You know, it just occurred to me: I don’t know a single person on this planet who likes Comcast. Seriously, there’s not an active OR inactive customer alive who could state anything other than dismay and general malaise for the bandwidth delivery juggernaut.

Why, look at what they did with your beloved TechTV and then ask yourself: should we be in the least bit surprised that they’re ruining the Internet for many of their customers?

Oh, taste the sweet irony lingering thick in the air – as I’m keying this post through my own Comcast connection, given very little choice for any other type of broadband in my neck of the woods. For you see, America is not about freedom of choice so much as it is “freedom for those who can afford to influence laws and regulations to make choices for you.”

I can’t cut off my nose to spite my face, but I also won’t sit around pretending like Comcast is awesome. They’re knowingly, willingly blocking traffic.

What’s particularly insidious about Comcast’s packet forging is that it’s transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they’ll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.

They’re killing legit network traffic, too:

When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast’s network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they’re greeted with the error message, “Remote system no longer responding.” Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast’s reset packets are the culprit. Instead of passing the legitimate e-mail through its network, Comcast’s traffic monitoring tool (likely Sandvine) is sitting in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server.

That’s Comcastic!