I don't have any of the above. It was a pure digital transaction. No cash, no merchandise.
Now what really surprised me was this; Blizzard has written their own file sharing application for users downloading their games. The DL speed was very slow compared to a "dedicated" stream that I'm used to from Apple, Microsoft, Adobe or Macromedia when buying or DL'ing software. However it no doubt shared them a ton of bandwidth seeding computers with various pieces of the software and then having those computers finish off each other's downloads.
Now, how would that be "seen" by such a filter/program?
I'm file sharing, I'm uploading some, downloading more, I'm seen from a traffic standpoint to be using something like Bit Torrent. Yet what I'm doing is 100% legal, paid for and Blizzard's official method of digitally distributing their software.
I don't like this aspect of technology. I'm starting to believe in open net policy more than ever. This kind of stuff scares me just because more companies are moving to file sharing type distribution and I know it.
It sounds like COMCAST is trying to squeeze more profit out of existing infrastructure, in a a growing demand market.
Eventually, that’s going to bite them in the ....
The really annoying thing here is that many legitimate companies use .torrent files and the P2P technology to transfer legitimate large files. Take, for example, VMWare who allows downloads of many free Virtual Machines which can be run in VMWare’s virtualization products. They exclusively use .torrent files, requiring a Torrent client, which would now be filtered or otherwise screwed with by ComCast. I use uTorrent which has a few methods of getting around any ISP filters/etc. But I’m sure that ISPs like ComCast are looking at ways to screw with that. uTorrent lets you randomize the port you’re using (which can defeat some of the simplest ISP screwing) but, better yet, allows you to encrypt the incoming/outgoing data so that the ISP can’t tell what you’re doing because it can’t inspect the internal packets between the nodes. However, a smart ISP can put together some rulesets to detect and screw with that too. It’s not to hard to inspect the IP traffic and put together what’s going on.
File sharing of all kinds is getting huge and will be as big a revolution as the invention of television. If STUPID ISP’s (like Comcast) want to avoid government mandates and interference (Net Neutrality), then they’d better adopt a very open plan for their subscribers.
The geeks aren’t going to take it. You have been warned.
Never have so many people missed the point entirely.
1. I’m no friend of Comcast, and I can give you the phone number of my local Comcast sales people who will verify that I’m a pain in thier @#$%!!
2. Comcast has “X” amount of data capacity. Like most service providers, they provide more speed on the download side than the upload side — DSL does it almost all the time (”ADSL”). So, it would not surprise me that uploads take longer than downloads.
3. Comcast knows that the vast majority of upload traffic is “junk” or outright illegal — music sharing, zombie’d computers, spammers, porno webcam operators, etc. In fact, any network admin with any training can monitor traffic an tell you exactly how much is being used, and by whom, and for what purpose.
4. A slower upload for Comcast still beats the “full speed” upload for most DSL, and even for most T1 lines.
5. This article is nothing but a shill for the “net neutrality act” legislation. On one side, you have people wanting to pass laws to make us free at the expense of the freedom of the ISP. I suppose that in some places there is only one high-speed ISP, but for the most part, if you can get one you can get many. If I don’t like my ISP, I can simply change — isn’t that the conservative thing to do?
pinging
I’m going to explain the basic technological methods that are used. First you need to understand that ALL internet traffic done with packets of data. Each packet of data contains 4 major chunks of data. 1) The data itself, 2) A source address, 3) A destination address, and 4) (And this is the big one) a PORT number.
Within the internet - PORT numbers are associated with service types. So if you are using HTTP - this would be port 80 as an example. BitTorrent and other such technologies have a common PORT number - so all the filtering technology needs to do is limit the number of packets of a particular PORT number that it chooses to pass.
That is how you can selectively affect one service and not another.
ping...
So rather than spend the money to upgrade their bandwidth, they cut the services?
PING
So far, so good and from what I can tell, the DSL is just as fast as the cable modem. I guess only time will tell if it's down as often as Comcast was, which was often.
bttt
Is Verizon’s FIOS fiber optic system a way to avoid the kind of bandwidth-throttling Comcast has implemented?