Bit Torrent and Comcast...

[Slater]

Hmm... Recently I've been hearing a plethura of rumors about Comcast killing Bit Torrent connections, and I would not believe these were it not for the fact that my own connections have been getting totally nerfed without any warning.

What happens is that let's say I'm trying to raise my U/D ratio on a network by seeding the OCR 0000-0500 torrent (keeping it legal ). Things go well for about 30 seconds, I get a nice upload rate of 30-100 Kilobytes per second, but then it just flatlines, and unless I manually announce my seeding on the tracker every minute or so, I can't maintain any connections, even though I should remain connected til someone has the whole torrent's contents.
This is what Comcast has been doing.

Does anyone know a way to prevent them from resetting BT upload connections?

[LorentzForce]

Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent#Encryption

[Mithrandir]

I've seen a lot of talk about this on some of the other (technical) boards. As far as I can tell, you've gotta encrypt the data if you want to be sure you won't be nuked on the QOS end.

I went to check out LF's deal, and that's basically what I would expect. I'm kinda surprised at how the ISPs are handling it, though. I would have thought they would simply be adding temporary firewall rules to block the traffic, but that article indicates they are dumping TCP RST packets back to the client. I was under the impression that one would have to send the reset packet from the link IP. If that's the case, then the ISP is basically spoofing the connection; I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

Well screw Comcast. They're denying everything even though the evidence shows otherwise. This won't only be bad for Comcast users, but for anyone using torrents. If a certain percentage of seeders and uploaders use Comcast, that'll effect everyone.

I hate my ISP. Money-grubbing loons.

[blkmage]

Oh yes, Rogers in Canada does this too. In fact, there was some worry that they were even checking encrypted data to throttle Bittorrent traffic. It was a pain when I was subletting with people who used Rogers over the summer ;_;

[Slater]

Well screw Comcast. They're denying everything even though the evidence shows otherwise. This won't only be bad for Comcast users, but for anyone using torrents. If a certain percentage of seeders and uploaders use Comcast, that'll effect everyone.

I hate my ISP. Money-grubbing loons.

Quite right, they deny doing anything with BitTorrents, but it's been proven that they are to blame. Maybe it's semantics... like they're blocking all P2P programs and this is their fancy way of saying that they're not targeting BT.

Anyhow, thanks for the tips, I'll try it out.

[Mithrandir]

FWIW, it appears that quite a few people on the technical boards are beginning to be upset about the spoofing. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. At the very least, Comcast may have just lost the entire "overgeek" segment.