Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

[smurv]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I trust all my faith in AT&T i have yet to have issues this happens 40% of the time i may get d/c from FFXI for a phone call but that's it.

There have been some down for 3-5 minutes but that's nothing to bust some buttons over. I would recommend trying them if Comcast cannot handle your issue.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

Really, its nice you took Introduction to Communications in college, but get a grip.

Data is speech because data can be used to express ideas. Look at what you just typed a little while back, for Christ's sake. You sent data through your client to a server that let you host your ideas. What if Comcast decides they don't think people should be able to get to FFXIOnline.com so easily? What if they make you install some ad-ridden/junk-filled browser like AOL just to see the internet ? What if they made you pay thousands of dollars just to be a priority on thier search engine?

They can control information in this way if they truely wanted to and when they decide to, speech is being restricted. We're not just talking about this on a user level, but a business and private level as well. Basically, what I'm saying is if they wanted us to use forums about MMOs, they'd be the forums that could pay to be a tiered priority, a place they would be assured advertisers would make money.

Where does that leave a guy Aniero over on Limitbreakradio.com? Or the hosts of Pet Food Alpha? Or an independant WoW resource site?

In the dark, that's what. They'd have to seek out advertisers and worse, SE would start handpicking the sites they approve of more specifically than they already do.

Slander, libel, FIRE!

I assumed one would be smart enough to make the distinction of what kind of speech we were talking about. I'm not talking about false information and things that can incite a panicked crowd. I'm talking about the ability to express political views, the freedome to question goverment actions, about artistry and being able to socialize freely about what I want with who I want without government intervention.

There you have it. Property rights dictate that any ISP is largely much free to do whatever it wants on its network, as long as your EULA covers it.

Except that the internet is now a resource and one that is not only piped through a cable, but now broadcast in public and private areas. Let's say you go to to Starbucks and bring your wi-fi enabled laptop with you to browse various sites to help you do your little business odds and ends with.

The ISP Starbuck's is aligned with decides they don't want you seeing X or Y site because it holds no advertising revenue in thier interests, yet the cafe accross the street has an ISP that does not restrict site access like Starbuck's ISP clearly does.

What happens? Starbuck's probably just lost a customer and it may or may not be the fault of Starbucks for this taking place.

I'm not saying it will become some tool to supress all information, but it definately is a move made by corporations to stifle innovations they were too stupid and slow to get on board when the opportunity was there. No, they wanted to keep doing things the old way.

Think of it like this, Sony spent years trying to supress filesharing websites and really only succeeded in making Napster a legit business. The RIAA decided to sue 12 year-old girls for downloading the Backstreet Boys, real hard-bitten criminals.

Meanwhile, Apple looked at the filesharing trend and thought, "What if there was a place where we could garuntee users quality audio files, at an affordable price and offered a wide array of popular and independant artists to listen to? What if we made a device to store the files on that works with our computers.

Enter iTunes and iPod. Enter a huge win for Apple. They were right, there were lots of people that would buy an iPod and pay for quality audio from iTunes.

Now Sony has to play ball with Apple and pay them licensing fees to get Sony/Interscope artists featured on iTunes. Considering Apple is a computer company and Sony is a huge hardware/entertainment corporation - which extends to many record labels under them, this is beyond humiliating. Since these record labels are/were allowed to operate independantly to an extent, their artists and producers took advantage of iTunes.

Smaller bands knew Napster gained them public exposure, this would be just as good. And then the big name artists, whom Sony can't pay to shut up (especially Bono from U2), got really vocal in how much they loved the product. People listened.

Apple owned Sony hard in Sony's own backyard.

Other companies have been humilated in this fashion, so with the big money these companies still have, they're going to try to pay ISPs like Time-Warner and Comcast and advocate legislation to supress the flow of data and create a tiered internet where thier "innovations" and websites get seen before the smaller, independant ones do.

Nothing good can come of that.

[Feba]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I don't think this is quite as 'death of the internet' as BBQ does, but I still find it horrible, just as if you restricted your users from sending email, or watching youtube, or playing games.

[Omni]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I know this sucks for a lot of us. Really, its all about money. Not the freedom of speech and my government is trying to oppress crap. It's just money.

Bandwidth is cheap. Network gear, though expensive is a fixed cost which can be recouped easily. Floor space or building ur own datacenter is a huge fixed cost but again, recouped over time.

What's the single more expensive thing every month is power. You might think, oh, power? my bill for electricity is only 50$ a month and I can have my lights on all day!

It's not that kind of power. Its having clean steady power. It's being able to run 5+1 diesel generators, flywheel powered generators and having redundant circuits at a datacenter. It's being able to have 2-3 different power feeds coming in from the city. It's being able to run for 2 months on your own when the world outside could be long extinct but, hey! your email will still run and your website will still be up.

It's just comes down to money. All of that civil rights stuff is just on the surface. They just need to make money/not lose money for having to pay for that much power.

[Aeni]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I honestly don't see this as step one in Comcast's bid to control what we see. I haven't found anything directly from Comcast explaining their actions, but I've found this:

Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and ISPs made it pretty clear that they do not like P2P applications like BitTorrent. One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

From here.

Torrents, for me, have always been a matter of network performance. It's no coincidence that torrents happen to be both a major drag on networks and the easiest way to transmit large amounts of data.

While I don't agree with Dak's stance over the practice of the usage of Torrents in its CURRENT STATE (It is the de facto standard for transmitting pirated ware over the 'net) I have to agree with Dak that bandwidth is NOT FREE.

Whoever thinks bandwidth is cheap should get their head examined. If you consume larger amounts of electricity in a given month, your utility company will most assuredly mark this increase through billing you appropriately for your usage.

Do ISPs do this with bandwidth usage? No. Then THANK YOUR EFFING GOD THEY DON'T. Because I guarantee all you punks would incur $5,000+ in bandwidth costs to your parents every month if the ISPs could.

So ... rather than punishing people who aren't a complete douchebag for siphoning off bandwidth from the general pool, they did the right thing by eliminating Torrents.

You want to blame someone? Go blame the pirates and the people who voluntarily download the data from them ... which easily numbers into the millions on a daily basis.

[Feba]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

bandwidth is NOT FREE.

Which might be why WE PAY EXTRA FOR MORE BANDWIDTH, dumbass. If the power company agreed to let you use up to a certain amount of electricity, no problem, then they came in and said "Oh, btw, you can't use our electricity to run power tools", you'd be freakin' pissed. They don't care if I download it any other way, as long as it isn't torrents, which isn't right. If you want to preserve bandwidth, you don't CUT OFF ACCESS TO A PROTOCOL, AND SAY "NO WE DIDN'T" WHEN YOUR CUSTOMERS COMPLAIN, you LIMIT bandwidth usage OVERALL so it's fair to everyone, and you OWN UP to it. That's my big problem with comcast here, they're trying to act like this isn't happening, when almost everyone with a comcast connection agrees it is.

Blaming pirates for comcast disabling torrenting is passing the buck, plain and simple. COMCAST disabled torrenting. Not pirates. Comcast controls their network. Not pirates. Comcast is getting way more money than they should every month. Not pirates.

[Omni]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

Sorry Aeni but, bandwidth -is- cheap. bandwidth and power are 2 different things that are measured differently and billed completely differently.

Maybe not to any of us because the mark-up is so high. For a service provider is pretty cheap (I know because I work for a service provider). It's probably the cheapest thing they pay for on a monthly basis. Plus, bandwidth is measured by a 95/5 standard (if you dont know what 95/5 is read section B3, point A in this link I found: http://www.fibercloud.com/Terms/Fibe...%20022207.pdf), so its not really how much you use per month, its more about how high of an average you can sustain that really hurts you.

Anyhow, like I said before its the power you use thats expensive to the service provider. Comcast and a lot of these cable companies still buy their internet from the few main providers (ie: network crossing, level3, etc.) and if they need to scale their networks larger and larger and consume more power, you can bet that cost gets passed on to comcast, which in turn boosts their costs and trickle down to you.

You're really not paying for that increase in bandwidth costs, you're paying for all the extra power you're causing them to consume by expanding their infrastructure so they can support so many sustaining concurrent connections.

[Aeni]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

Which might be why WE PAY EXTRA FOR MORE BANDWIDTH, dumbass.

You don't pay for more bandwidth retard. Whether you downloaded 5gb worth of data for a month or 50kb, you pay the same monthly fee.

But, if you went over your plan minutes on that cell phone, guess what? They assess a per minute fee.

Electric bills are charged per KwH genius. I never heard of any utility company allowing you x amount of KwH and then charge you extra for overage (My example simply illustrates that the more electricity you use, the more you pay)

The way the ISPs operate is what they call the Law of Averages. They are assuming (righly so) that most of their customers won't even use much of their internet access, as many people just check their emails, view a couple of websites and maybe download a couple of files.

This is to compensate for "power users" who are constantly online, downloading tons of data in any given day.

Torrents work on the principle that every single second it is connected online, as long as there is a request for the file seeded, will continually transmit data.

You don't see an issue because you've never worked for those ISPs and you've never actually get to see the data they see with regards to operating costs, costs to expand their network to compensate the continual usage of their bandwidth (Torrents ARE NOTORIOUS FOR THIS) and it also causes slowdowns and interruptions to service for other customers.

[Feba]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

Whether you downloaded 5gb worth of data for a month or 50kb, you pay the same monthly fee.

Except that if I only wanted to download 50kb every month I could get a plan that PROVIDES LESS BANDWIDTH. Therefore, I PAY MORE FOR HIGHER BANDWIDTH.

But, if you went over your plan minutes on that cell phone, guess what? They assess a per minute fee

Electric bills are charged per KwH

Exactly. They are charged BASED ON USAGE. Your cable bill IS NOT. It SHOULD NOT BE TREATED LIKE IT IS.

costs to expand their network to compensate the continual usage of their bandwidth

And again, if they cannot afford to provide a service, they should NOT say they can.

It's like an all you can eat buffet-- yes, some people aren't going to eat much, and some people are going to act like it's their last meal, but you DO NOT take away forks because they allow you to eat more food! If you went into an all you can eat restaurant, and they ran out of food, you wouldn't be understanding, you'd be pissed, and that's exactly the case here.

it also causes slowdowns and interruptions to service for other customers.

Bullshit. ISPs selling access to networks they cannot maintain causes slowdowns and interruptions. Not people using THE INTERNET THEY PAID FOR.

[DakAttack]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

If you went into an all you can eat restaurant, and they ran out of food, you wouldn't be understanding, you'd be pissed, and that's exactly the case here.

I wouldn't be pissed. I'm sure they would refund my money, and I would find accomodations elsewhere. The first thing across my mind, though, whould begin with 'Which fat bastard...'. Leaving Comcast for better accomodations would cost me more money, though, because I've got a double plan with them. They provide access to cable with HD channels, as well as the internet. When it hits the fan all I can do is wonder which bastard is ruining it with their anime and porn torrents.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

In order to curb piracy, people should stop glamorizing pirates.



Its clear where I stand on this issue.

[Mhurron]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I bet you'd loose to a NIN in ballista though.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I bet you'd loose to a NIN in ballista though.

I wouldn't have to fight them.

Light Shot ignores shadows

[WishMaster3K]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

I can say, as a Network Engineer, bandwidth isn't a problem. We haven't ever SCRATCHED the theoretical limitations of Fiber. Point Blank. It's smoke and mirrors.

[Akashimo]

Re: Well this explains why I haven't been able to torrent for shit lately.

Out of curiousity, how fast in theory can we push fiber optics. Assuming all connections are fiber optic?