I didn't save any of my Wireshark traces, but this is what I observed (I'm behind Charter at home but visiting my brother in NJ - Comcast territory). All attempts to check my e-mail (neither Charter nor Comcast) showed the syns going out but no syn acks coming back. Then, after a few minutes (pop server time outs I guess) I started seeing fins coming back from the pop server that matched my connection requests. Saw that occur with various http connection attempts as well. Of course, the only reason I can send this reply out is that they appear to be back up. Any chance of getting a non-nonsensical RFO from someone? Ted At 02:16 PM 4/5/2008, you wrote:

On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Steven M. Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu> wrote:

...

The fact that I get different behavior for different protocols makes me suspect they're having trouble with equipment designed to control p2p traffic. Their help phone line simply speaks of an outage. Service has come back occasionally, but not for long. The problem has been going on since about 6am.

Does anyone have any data?

wasn't it sandvine last time? did you try calling them as well? All joking aside, one hopes that these sorts of things show that the 'p2p control' soutions are far from perfect and far from 'well baked' and likely still very ill-advised.

-Chris