If the problem is BT requests produce a storm when it starts, resetting the connection is the LAST thing you want to do. Because what will you do then? Start it up again.

Storm.

And have they copped to impersionation and fraudulent misrepresentation, seeing as they were pretending to be customers outside their network?

even when their trying to tell the truth they lie... Can companies be diagnosed with mental health problems? cos this one could be diagnosed as a pathological liar.

I live in California, I use comcast, and I bittorrent linux ISOs constantly (damn ubuntu's Hardy alphas).

As a network admin, I don't mind that they're throttling the bandwidth, as I do the same with Thibor on my WRT54G.

What DOES bother me is that Comcast is throttling traffic and not TELLING ANYONE how, why, or when they're doing this. The silence and lies are what pisses me off about this.

Oh well, one more reason to turn torrent protocol encryption on. I don't have anything to hide, but I prefer to manage my own bandwidth, thankyaverymuch.

and the trees are all kept equal by hachet, axe and saw.

Poor musicians; "slaving" away all day making music and expecting to get rich out of it... then blaming someone else when you don't... years ago people used to blame A&R or radio for ignoring them... now they blame "pirates"... NOTHING has really changed....

Artists are, on the whole, not rich people. If you enjoy what you do and make a little money then great... if one day you are recognised as a special talent, even better - but if you're not satisfied with your income then why not get a proper job like the rest of us?

The world has plenty of musicians; if you're not prepared to put in a little time and passion for the love, rather than for your wallet, perhaps you're in the wrong job?

...on which new version of a BT client will have a checkbox: "ignore RST packets?"

Odd title when the situation has arisen because unregulated market economics allowed Comcast to swallow or freeze out competitors meaning that they now have an effective monopoly position in many areas, which they can and obviously do.

Corporations are run by people who simply don't understand that you are supposed to tell the truth as a matter of course. The funny thing is that telling the truth is a lot simpler, in both the short- and long run, than lying and trying to cover your ass.

So-called executives, bean counters, spin doctors, and lawyers: they're all guilty of violating social norms. The excuse is "maximizing shareholder value"; I hope Milton Friedman is being fried in molten sulfur in hell for inventing *that* one.

Time to radically overhaul the parameters under which corporations operate to make it clear that their first duty is to society as a whole.

Warning: Uninformed opinion ahead!

Comcast *could* be doing this at their network egress points. ADSL connections are naturally throttled by lower upload speeds than cable connections. That makes the comcast network disproportionately attractive to *non-comcast* torrent users. That is, people who don't pay comcast anything at all. This is only *upload* traffic remember - unless they are running a commercial p2p server, comcast customers are hardly being deprived of anything. If you are a commercial user, you'd suspect you would be breaking the comcast T's&C's and can't really complain.

Having said that, the whole affair has been badly managed. Comcast should have come clean about what was going on. Maybe they could provide an certificate-signed open-source azeurus/ktorrent plugin which throttles upload bandwidth at critical times (perhaps just for non-comcast IP addresses) and registers with a comcast server that it is doing so. Comcast could then provide a discount on their monthly fees based on the traffic volume throttled. I'm sure it could be abused, but for uploads, where's the incentive to do so? It only has to mostly work to have the required effect.

>> i.e. Anything stupid enough to obey RFC's and obey reset packets

You mean the Windows TCP stack? Cause BitTorrent isn't responsible for obeying those particular packets. God help us all if they go as far as to write their own hacked TCP drivers and write directly to the NIC at layer 2. God only knows what kind of chaos that would cause.

@Comcast: WTF? I understand the need to manage traffic, but to lie about it? Someone should go to jail for fraud on that one. Of course that will never happen, as they will claim operational ignorance.

Of course they're operationally ignorant. Name one corporate monopoly that actually *satisfies* its victims (no, then they'd be 'customers') as a matter of course, and doesn't spend millions of its victims' payment dollars on The Best Congress Money Can Buy. If they need to buy more Congresscritters, they just up the subscription rates - it's not like they have to worry about competitors. Sort of like Congress... though I'm not quite clear on who learned that trick from whom. But the point is, Comacast et al are spending money and time (money again) on this sort of BS when they could be at least marginaly keeping up with what residential customers in the Free World consider marginally acceptable Net access (like the 10 Mbps down/2 up that is mid-range in Singapore, or the 1 Gbps being rolled out in Korea. Think about that for a minute, and then go back to your 1.5 Mbps 'high-speed' connection.)

If there was ever a poster child for striking down the whole concept of corporate personhood (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Personhood_Debate for a discussion) and the century-plus of Really Bad Law based on it, Comcast and the other megacomms would be on the *very* short list.

One problem with the "impersonation" argument against Comcast's behaviour is that many ISPs impersonates services to some extent.

A common one is to redirect port 80 requests to their proxy server so they can cache pages, reducing use of their internet links and providing better service to their users.

Another is redirecting SMTP connections to their server, so they can monitor the traffic (and potentially cut off spammers). This one is a bit more controversial, and is a pain if you are trying to access a corporate SMTP server while on the road.

Now I realise that these two examples are quite different to inserting TCP reset packets into an overwise untouched stream, but it makes arguments like "the ISP should never interfere with customer TCP connections" a bit less clear cut.

The telephone company has the right to manage traffic on their network too, but if they tried to do it by getting you to use your phone less, by calling you up with the spoofed caller ID of a friend and faking a message in their voice telling you never to call them again, you wouldn't think it anything less than completely clear cut.

The examples you gave /don't/ muddy the waters all that much. Transparent http proxies don't alter the content. If they /do/ alter the content (such as Rogers have been doing lately), it is seriously controversial, as recent events have shown.

So the degree of acceptance toward ISPs' impersonation practices that currently occur is _predicated_ on them not *interfering* with your use of the service nor *falsifying* the data through abuse of their position, which is essentially that of a man-in-the-middle. Conveying our packets is a very serious social and moral responsibility, like conveying our postal mail or phone calls, and tampering with either should be equally taboo.

Re. the technical difficulties argument: I'm not buying that one either, or only marginally convinced that it couldn't be addressed pretty straightforwardly using existing technologies and only a modicum of development and deployment effort. If you can spot a p2p syn+ack packet flying across the network and send a rst, you can just as easily slap a tag on the traffic and shunt the punter sideways onto a lower traffic priority vlan, or I would like to know why not?