Joel Uckelman wrote: > Thinking out loud here... I would be amazed if whatever they're doing > to shape traffic is targetting VASSAL specifically, since it uses > hardly any bandwidth at all and they've probalby never heard of VASSAL > in the first place. Some people have reported success at evading > traffic shaping by turning on encryption in their file sharing programs; > that's going to work only if the ISP is throttling traffic by examining > packet contents and letting through unhindered anything it doesn't > recognize, as VASSAL traffic is probably something that it wouldn't > recognize... Hmm.
Depends if 'encryption' means 'IPSec', in which case the ISP may well have a specific exemption for it in order to keep teleworkers with VPNs happy. (Or they may explicitly block IPSec, and tell you to upgrade to a much more expensive 'teleworker' package. Traffic filtering is frankly a bizarre business - and I work in the industry!) This is all speculation though, the only answer as to which one of a number of crazy^Winteresting options an ISP is using comes from that ISP. As I've said before, the only thing that's guaranteed to work *everywhere* on today's Internet is, sadly, HTTP on port 80. There's two questions to the developers arising from that - do you want to put the work in to support people with filtering ISPs, and do you care about the end-to-end principle enough to resist changing things to be 'filter-friendly' when you shouldn't have to? (Sorry, I tried to find a more objective way of writing the second one, and I'm struggling - it's one of my hot buttons, as you may have gathered. Not to imply that you *must* feel likewise, or be Wrong.) Regards, Tim.
