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> T-Mobile degrades video quality SSL cannot prevent this. The connection can still be slowed down and video quality will be automatically degraded. They don't
by ultramancool 11y ago
> T-Mobile degrades video quality
SSL cannot prevent this. The connection can still be slowed down and video quality will be automatically degraded. They don't reencode streams on the fly or anything, just degrade bandwidth and let the applications do the rest. The reencoding and DRM cracking needed to do the former would be an insane investment of man-hours and CPU resources, even if they didn't use SSL.
Additionally a bunch of these "reasons" are just artificial restrictions imposed by web browsers. If it weren't for letsencrypt providing free certs without any ID checks like other free cert places I'd be complaining about it.
- nailer 11y agoYeah, I think in this case T-Mobile was re-encoding anything in HTTP, so the stream appeared to be full quality but wasn't. Simple QoS would keep the quality down and the bandwidth low, but hopefully it would be more apparent that a better quality stream exists but is not being delivered.
- ikeboy 11y agoDo you have a source for that? The article you linked doesn't say that, and https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles-bingeon-optimization-just-throttling-applies https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles... also confirms that no encoding is taking place. Separately, the article you linked from techdirt has a major misunderstanding of the EFF piece. It says "EFF also discovered that T-Mobile's earlier statement that it can't detect encrypted video is also misleading, as the company now claims it can" But the EFF part quoted is talking specifically about http, not https, as a close reading will reveal. Also, the EFF test is a bit inconclusive, because https might be slower than http for other reasons. It probably doesn't account for the large differences they observed, but a better study would have tested http/https on other carriers, and on a T-mobile phone with Binge On turned off, to isolate the Binge-on effect.
- fryguy 11y agoIf you look at the chart about halfway down, the "Normal" (red) is HTTPS, and the "Binge-on" (blue) is HTTP.
- ultramancool 11y agoYes but they could easily add the ability to do this over HTTPS too by using SNI or knowing the CDN IPs.
- ikeboy 11y agoExactly. The part about detecting video is specifically binge on/http, and the techdirt article completely misunderstands it and claims it's talking about encrypted video.
- nitrogen 11y agoIn other HN threads it seems people figured out that Tmo really was just throttling anything that looked like video and relying on the app or service to switch to lower quality.
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- tomjen3 11y agoWith SSL how can they know it is a video? At best they can either slow down everything that takes a while to download or they can selectively harrash some of the video services, which might get them negative attention in Washington.
- ultramancool 11y agoA few options: - The SNI extension can tell you the hostname you're connecting to even over SSL, just like the Host: http header they're already using. This is visible in the clear during the SSL handshake. SSL connections do not mask what you're connecting to at all, nor do they attempt to. - They selectively pick the video service's CDN IPs and slow them down
- blibble 11y agoyou can probably have a pretty good guess based on the behaviour of the stream, and the size of the packets involved also the ip...