Online games stealing your bandwidth
I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher distributes files through Bittorrent, however apparently a number of other MMO companies (LotR, Lego) are apparently doing something similar but aren't as upfront about it, and are installing Windows services which seed whenever the computer is online. Game Companies Should Play Fair With P2P | TorrentFreak<http://torrentfreak.com/game-companies-should-play-fair-with-p2p-100901/> If you follow the links in the article people are complaining that the LotR process has served 70gb in a week, others are complaining that the service is resulting in 300ms pings, and unusable connections. This is a very grey area it will be interesting how this issue unfolds in the long run. -- [ Rodrick R. Brown ] http://www.rodrickbrown.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrickbrown
On 25 September 2010 21:16, Rodrick Brown <rodrick.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher distributes files through Bittorrent,
<snip> I once read an article talking about making BitTorrent scalable by using anycasted caching services at the ISP's closest POP to the end user. Given sufficient traffic on a specified torrent, the caching device would build up the file, then distribute that direct to the subscriber in the form of an additional (preferred) peer. Similar to a CDN or Usenet, but where it was cached rather than deliberately pushed out from a locus. Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there? M
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:43:25 BST, Matthew Walster said:
Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there?
The ISP is off the hook on that one. 17 USC 512(2) specifically carves out an ISP safe-harbor for data that's only cached on an ISP's servers due to an end user's request. IANAL, so have somebody you pay for legal advice read 17 USC 512(2) and tell you what they think.
On 2010-09-25 23:53, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:43:25 BST, Matthew Walster said:
Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there?
The ISP is off the hook on that one. 17 USC 512(2) specifically carves out an ISP safe-harbor for data that's only cached on an ISP's servers due to an end user's request. IANAL, so have somebody you pay for legal advice read 17 USC 512(2) and tell you what they think.
So it that is true, if you define "news server" as a "cache", even though you have to buy several terabytes, make that several petabytes, to "be able to "cache" this data one along with all the network environment to support getting data out of this "cache", the ISP is completely in the clear even though that "cache" is the sole single point where one can retrieve that "cached" data from even years after the data was originally put on the network, the original is gone and that "cache" works without anything being attached to it ? :) Oh, one just have to love these things called laws... good that they are protecting the right parts of the distribution network eh ;) Greets, Jeroen
t On 26/09/2010, at 6:43 AM, Matthew Walster <matthew@walster.org> wrote:
On 25 September 2010 21:16, Rodrick Brown <rodrick.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher distributes files through Bittorrent,
<snip>
I once read an article talking about making BitTorrent scalable by using anycasted caching services at the ISP's closest POP to the end user. Given sufficient traffic on a specified torrent, the caching device would build up the file, then distribute that direct to the subscriber in the form of an additional (preferred) peer. Similar to a CDN or Usenet, but where it was cached rather than deliberately pushed out from a locus.
Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there?
M
IMHO, Sooner or later our community will catch on and begin to deploy such technology. P2P is a really elegant 'tool' when used to distribute large files (which we all know). I expect that even the biggest last-mile providers will lose the arms race they currently engage in against this 'tool' and start participating in and controlling the flow of data. Throwing millions into technologies to thwart this 'tool,' technologies such as DPI only takes away from a last-mile provider's ability to offer service. I believe this is one reason the USA lags the Rest of the World in broadband deployment. Ultimately, I believe it will make sense to design last-mile networks to benefit from P2P (e.g. allow end stations to communicate locally rather than force traffic that could stay local to a central office through a session- based router). Then take advantage by deploying a scenario such as the one you've outlined to keep swarms local. Before we do that though, we need to cut the paranoia about this particular tool (created by the RIAA and others) and we need to see a few more exec's with vision. jy
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010, Matthew Walster wrote:
I once read an article talking about making BitTorrent scalable by using anycasted caching services at the ISP's closest POP to the end user. Given sufficient traffic on a specified torrent, the caching device would build up the file, then distribute that direct to the subscriber in the form of an additional (preferred) peer. Similar to a CDN or Usenet, but where it was cached rather than deliberately pushed out from a locus.
Was anything ever standardised in that field? I imagine with much of P2P traffic being (how shall I put this...) less than legal, it's of questionable legality and the ISPs would not want to be held liable for the content cached there?
I don't recall any protocols being standard. Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors. Adrian -- - Xenion - http://www.xenion.com.au/ - VPS Hosting - Commercial Squid Support - - $24/pm+GST entry-level VPSes w/ capped bandwidth charges available in WA -
On 26 September 2010 00:47, Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au> wrote:
I don't recall any protocols being standard.
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
I had the P4P (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proactive_network_Provider_Participation_for_P2...) pointed out to me - but like you said, it's hardly going to be an open standard if it gets anywhere. M
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Matthew Walster <matthew@walster.org> wrote:
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors. Somehow that seems appropriate for gaming networks; maybe add some swords or old Gandalf boxes.
In general distributing gaming software isn't going to have a big impact on your traffic levels - the average user will upload at most about as many megabytes as he downloaded (though obviously some will upload much more and some much less), and if the P2P is implemented well the uploads will mostly go to other customers of the same ISP, reducing the amount that comes through their peering point. And it'll all be a lot less than somebody pirating movies, because the game doesn't get DVD-sized updates multiple times a day or even a month. If you're running a satellite ISP, you probably care a lot more about upstream bandwidth, but it'll be much faster for one satellite user to get bits from Anchorage or even Seattle than to get it from another user two satellite hops away, especially if your uplinks are smaller than your downlinks, so if the P2P is implemented well (no idea if it is), you'll get very little uploading. (Does it save you money to get a WoW subscription for a box that sits in a server rack at your hub site with nobody actually playing it, to further reduce your bandwidth needs? Maybe.) -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.
As for online experience, any action game with players 200ms away from each others, is not really playable. By the time you aim, shoot, and the info register on the server and other user player PC, it has moved far away from the shot...
On Sun, 2010-09-26 at 07:47 +0800, Adrian Chadd wrote:
I don't recall any protocols being standard.
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
Adrian
Less smoky is the relatively common practice (at least in Europe) of tech-friendly ISPs running bittorrent for "release days" of Linux and BSD distros; Ubuntu releases especially because they have a large proportion of release-day installs (!) and the servers get hit hard. How much of this is just staff doing their customers a favor is debateable, but I know two places where it's written into SOPs for Debian and FreeBSD major releases (about a week or two after the release). Linux distribution by bittorrent is sometimes harder now that more Tier 1 ISPs block or inspect the P2P traffic By a bit of quick fiddling you can ensure that users outside your blocks don't get served. I'm talking installation ISOs, not the ports or packages - the rsyncs and mirrors take care of that as normal. For the Debian 5.05 release I provided 700GB+ in a week for the x86 Gnome CD alone via BT, the AMD64 CD was about twice that, yet most of the Debian stuff will be done using Jigdo, so that's a fraction of the actual traffic. The Debian Netboot CD's seem quite popular too but especially for exotic hardware archs. The 5.06 release is still flowing nicely. The last few FreeBSD releases I've pushed 500GB each time though I hold them open for much longer for the less popular architectures. The thought of it all flying round in such long circles dismays me somewhat. There's probably an reasonable argument for temporary ISP-BT of this stuff, as it'll save us all a tiny bit of peak and a lot of packets, all for very little kit, space and man-hours. The rest of the torrent users, (games or copytheft), can surely be /dev/null-ed ? :) Hmm, can I smell burning torches in the distance? Gord -- # Hahaha, hehehe, I'm a little Gnome and I hate KDE
On 9/25/2010 6:47 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
I don't recall any protocols being standard.
I don't either, though I recall bittorrent actually supporting it once and pushing to have ISP support and stay away from encryption/ISP circumvention. That was years ago. Haven't stayed current.
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
Seem to recall some law suits concerning a few of them. Even if we had ISP supporting caches, there is always the problem getting p2p clients to support them (given they often are too busy trying to circumvent). A good standard would be nice, though, and at least offer a middle ground for trying to get support for such technology as well as pushing it back to open source, legitimate caching vs lying to p2p clients, and solving many issues that pop up from time to time of upstreams not supporting the downstream loads, which a cache could heavily alleviate. Jack
-----Original Message----- From: Jack Bates [mailto:jbates@brightok.net] Sent: 27 September 2010 17:39 To: Adrian Chadd Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth On 9/25/2010 6:47 PM, Adrian Chadd wrote:
I don't recall any protocols being standard.
I don't either, though I recall bittorrent actually supporting it once and pushing to have ISP support and stay away from encryption/ISP circumvention. That was years ago. Haven't stayed current.
Plenty of people sell p2p caches but they all work using magic, smoke and mirrors.
Seem to recall some law suits concerning a few of them. Even if we had ISP supporting caches, there is always the problem getting p2p clients to support them (given they often are too busy trying to circumvent).
We had a great P2P cache from Cache Appliance. Did anybody else try them? -- Leigh
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Rodrick Brown wrote:
If you follow the links in the article people are complaining that the LotR process has served 70gb in a week, others are complaining that the service is resulting in 300ms pings, and unusable connections. This is a very grey area it will be interesting how this issue unfolds in the long run.
I haven't played any of these things, so I don't know what they put in the fine print, but unless LotR makes it clear that they're going to utilize your (i.e. players of the game) bandwidth to PTP distribute their software, I'd call that theft and unauthorized use of a computer network. Are these companies not making enough in monthly subscriptions to afford Akamai or similar CDN services to distribute their software updates? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 04:56:21PM -0400, Jon Lewis wrote:
Are these companies not making enough in monthly subscriptions to afford Akamai or similar CDN services to distribute their software updates?
If you read the article, you will see that Akami is one of the perpetrators, via the "Akamai NetSession Interface". :)
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010 16:56:21 -0400 (EDT) Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> wrote:
On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Rodrick Brown wrote:
If you follow the links in the article people are complaining that the LotR process has served 70gb in a week, others are complaining that the service is resulting in 300ms pings, and unusable connections. This is a very grey area it will be interesting how this issue unfolds in the long run.
I haven't played any of these things, so I don't know what they put in the fine print, but unless LotR makes it clear that they're going to utilize your (i.e. players of the game) bandwidth to PTP distribute their software, I'd call that theft and unauthorized use of a computer network.
Skype have been doing this for years to ISP users who have public IP addresses, which is how they get around NAT without having giant publicly addressed relay servers. I don't know how much effort they got to to notify users via the T&Cs. The only real difference here seems to be the volume of traffic involved.
Are these companies not making enough in monthly subscriptions to afford Akamai or similar CDN services to distribute their software updates?
---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 04:16:46PM -0400, Rodrick Brown wrote:
I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher distributes files through Bittorrent
I personally love Bittorrent. It is wonderful for CDN - for both legal and not-so-legal files. I however despise the game-loaders not giving you more options to control this traffic. For example, many run as a daemon that does not stop seeding - even when you're in-game. You could manually kill it, but it will re-run again. If you remove it, enjoy not being able to continue to play the game if it updates. "Pando Media Booster" (which I have had to deal with), detects your upload speed and uses about 3/4ths of it. The game installer never even had you accept an EULA - just when PMB.exe started when it was installed, it says on the bottom "you have accepted the EULA". EULAs don't really mean much now of days, sadly. This ruins the network quality, especially on large LANs, and most people don't even realize it's using all their connection. My personal verdict on it is: Give the users the option to limit the upload speed to whatever they want, and an option to disable it when they don't need to download any updates; if this is done, I personally see no problem with it. If this option is not added, I see it as malware that should be deleted. As I said above, I have no problems with using Bittorrent as a method of CDN - it's actually one of the best methods. But, the end-users need more control over it.
Speaking to your example with Blizzard: The Blizzard downloader does provide an option to disable P2P transfers which then downloads direct via http from Blizzard. Yes, the update software defaults to allow P2P but it isn't like they are forcing it upon their users. I have seen Sony do the same thing and have never seen a downloader that you couldn't disable that option if you like. -Kevin -----Original Message----- From: Harry Strongburg <harry.nanog@harry.lu> Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:03:43 To: <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: Online games stealing your bandwidth On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 04:16:46PM -0400, Rodrick Brown wrote:
I think most people are aware that the Blizzard "World of WarcCraft" patcher distributes files through Bittorrent
I personally love Bittorrent. It is wonderful for CDN - for both legal and not-so-legal files. I however despise the game-loaders not giving you more options to control this traffic. For example, many run as a daemon that does not stop seeding - even when you're in-game. You could manually kill it, but it will re-run again. If you remove it, enjoy not being able to continue to play the game if it updates. "Pando Media Booster" (which I have had to deal with), detects your upload speed and uses about 3/4ths of it. The game installer never even had you accept an EULA - just when PMB.exe started when it was installed, it says on the bottom "you have accepted the EULA". EULAs don't really mean much now of days, sadly. This ruins the network quality, especially on large LANs, and most people don't even realize it's using all their connection. My personal verdict on it is: Give the users the option to limit the upload speed to whatever they want, and an option to disable it when they don't need to download any updates; if this is done, I personally see no problem with it. If this option is not added, I see it as malware that should be deleted. As I said above, I have no problems with using Bittorrent as a method of CDN - it's actually one of the best methods. But, the end-users need more control over it.
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 09:56:15PM +0000, khatfield@socllc.net wrote:
Speaking to your example with Blizzard:
It was not my example, I do not play Blizzard games.
The Blizzard downloader does provide an option to disable P2P transfers which then downloads direct via http from Blizzard.
This is nice. Many other games using Pando and other such P2P downloaders do not.
Yes, the update software defaults to allow P2P but it isn't like they are forcing it upon their users. I have seen Sony do the same thing and have never seen a downloader that you couldn't disable that option if you like.
I am 100% sure "Pando Media Booster" do not give you the option of disabling it. Unless they hide it very, very deep.
Games? Yes a few, but... Ever seen Skype on an open, non-NAT'ed internet connection? Capture some netflow on a self-promoted supernode sometime. Or seen Octoshape in action? Jeff
participants (16)
-
Adrian Chadd -
Bill Stewart -
Franck Martin -
gordon b slater -
Harry Strongburg -
Jack Bates -
Jeff Kell -
Jeffrey S. Young -
Jeroen Massar -
Jon Lewis -
khatfield＠socllc.net -
Leigh Porter -
Mark Smith -
Matthew Walster -
Rodrick Brown -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu