Interesting piece at Machinist on Comcast’s underhanded attempts to shape network traffic by blocking certain kinds of customer-generated traffic without their knowledge. Accessing a given, non-copyrighted resource such as the King James Bible via BitTorrent from a Comcast-connected computer may fail, while accessing the same file from a non-Comcast host may work fine. What’s going on? Comcast is apparently running bots on its network that masquerade as P2P client machines, which send false “hang up” messages to both ends of a P2P communication. In other words, Comcast is not treating all network traffic equally – they’re controlling and managing the activities of their users however they see fit – and they’re doing it without letting their users know. This sums up the paradoxical position that providers like Comcast are in:
Providers … have an incentive to reduce peer-to-peer traffic on their networks. But they can’t do so openly because, remember, a lot of people only pay for services like Comcast in order to use peer-to-peer programs.
If consumers ever needed a clear example of why we need net neutrality written into law, they need look no further. The free market isn’t going to shake this out – not when you’re dealing with things like cable companies and their virtual monopolies.
Music: Cibelle :: Train Station
anything inthe service contract that addresses this?
According to the article, apparently not – they’re silent on it.
BTW, just went through multi-visit hell with them, trying to get a multi-tuner digital cable card working in Series 3 Tivo. The technicians are so narrow-focused (I had to explain the concept of tuners to the tech – she almost left the house with a single tuner card installed and then tried to tell me that it would “work fine” even though the tivo had a big message on it saying “Warning: You’ll only get one channel at once this way…” Kee-rist.
Getting ahold of them has been a nightmare, no hand knows what the other is doing… And in the midst of it all they’re trying to convince us to go with Comcast phone service as well. Which is tempting for the price, but given their lameness at communicating, doesn’t exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy.