[PLUG] VOIP and Comcast

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:25:28 -0800
merlyn at stonehenge.com (Randal L. Schwartz) dijo:

> Just a heads up for local folks... starting a few days ago, I appear to be
> blocked on Comcast for all torrent traffic.  Just tested it with the latest
> ubuntu distro seeded from ubuntu.org, so it's not about "blocking illegal
> content".  I'm on the west side, and I'd be curious to see if it's just me, or
> if others are also noticing this.
> 
> The symptom is that Transmission (on mac) reports "status 0" when it tries
> to contact the tracker.  Normally, this is "status 200", so I imagine
> that Comcast is doing deep packet inspection, recognizing the tracker
> payload, and somehow replacing that with an empty response.

I have a torrent that did not finish but I haven't been trying for the
past couple of days. Just now I launched ktorrent and checked the
tracker window. The torrent in question had two trackers:

torrent-downloads.to:2107/announce
open.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

The first one connects fine. The second one I get "Unable to connect -
unknown error."

The second one sounds illegal just from the name (it's not). I wonder
if Comcast might be blocking just some domains rather than inspecting
packets. That doesn't explain why they think ubuntu.org is an illegal
provider.

I'm on the east side, near the old Kaiser hospital on Greeley (now
Adidas).