[ NNSquad ] Blocking Comcast's Sandvine with simple firewall rules?

[Brian Clapper <bmc@clapper.org>]

I suspect I'm not the only person on this list to see this story on Slashdot 
today.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/30/0249249

"Multiple sites reported a while ago that Comcast was using Sandvine to do TCP
packet resets to throttle BitTorrent connections of their users. This practice
may be a thing of the past as it's been found a simple rule in the Linux
firewall, iptables, can simply just block their reset packets, returning your
BitTorrent back to normal speeds and allowing you to once again connect to all
your seeds and peer. If blocking the TCP packet resets becomes a common
practice, on and off of Linux, it'll be interesting to see the next move in
the cat-and-mouse game between customers and service providers, and who
controls that bandwidth."

http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/
--
-Brian

Brian Clapper, http://www.clapper.org/bmc/

  [ ISP-injected RST packets are a very blunt instrument.  
    I believe it's safe to assume that their use for "traffic
    management" will be reduced in any case as time goes by, to be
    replaced with more "subtle" (but possibly no less potentially
    onerous) techniques.  We already know this to be the announced
    case with Comcast.

     -- Lauren Weinstein
        NNSquad Moderator ]