[BBLISA] Verizon: No p2p blocking

[Robert Keyes]

On Thu, 17 Jun 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

>> From: Jurvis LaSalle [mailto:jurvis at gmail.com]
>>
>>> I've said before that I really like FiOS, partially because they
>> don't do any shenanigans with my traffic, the way RCN or Comcast did
>> when I used them.  And here's an article supporting that claim.  ;-)
>>>
>>> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/verizon-comcast-p2p-
>> blocking-was-wrong-we-wont-do-it.ars
>>
>> RCN did that too?  I've caught them throttling me well below the tier I
>> was being billed, but not shaping my traffic yet.
>
> Before anyone says "why do you whine when they stop providing you service
> they said they wouldn't give you," I want to say this:  isp's petition and
> bid with towns and cities to service those areas, and often one or two isp's
> have a monopoly on service for wherever you are.  If they impose rules you
> don't like, there's nothing you can do about it except move to a different
> town.
>
> I don't know if RCN blocked p2p, but here were my experiences on RCN:
>
> I ran an ssh and http server at home.  One day it stopped working.  They
> suddenly started filtering inbound standard ports ...  So I moved to high
> numbered ports ... And some months later, for the heck of it, I put it back.
> Why the temporary change?  I don't know.

Can you be more specific? If they only blocked http ports, that might have 
been an attempt to stop a worm from propagating. I haven't heard about ssh 
port filtering.

Personally, I have been able to find really good server rental service for 
$25, with unlimited bandwidth and really good uptime. There's just not a 
lot of disk space (only 160GB). I find this keeps me from worrying about 
filtering, crappy service, and power outages. Check 
http://www.serveraday.com for their occasional deals. I have other places 
offering similar service, such as http://www.wholesaleinternet.com, but 
I've been grandfathered in to lower cost tiers on older hardware. They may 
eventually come up with some cheap plans, again, too.

> And my experience on Comcast:
>
> My business paid for business-class cable service, with static IP's.  For
> some reason, comcast filtered inbound port 22, and no matter how much I
> called support or tried to get them to change it, they denied that they do
> it.

Shitty of them to do that, especially on a business class line. I had 
comcast and never had that problem. Comcast seems to vary a lot.

> And my experience with Earthlink:
>
> One of my users has an Earthlink connection in NY city.  He couldn't connect
> to our company VPN.  After about half an hour on the phone with him, we
> figured out that his DNS server was resolving our domain name to the wrong
> IP address.  This intentional DNS poisoning was done by Earthlink, but it's
> also done by opendns.  (Just try this:  nslookup google.com 156.154.70.1 )
> (Ultradns says google.com is 92.242.144.2 which is really one of their own
> servers, they use to relay your queries to google, and they *claim* they
> don't capture or use that information for anything.)

pretty sneaky! I've always run my own authoritative dns for this, among 
other, reasons.

> I also had a user with Verizon DSL at home, who had problems years ago with
> outbound connections to port 25 ... Before 465 or 587 became standard, that
> was a problem.  But I haven't heard of anything like that on verizon since.

Well, port 25 is a problem because of spam. I can see such filtering as 
being reasonable.