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EverAndAnon
@verizon.net
 from:
jap 
| Re: Net Neutrality is NOT about being protocol neutral Managing a network is one thing. Falsifying network data/packets to defraud your customers is another.
Network neutrality is all about providing a neutral network regardless of how you define it.
And there's nothing neutral about this. | |
|  | | rahvin112
join:2002-05-24
Sandy, UT
| Re: Net Neutrality is NOT about being protocol neutral Public knowledge. If they admitted and were forced to put in their advertising that they toss the packets, instead of denying they do it and sending forged packets, I wouldn't have a problem with it. Consumers would be able to make real decisions about what service they want and whether they wish to stay with a provider who is making determinations about what kind of traffic they will allow to pass.
Under the policy Comcast is currently operating under they don't even acknowledge that they are intercepting the communication and interfering with it. This leads people to believe that the problem isn't with the Comcast service. To me it's fraud, it should be an announced policy that is forced to be carried in their advertisements so consumers can make informed decisions about their Internet provider. The real test on how fraudulent the behavior is relies on whether Comcast would be willing to make the knowledge public. In fact their own careful wording and pseudo-denials indite their fraud. They won't talk about it publicly because they know it will cost them customers. That's what's dirty about it, and that's why it should be illegal. The policy is in every single way counter to what they say and imply in their advertisements.
It saddens me every time people get up and defend what is essentially false advertising. As a country we were pioneers in making sure that advertisements were truthful and supported by fact. Thanks to the political polarization of this country pioneered by the Neo-cons we are abandoning all the ideas that made this country strong. Ideas like truth in advertising and use of the public airwaves for the public good. | |
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Combat Chuck
Too Many Cannibals
Premium
join:2001-11-29
Erie, PA
| said by espaeth :Ok. So what's the difference in net effect if they filter this traffic by blocking it outright vs closing the connection with TCP resets? No Bittorrent if they go the other way. Someone call the Judean People's Front, crack suicide squad.
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Mooooooo!!! | |
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jap
Premium
join:2003-08-10
038xx
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| said by espaeth :Ok. So what's the difference in net effect if they filter this traffic by blocking it outright vs closing the connection with TCP resets? See my post here. I think it answers question. Though your phasing "net effect" suggest a dismissal of ethics, legality, customer relations and intelligent technical management. | |
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jap
Premium
join:2003-08-10
038xx
·RoadRunner Cable
| Re: Net Neutrality is NOT about being protocol neutral said by EverAndAnon :
Managing a network is one thing. Falsifying network data/packets to defraud your customers is another. Correct. And this article should not be titled "shaping" for the same reason. It's easy to assign BT packets a low priority relative to others and I support that practice. Complete neutrality has never existed and is a pipe dream.
Note that Topolski analyzes Comcast as falsifying peer responses only at the boundary and not within their own network. That's both a cost-cutting move and a marketing manipulation which he rightly emphasizes. Sandvine is lying in the name of users both in connection requests/acceptance and in BT-specific communications by changing message packets which say "I need this chunk to complete this file piece" to "I've completed this file piece." It's fundamentally different to lie in someone else's name than to prioritize packets network-wide.
It surprises that Comcast is relying on packet headers to ID the BT protocol when protocol (header) encryption has been a push-button feature in all dominant clients for over a year. It's a piece of cake to ID by user connection patterns ... just not at the boundary. Unlike Topolski's expressed opinion I consider the boundary-only practice a poor one even if it was done above board. It's a walled garden approach, albeit a half-step at the moment, and antithetic to global openness of the internet. Content originates from all over the world and Comcast's practice, if adopted by others, means content would have to be imported to each network by some other transport like FTP then re-published via p2p. Stupid and utterly anti-customer, anti-user.
Limiting both throughputs by protocol and connections per second at the account level during periods of high network load is perfectly reasonable. It solves all the loading issues of P2P and it's verifiably above board. I am continually mystified by the stance & behavior of ISPs on their responses to p2p. Neither the business practices nor technical aspects are obscure or complicated. P2P users would be happy to have their traffic slow down during peak times if they were confident traffic was elsewise unmolested. It's not like p2p content is time-critical like VoIP. | |
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espaeth
Digital Plumber
Premium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
 ·voip.ms
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1 edit | Re: Net Neutrality is NOT about being protocol neutral said by jap :And this article should not be titled "shaping" for the same reason. It's easy to assign BT packets a low priority relative to others and I support that practice. Complete neutrality has never existed and is a pipe dream. It's really easy to talk about this and discuss the theory of it, but the actual implementation of such a system is plagued with complexity and technology limitations. Anyone who has ever implemented large scale IDS/IPS deployments knows all about the scaling factors that make this challenging. For this to work as you suggest the inspection probes would need to be placed in-line at all of the points that are being monitored today so that the packets could be touched/marked. Then you have the problem of how you place the traffic into a different class of service. Traffic shaping means queuing, and that's going to require memory on your routing hardware. Assuming right now Comcast is able to get everything done with a single queue per end-station attachment, what you propose would double the number of queues each CMTS needs to manage (one regular and one P2P queue for each end station), which could potentially drive expensive CMTS upgrades or even CMTS splits where adding more capacity to the existing hardware isn't possible.
said by jap :Note that Topolski analyzes Comcast as falsifying peer responses only at the boundary and not within their own network. That's both a cost-cutting move and a marketing manipulation which he rightly emphasizes. Sandvine is lying in the name of users both in connection requests/acceptance and in BT-specific communications by changing message packets which say "I need this chunk to complete this file piece" to "I've completed this file piece." It's fundamentally different to lie in someone else's name than to prioritize packets network-wide. That's reading *way* too much into what is taking place. Sandvine isn't interacting with the BT protocol, or touching the payload of packets at all. It's sending a packet with the RST bit set to 1 in the TCP header. To a certain degree it is a cost cutting move, but really it's a matter of balancing access to somewhat limited resources at the edge of the network.
I find it interesting that people are treating network communications between machines as the equivalent of constitutionally protected human free speech. The only way that legal argument is even plausible is if you personify the packets in an effort to describe what is taking place. If you're going to go on a moral tirade about injected RST packets to close connections in the name of bandwidth mitigation, then you better have the same fervor in arguing against satellite providers who are performing ACK spoofing to allow TCP connections to overcome latency limitations and allow for higher transfer rates. If something is legally wrong, it's not just wrong in the cases where you don't benefit from it. Manipulation of protocols is a common practice; technologies like random early detection intentionally discard certain TCP packets to trigger TCP to make flow adjustments, Intrusion prevention systems will inject TCP resets for connections where malicious signatures are detected, and routers will spoof the ARP response of devices off-segment to allow machines with improperly set subnet masks to still function.
said by jap :It surprises that Comcast is relying on packet headers to ID the BT protocol when protocol (header) encryption has been a push-button feature in all dominant clients for over a year. It's a piece of cake to ID by user connection patterns ... just not at the boundary. Unlike Topolski's expressed opinion I consider the boundary-only practice a poor one even if it was done above board. It's a walled garden approach, albeit a half-step at the moment, and antithetic to global openness of the internet. Content originates from all over the world and Comcast's practice, if adopted by others, means content would have to be imported to each network by some other transport like FTP then re-published via p2p. Stupid and utterly anti-customer, anti-user. I'm not sure what you are defining as "the boundary"; this implmentation is most likely taking place at the distribution / aggregation layer between the individual CMTS hardware and the upstream Internet access routers. According to posts in the forum this connection limiting is taking place even between connections that only take place on Comcast's network. This make sense because the key point of contention is not the Internet access circuits; Internet bandwidth is dirt cheap and easy to come by, especially when you have your own nationwide fiber backbone like Comcast has built out. The key limitation is the capacity available between the cable modem and the cable head-end -- that's a tougher nut to crack which carries greater expense.
I do believe that you're invoking the freedom of the Internet incorrectly here. This isn't censorship on the content, this is a limitation on the method of distribution. The freedom of the Internet is indeed a great thing, but there are costs involved in moving bits. The premise of the network has always been that as long as you were willing to pay for the cost of distribution you can pretty much move whatever content you want (subject to legal restriction). The issue here is that people have a very distorted view of how much of the actual transport costs their $42.95/mo covers. The cost model works quite well for normal traffic (surfing, email, youtube, typical downloading) but breaks horribly when heavy P2P loads are applied. There's only 2 ways out of this: reduce consumption or raise prices. If Comcast had their entire user base vote on what should be done, I think you know how that'd turn out. | |
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