BitTorrent throttling by Comcast

[Tale]

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.

[naum]

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.[/url]

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…

[Broughden]

BitTorrent bites the big one.

Just tried to download something.

Got this for my effort:

Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy
Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website.Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws.

[schild]

That's _just_torrent_spy_.

And like 2 week old news.

[Chenghiz]

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...

[Trippy]

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.

[Teleku]

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?

[Merusk]

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

[Jayce]

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%.

[Phred]

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.

[Phred]

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.

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?

[Trippy]

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.

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)

[Ironwood]

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

:(

[Phred]

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Trippy]

How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling:

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

[Signe]

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!   

[Phred]

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.

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[Phred]

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.

[Bunk]

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

[Strazos]

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

[stray]

Sir Brucing people.

[Samwise]

Sir Brucing

I disagree

people.

with what you said.

[Righ]

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.

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

[Phred]

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.

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.

[Bunk]

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

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.

[Miasma]

Another story about it.  They've dropped the "no we're not doing anything" lie and have replaced it with a "we're only delaying it" lie.

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Phred]

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.
.

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.

[Riggswolfe]

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

[bhodi]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

[schild]

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