<OT> How do ISPs work?

[Michael Hipp]

Tony Alfrey wrote:
> Why do I care?
> Because a guy on the SuSE list who uses SeaMonkey for his mail client, 
> and Comcast as his smtp server, claims that Comcast has been "blocking" 
> the use of SeaMonkey and telling everyone they should be using Outlook 
> or Internet Exploder.  Also, one hears rumors that Comcast is somehow 
> slowing access to bandwidth hogs, implying that they keep records of 
> usage from particular IP addresses.
> 
> Question:  Is this actually possible, i.e. that an ISP could give 
> selective web access to a particular web browser?  Does a web browser 
> somehow encode within its packets some identification?

It probably goes without saying that an ISP, with a sufficiently powerful 
proxy, could do this or just about anything with your traffic. Why they would 
want to I can't quite imagine[1]. (Unless the MS conspiracy theories are 
actually too conservative.)

I could perhaps see an ISP attempting to put a stop to the "multiple 
simultaneous connections" hacks that are commonly added by Mozilla browser users.

Are you otherwise using a lot of traffic, sufficient to trigger some 
throttling algorithm?

Occam's razor should be consulted here. It will likely yield a better answer.

Michael

[1] I discovered something being done by Alltel to my HTTP stream that at 
first left me aghast. So such pseudo-malicious behavior is not entirely 
unknown among ISPs.