Comcast P2P blocking spurs calls for Net Neutrality

[Daniel ~]

Written by Daniel
Saturday, 20 October 2007
ISP skulduggery
The Inquirer
By Egan Orion: Friday, 19 October 2007, 10:58 PM

IN LESS THAN A DAY, an Associated Press (AP) story that Comcast blocks its customers Peer-to-Peer (P2P) connections has pinged around the Internet like a pinball, ringing bells at MSNBC and other AP subscribers and provoking hisses and catcalls at Slashdot as well as more boos and calls to action at Salon and even the lefty political activists' bog Daily Kos.... Front Page

[dsio]

From Slashdot:

Slashdot | Comcast May Face Lawsuits Over BitTorrent Filtering

Comcast may face legal action over what they're doing.

The whole 'Bittorrent is for pirates' argument is garbage, BT is not a piracy tool, its a p2p content distribution tool, and contrary to popular belief, P2P sharing IS NOT ILLEGAL.

The bulk of Linux distros are distributed primarily by Bitorrent, and the same goes for any community based organisation that needs to distribute data. When I was looking for the UT3 server, the method that EPIC chose to distribute it was Bittorrent. 10 Million World Of Warcraft players get all of their game patches via Bittorrent, as Blizzard knows that the logistics of getting a 600MB patch to a few million people in a matter of hours is beyond anything they could handle if it had to be grabbed directly from their servers.

ISPs are getting too big for their boots at the moment, and are attacking customers' rights in order to increase their profits.

Right now I have an issue with local Australian ISPs in that it is becomming common practice to block external access on port 25, and limit the number of emails from one address to 100 per day. Previously, if a company had a hosting provider in the USA for example, on the same type of servers that AOA is run out of, they could set up outlook or whatever mail client they use, to use that server as their outgoing mail server, and have greater freedom in that sense.

However, doing this means that all of the client's outgoing data has to be sent over to the USA. Now the ISPs believe that 80-95% of all client mail is Australia to Australia, which means that if they get the mail, they can handle it locally at no cost, so to force clients to do this, they block Port 25 externally. This is a pain in the arse, as it means clients have to have one mail server (their pop server) set to one thing, and another mail server (their smtp server) set to another thing.

It gets worse though. Because the three largest ISPs in Australia have now instituted a 100 message per day hard limit on email accounts. What this means, is that if a person sends more than 100 messages in one day, that person's mail account is shut down, not just for the day, but for a ONE WEEK 'cooling off period'. Business clients can OFTEN need to send more than 100 messages in a day, both for small business mailouts, and for customer interaction, and support. However, this is a hard limit, that is automatically implemented, and if you call the ISP AFTER your account has been locked for a week, you are SOL because its an automated process that can't be modified.

The justification of this bull**** is that they consider it a method of preventing SPAM. You see, spam filtering, is a major issue, and filtering is a huge load on mailservers, so rather than actually spending money on implementing filtering, ISPs are now simply stopping people sending large numbers of emails BLINDLY.

GG dickheads.

[Daniel ~]

The "rules" seem to be almost entirely fading into "What ever you can get away with". This has always been a strong tendency, now it seems to be the goal.

When ever business starts acting in "Our" interest...in secrete... there's a real good chance someone should go to jail! ":O}

[danrok]

Have they managed to block all P2P file sharing?

As dsio points out, P2P tech is used for many legit reasons.

[Daniel ~]

I'm sure the people (Orgs.) dsio mentions will be able to purchase exceptions Dan.":O}

Actually it's the Desktop users (Me) Comcast is screwing with rather than the more expensive Business version, but that might bear looking into as well...When did everyone turn into such rats asses!?