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Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

community.spotify.com

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Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#111

Post by whaevr »

nthj wrote: post #97
puivert wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet is peer to peer. If you are a victim of packet beancounters, the onus is on you to filter your traffic and apps to conform.

I take responsibility for making my software behave the way users expect. I would expect other developers to do the same. This "well you should have known about obscure UNIX command X" stuff is both why software still sucks, and why business people make mega bucks while technical people are capped at $120K salaries.

This. Under no impression from the Spotify website (although Im sure its buried in the T&C somewhere), or from what people say about it via word of mouth etc etc..what the application is MARKETED as; that it streams music to you for your listening expereince.

All "well p2p saves them server cost, reduces latency etc" bullshit aside. No-one EXPECTS that of the application. Its deception. Plain and simple. A vast amount of users don't expect this of the application and that could lead to plenty of consequences unbeknownst to them. Plenty of good reasons have popped up in this thread (data plans being eaten, people with limits imposed by their ISP, work environment concerns)

TL;DR Its negligent of spotify to market for one thing, and then include something like this in such a hidden and unmodifiable sort of way in their program. You want it in there? Fine. Tell me about it up front and give me some control over the upload speed

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#112

Post by freehunter »

ryandvm wrote: post #110
freehunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action…

> it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action stop Or... get your security monitoring tool to stop reporting legitimate P2P protocols as a security threat.

"Legitimate" p2p protocols depends completely on your risk appetite and how you define your security. For us, our risk appetite is quite low, and there is no such thing as a legitimate p2p protocol.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#113

Post by sahaskatta »

The Android app is horrendous for this issue as well. I have a Nexus 4 with the latest Android OS and the latest version of Spotify. I have yet to use the app even once this month. (I use Google Music.)

The Spotify Android app has consumed almost 250 MB of data on WiFi and about another 100 MB on 3G/4G this month alone. Does anyone else have this issue?

(For anyone that doesn't know, Android provides the data usage of each app in the settings panel.)

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#114

Post by diminoten »

freehunter wrote: post #32
mcculley wrote: post #28

I had to ban Spotify on our office network as the clients don't take into account how many users are on the local net and scale back accordingly. It only took a handful of users to soak up a noticeable amount of upload bandwidth. That and there is an operational security issue with a program that uploads files from the local disk to untrusted peers and encrypts everything such that one cannot tell what it is uploadin…

What sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action…

I just don't see Spotify as a business risk unless the bandwidth itself is a cost. It almost sounds like someone just wants to make a decision and is post-hoc justifying that decision with this "security concern!" fearmongering.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#116

Post by Lockyy »

path411 wrote: post #59
bobsy wrote: post #18

I have never liked this about Spotify... So the solutions outlined by Spotify are... 1) Suck it up. Its how the system works. 2) Use the web player. (Seems to be invite-only beta - US Only) 3) Use offline mode. Unlimited members pay for the service and cannot download tracks so not much use to those. Somewhat kills music discovery. Means you cannot use the radio option. Do social options work in offline mode? Not muc…

I'm mostly shocked at how I simply was uninformed that spotify was using my connection so. I know over the past few months I've had occasional and even sometimes frequent spikes of latency while gaming. I'm often left confuddled at these spikes as I won't have anything open I would consider requires much bandwith. Also, even though I would have high latency, opening a browser and navigating through sites would work a…

I am purely annoyed that I didn't know that it did this, I can't say whether this is my fault for being ignorant or theirs for not informing me but it worries me that I may have been putting unneeded load on networks that aren't mine, like my universities network.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#117

Post by freehunter »

Ao7bei3s wrote: post #78
alpeb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good solution nowadays is to ban everything that is not work-related and have people just use their cellphones with their own data plans for that.

No, thats just stupid. A good solution would be a guest WLAN that is, for example, on a separate VLAN. There is no reason to force people to use the slow and expensive cellular network -- both your employees and the people who actually need to use the cellular network will thank you. Also, the GP companies no-peer-to-peer-at-all policy seems... not well thought out, even thought it might be a pretty common policy. Th…

We do indeed have a guest WLAN, going out a separate circuit with a different ISP and different IP block. The problem is, people want Skype and Spotify on the same laptops they're using for work, and we don't allow split tunneling with our VPN.

P2P applications have security risks associated with them, but they also have network constraints associated with them. It doesn't take many P2P users to choke legitimate users out of a network. When some of the network monitoring tools we use are licensed based on how much data is flowing through the network, P2P gets expensive real quick. Move that stuff to a network we're not monitoring as extensively.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#118

Post by freehunter »

krakensden wrote: post #88
freehunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action…

Since Microsoft bought Skype, I heard they turned off the p2p part.

It's possible there are some clients that do not have p2p enabled, but I can confirm that the clients I'm seeing do still have p2p enabled and active.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#119

Post by freehunter »

diminoten wrote: post #114
freehunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sucks is that here at work (I work in corporate information security), we have developers who love to listen to music when they're programming. I support it. I like listening to music too. The problem is, some of them like Spotify. And since Spotify is peer-to-peer (and p2p applications are against the policy), it gets flagged in our security monitoring tool. And when it gets flagged, I have to make that action…

I just don't see Spotify as a business risk unless the bandwidth itself is a cost. It almost sounds like someone just wants to make a decision and is post-hoc justifying that decision with this "security concern!" fearmongering.

I posted this elsewhere, but...

P2P applications have security risks associated with them, but they also have network constraints associated with them. It doesn't take many P2P users to choke legitimate users out of a network. When some of the network monitoring tools we use are licensed based on how much data is flowing through the network, P2P gets expensive real quick. Move that stuff to a network we're not monitoring as extensively.

Re: Why is Spotify chugging upload bandwidth when it is not streaming?

#120

Post by mcculley »

csense wrote: post #100
mcculley wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The P2P app could make itself more trustworthy. On OS X, it could opt into the App Sandbox such that it could not read files unrelated to what it has downloaded. If you run fs_usage against Spotify on OS X, you will see that it is reading files in other places than where it downloads to.

Isn't it the norm on UNIX-like OS'es for things to use tons of dynamic libraries and spew pieces of themselves all over different directories?

I would not say this is the norm. If you look at Sandbox-enabled third party applications such as Google Chrome, it is well defined what libraries it dynamically links to outside of the directory it is installed in.
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