Bringing it

Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected

I saw this story yesterday, but forgot to start the blog until today, so here it goes. I frequent about 8 different websites, arstechnica being one of my favorites because all of the stories are pretty interesting and well written.

To sum up this story, Comcast has been accused of many different things recently, and being the #1 cable provider in the country its a pretty big deal. On top of backing out on some of their "unlimited" speed claims, or basically setting a limit whenever someone is actually utilizing the "unlimited" offer, they have been known to throttle traffic in an attempt to block illegal file sharing. When this wasn't really working, they outright blocked certain protocols such as BitTorrent, which has a large following as a legal means to distribute large files.
Yesterday it was found that not only was BitTorrent being tampered with, but also the Gnutella network, which is utilized by the infamous LimeWire application, amongst many others. Comcast disguises their musings well, as sometimes customers will be able to use these as they wish, and others they just totally break down.

The biggest problem, the one really focused on in the article, was that in Comcast's efforts to block illegal file sharing, they have ended up blocking certain groupware programs, such as Lotus Notes, which has no ties to anything illegal at all. This is when it goes too far, as it can be agreed by most that BitTorrent and Gnutella are primarily used for evil, even if not always. But in this case, Lotus Notes is commercial software that should be functioning regardless of the ISP. Hopefully Comcast gets their act together, but it'll probably take a bigger story for anyone other than the Internet elite to really care that much.

Basically I just summed up the article, hopefully I'll get better at this blogging thing and add more of my own thoughts to this.