Following up to yesterday’s Comcast/Pirate Bay confusion, it was claimed that Comcast helped restore connections to the Pirate Bay, the notorious bittorrent site. Evidently, there was some confusion as to what happened and what Comcast was given credit for. Did they directly restore access or was another party responsible for the disconnection?

The initial issue had to do with Comcast customers not being able to access The Pirate Bay, something Comcast naturally got the blame for. After denying any action against TPB, apparently Comcast conducted an investigation of their own, actually assisting the oft-maligned torrent tracker by making sure their service wasn’t filtering any data packages originating from TPB. Comcast members also defended their service on the XFINITY Facebook page, responding directly to accusations of Pirate Bay filtering:

Comcast’s “not us” response didn’t stop there, either. Besides assisting The Pirate Bay’s developers, Comcast also informed Serious Tubes, an ISP that adheres to the open Internet ideology, of the connection issues. The Serious Tubes developers then took action, correcting the issue, while placing the blame where it was supposed to be. They also made it quite clear Comcast did not fix the TPB connection issue:

Comcast did not help us fix The Pirate Bay. The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We don’t even know where their servers are. We resolved the issue by activating our other transit again.

GBLX is short for Global Crossing, an international ISP that uses an AT&T-inspired business logo.

So, does Comcast deserve credit for assisting here or will they forever be buried under their history of previous peer-to-peer filtering situations? They know what The Pirate Bay can be used for, but yet, they actively tried to avoid the negative press that comes from ISP filtering, going as far as reaching out to The Pirate Bay developers. How significant is this potential olive branch? Or can it even be constituted as such? It’s a pretty safe bet any illegal file sharers caught while using Comcast’s service would be punished, but the fact Comcast even addressed the situation means they are willing to give users enough rope to hang themselves.

In closing, this is why contextual advertising is and will always be awesome. The following screenshot was taken from a site that has a “Comcast Service Sucks” page, with not much of significance on it. There is, however, a Google-served ad that captures just how much quality the Internet experience truly offers:

Alanis Morissette may have to weigh in here.