On a much more serious note, I highly recommend How Comcast Blocks Your Internet Traffic, a post on Machinist, Salon’s tech blog. You have to watch a brief commercial to access Salon’s content, but this really is important, and it’s not just Comcast—or if it is, it probably won’t be for long.

The post is a fairly long but clear explanation of how Comcast, in the name of traffic management, secretly listens in to your Internet communications. If it wants to shut you down, it has software that steps in and essentially tells your machine and the machines you are communicating with that your connection has been lost. You have no way of knowing otherwise, and it is fairly surprising Comcast even got caught doing this.

Comcast at the moment appears to use it on peer-to-peer file transfers, which admittedly can cause surges in network traffic. And sure, some of those file transfers are illegal music downloads or whatever, but many are perfectly legal. As Machinist says,

If the company feels justified doing this on peer-to-peer connections, what's to say it wouldn't feel similarly justified shutting down or slowing down your communication with Amazon.com, or NYTimes.com, or YouTube or any other online service (whether because it doesn't like the content, or because it's got an economic incentive, or because it's just mean) -- and all without telling us?

Just one more reason Congress needs to move, and move soon, on Net Neutrality.