The Real-time Applications & Infrastructure (RAI) Area of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) will hold a workshop on P2P Infrastructure on May 28, 2008 at 50 Vassar St, Room 34-101 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA USA. They are calling for papers to be submitted before May 9. Continue reading
p2p
Comcast and BitTorrent announce pact
Mar 27: Comcast and BitTorrent today issued a joint press-release where they announced a collaborative effort to move beyond the current ‘reset spoofing‘ hooha. While Comcast will migrate by year-end 2008 to a capacity management technique that is “protocol agnostic”, BitTorrent agreed to develop fresh “optimizations” that will promoted as application standards.
Both BitTorrent and Comcast expressed the view that these technical issues can be worked out through private business discussions without the need for government intervention. Continue reading
Microsoft limits P2P connects in XP/Vista, eyes ‘greener’ P2P for Windows 7
In the current P2P world, torrenters and the like are discovering that a recent Windows-update – included in XP service pack 3, and Vista – alters the tcpip.sys file that governs Windows tcp behavior to limit users to just 10 ‘half open‘ connections at any one time. This could be a response to the concerns raised by cable ISP’s like Comcast that’s DOCSIS-based networks break down when clients use over-multitudinous connections. Needless to say, as the word spreads, workarounds to undo MS’s changes are proliferating.
A Mar 17 article in BetaNews notes the aptly-timed announcement that, for the forthcoming Windows 7, Microsoft is contemplating adding such features as metered connections, distributed hash tables, and something called ‘green P2P’. The article notes that Windows Vista already includes an IPv6-based P2P-enabling technology known as Teredo. Continue reading
Flow Rate Fairness: Dismantling a Religion
Network engineer Richard Bennett’s new article for The Register: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet explores the difference between the way the EFF wants to see the the Internet managed and current discussions under way in the IETF.
Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one. Continue reading
ipoque Internet Study 2007
An analysis of Internet traffic by German Internet traffic management systems provider ipoque has found that Skype accounts for 95 percent of all VoIP traffic on the net in a large part of the World, but P2P is the dominant consumer of bandwidth, accounting for over 90 percent of Internet bandwidth during the night. Continue reading
Record labels *didn’t do* technology in the 90’s
An article in the current Wired, not online, interviews Universal Records CEO Doug Morris. Doug reveals to just what extent the major record labels exhibited ostrich-like behavior when confronted with napster etc. in the late 90’s. Continue reading
MPAA University ‘Toolkit’ Raises Privacy Concerns
 An Washington Post article by Brian Krebs details a new piece of spyware that the MPAA are trying to foist on universities. Krebs had the ‘University Toolkit’ tested by security experts and concludes that it is full of holes that could allow third parties to view the gathered information. Continue reading
VIDEO DISTRIBUTOR TO FCC: STOP ISP TRAFFIC ‘THROTTLING’
A distributor of online video content has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission, asking the agency to stop broadband providers from blocking or slowing peer-to-peer traffic. The petition filed by Vuze, which uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol to distribute Web content, asks the FCC to set rules for network management by ISPs. Continue reading
COMCAST SUBSCRIBER SUES OVER INTERNET FILE-SHARING INTERFERENCE
A San Francisco Bay area subscriber to Comcast Corp.’s high-speed Internet service has sued the company, alleging it engages in unfair business practices by interfering with subscribers’ file sharing. The subscriber based his claims on the results of an investigation by the Associated Press published last month that showed Philadelphia-based Comcast actively interferes with attempts some high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online. Mark N. Todzo, the lead lawyer in the case, said his client suspected before reading the AP report that Comcast was interfering with his Internet traffic. “What the AP report did was just confirm to him that it wasn’t just him who was suffering from the problem,” Todzo said. “There was this confluence of events where everyone seemed to reach the same conclusion, which was that Comcast was engaging in this activity.” Continue reading