EFF: Comcast continues to block P-to-P

EFF: COMCAST CONTINUES TO BLOCK P-TO-P
[SOURCE: InfoWorld, AUTHOR: Grant Gross]
Comcast continues to slow down customers' connections to some P-to-P (peer-to-peer) applications, using hacker-like techniques against its own subscribers, according to a report released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). But Comcast officials, first accused of blocking P-to-P application BitTorrent and other traffic in an October Associated Press story, insisted they're not stopping any Web traffic from getting to their customers. The cable broadband provider does manage its network, which would slow to a crawl if it did not manage bandwidth-hogging P-to-P connections during times of heavy congestion, a company official said. At times, Comcast will delay P-to-P traffic, but the traffic will eventually go through, said Charlie Douglas, Comcast's director of corporate communications. But the EFF defined Comcast's actions differently. Comcast, the second largest ISP in the U.S., uses a technique called packet forgery to slow some subscriber traffic, the EFF said in a report released Thursday. Comcast appears to be injecting RST, or reset, packets into customers' connections, causing connections to close, the EFF said.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/11/30/Comcast-continues-to-block-P-t...