[ NNSquad ] Re: Comcast using Sandvine to Interfere with P2P

[Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>]

At 10:59 AM 11/8/2007, Robb Topolski wrote:
 
>> Or, from Comcast's point of view, it is preventing network abuse and
>> stopping customers from violating the terms of their contracts.
>
>If this is Comcast's position, then there are many other ways to do
>this without forging and injecting RST TCP packets onto the Internet
>and to their customers.

It's a perfectly fine way to do it. You could just boot the user off
the network altogether, but this way you are just eliminating the
abuse while (hopefully) you contact the customer and tell him or
her of the contract violation.

Of course, if you're one of the "every bit is sacred" crowd, and
believe that no packet should be touched by the ISP, then even
Web acceleration is off limits. We have a transparent Web cache
that really speeds up users' browsing. It works by "impersonating"
the intended destination machine and feeding the user the file from
a local disk. Users love it.

We also have another mechanism that you might, if you were being
vindictive, claim to be "forging" packets.

When a user doesn't pay his or her bill, and we cannot get hold
of him or her, we redirect all browser requests to a page which
tells the user to call us. No matter what Web server he or she
tries to contact, we intercept the request and feed back the
notification page. Evil? Not at all. We could just cut the user
off cold, but this is not nearly as friendly as putting a notice on
the screen.

And so it goes. When we blocked the "Slammer" worm, were we 
discriminating against an application? You betcha. And, again,
our users loved us for it. Not one infection network-wide.

--Brett Glass, LARIAT.NET