[freenet-chat] TorrentFreak: Comcast/Sandvine block bittorrent seeding

[Aidan Thornton]

On 9/7/07, Florent Daignière <nextgens at freenetproject.org> wrote:
> * Matthew Toseland <toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> [2007-09-07 13:49:26]:
>
> > Seems to be on a traffic analysis level as it works on encrypted bittorrent -
> > I wonder if this would block Freenet?
> >
> > http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic-seeding-impossible/
> > http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18323368-Comcast-is-using-Sandvine-to-manage-P2P-Connections
> >
> > Thanks to whoever originally sent me this URL!
>
> Nothing new as far as I can see ... killing TCP sessions sending out
> RSTs is what China has been doing for years!
>

The interesting bit is how they identify the connections to kill,
particularly if encryption is in use. I reckon they could probably do
most of the stuff they're advertising (most of the time) by monitoring
the unencrypted communication with the tracker. Of course, this could
result in them missing connections - particularly encrypted ones - or
killing ones they shouldn't (for example, if it's set to prevent
seeding and there are peers in common between a torrent a user is
seeding to and one they're leeching from).

Then again, they could be doing some sort of traffic analysis. (Of
course, that'd probably have even more problems.) I think I saw an
interesting comment on /. somewhere about that.

Aidan (a.k.a. makomk)