Last week, we reported on mounting evidence that Comcast is targeting and disrupting BitTorrent traffic on its network. Further digging by interested parties has turned up more indication that BitTorrent isn’t the only popular P2P protocol being tampered with by the United States’ largest ISP.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the same sort of packet forging that the AP did (and that Broadband Reports readers did some time ago), and continued its testing to see if other applications are affected. The answer is a disturbing “yes.” The results of additional testing done by the EFF indicate Comcast is sending forged reset packets with some Gnutella traffic. When the EFF ran a Gnutella node on a Comcast connection, the forged reset packets disrupted communication between the nodes.
What’s particularly insidious about Comcast’s packet forging is that it’s transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they’ll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.
Even if you accept the argument that all P2P traffic is inherently evil, and that Comcast has the right to disrupt it in order to put a stop to copyright infringement, Comcast’s traffic-shaping efforts have apparently extended beyond the realm of P2P and into good old enterprise groupware. Kevin Kanarski, who works as a Lotus Notes messaging engineer, noticed some strange behavior with Lotus Notes when hooked up to a Comcast connection last month.
Sooner later someone is going to tell Comcast they cost some one there business and have to pay for it. I don’t expect this to keep up much longer
We’re not sure what’s more impressive here: the fact that Samsung has produced the world’s first 30nm-class 64Gb (bit, not byte!) NAND chip or that they’re now roping defenseless product waifs into hawking their silicon wafers. Nevertheless, we’re looking at a serious jump in density in just 10 months. A maximum of 16 of the new chips can be combined for cost-effective 128GB (byte, not bit!) MLC NAND-based flash cards used primarily for data storage. Sammy’s faster SLC based flash cards will still be the preferred choice when speed is of the utmost priority and cost isn’t an issue. As such, Samsung also announced a 32Gb SLC NAND chip based on the same SaDPT (Self-aligned double patterning technology) manufacturing process. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until 2009 for production to begin. Still, he looks happy dontchathink?
