Posted on 10/24/2007 7:32:37 AM PDT by steve-b
Internet users take for granted the free flow of information that has made the Net such a vibrant and innovative communications medium. But Comcast cable-modem users have discovered that certain types of information don't flow so well, and the company has been less than forthcoming as to why.
Recent investigations by the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and blogger Kevin Kanarski uncovered surreptitious efforts by Comcast to interfere with at least three types of traffic: packets sent via the BitTorrent and Gnutella protocols, which are forms of file-sharing software, and through Lotus Notes, an electronic messaging program....
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
A friend of mine with Comcast simply turned on encryption in his bittorrent client and the limitation stopped working.
A simple change and Comcast’s efforts were useless to them.
Soon enough this fix will get around.
I’ll warn you that Verizon customer service is worse than Comcast, but response times are better.
If you call Verizon, you will be talking to someone in south Asia that is poorly trained. You will talk to machines which run you through long checklists that may or may not list your problem. They won’t let you call up, talk to a real person, and request a technician fix a broken wire at the neighborhood box or a bad connector at the central office.
I know about Google being my best friend (better than the dog) but what’s FIOS?
Verizon’s fiber-optic data/television service. An alternative to Cable TV and Internet.
In the state of New York, for example, section 190.25 of the penal code describes the crime of “criminal impersonation in the second degree,” in which one may not “[pretend] to be a representative of some person or organization and does an act … with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another.”
http://www.dailytech.com/Comcast+Could+Face+Lawsuits+Over+P2P+Discrimination/article9381.htm
Verizon's technical system may be great, but just pray you don't have to deal with their customer service, either. I had to go through multiple calls on a minor nontechnical issue, and could only get things fixed when I got a supervisor who spoke passable English.
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