Letters to the Editor
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More of this
This article is the sort of thing with which Salon made its name back in the day — topical, well-researched but concise, articulate, and uncompromised by the kind of craven shock and awe that one often sees in business technology reporting.
Like many of your readers, Editor, I hope to see more of this kind of writing from Farhad Manjoo.
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Excellent article. Time Waner Cable Su...
I'd love to be able to drop my service due to these infringements, but unfortunately I live in a large metropolitan city where I do not have any choice. For a nation that admires free choice in the marketplace, they certainly don't show it with regards to cable companies and broadband companies. I was a Comcast customer. I have been "sold" to the new owners 5 times since I have been a subscriber. I am now "owned" by Time Warner. They also drop peer to peer connections. How long do these cable company monopolies last? Is there a time limit? When do the terms come up and the marketplace open? These companies were originally offered these monopolies because they suggested that only one company could organize the network and lay the cable. In that I have been delivered to 5 subsequent companies, I'd say that was a lie. Better get some competition in the marketplace, or this will be the tip of the iceberg on the activities of these broadband companies. Peer to peer today, political speech tomorrow.
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Yes, good article.
I've been critical of Farhad in the past, but this is the kind of muckraking that we need. Well done.
BTW, who's wiring is that? It's even worse than the mess in my basement ...
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Comcast throttles more than peer-to-peer
About a year ago I has an experience similar to this. I was cruising Google Video just clicking around looking at vids. On this particular day, unlike in the past, I was having a terrible time getting any videos to load. The downloads of the vids were taking forever. The bandwidth would drop dramatically every time I tried to watch a vid.
So I tried an experiment. I VPN'd into work and then returned to Google Videos. Voila! No issue. Vids would download quickly and begin playing.
I thought maybe it was a fluke so I tried this 5 more times. I would log off of work VPN and try to watch videos. They simply would not download. VPN to work and the videos would download no problem.
So I realized that Comcast was trottling my attempts to watch google vids when they could see where I was going. But as soon as I would VPN to work, and my traffic was essentially masked from their ability to see where I was going, the vids would download fine.
I called comcast to complain. Refused to hang up and got escalated up the chain. They would not admit they were doing this and yet as I was on the phone with the techincal folks, low and behold the problem went away.
It was clear to me they do have control over throttling traffic. In my case throttling the udp traffic.
I consider this a type of stealing. I pay a certain amount each month for minimum bandwidth. by not providing that, Comcast is taking money out of my pocket.
A
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Two words:
Protocol obfuscation.
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VPN or SSH
Either VPN or SSH will obscure the packets you're sending, and keep Comcast (and other people) from reading the data. There are a number of free ssh and vpn servers out there, if you really want to bypass packet sniffers.
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Infrastructure
Good God, it just keeps on coming. I suppose this is known and allowed by our government, in a 'look the other way' agreement packaged with the telecoms provision of all of our communications to the government intelligence sector. I knew I hated Comcast, I just didn't know how much.
The worst part is that, had our government or- god forbid- the Comcast management themselves had decided to invest in infrastructure, ie. FIOS, they wouldn't need to squeeze money out of their customers by short-changing them on net availability and unfettered-use principles. Sigh.
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A handful of companies control our media
First off GE has a 10% stake in salon. And, it appears GE wants a Giuliani/Clinton ticket. See, that is the way it works. Those who own the media control the programming. The programmed have very little control in the matter because the handful of media companies own the politicians as well. Here is a link to who is really running the show. http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html It seems that what ever freedom netizens had is slowly being consumed by the corporations who want control of your mind. They don't call it programming for nothing.
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Comcast Stinks On A More Basic Level
Where I live, I have Comcast only because there has been no other practical way to get "The Sopranos."
My Comcast www service goes down periodically, for no reason. When I call, I can get a guy to come out and restore it, but (here's the point):
Apparently, the Comcast guy has to disconnect somebody else on my floor of my building to bring my service back! There are eleven apartments on my floor. So, then, that person calls within a couple days, and the Comcast guy has to disconnect somebody else, in a never-ending cycle!
So, it appears that my service goes down when it's my turn, every few weeks, on the Comcast daisy chain. The service guys have all but admitted this. But Comcast admits nothing, and still charges full price.
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I'm with COMCAST on this issue
I'm no fan of COMCAST, but I agree with what they're doing in this case. People who download using tools like torrent gulp up the bandwidth leaving the rest of us holding the bag. However, I don't understand why COMCAST doesn't see the revenue potential in all of this. If people want to do this, then charge them enough so that COMCAST can upgrade the network to give both them and the rest of us enough bandwidth to get done what we want to on the web.
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for me it's more of a saturation issue
Earthlink/Time Warner probably makes the economic decision to underbuild and catchup behind the capacity problems. That & I think their 2nd level DNS servers are for crap. Either the iterative searches aren't built right or they're using Windows based recursive DNS. Plus it seems to drop out more than it should.