BitTorrent traffic - THROTTLED-BLOCKED Vista News Discuss BitTorrent traffic - THROTTLED-BLOCKED in the Windows Vista forums; Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com Published: August 20, 2007, 10:46 AM EST It appears that Comcast has stepped up their fight against BitTorrent by outright ...

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Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic
By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: August 20, 2007, 10:46 AM EST


It appears that Comcast has stepped up their fight against BitTorrent by outright cutting off users’ transfers and blocking their ability to seed downloads.

ISPs have been limiting the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now, according to TorrentFreak, and though BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, Comcast’s more aggressive throttling methods can’t be circumvented just as easy.
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Opera fixes 'highly critical' BitTorrent flaw
By Jose Vilches, TechSpot.com
Published: July 20, 2007, 10:52 AM EST

Following the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox update earlier this week, which fixed a total of 8 security issues, Opera has also released a security update addressing six security problems found in its browser.

A 'highly critical' vulnerability found version 9.21 of Opera, caused by the browser's misuse of application memory when removing BitTorrent transfers from the transfer list, can be exploited by malicious users to execute arbitrary code to remotely compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is detailed in an advisory published by iDefense, a subsidiary of Internet and security services provider VeriSign. The problem, plus five other security issues, can be fixed by upgrading to Opera 9.22.


It is reported that Comcast is using an application from Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. Sandvine breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user. This makes it virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any Comcast users.

ISPs have long argued that bandwidth-hungry P2P applications can cripple their network and thus some controls are due in order to make the experience good for all users. However, customers aren’t likely to agree that limiting their internet connections is an acceptable solution.

TorrentFreak says setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only workarounds for Comcast’s throttling methods.