The report shows that Netflix accounts for 29.7% of traffic in the US at peak times, and 22% throughout the whole day. Torrenting topped out at 21%, and this time the number is even down from what it was last fall. The report shows Netflix and streaming of audio and video in general to have increased 445 within the last year or so. People are starting to consume their media online instead of watching it on TV.

Hollywood should approve of this. These numbers mean that people are beginning to stream their videos instead of torrenting. Because, of course, we all know that the only reason for bit torrent’s existence is piracy, right? Well, not quite, but that’s what Holly wood as a whole seems to believe. The fact that Netflix is getting bigger and torrenting has taken even a slight downturn should be thrilling.

The numbers show a trend toward more online streaming. This gives ISPs an idea of what they have to look forward to in the future. People are going to want more and more bandwidth as the way they consume entertainment changes.
The problem with this whole thing is that ISPs, mostly due to the few people who do torrent on a regular basis, have begun putting in caps. In the states, even the major ISPS who arguably have lots of bandwidth to spare are debating putting in caps anywhere from 150-250 GB.

Even in Canada, where Netflix has been hugely successful since it arrived in September, some of the major DSL ISPs are debating bandwidth caps of 25 GB. If you’re streaming video, you could go through that in a day. Netflix has already had to lower the quality of its streaming in Canada to deal with the bandwidth caps. Canadian ISPs say that the current infrastructure just isn’t meant to handle the amount of internet traffic people are asking for, and that problem is only going to get worse.

Netflix is becoming a major source of internet traffic in the US and in Canada, at least. The big movie companies are thrilled with this, because it means that their seven year battle to get movies off of the torrent sites might actually be showing results. But, partially as a reaction to that battle, ISPs are now putting in caps to control how much bandwidth one user can get. I’m thinking this isn’t quite the outcome the Hollywood companies expected …

What are your thoughts? Do you have bandwidth caps in place that make it difficult to do everything online that you would like? Do you watch a lot of online media? How much bandwidth do you think you use every month? What do you think would be a good solution for Netflix and the ISPs?

IPv6 offers a larger address space. The move from IPv4 to IPv6 is difficulty as it requires a coordinated effort from all parties including Internet users. Users with improperly configured computers may experience slowdowns, timeouts or other connectivity issues when the Internet moves to the IPv6 protocol.

Will you have troubles? You can find out if you run the IPv6 test. The test is an Open Source script that runs using JavaScript. Just visit the website http://test-ipv6.com and wait until the test has finished. The IPv6 test runs a series of tests including the browser’s IPv4 and IPv6 capabilities, IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity with and without DNS records and a test that checks if the ISP’s DNS server uses IPv6.

A click on test data reveals details about the tests.

Another click on Technical Info leads to a page that offers technical information about each test which may provide clues to troubleshoot the issue.

The most important test at this point in time for the majority of users is the dual stack test. There will be a transition period where websites and services can be reached via IPv4 or IPv6. The user’s computer now needs to pick one of the protocols and use it for the connection which means that devices that only support IPv4 at this time can still connect to the websites. Connectivity issues occur if this is broken.

Major services and websites will switch to IPv6 for a 24 hour period on World IPv6 day on June 8. Among them Google, Facebook and Yahoo. That’s where the dual stack DNS record support can be tested in a life environment.

The controversial system collected the URLs of websites visited by its customers and the ISP failed to inform either its customers or the ICO before its launch.

Mark Schmid, TalkTalk’s Director of Communication said in a statement “We were simply looking at the urls accessed from our network, we weren’t looking at customer behaviour so we didn’t feel we were obliged to inform customers.  This is all about protecting customers. It is not designed to provide us with data for any other purpose.”

The system scanned the websites visited by TalkTalk customers to aid the company in detailing websites that could contain malware or viruses.

British Telecom had proposed a similar service called Webwise which was heavily criticised by the British public.  BT also conducted trials without informing customers which led to accusations of intercepting private data.

Online privacy is an issue of which the public is becoming increasingly aware, which can only be a positive thing.

Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

The interesting question will be how they will pick the customers that will receive the warnings. Will they actively monitor P2P networks, will they only react when the BPI sends them a list, will they verify those lists ? What about false positives ? Someone who is download music from Jamendo using the Bittorrent protocol. Will he receive a warning as well ? What about secure Usenet connections ? IRC, FTP, file hosts. How the hell will they be able to determine that a file that is being transferred is indeed a copyright violation ? Filenames alone are without doubt not the safest way of determining that. So, how will they do that ?

My second assumption would be that Virgin Media could have some ties with the BPI or a company that is a member of the BPI. I really do not have enough time to research this so if anyone could help me out it would be appreciated.

I usually restart my router to be on the safe side but that’s it. Sometimes you can make a connection to the Internet but that connection feels slow, you get disconnections and websites that are not loading properly.

One way to find out if the problem is located on your side is to perform a tracert command to the target server. If that tracert times out you pretty much know the IP address of the server responsible for that along with information about the country the server is in.

This is also the basic approach of Hubble, a service that monitors Internet reachability in real-time. Instead of using one tracert at a time they send out more than 100k every 15 minutes to monitor reachability problems throughout the world using a Google Maps mashup to provide a map of so called black holes, meaning servers that are unresponsive or have a reduced reachability.

The interesting information for the users are the IP addresses or ranges of those servers and the country column of the table. Sorting the column by country reveals problematic server at a glance which can help determining if the problem is located at your end.

The web application is simulating a Bittorrent transfer between the user’s computer and the web server the application is running from to determine if the ISP is tampering with the Bittorrent traffic. The test can detect if the ISP is throttling all Bittorrent traffic, throttling all traffic at well known Bittorrent ports or throttling Bittorrent traffic at well known Bittorrent ports.

The user has the choice to perform a full test that takes roughly seven minutes or a fast test that lasts four minutes. The servers seem to be overrun currently by worldwide users and it might happen that you will receive a message that the servers are currently busy.

If you take a look at the results map you will notice a high concentration of ISPs that are throttling Bittorrent traffic in the United States and Singapore.

All blocked transfers were observed in the upstream direction (i.e., when the client host attempted to upload data to one of our Glasnost servers). No host observed blocking for downstream BitTorrent transfers.

We found widespread blocking of BitTorrent transfers only in the U.S. and Singapore. Interestingly, even within these countries, blocking was observed by hosts belonging to a handful of large ISPs.

The Danes and Brits seem to have tested the web application intensively because their countries are almost not visible anymore. What about your ISP, is it throttling Bittorrent traffic ?

This brings up some interesting moral but also legal questions. Website owners have no idea, and obviously no control, that ads are displayed on their websites. The problem here is that they probably do not have the means to verify that ads are displayed either unless someone would come up with a log that showed which websites have been affected by this practice. Customers however are on the other end of the spectrum. Their traffic is meddled with and are shown ads that are probably specifically targeted to increase the success rate.

Some ISP names have been published by the researchers already: RedMoon, Mesa Networks, MetroFi and XO Communications with the last being one of the largest ISPs in the country and only in that list because of a smaller reseller according to an XO spokesman. It will be interesting to access the full list of Internet Service Providers that inject ads in websites without their customers consent.

Update: The topic of injecting ads into websites that their customers visit has really caused that much of a public outcry than it should have. Most newspapers and news agencies, even technology related ones, have not covered ad injection by Internet Service Providers ever since it first became known.

ISPs use a variety of techniques to prevent their clients from using P2P networks like Bittorrent. Limiting the clients bandwidth is just one of them. Other techniques limit the bandwidth during a certain period of the day, prevent the user from downloading files with the .torrent extension, prevent seeding while some even cause unresolvable NAT problems.

The developers of the Bittorrent client Azureus have created a plugin for their application that gathers information “relating to network interference, in particular, to shed light on which ISPs are forging RST packets. Every ten minutes, the plug-in detects from your computer the number of reset tcp connections, and then displays the results to you.”

Those information can then be anonymously shared with a central server which in return leads to an updated table of Bad ISPs but also gives the Bittorrent community more firepower against those ISPs.

I like the second sentence on the page with the table, it says: “If you are using one of the following ISPs, please consider finding a new, better one.” That’s exactly what one should do and what I would consider doing even if I would not be affected by it.

The United States, Canada and the United Kingdom lead the table currently with several ISPs that impose some sort of restrictions on their users. Interesting read.

We all remember that AOL released similar data last year using a weak method to anonymize the data. It was possible to identify certain users that were conducting specific searches. The exact nature of the data that is being sold to the marketing companies is not known yet. Experts estimate that the ISPs receive about $0.40 per month per user which totals to $4.80 per year.

An ISP with 10000 users would gain $48000 per year for the data that they sell. Enough money to forget about the privacy rights of their customers. The question remains: how can you find out if your ISP is selling clickstream data ? You could try and call them and ask them directly but the guys from the hotlines probably do not even know what clickstream data is. A better way would be to call a representative or a official data protection officer.

The only possible way to counter this would be to use encryption, specifically encrypted vpns that make it impossible for the ISP to log what their users are doing.

Piratebay also published the php code of the script that blocks the ISP from accessing the website and asks other sites to join in and ban that ISP. Infocider took the liberty to translate the press release into English. The intention seems to be to convince customers of Perspektiv to change the ISP because of their ban of the Russian mp3 website allofmp3.

Do you think that this will work ? I’m not sure yet, if enough websites join the party it could work. Would be interesting to know how many of the users of Perspektiv are actually using the Piratebay. Can you fight fire with fire or should you better try and eliminate the oxygen instead ?

I think another method would be to use a similar script to inform the users of that ISP of what their ISP is doing and offer them ways to change to another ISP. Integrate a ISP search script, think that would actually work better.