Comcast has been telling the press that its not interfering with its users' traffic, it's just "delaying" it. Let's examine that proposition for a moment. In previous posts to our Deeplinks blog, we discussed Comcast's forging of TCP RST packets to kill users' connections on BitTottent, Gnutella and Lotus Notes. To see just how disingenuous Comcast is being, consider the following analogy:

Alice wants to speak to Bob. Alice telephones Bob and hears someone answer the phone in Bob's voice. That voice says, "I'm sorry Alice, I don't want to talk to you," and hangs up. Except, it wasn't actually Bob who answered the phone, it was Comcast using a special device to impersonate Bob's voice. Comcast might describe this as "delaying" Alice and Bob's conversation on the theory that perhaps they'll keep calling each other until some day when Comcast isn't using its special device. Comcast may also invoke the theory that Alice will call other people who are a lot like Bob but aren't on Comcast's network, so her conversation will only be delayed.

If "delaying" traffic was Comcast's private intent, it was clearly making absurd and frequently incorrect assumptions about the protocols it was jamming. No doubt that is how Comcast wound up blocking Lotus Notes.

Comcast should come clean. The company should explain what it's doing and explain in precise and detailed terms why it's doing it. If Comcast does that, the technical community will be able to evaluate its arguments properly, decide whether they've got any basis at all, and (we're just guessing here) explain to Comcast how to cialis erectile dysfunction solve its problem correctly and without arbitrarily jamming things.

That way, Comcast might not break the very thing it claims to be selling access to: the Internet.

Read AP reporter Peter Svennson's article, "Comcast Admits Delaying Some Traffic":

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gxRiQSVfgK4sLbVRE_X4MOlM9q0A

For background, "EFF Tests Agree with AP: Comcast Is Forging Packets to Interfere with User Traffic":

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-comcast-forging-packets-to-interfere

For this post and related links:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/comcast-needs-come-clean