Liar liar pants on fire

From techdirt . . . .

Associated Press Confirms That Comcast Blocks Some BitTorrent Traffic; Despite Comcast Denials
from the someone's-not-being-totally-honest-here... dept

Back in August, there was a report that Comcast was throttling certain types of BitTorrent traffic making it difficult to impossible to seed a download. In response, Comcast vehemently denied this was happening, despite many people saying they were experiencing it. Specifically, Comcast said: "the company doesn't actively look at the applications or content that its customers download over the network. But Comcast does reserve the right to cut off service to customers who abuse the network by using too much bandwidth." The EFF went and spoke with Comcast and got the same story. However, with so many people reporting the same thing, some were wondering how truthful Comcast was. Now the Associated Press has done their own investigation (trying to transfer the Bible since it's in the public domain) and found that Comcast is clearly blocking the ability to upload completed files via BitTorrent, inserting a message to a computer trying to upload a file pretending to be from the downloading computer, telling it to stop sending. This seems to go against what Comcast originally said, though when the AP asked for a comment, Comcast subtly changed it's story. Rather than saying it doesn't look at applications or content, now it says: "Comcast does not block access to any applications, including BitTorrent." No, it doesn't block "access" but it does limit the functionality greatly (including perfectly legitimate uses of BitTorrent) without letting people know about it.