DeHackEd wrote:
Those probably read the packets though. For an ISP, it's too infeasable to read every single packet and figure out what is what. And no ISP would use Linux for its core routing. No serious ISP anyways.
You might be surprised. I doubt they would throttle realtime like the Linux packet filter, but they may very well run a monitor that records stats about who is using what protocol and set throttles based on that. Of course, they might just do that based on network usage, which would make more sense.
Anyway, it won't be long before mainstream routers do this sort of thing. Especially considering that the only thing on the internet using more bandwidth is spam email, (I pulled this staticstic out of my butt, but it's probably true) ISP and backbones stand to gain from it.
Even a simple low-computation encryption would be able to prevent protocol detection. At least until it's broken.