Friday, October 19, 2007

Comcast Is Indeed Editing Your Internet Connection

Well, it's verified. Comcast screws around with your internet connection and makes editorial decisions on what you can and can't do with it.

For me, that's a pretty good reason to drop Comcast internet service and find alternative's. For me, it's Qwest (the one phone company that also happens to have told the government to shove it when asked to perform illegal wiretaps, BTW).

From the Associated Press:

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user. Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye."

If my telephone provider told me I was using my unlimited phone service too much, making too many calls to too many people and cut me off because of it (even as they advertised unlimited calls) that's grounds to dump them. Hell, it's grounds for a class action lawsuit if you think about it.

I'm buying internet access from these guys. That means plain old any way I want it to use any program I want to use access. It doesn't mean filtered access. Or access to some things but not other things. As long as I'm not trying to use more of the advertised bandwidth that I'm paying for, I would appreciate you keeping your grubby paws off my bits, thank you very much.

What burns me here is I'm not really much of a P2P user. I don't use bittorrent to find movies and music. I do use Miro to find legal content (and it does use a P2P approach) but that's content that's submitted by the content owners. Is Comcast breaking my connections here to?

I suspect yes. And this is a very legimate, very useful and very well liked (by me) service.

Enough of this crap. Comcast is banned from my house.

Qwest for internet access and Dish Network for TV is the way to go in my book. I may not love Qwest, but I'm reasonably sure they aren't filtering my bits and giving me less than the advertised service I bought based on the services I might use. And Dish give's me more channels with higher quality for less money.

Why didn't I do this sooner?

Everyone should.

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An excellent read from an ex-evangelical.

  As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor and my pastoral career stretched over many years. Eventually, I could no longer t...