ISPs

Comment: Virgin Takes Aim At BitTorrent

/ Christopher Parsons

In the US, Comcast is presently using what is referred to as ‘protocol agnostic’ filtering‘ – effectively, if you use the full amount of bandwidth that you are paying for for more than a few minutes, they decrease your available bandwidth for a while. This was, in part, a reaction to their sending RST packets to BitTorrent users – these packets would ‘kill’ connections that individuals had with other P2P users, but were also catching some other programs in the crossfire. What’s more, they were using a technique referred to as ‘packet forging’, which is involves changing packets in-stream. After a substantial amount of public criticism and backlash, Comcast stopped using their DPI equipment for this purpose and instead shifted to using them for protocol agnostic filtering.

Let’s turn to Virgin, who is currently implementing protocol agnostic filtering, but there are rumblings that the way that they’ve deployed it may not be the best solution to combatting what is perceived as the real problem: BitTorrent traffic. From a DSLreports article:

[A] customer on Virgin’s 10Mbps/512kbps “L” tier loses 75% of his throughput for five hours should he download more than 1200MB between 4 and 9PM. (Source)

There are several issues with this kind of agnostic filtering.

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Comment – Major ISPs To Deploy P4P Within Months

/ Christopher Parsons

In the US, several ISPs (e.g. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast) have been testing the effectiveness of using Pando Networks’ own P2P client, which localizes transfered files, to increase the transfer speeds of files while reducing the flow of traffic between ISPs. These tests have demonstrated that Pando’s solution to P2P traffic ‘overwhelming’ network traffic has largely been successful; far less data is passing between ISPs, with a huge portion of the P2P traffic now being contained to the respective ISPs’ networks . DSLreports is concerned that, there may be hidden costs to the roll-out of these technologies. Perhaps individuals will need to pay a fee to enjoy the enhanced speeds. Perhaps this will correspond with a more invasive content analysis system. Maybe there will be blocks put on ‘non-authorized’ P2P clients.

Personally, I expect that P4P will be used to let ISPs compete in the media-content selling business. Imagine: you can get a movie from iTunes in 20 minutes, or in 2-4 from your ISP. Sure, the analysis and filtering that DSLreports notes could be coming, but I have a suspicion that P4p will be used to undermine the current content distributors first, and that other uses of P4P will follow only after that business model/technique is tested.

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Three Strikes and Goodbye World

/ Christopher Parsons

In this post I’m going to briefly note just how bad an idea it is, for citizens, that ISPs and content providers are working together to resolve ‘copyright infringement’ without having a substantial degree of government involvement.

Rules of the game
Perhaps you’re familiar with baseball (or California penal rules). In either case, you’ll have heard of the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule. In baseball, this would mean that a batter returns to the dugout, and another person attempts to swat a ball and race towards first base. In the penal system, it indicates that you’ve committed enough criminal offenses that you’re going to have the book thrown at you . . . the next person behind you in court can then try to argue why they’re innocent, and go free (first base?).

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Boost Up Your Net With ISP Injections

/ Christopher Parsons

I’ve written about Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies before, and their various potential privacy issues. Generally, I’ve talked about how the possibility of having your ISP persistently monitor your online actions could stifle the substantive abilities exercising of autonomy, liberty, and freedom of conscious. I won’t revisit those issues here, though I’d recommend checking out my earlier post on DPI. What follows examines how ISPs are injecting information into the webpages that you visit, which prevents you from viewing webpages as they were designed.

Web Tripwires

When you visit a webpage, your computer downloads a little bit of code and renders it on your screen – the web is an environment where visual stimulation necessitates copying data. Recently, researchers from the University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute have discovered that about 1.3% of the time what is displayed on your computer’s screen has been altered. This having been said,

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Three-Strike Copyright

/ Christopher Parsons

To fully function as a student in today’s Western democracies means having access access to the Internet. In some cases this means students use Content Management Systems (CMSs) such as Drupal, Blackboard, or wikis (to name a few examples) to submit homework and participate in collaborate group assignments. CMSs are great because teachers can monitor the effectiveness of student’s group contributions and retain timestamps of when the student has turned in their work. Thus, when Sally doesn’t turn in her homework for a few weeks, and ‘clearly’ isn’t working with her group in the school-sanctioned CMS, the teacher can call home and talk with Sally’s parents about Sally’s poor performance.

At least, that’s the theory.

Three-Strike Copyright and Some Numbers

I’m not going to spend time talking about the digital divide (save to note that it’s real, and it penalises students in underprivileged environments by preventing them from acting as an equal in the digitized classroom), nor am I going to talk about the inherent privacy and security issues that arise as soon as teacher use digital management systems. No, I want to turn our attention across the Atlantic to Britain, where the British parliament will soon be considering legislation that would implement a three-strike copyright enforcement policy. France is in the process of implementing a similar law (with the expectation that it will be in place by summer 2008), which will turn ISPs into data police. Under these policies if a user (read: household) is caught infringing on copyright three times (they get two warnings) they can lose access to the ‘net following the third infringement.

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