Saturday, October 20, 2007
EFF replicates Comcast discrimination via TCP spoofing
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has replicated the AP's finding that Comcast is sending TCP RST messages in direct violation of the Internet's end-to-end principle. Seth Schoen of EFF reports:
Thanks to Bob Frankston for this pointer.
The TCP RST packet forging seems to be protocol-specific: as AP reported, it at least sometimes happens directly in response to specific BitTorrent protocol events. This contradicts Comcast's statement to us that their network management does not target or discriminate against particular protocols. The timing of the injected packets suggests that something on Comcast's network understands the BitTorrent protocol and treats it differently from other protocols.He lays out the methodology quite explicitly, and concludes
. . . we repeated the experiment with two different Comcast connections (one in San Francisco, and one in Oregon) and saw the RST packets appear in both cases.This gives further evidence that Comcast Interactive's President, Amy Bance, was lying or clueless when she said that only 0.1% of customers were affected by Comcast's network management.
Thanks to Bob Frankston for this pointer.
Technorati Tags: Comcast, EFF, NetworkNeutrality
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