while worrying if you're news server is gonna be raided for something you have no idea is on it.

My impression is that they're claiming this is about bandwidth. And probably about how much it's costing them to maintain that bandwidth.

Right, and my point is that it costs a hell of a lot more to try and police what you traffic... not to mention ultimately futile.

Doesn't Comcast already have a flat cap on the amount of bandwidth you can use each month?  That (along with their obnoxious marketing) was why I went with DSL instead of cable (despite the allure of better download rates and cheaper cable TV) -- all of the cable providers had limits buried in their fine print, and the DSL providers didn't.

Anyway, if that is the case, you'd think that from a business perspective they wouldn't care what you spent your 3GB a month on.

They don't. Or at least didn't when I was in MD. I'd pull down 200GB+ monthly without an issue.

Comcast is bullshit, its funny.  On a fresh set of lines in a house where there has never been Cable I'm getting close to 1mb/s from fucking torrents... which is awesome.  They are totally going to throttle me back soon, because they fucking hate freedom.

At my old house where people had been running multiple comps and downloading and gaming the fucking cable was capped so bad that getting over 100k/s was celebration time.

I fucking hate Comcast.  As usual you give a goddamn corporation a monopoly and I'm supposed to be surprised they fuck over customers left and right?

Its the seeding of torrents that Comcrap puts it effort into spoiling. I can get well in excess of 1mb/s leeching.

They do. It's on the order of 1.5T/mo, but it's scraped by overall percentage per month so it varies.

Not to rehash the popularity of UseNet or anything but I just found out that the university I'm working at willl be sunsetting their UseNet server as of December break this year. Apparently there are only around 5 people who use it in any given month and it's not worth maintaining any more, probably moreso since they probably haven't upgraded the server since it went in back in the 80's.

Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071023-comcast-shooting-itself-in-the-foot-with-traffic-shaping-explanations.html) has a good article up on this, if you haven't already seen it. They were allowed to sit in on a discussion conference call while comcast tried to wheedle.

So is the old install in a popular upscale neighbourhood or someplace where more ppl might be on it? Cable is a shared bandwidth medium so the more customers in an area the worse your bandwidth is gonna be.

1mb/s, on a torrent? I think it's great if I can get over 100k/s on a torrent.

Suffice to say, I don't torrent anything I want NOW; I just let it go for an hour or so.

Working for a telecom company myself, I can say that this throttling stuff happens EVERYWHERE. Each company does it a little different, but they all have to do it. Comcast is just doing it in a particularly stupid fashion.  When you consider how much a DSL card costs for example, $700 for a 16 port pack refurbished... not even new... and then the fiber trunk leading back to the office... Then trunks going to the major carriers. Then they have to pay people like me to sit here on a friggen sunday... oh and don't foget Christmas day... and watch the shit. The crap goes down ALL the time. A fan goes bad, lightening, drunk people running over peds... then we send out a tech that makes around $50 an hour out to fix a card thats effecting 16 people. It costs a fortune.

If you really think someones going to give you 2MB service for $30/month and you're REALLY going to get 2MB, you're just plain dumb. The idea that their management is "telling a lie" is silly to. Management doesn't know a damned thing. They just kept cutting their Network Services budget till it got to the point that this stuff was required. Then their Operations manager is sitting there deciding "Cut my salary in half... or cut torrent traffic in half... hmm...."

edit: typo

I'd like to hear more about this.  Got links?

Google on: RST packets firewall Comcast

That only works if both ends are dropping the forged RST packets Comcast is sending out.