ISP's War On BitTorrent Hits World of Warcraft 252
jfruhlinger writes "Canadian Internet users have the prospect of a metered Internet looming over their head, and now World of Warcraft players who use Rogers Communications as their ISP are encountering serious throttling. The culprit seems to be Rogers' determination to go after BitTorrent. WoW uses BitTorrent as a utility to update game files — something most users probably aren't even aware of."
This is my suprise face. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'm sure a lot of us saw this coming.
Yup.
Every time there's a story on here about some ISP going after BT traffic, I mention WoW.
Sure, yes, there's a lot of pirated stuff moving across BitTorrent. The big torrent trackers like ThePirateBay are all aimed at piracy... But there's a lot of legitimate traffic moving across BitTorrent as well.
It is a terrific way to reduce the amount of bandwidth you need to distribute something to a large number of people - which is why Blizzard uses it for WoW (does SC2 use it too? Will Diablo 2?) updates. Bu
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perfect example: on my current BT "session" I've uploaded over 60 Gig, every bit of which is completely legal.
I'm seeding Ubuntu and Knoppix ISOs. I seriously hope that they don't "kill" bittorrent, as it is one of the most efficient ways of moving large files around.
In the words of Yamamoto... (Score:2)
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Where do you get your 75% of ? Did you know that 83% of all the statistics are pulled out of YOUR ass ? Anyway, care to think about the bandwidth coming from youtube ? All those facebooking people, playing flash games, uploading pictures ?
Did some digging (Score:5, Informative)
I don't play WOW myself but I hate selective service blocking...found this digging around for a couple of minutes:
Thank you for your letters of February 23rd and 25th, 2011 regarding the impact of Rogers Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) on the interactive game called World of Warcraft.
Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft. We have been in contact with the game manufacturer and we have been working with our equipment supplier to overcome this problem.
We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft. However, there have been recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June.
We have determined that the problem occurs only when our customers are simultaneously using peer-to-peer file sharing applications and running the game. Therefore we recommend turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer. Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution.
We sincerely regret the inconvenience that some of our customers have experienced in playing World of Warcraft and will continue to work with the game supplier and our technology supplier to solve the remaining problems as soon as possible. source [battle.net]
(I have doubts about that portion above in bold.)
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Isn't Blizzard downloader a sharing application for WoW?
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Blizzard downloader is a 2-in-1 http download and bittorrent client.
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Hell, this can be a problem even without caps: if you saturate your upstrea
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Hell, this can be a problem even without caps: if you saturate your upstream with a torrent seed or twenty, or don't think to throttle that big queue of Linux ISOs you're uploading to an FTP, your ping times will go through the roof and Warcraft performance will go straight into the Dalaran sewer.
I don't think the Blizzard patcher allows you to change such settings. I used to play WoW and I swear my ISP was throttling my bandwidth when it came to bittorrent. I almost never used it but to get Linux distros and and WoW patches; I'd see the first five minutes had good bandwidth then it would suddenly drop to lower than dialup speeds. It made getting patches on patch day a pain in the butt especially if a raid was planned. Half the raid would be offline waiting for the patch to download.
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There's an all-or-nothing switch - you can't throttle it or set limits, and of course you can't use your own torrent client to download it.
And the non-p2p download (via HTTP I believe) is slow as fuck, comparatively.
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http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors [wowwiki.com]
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Hasn't Rogers throttled torrent traffic during peak time for a while now? You max out at 30kb/s.
Oh and WoW's shitty torrent client does not play well with slower dsl lines. We used to have a 3mb/768k line and the client would max out my upload and then strangle the download speed to almost nothing. Large updates could take days. I found a program that runs on Windows 7 called Netlimiter where you can throttle bandwidth for individual applications. Now the updater gets limited to 10k up, fuck 'em.
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Hasn't Rogers throttled torrent traffic during peak time for a while now? You max out at 30kb/s.
Holy crap dude... I knew you North Americans had it bad when it came to ISP interference, but that's just awful. As we speak my uTorrent is hitting about 2MByte/sec (which is exactly what my DSL line is rated for - 16MBit) on the latest Simpsons and Family Guy episodes...
Are file upload sites (Rapidshare, Netload and so on) an alternative? Plain HTTP downloads, so no throttling, theoretically?
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BT client works fine for vast majority of people (essentially everyone who has a proper internet connection). For the rest, it's not blizzard's fault, but their ISP's.
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Yea. They can't be bothered to let you type a fucking limit yourself, or yet you use a real client to download the thing.
I think that part is what pisses me off the most. I've posted the suggestion countless times in the bugs forum, been told countless times they would take it under consideration....
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.torrent file for every update is in its own folder. Just open it in utorrent or similar client, select correct update directory and off you go.
Re:Did some digging (Score:4, Informative)
We have determined that the problem occurs only when our customers are simultaneously using peer-to-peer file sharing applications and running the game. Therefore we recommend turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer. Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution.
Are they missing the point or just playing dumb?
For one, their "advice" isn't going to accomplish anything. That's like fixing a broken limb by amputating it.
Secondly, Rogers is the one that's breaking things, so it's their responsibility, not the responsibility of their users. Whether a workaround exists is irrelevant, because they shouldn't be breaking things in the first place.
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It looks like they failed to understand that since the game uses BT you will have a P2P app running when you update it. The idea of using a software fix is very short sighted; what happens when the next game using P2P comes out? Another patch for its P2P traffic? What about video sites that are using it?
Not news.. (Score:2, Informative)
..for most of the rest of the world, where data caps have been in play for some time, if not since the beginning of broadband. Having unmetered data is the exception, not the norm. Calling for boycotts is very funny indeed.
Re:Not news.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No... no it's not.
Just because a large portion of the world has shitty internet, doesn't mean everyone should have shitty internet. It's only funny in the sad/pathetic/hopeless sort of way... just because they let it happen doesn't mean we do. If everyone else drank urine, and we drank water... we'd protest when people started pissing in our faces too...
I'm fine with universally limited bandwidth, ie: Xk/s down, Yk/s up... but throttling specific uses of it is retarded... from 00:00 to 18:00 I can download "normal" things (HTTP, etc) at 1.7MB/s (which also used to apply to torrents), torrents are limited to about 350k/s... between 18:00 and 00:00 it's limited to 120k/s... which isn't terrible, however whichever way my ISP chose to implement it, fucks up everything else at the same time (even if I haven't downloaded any torrents), it turns my cable connection into noisy WiFi... websites that take a few attempts to connect, occasional messenger disconnects, etc. It was "unlimited" for years, till about 2 weeks ago.
I wouldn't have much of a problem with that either, except they still charge the same price for basically half the connection. No real alternatives either except to rent a higher package from the same ISP (to get speeds that the current plan says it provides), or switch the ISP which also means switching the connection to WiFi, or Satellite... both of which are useless, regardless of whatever arbitrary speed in some other country may be.
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See, the thing is, throttling only makes sense on unlimited connections. If you charge customers for bandwidth, the motivation for throttling goes away - you want them to use more bandwidth so you can bill them more. The rest of the world has perfectly fine internet - its the US/Canada that has shitty internet, because the payment models you demand fly in the face of reality, and your government-endorsed telco monopolists screw with your connection as a result.
I'd much rather my 500GB-capped, free-for-all c
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I'd much rather pay for a rate percentile commit. It works fine at the DC, but for some reason the "classic" ISPs can't figure it out.
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Here in Sweden, unlimited, unthrottled Internet is the norm. I pay less than 400 Swedish crowns (about US$60) per month for 100 Mbit/s up/down. And that's including the 25% sales tax.
Our telecom market is very unregulated ever since the government abolished the monopoly.
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I think we can all agree that the ideal plan is one where you pay per usage, but have the ability to set and change daily/monthly/continuous limits, with no commitment, and in an environment where you can switch to a different provider at the drop of a hat.
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Just because a large portion of the world has shitty internet, doesn't mean everyone should have shitty internet. It's only funny in the sad/pathetic/hopeless sort of way... just because they let it happen doesn't mean we do. If everyone else drank urine, and we drank water... we'd protest when people started pissing in our faces too...
You see, seems to me that one may finish in needing to make a choice between "eating" unlimited amount of crappy bandwidth or "drinking the piss" of paying for how much you download without bandwidth compromises.
'Cause I can't see how "unlimited download with unlimited bandwidth" is economically sustainable - not in the near future.
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'Cause I can't see how "unlimited download with unlimited bandwidth" is economically sustainable - not in the near future.
My ISP sure seems to be making a profit despite my unmetered 100/100 Mbps FTTH connection.
But then I'm not in the US or some other country where the ISPs have managed to fool people into thinking that this couldn't be profitable...
For non-Canadians, let me explain that Rogers..... (Score:4, Informative)
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At least they wrote a book, it's kinda impossible to get anything written or otherwise binding out of my ISP...
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Re:Telus... (Score:2)
Telus is also in competition with regards to lousy service, but then so is Shaw.
What is a shame is that the various cable/internet providers have been allowed to carve up the market in such a manner as to avoid competition for the most part. Here in Victoria, your choices are Shaw or Telus. By agreement Rogers does not compete in the internet market here, just as Shaw agreed to not compete in other cities. They divvied up the market between them and for the longest time there was no competition at all. Telu
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Thankfully Bell has apparently dropped its push to go for metered billing...
Nope, they've just changed the name of it to Aggregated Volume Pricing (AVP). From Michael Geist's blog: "Bell obviously saw the writing on the wall and has come back with a plan that allows independent ISPs to purchase 1 TB of data for $200 with an overage charge of 29.5 cents per GB."
That's data that the ISP already pays for. Bell wants to double-dip.
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Compared to Rogers, Comcast is eligible for canonization.
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Our office has a Comcast business line (while we wait for some jackass to hurry up and fix our broken fiber) - several times a day, our latency spikes up to - in some cases - 15 fucking seconds.
MTR graphs show this latency spike is always in the middle of Comcast's local network. ... I think once you get past the first few circles of Hell, it doesn't really matter how evil you are compared to your neighbors.
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Unfortunately, Illegal != Does not exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponsorship_scandal [wikipedia.org]
One of many examples of our illustrious politicians throwing handfuls of money at their friends. Some of which they see back via "fundraising". It's our form of corporate contributions, and even though it's limited it still stains politics.
We've an election very soon and I feel there is no one to vote for that isn't either corrupt or bat-shit crazy (or both). :(
WOW and other games affected (Score:4, Insightful)
If I'm not mistaken, the torrent aspect of WOW also extends to its normal gameplay connection since Cataclysm. In that they altered their network traffic protocols which resulted in high ping times for users of various ISPs. I think RIFT has the same issues with its traffic being delayed by ISP traffic management software because it sees it as P2P traffic.
I think this is an example of how the witchhunt against pirates and the reluctance to upgrade systems to meet consumer demand will hurt innovation and use of the internet overall.
My understanding is developers are making these protocol changes because they are more efficient - except they are being blocked by ISPs.
Sadly, we do need government regulation to keep the playing fields level, and to ensure that we see continued growth and development of various industries over the Internet. If every ISP employs the same measures, and smaller providers must follow the traffic restrictions of their own larger providers, there is no Choice and Free Market to influence the behaviour of these corporations. It is also clear that these corporations are working hand in hand with IP Holders such as the MPAA and the RIAA. So there is no decoupling of the various business considerations.
I'm not sure why Anti-Monopoly and Anti-Trust laws haven't kicked in yet to prevent what is obviously destructive to competition and a free market. Perhaps Rogers wants Blizzard to knock on its doors and offer money to allow WOW traffic to flow unimpeded?
We may all need to pay a separate VPN provider to play our MMORPGs and other games in the future. Then they'll probably spend MILLIONS developing software that can inspect VPN packets and determine if it's likely to be gaming, video, or torrents. Instead, of course, in spending those millions in upgrading infrastructure.
Make no mistake, none of these companies are strapped for cash. None of them would be pushed to the brink by the use of World of Warcraft, Torrents, or Netflix across their networks. They post >40% profits.
Re:WOW and other games affected (Score:5, Informative)
(I'm a UI AddOn developer for World of Warcraft. I also work on anonymous P2P software, and actively research and develop censorship evasion techniques. I do not work for Blizzard.)
You are mistaken. So, in fact, are Rogers (and so also were Virgin Media UK). This is a fault in their traffic classifiers.
These traffic classifiers actually see the normal connection to the WoW servers as "P2P traffic" simply because it's encrypted and it can't recognise it - that's right, they're throttling everything they don't explicitly recognise, and they haven't whitelisted traffic to the Blizzard servers (which is silly, because the IP addresses are well-known). This is the same issue that hit Virgin Media when they tried a similar "throttle everything we don't recognise" policy, and the simple solution is to stop being such an asshat by doing that.
At worst, only the web-seed (a single outbound HTTP connection to Akamai) remains connected in current versions of the Blizzard Launcher while you actually play; in particular it closes the upload connections. It does that to save your ping, and the connection remains open if you are still streaming content while you play - but that's all Akamai HTTP traffic, not torrent. If your bar is green, when you close the launcher, even that closes.
Recognised VPN traffic is also detected and they've tried to throttle it on Rogers, according to my data.
The trouble is that they probably don't realise that this kind of thing, and the kind of (closely-related) incredibly sophisticated censorship system in place in, say, Iran, is simply a driver for the development of network protocols that lack the usual traffic analysis markers you'd use to classify and censor, throttle or prioritise them, and in turn, the wrapping of those protocols in steganographic network transports. Want to make your connection look like SSH, or TLS? No problem. HTTP? Sure. I can make it harder to recognise with less computational power than you'd need to try to recognise it. Go ahead, spend millions - won't help against a mimic function. It increases the overhead a little, but not as much as throttling or blocking affects it, so in the long run, all you'll do is choke your pipes more, because you're being an asshat.
Please, if you're going to manage traffic, shape it sensibly. Prioritise, don't block or throttle. Have enough overhead to allow people to use the internet how they wish, and use easy, sensible traffic shaping techniques to increase the performance of the network for everyone, by reducing buffer bloat and latency for quick protocols, supporting ECN properly, letting uTP be nice to you, but do have enough network backbone to allow the traffic to flow. Spend the money on more bandwidth. Or things are really going to suck for you in the coming years - because if you can't play with your toys nicely, we'll take them away.
Nonsense (Score:3, Funny)
Everyone knows that Torrents are only used for illegal file sharing.
Friend's Wireless Provider (Score:3)
Anyways, his terms of service explicitly forbid Bit Torrent and after three days of their service he was disconnected. He called up their tech support line and their first question was, "Well do you play WoW?" After he answered yes, they re-enabled his service and apologized for the inconvenience.
Bit Torrent = Evil except when it keeps people paying their ISP bill...
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When I say wireless, I don't mean cellular and I don't mean wifi, it's some local provider for some corner of our county delivering wireless internet on a licensed spectrum.
The actual term for this is "fixed wireless".
The More You Know
Encryption (Score:2)
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That's special.
What about wrapping it in HTTPS? HTTPS is HTTPS, there's no way to know the internal content without having both keys, and that isn't going to happen. ... and I don't expect that's going to fly very well.
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This is censorship, plain and simple (Score:2)
Old news (Score:2)
This is pretty much old news, this has been seen ever since Cataclysm was released.
http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/01/14/the-lawbringer-net-neutrality-and-mmos/ [joystiq.com]
I believe the issue is mostly that the deep packet inspection kit that the ISPs use to classify and throttle/shape traffic are unable to distingush between Warcraft traffic and Bittorrent traffic since the changes made for Cataclysm, until signatures/filters/etc are updated to classify the traffic correctly, but in many cases they seem to be taking their
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And also worth adding:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1568009046?page=1 [battle.net]
Discussions regarding bittorrent throttling at Rogers affecting Warcraft from mid-December.
Why should they pay to distribute WoW patches? (Score:2)
That's what they're thinking. But, like it or not, metered Internet - properly, fairly metered Internet - is the solution to this problem.
ISPs should be selling you A Chunk of Data. They can figure out how much they should sell you based on their recorded average usage patterns, figure out prices, and then tell you that you get X GB per month for $Y.
And then their job is to fuck RIGHT off, and let you use it any way you see fit. You want to use it to download 1 megabyte of email a month, fine. You want to b
As long as... (Score:2)
I f configured properly, WoW can be played with no slow down what so ever, as the file is downloaded in the background, and will be installed once fully loaded, so if it takes 5 minutes instead of 1, who cares...i guess they are trying to get more to see there is a potential problem, but we all knew that already. Do not let them throttle your connection for any reason, as you pay for a service for xxx bandwidth and xxx speed....for the price you pay....unless they want to give you credit every time they thr
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It'll bleed over into the US soon enough.
The MafiAA usually try out their latest "fuck the consumer" crap in Canadia before they bring it down here. The Canadians aren't used to fighting back.
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Wouldn't it be better to try this in France?
*ducks*
DADVSI and HADOPI (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be better [for the RIAA and MPAA] to try this [latest "fuck the consumer" crap] in France?
They already are. What do you think DADVSI and HADOPI are?
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How many tries did it take to get your DMCA passed?
They've tried 3 times to get it through here, and all three times it's failed; the first two because of citizen backlash.
The third time was because the government was just brought down in a non-confidence vote.
<sarcasm>Another election! Yay!! </sarcasm>
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Or, alternatively, we keep the sheep addicted to the virtual world, the ISP somehow decides to recognize gaming as a legitimate use of the network, they refuse to throttle the bandwidth for something that isn't illegal, and we get to keep our p2p channels open as a result.
More likely, I think, a middle ground would be for Blizzard to somehow use a nonstandard port for their torrent activity, and then the ISPs throttle p2p traffic on ports that aren't that one. Yes, the rest of us probably get around that b
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I have a better idea: just don't throttle anything based on the protocol used.
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Re:too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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You do know your audience.
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So you'd rather they spent their time on /. ?
Are you entirely deranged?
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In case you don't see the point, they are punishing the tool for its (mis)use. P2P and bittorrent do, as this shows, have very legal and very useful purposes. Yes, it's used to distribute files illegally, but it can also be used legally.
Should we outlaw something or allow companies to arbitrary label tools illegal just because some people abuse them?
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I've seen illegal copies of music on web pages, and look at all the stuff on Youtube that shouldn't be there. I've seen people selling many questionable things out of their cars. Planes are frequently used to smuggle illegal drugs. Hell, you can find stores selling stuff that they're not supposed to be selling in the 'right' parts of the world. Shut all those down too by removing the tools?
If we can just get *most* of the things on bittorrent to be legal, maybe...naw, the music industry has to have a sc
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... bbbuut it's THE INTERNET! It's different! (... somehow?)
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I've seen people selling many questionable things out of their cars. Planes are frequently used to smuggle illegal drugs. Hell, you can find stores selling stuff that they're not supposed to be selling in the 'right' parts of the world. Shut all those down too by removing the tools?
So you're fighting to make lock pick sets legal in all fifty states now? And you're standing in line to make all guns legal too? And I know all phallus shaped vibrators are next to receive your ringing endorsement and active protests.
Realistically, there actually are important things which should be receiving your attention, which are literally protected by the US Constitution, and yet frequently outlawed by the weak minded who seem completely incapable of understanding the US' most important document. At l
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music and lock picks have been "outlawed" because the vast majority of uses are, in fact, illegal.
I don't know what "music" you're talking about, but lock picks are legal in all states (some states require locksmith license) because they recognize that people only think they're used for illegal purposes. Television has made the perception that criminals use them, but a kick to the door, crowbar, brick to the window, and bolt cutter to the padlock are the real burglar tools. Why would a criminal spend several minutes to an hour to pick a lock when some property damage gets them instant access? Lock pi
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I don't know what "music" you're talking about
Don't know what you're talking about.
but lock picks are legal in all states (some states require locksmith license)
Only when licensed. If you are unlicensed, you are arrested. Furthermore, many states require background checks to receive your license. And worse, some states require sign-off by a law enforcement official. The point remains, they are illegal unless you go through great leaps to be allowed to legally own. Are you suggesting we should all be licensed to be allowed to use bit torrent? That's they only way your statement seems to make any sense.
Why would a criminal spend several minutes to an hour to pick a lock when some property damage gets them instant access?
Why are 98% of all crimes co
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That implies that the ISP cares about whether the bits are legal or not. I don't think they do. What they care about is having to actually give people the bandwidth they paid for.
Make $HIGH_BW_PROTOCOL so slow that people just don't bother, save money on not upgrading routers and not paying for bandwidth. Funnel extra profit to CEO. win.
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Boycott them anyway. At least you won't be one of the ones they charge "a hell of a lot more" to.
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The problem is, their customers don't have a lot of places to go.
I've only visited Canada a few times, but even I know it is mostly Bell for DSL, or Rogers for cable in the ground with some resellers on top.
You probably will be paying the two mentioned above atleast a line or termination fee.
So their isn't much to choose.
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If I had mod points, I'd mod you up... Instead, I'll just say "thank you, I didn't know that's how it worked"
I'm a Comcast customer in the US, and I'm watching this closely as I'm sure it's bound to affect me one way or another. I wonder if we've got any of these "leased last mile" alternative providers.
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And understanding the article, you would realize that the updater runs while the game is being played. The current World of Warcraft client updates during play as well as before, allowing the player to get in game faster. The updater IS a bittorrent client.
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I'm with Rogers and I've seen this a lot. For me, it's not about high latency, it's an auto-disconnect. If a torrent download starts while the game is on, you get disconnected, full stop. Very annoying, especially since we've asked about it before and they basically said that we were idiots who didn't know how to set router priorities.
I'd be inclined to agree. You did connect your uplink to Rogers, for example.
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There is a dirty hack you can do with rate limiting to apply QoS at the router, but it is very ugly and means sacrificing a small amount of capacity even under ideal conditions.
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What's more, this is affecting ervices like PSN and XBox Live, but because WoW is just so huge, it's the one attracting all the attention.
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If people run torrents (the WoW updater) their connection is throttled. If they run WoW with a throttled connection, there is a problem. If they don't run WoW with a throttled connection, there is no problem.
Either way, the connection is throttled. It's just that if you don't play WoW during it you're less likely to notice.
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That's what I meant. If you use bittorrent, you get throttled. You only notice it if you play WoW, so their solution is to tell people not to play WoW (or any game) so they won't notice. It's not a solution at all, they're just telling their customers to cover their eyes so they won't see the problem.
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So you mean they respond to torrent traffic by throttling everything? WTF!?
Is this some $40 Traffic "Shaper" they have patched into their network!? They can't throttle the specific connections or protocols that are objectionable?
Re:F..... Rogers/Bell (Score:4, Informative)
I just switched to TekSavvy Cable, which is being rolled out in a few metro areas. No throttling, no spurious RST packets. For the first time in years, I can download torrents reliably and play on Xbox Live without timeouts... This is like old-school broadband, before the telcos started filtering everything to shit.
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but you do know that most Linux distros also use bittorrent to distribute, right?
Roger that. But guess what? Rogers don't give a fuck about Linux, not for their customers at least.
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Jidgo is pretty damn slick!
Re:Sources? (Score:5, Informative)
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Please keep your 4chan, anon, worthless shit on /b/. You and Anonymous are a waste of packets.
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Yea, and your 40 minute update (with p2p on and a non-retarded ISP) baloons to hours, if not over a day.
Sounds like a good trade to me! ...
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Without the BitTorrent feature in the updater on you can look forward to spending many hours downloading the latest content patch (and don't even think of doing a reinstall and downloading all patches since release at once, that will take you days since the http connection to Blizzard's server will be dog-slow).
Of course, if you're on DSL or some other connection with piss-poor upstream speeds you're screwed anyway since the Blizzard updater doesn't play nice with your upstream, it just goes full out (thus
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For the record, "bloodsail admiral" is considered an awesome title in WoW. And it comes with an awesome pirate suit.
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They have only "Save the children" or "Save the entertainment cartels" on their minds. Well, what little minds they have, anyway.
They've got their minds on their money and their money on their minds. Except when they've got their minds on their power and their power on their minds.
Everything else, particularly people, are either a means to an end or an obstacle to be rolled over or bought off.
Much of the problem is with a society that tolerates, even rewarding and celebrating, such ruthlessness, greed, and amorality as demonstrated over the last 100 years or so by those in government.
It *can* be changed and even reversed, *if* the ma