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Saturday, December 6, 2008

Shame on you, Charter Communications

Charter Communications is now throttling BT traffic by blocking user connections to seeds. Their tech support staff is unaware of this because they and their supervisors have not been informed.

How do I know this? Because I tested several torrents twice, first unencrypted, then encrypted. Since the torrents identify possible seeds but cannot connect when unencrypted, and can connect when the data is encrypted, Charter is likely using the same (idiotic) choke software used by Comcast, as of a day ago or thereabouts.

Shame on you. I'm a paying customer. You did not notify me that you were changing the product you were selling me.

Unfortunately, you're a local monopoly, because despite the fact that the government paid for your infrastructure, you still (for some reason) have managed to obtain legal ownership of it.

So I'll keep using you, because I have to. But I'll be damned if I won't do absolutely everything I can to make your existence a living hell.

To everyone else out there, in the interest of saving you a few seconds on Google:

Basic instructions for encrypting BT traffic:
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-BitTorrent-traffic/

Azureus (now named Vuze):
http://www.vuze.com/app

On my part, I'm going to load up my torrents at night and max out my bandwidth with encrypted torrents in order to drain as much resources from Charter as I can. I suggest anyone else in the St. Louis area who is reading this do the same.

Charter may, however, choke your bandwidth if they feel that you're using too much of what you paid for. Sometimes I wish I was rich enough to use the U.S. legal system to sue.

huh. Come to think of it I know a bored intellectual property lawyer, I wonder if he's still unemployed and looking for a break. Maybe he'll take percentage-of-winnings.

3 comments:

Marcus Tullius Tiro said...

I've always thought that the existence of 'ambulance chaser' lawyers was one of the best things about our justice system -- if you can convince a lawyer that you have some chance of winning, and that you'll split the settlement, then anyone can afford justice!

-Tiro

Maxwell Evans said...

I believe the defining attribute of an "ambulance chaser" is technically not the method of payment, but that the lawyer goes around trying to convince people they have a court case to play, where they might otherwise just suck it up.

Nonetheless, I never thought of it that way. Good point.

Maxwell Evans said...

incidentally, I believe my sources may have been mistaken about Charter's infrastructure. I'll look into it more but according to an uncle of mine (a lawyer) the money that built it, while probably not Charter's, was private.

I'll edit the article accordingly when I find time to learn more, but when information in my articles is probably incorrect I feel obligated to post a red flag.

The salient point of the article still stands, however.