Comcast wants "clear rules," even if it means net neutrality: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Comcast wants "clear rules" from the FCC when it comes to network management, and it wants them so badly that it's even willing to accept network neutrality as the price of getting them. What the huge ISP does not want is the kind of ambiguity that led to so much acrimony about its P2P blocking in 2008, and which is now being hashed out in a DC courtroom.

Read Original Article:(Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)

Skeptical judges ask FCC if Comcast P2P smackdown was legal: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Comcast has had its day in court over the issue of "network management." News accounts suggest that the three-judge panel from the DC Court of Appeals was plenty skeptical that the FCC had the proper authority to sanction Comcast's BitTorrent blocking in 2008. [ Read more ... ]

Comcast settles P2P throttling class-action for $16 million: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Comcast has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the throttling of P2P connections that had users up in arms in late 2007 and 2008. The company still stands behind its controversial methods for "managing" network traffic, but claims that it wants to "avoid a potentially lengthy and distracting legal dispute that would serve no useful purpose." [ Read more ... ]

Feds Charge 3 With Comcast.net Hijacking: Via Threat Level.

Three alleged members of the hacker gang Kryogeniks were hit with a federal conspiracy charge Thursday for a 2008 stunt that replaced Comcast’s homepage with a shout-out to other hackers.

Prosecutors identified Christopher Allen Lewis, 19, and James Robert Black Jr., 20, as the hackers “EBK” and “Defiant,” known for hijacking Comcast’s domain name in May of last year — a prank that took down the cable giant’s homepage and webmail service for more than five hours, and allegedly cost the company over $128,000.

Visitors to Comcast.net had been redirected to a simple page reading “KRYOGENIKS EBK and DEFIANT RoXed COMCAST sHouTz To VIRUS Warlock elul21 coll1er seven.” [ Read more ... ]

ISPs and the fight against bots: Via StopBadware Blog.

For the last several months, some of the folks at Comcast have been working on a draft IETF document to inform ISPs about the role they can play in remediating bots on their customers’ computers. This is a tricky challenge: on one hand, ISPs are in a great position to detect bot activity, notify their customers, and potentially even block traffic. On the other hand, customers and net neutrality advocates don’t want ISPs mucking around with customers’ Internet use.

The document attempts to find a balance, encouraging ISPs to notify customers of bots and assist with remediation, while warning about some of the risks of more aggressive involvement (such as "walled gardens," in which users are cut off from most Internet access until they clean up an infection).

I wrote up a set of comments which I shared with the authors and now make available here. [ Read more ... ]

Comcast pop-ups alert customers to PC infections: Via InSecurity Complex - CNET News.

Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections, if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware.

For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet.

The alerts are triggered "when we see computers on our network that are doing things that are known bot activities--say, a computer is spewing out thousands of spam e-mails," said Jay Opperman, senior director of security and privacy at Comcast. [ Read more ... ]

FCC enforcing imaginary laws in P2P ruling, says Comcast: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Almost a year ago, Comcast pledged that it would sue the Federal Communications Commission over its Order sanctioning the cable ISP for peer-to-peer throttling. Now, the company has filed its case with the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Although Comcast's legal arguments are complex, the crux is simple: there were and still are no statutes or credible regulations that support the Commission's authority to act on this matter, the company says. [ Read more ... ]

Comcasts Spells Out Congestion Management Plans - Via CDT - PolicyBeta:

Back in March, CDT welcomed Comcast’s announcement that it would move to a “protocol agnostic” technique for managing network congestion. No technical details were provided, but the announcement certainly seemed to imply that the new technique would steer clear of singling out particular protocols, services, or content for inferior treatment. In other words, it would avoid the kind behavior that gives Internet neutrality advocates fits and that puts network operators in a position to undermine unfettered innovation. To use a potentially loaded term, the announcement seemed to imply that the new technique would be neutral.

But we also noted that we would have to wait and see how the new technique actually works. However promising the term “protocol agnostic” might sound, it doesn’t exactly have a widely accepted meaning.

Well, Comcast has now filed with the FCC a description of the new congestion management technique it is rolling out. Based on that description, it appears to be the real deal. [ Read more ... ]

Scrutinizing Comcast's Apologists - Via EFF: Deep Links:

EFF is continuing its research into Comcast's use of forged RST packets to interfere with their customers' BitTorrent connections. (Apparently the FCC is investigating, as well.) While Comcast has remained conspicuously silent about the technical details of its activities, a few networking engineers have tried to defend Comcast by proposing technical justifications for Comcast's interference activities.

One of the most energetic of these pundits is Richard Bennett, who has argued that Comcast deserves a "pat on the back and a gold star", not criticism, for injecting spoofed RST packets into their users' traffic. In this post we're going to examine and rebut his arguments... [ Read more ... ]

Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible | TorrentFreak: Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.

ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding. And Comcast is not alone in this, Canadian ISPs Cogeco and Rogers use similar methods on a smaller scale. [ Read more ... ]

Comcast Hinders BitTorrent Traffic: "FsG writes 'Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn't seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren't helping. If more ISPs adopt their strategy, could this mean the end of BitTorrent?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot: Your Rights Online.)