I recently moved into a new apartment. It’s basically an SRO; it’s near a major University, so there’s big market for tiny apartments–basically privately owned dormitories. Part of the reason I took this place rather than another, although the rent was nominally higher, is that it has hot and cold running internet and cable: two hot jacks in the wall, all included.
After much frustration, I found out that a previous tenant had done enough illegal downloading that the building owner got A Letter. So he had the ISP block “certain portals.” Now this tenant has moved on, and is presumably gleefully downloading again wherever he’s landed.
Meanwhile, not only can I not download–some of which is legitimate; it’s part of my job to vet films for the distributor I’m working for to distribute–but I can’t receive webcam images on Yahoo, AIM, or Windows Messenger. Some of which is personal, but some of which is work: my boss likes to have IM “meetings,” cam and all, and I’m supposed to conduct IM interviews with filmmakers for our “meet the filmmaker” blog.
Am I screwed? The portals are blocked “before” they get to the building; can’t be done on a unit by unit basis. Far as I know. No way I’m gonna get the landlord to willingly open himself up to get another letter, is there? Can I demand it?
Or is my only recourse getting my own internet cable installed? In which case the extra rent I’m paying for the privilege of “free” internet is flushed, right?
I’d talk to the landlord. If he’s unwilling to change the blocks, ask him to lower the rent because you need an open internet. His answer will answer your last question.
That said, If I needed the Internet for my job, I wouldn’t rely on another individual’s connection, I’d get my own.
Send a letter to your landlord saying that you aren’t getting what you paid for, and copy to your boss? Seems to me that a new lease should imply that old blockages were lifted and a new connection made for your apartment. If the ISP is blocking the whole building instead of indovidual apartments, there’s something wrong. Are you sharing a group internet connection?
Yes, that’s my understanding. One building, 24 apartments, one connection. At least that’s what the IT guy implied; he says it’s not possible to lift the block for a single unit.
I wouldnt be surprised if they just closed a bunch of ports on the firewall for everyone, not just you. Not to mention this level of micromanaging is pretty crappy. Instead of blocking ports they should be just throttling connections and giving the C&D notices to the tenant. The root problem here is that few apartment property managers are equipped to be an ISP.
A lot of these buildings are nothing more than a shared dsl or t1. Even if they unblocked it you may find a real problem with available bandwidth. In the end you might just have to pony up for internet. Id rather have my own internet pipe on my terms than deal with this. You could probably negotiate a decrease in rent if you cannot get it to work and you have to pay for your own pipe. Not to mention, if this is for work, then work should be paying for it.
Failing that, a company VPN (if VPN isnt blocked) will alleviate some of these problems, but with some level of performance hit.
It won’t go anywhere any time soon, but an FCC complaint against the landlord and ISP won’t hurt. Especially with all the pro net neutrality hoopla floating around DC.
I’m at uni, and for the last three weeks we’ve been getting throttled - but only for MMOs. Skype, fine. YouTube, fine. Streaming radio, fine. WoW, RoM, DDO? If you’re lucky you get to the character screen, but you don’t go beyond that one.
I have no idea how are they doing it, but if it wasn’t our IT it wouldn’t be affecting only us, would it?
And we can’t get another supplier. Just can’t. In theory we could get dongles, but there’s no coverage on campus.
So the IT guy says he can fix my inability to do webcam interviews over Yahoo if I tell him what portal to open. What does that mean? What do I tell him?
He probably means ports. Most internet services have their own TCP or UDP ports (for example, the web is on TCP port 80). If there’s any help sections for your webcam ap, it probably says what ports need to be opened.
He probably closed all the ports simply because one guy was using too much of the bandwidth for his private downloading, not 'cause he got in trouble for it.
So he set up a firewall and closed all the ports, except for the common ones, like for mail. So you can give him a port number, yahoo can tell you the most common one used for webcams etc. Then he’ll open that port so it can receive and send.
Of course then you can use that port for downloading other things as well
You may want to try to download using common ports, the IT guy can’t close them all down or nothing would work.
This is incorrect and doesn’t really make sense. Say port 50001 gets unblocked. How are you going to use that to grab from a web server? You have no control over the web server, it’s only listening on port 80 and you can’t change that.
To browse a website, your computer picks a random local port (generally above 1024) and makes an outbound connection from this port to port 80 on the destination web server. The web server then sends traffic from it’s own IP and local port 80 to your IP and whatever high-numbered port your browser chose.
To download movies/pics/docs/warez from a website the exact same thing happens. There is no difference between downloading a pirated movie or a series of HTML and images.
So how can the IT guy be blocking file downloads like this? He’s certainly not blocking by port.
It’s possible he has a more intelligent firewall which actually looks at the data contained within the TCP session and tries to block when you download a file but this would need to differentiate between downloading a picture as part of the web page, and a picture that’s dodgy. Or an inline movie versus a copy of Latest Blockbuster. It’s just not likely to be happening.
I think you are confusing two separate issues.
He’s blocked some ports so you can’t use web-cams or IM chat. These use defined ports and he can block outbound connections to those ports.
The file download is trickier. As explained above, you cannot stop somebody from downloading files through a web browser using the HTTP protocol without also killing web browsing. It’s possible that the OP is talking about FTP being blocked, which is doable whilst keeping web browsing working. Or he’s blocking common peer to peer ports.
In short, some of the answers you’ve been given are wrong and we need more information. What exactly doesn’t work? A sample URL would be ideal.
An ideal fix here would be to assign you a static IP and then add a PERMIT rule in the firewall for your IP. Have you sign something to say that you take full responsibility for anything which occurs from your IP address.
The VAST majority of software/media piracy is not via websites - that’s too easy to track/shut down and the host would actually have to pay for the bandwidth (and if they won’t even pay for a CD you think they will pay so thousands of joe internet users can steal it?).
It’s done via various P2P (peer to peer) programs and those do need open ports. Block all the ports and you can’t use P2P anymore. Unfortunately, you also can’t use yahoo webcam or any other software which does not use popular ports they left open.
