Truth, Computing and Fail

Ah! The cat is now out of the bag. Comcast does pose restrictions on P2P traffic under the garb of QoS. Refer to one of my previous posts where I mentioned traffic shaping on our college network.

The ISPs should limit themselves to what they are supposed to do, provide us with a connection to the internet. It is none of their business to decide what are we going to do with that connection. The problem actually arises from the fact that these ISPs have bitten off more than they can chew. The next time you see some ISP going hysterical with its claims of offering you a 384 kbps unlimited connection, be careful. They simply don’t have the necessary bandwidth to keep on adding customers by tons and yet provide them with the same download speeds. They expect all the customers to be (lets face it) lamers who would never go beyond a few mails, orkut scraps and a few movie review sites. The problem starts when you really start taxing your connection to the hilt. Anyways, thats what you are supposed to do. You are getting a 384 kbps connection, so you would be ofcourse downloading at that speed for whatever time you want. You are not going to get 500+ speeds on a 384 kbps connection anyways.

So here is the scenario. A user is downloading within the limits of his connection (as advertised by you, my dear ISP) yet you can’t handle that much traffic.

A very common excuse by the ISPs that we would often come across is that file-sharing applications constitute close to 90% of the network traffic. Let us examine this point. Where lies the problem if it constitutes some x% of the traffic? The users are downloading at the rates you have supplied them with, they aren’t crossing the limit. It simply means that you don’t have the capacity to handle such a volume of data flow and hence resort to such dirty tactics.

Coming back to the modern file-sharing protocols, they are the true applications of distributed computing in the public realm that benefit the common user instead of being restricted to University research projects. We don’t need to be re-introduced to the virtues of distributed and decentralized computing, do we? Its no use denying the fact that P2P protocols are the next level in the way the internet will be used. Lets face it. Change is inevitable. It started off with dial-in BBS boards and plain text webpages. Are we still clinging on to those technologies?

Now moving on to the technique that Comcast uses to “shape the traffic”.

Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

Isn’t this the same MITM (Man In The Middle) attack for which hackers are despised?

An analogy on Wi-Fi networks (‘coz thats what I’m comfortable with ).

Suppose a certain network is an ‘Open Network’ but uses a captive portal to authenticate users. So now I probe the network in promiscuous mode and find out an authenticated client associated to an AP. I deauth that machine and spoof its MAC address, and then the possibilities are endless…..

What I wanted to point out was, had I been caught in the above act, there is no doubt I would be behind bars. So what about these corporations?