[Infowarrior] - EFF Report on Comcast network blocking of BitTorrent

[Richard Forno]

A pair of new Electronic Frontier Foundation reports prove that Comcast is
degrading and interfering with BitTorrent, and shows how you can use free
software to test your own ISP to see if it is doing the same:

    In addition to providing evidence of network interference, the EFF study
also explains how Comcast's selective degradation of BitTorrent traffic
undermines future Internet innovation. "The Internet has enabled a cascade
of innovations precisely because any programmer--whether employed by a huge
corporation, a startup, or tinkering at home for fun--has been able to
create new protocols and applications that operate over TCP/IP, without
having to obtain permission from anyone," the EFF wrote. "Comcast's recent
moves threaten to create a situation in which innovators may need to obtain
permission and assistance from an ISP in order to guarantee that their
protocols will operate correctly. By arbitrarily using RST packets in a
manner at odds with TCP/IP standards, Comcast threatens to Balkanize the
open standards that are the foundation of the Internet."

    The EFF also published a second report (PDF), which provides detailed
technical instructions explaining how to use Wireshark to reproduce their
study and test for ISP packet injection.

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http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/28/eff-proves-comcast-i.html