Comcast Declares War on Tor? | Hacker News Reader

Comcast Declares War on Tor?

deepdotweb.com

121 pointsdoctorshady43 comments

This article seems seriously confused about how Tor works ("only the ISP used along with it can ascertain what activity takes place on Tor"), such that I don't trust the rest of what it's saying. There is probably no story here.

Likely a technical misunderstanding by the author. It is possible for an ISP to detect tor traffic[1], but not determine the contents of the traffic. My guess is that the author is not aware of this.

http://www.netresec.com/?page=Blog&month=2013-04&post=Detect...

Considering the entire blog is about 'deep web' you'd hope the author is aware of this difference and made an error. But clicking on his bio it seems to be this authors first post there, so who knows.

> but not determine the contents of the traffic.

Not even this much, actually. Tor doesn't do any sort of protection on the traffic; it just routes it cleverly. The packets themselves are still plaintext if you're not using an encrypted protocol (e.g. HTTPS) on top of Tor.

In practice, most people use Tor through the browser bundle, which includes an HTTPS-Only extension. But if you're routing random other protocols through Tor (e.g. XMPP, BitTorrent, etc.) be aware that Tor is not doing any protection of your plaintext; that's the responsibility of your client/protocol.

Not exactly.

Tor encrypts your traffic within the Tor network. Even if you don't encrypt, Tor does automatically so your ISP cannot see your content.

If you don't encrypt, your content will be visible to the exit node, but not to your ISP.

https://www.torproject.org/about/overview

You're right with respect to the exit node, but here the story is about the entry node. The entry node would not be able to see the traffic contents, because they're encrypted with the exit node's key.

I helped make this diagram to demonstrate these details:

https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

You clicked link, they got page views -> mission accomplished! (the sad state of affairs of tech "journalism")

lucky me I read the HN comments first :-p (moving to the next article).

I often do this (and did in this case). I wonder how frequent a phenomenon this is becoming and how it affects media consumption / retention?

And how often do you think comments are manipulated as part of marketing and damage control?

To be fair, this is a dumb error and I wish they would issue an honest correction rather than simply removing the incorrect part.

Well, simultaneous to that, it also describes Comcast asking the customer what it is exactly they were using Tor for.

Since then, it does appear that phrase has been redacted. It would be nice if they published a correction, though.

Not a very friendly web-site either ... My first-generation iPad does show anything.

Yea, it's a bummer because I would love any reason to flame comcast.

But this entire article seems to be based off random complaints by people on reddit. There is nothing to go on here.

I live on the peninsula and it boggles the mind that, in sfbay, I effectively have one choice for wired internet access because dsl is so slow where I live.

As idlewords says:

   San Francisco is an 8-mile square that aims to disrupt the world but can’t 
   wire itself for decent Internet. I guess it’s a hardware problem

I can't believe I'm "defending" Comcast, but this sounds made-up.

Why would Comcast care about Tor and if they wanted to discourage use why would they confront customers using it?

I think the methods are crude but the motives are quite clear (if the story is true); Comcast doesn't like Tor for the same reason the NSA doesn't like Tor. Comcast doesn't have a good track record for handling traffic ethically, for instance attempting to monetize NXDOMAIN errors [1], throttling protocols they don't like [2], etc.

I don't think its beyond the pail to suggest they want to spy on their customers and sell their data to advertisers. They may even be under contractual obligation from RIAA/MPAA to disallow Tor as a part of Six Strikes, and are doing this either before or in lieu of a technical solution.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/08/comcasts-dns-redi... [2] http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-throttles-bittorrent-traffic...

Even if money was the motivation its not like Tor is super popular. I doubt it's hurting any ISPs bottom line. My bet this is simply a political move, or one influenced by interested 3rd parties who do financially benefit from a destruction of privacy. Assuming it is real.

fabulist is not arguing that this policy is a result of financial loss, but rather contractual obligation with RIAA/MPAA.

Totally with you; this story sounds made-up.

>>Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that aren’t so-to-speak legal.

So what does Comcast think about people who use VPN? Maybe VPN also illegal now? Privacy is dead? Next up, curtains on the windows of your house are also illegal.

It's interesting to read what BBC thinks about that [1].

[1] http://torrentfreak.com/bbc-isps-should-assume-heavy-vpn-use...

So it's really going to happen... slowly, in the name of piracy(but we know that's not really why), any form of encrypted communication will become illegal. Oh, and of course this won't apply to affluent.

Or 3rd-party DNS.

well, it's possible for Comcast to inspect the hostname of a DNS query even if its destination is not Comcast's nameservers.

Not if the communication with the DNS server is encrypted, for example with this service: http://www.goldenfrog.com/vyprvpn/features/vyprdns

Don't even need to use a VPN. DNSCrypt encrypts DNS queries.

http://dnscrypt.org/

Agreed, this doesn't sound like anything an ISP would actually do.

Comcast isn't run by the brightest people though so I'd be interested to see if anyone provides evidence that these phone calls actually took place.

Maybe it goes something like this:

1. Customer got caught X time(s) under the "Six Strikes" policy.

2. Comcast starts monitoring customer more closely.

3. Customer starts torrenting over Tor.

4. Comcast (who is monitoring this person more closely) sees that large amounts of traffic is going over Tor.

5. Comcast tries to intimidate customer to stop using Tor.

6. ???

7. Profit?

I'm kind of iffy on the motivation for anything past #4 though, but it seems sort of plausible... maybe?

If it's not a fabrication, it's more likely the customer was running a Tor exit node and that caused some problems and Comcast told him not to run an exit node. Which is somewhat reasonable, as it's a pain to deal with abuse complaints.

Good point -- it would be very easy for Comcast to disable entries on to the Tor network if they wanted to (as China does), since their IP addresses are public.

To be fair, not all tor IP addresses are public; there are bridge relays which are not publicly listed[0]. This is one of the tactics for getting around blocking of tor in countries such as China.

[0] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en

>A Comcast agent named Jeremy allegedly called Tor an “illegal service.”

Did the customer mention it was started by the US Navy and continues to received a lot of funding from them?

Talking to a comcast "agent" is like asking a Seaman about Naval tactics.

That's giving far too little credit to the average Seaman.

The article implied, but didn't make clear, that the customers were using Tor to browse the internet (as opposed to being a Tor endpoint). I could see comcast having an issue with customers who are endpoints, but, I'm not really sure why they would care / how they would know that someone was was using Tor.

> why they would care

Not sure. It's not as though using Tor circumvents the need for an Internet service provider. Maybe it's political.

> how they would know that someone was was using Tor.

It's easy to determine whether a user is using Tor based on the (known) connections that are made. It's the same way organizations can block Tor, or that the Tor client knows how to reach the rest of the network.

So here's one of their sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/2g2e44/is_c...

I think it was posted by this user:

https://www.reddit.com/user/theliberare/

Who uses Tor without VPN? When I'm using Tor, all Comcast sees is an encrypted tunnel to Private Internet Access.

Isn't Tor supposed to be an encrypted tunnel?

Yes. But, with VPN it looks something like this:

Me -> TOR encrypts data -> VPN encrypts data -> data goes through tunnel -> VPN decrypts data -> TOR encrypted data passes through first node -> TOR encrypted data passes through relay node -> TOR decrypts data as it passes through the exit node -> swish nothing but net

This gives protection from the ISP and from the VPN provider -- I have to trust neither.

It seems excessive; tor traffic already goes through 3 different nodes. And if the ISP is banning tor there is no reason they wouldn't/couldn't ban VPNs.

Too many people use VPNs for work.

What other proof does anyone need that Comcast hates net neutrality? It should be a clear reason to tank any of their plans for acquisition of TWC.

Can anyone explain how this article has more upvotes in less time than the story about Beamforming, yet is two spots lower on the HN frontpage?

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