Bus error: Jake Billo’s weblog

From a HowardForums post, I’ve found out that the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic is seeking comments from people affected by Bell or Rogers’ throttling. This refers to Bell’s global limitation of about 30K/s for BitTorrent, and Rogers areas affected by Ellacoya/Sandvine boxes.

I’ve written Robert Hester an email about my own experiences on TekSavvy, which I’ll repost below. If you’ve been affected by this nonsense, it might be worth your while to write in before a decision is made in September.

Hi Robert,

I read a post from a CIPPIC alias on HowardForums (http://howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1406593) and figured I’d contribute my experiences with Bell’s internet throttling.

I’m a Computer Science student in Waterloo, Ontario, and currently subscribe to TekSavvy - a Bell DSL reseller. I chose them because I consider Bell Sympatico service to be substandard in the market: Bell’s technical support is lacking at best, they limit bandwidth usage to 60GB per month, and they don’t offer additional features such as static IP addresses.

Bell has applied throttling to their wholesale customers including TekSavvy, specifically for P2P protocols such as BitTorrent. When this network management is active - which I find tends to be more than twelve hours out of every day - my BitTorrent download speeds are limited to 30-50KB/s. This is a far cry from the 5Mbit (~500KB/s) service that I pay for.

What really disappoints me is that an independent reseller has to suffer because Bell unilaterally decides to squash competition. Unfiltered P2P and unlimited bandwidth usage are key competitive features that I’m willing to pay for. When a third party like Bell decides that they can’t compete and uses technical restrictions to bring other services down to the same level of reduced functionality, I’d go as far to say it’s an unfair trade practice. In my opinion: if this practice is not currently illegal, it should be.

I have no objection to reasonable network management, but reducing download speeds to 10% of their potential based on a transmission protocol is far from reasonable.

Thanks for your time and consideration on this important issue. Please feel free to contact me at the email address or phone number below if you require anything else.

Jake Billo
jake@jakebillo.com
http://jakebillo.com/
519-279-4009

This post discusses tools that can, but are not designed to, aid copyright infringement. Leaving aside potential legal issues, this post is intended to serve an educational purpose and merely describes already available services and software.

As part of my consulting business, I’m often asked to suggest alternatives for popular P2P programs like Kazaa and Morpheus. The first thing I mention is that I no longer support LimeWire, which is a P2P client that uses the Gnutella network. Unfortunately, most search results for any popular keywords contain pornography, trojan executables or MediaSentry “fake” files. Executing one of these files can do significant damage to a system, on the level of installing “MSN Block Checker” or similar software.

Just a note, for those reading: “MSN Block Checker” is a trojan that preys on people wanting to find out who blocked their account on MSN/Windows Live Messenger. There is no way to do this, since online status changes are sent by Microsoft. You can’t find out who blocked you with client software.

MSN Block Checker and its ilk necessitate a complete Windows reinstallation, and generally you can’t run a “repair” procedure. Systems can become reinfected just by viewing an old Windows folder with a shellcode exploit. We recommend a complete system wipe (deleting the original partition) and reinstallation for this particular problem, followed by disabling MSN file transfers and applying a limited user account for the teenager involved.

There are three P2P alternatives that I generally offer to clients who ask. Continue reading ‘No more LimeWire: what other options do I have?’ »