<OT> How do ISPs work?

[Tony Alfrey]

Michael Hipp wrote:
> 
> 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].

As per your footnote.  And Comcast is beginning to get an 
urban-legend-like reputation as being annoying.  But again, to what 
advantage I don't know.
<snip>

> 
> 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.

except that Firefox also looks like a Mozilla browser until one gets way 
down to the end of the User-Agent string.

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

Usually just the NY Times.  No torrent stuff but sometimes I stream a 
radio station.

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

Of course.  And the fact that it has now stopped makes the problem moot 
(but maybe interesting).

> 
> 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.
> 



-- 
Tony Alfrey
tonyalfrey at earthlink.net
"I'd Rather Be Sailing"