I don’t use Comcast for internet access (or anything else, for that matter), and I don’t know anyone who does, so I can’t independently confirm this - but a comment left not-too-long ago on a post here about bypassing Comcast’s blocking of P2P traffic (i.e. bittorrent file-sharing) suggests that Comcast might have recently (in the last week) initiated some new program which breaks SSH traffic on (the standard) port 22. Whatever your views on filesharing, disrupting SSH is not acceptable behaviour from an ISP, because it has very legitimate - and very important - uses quite unrelated to filesharing.

I’m extremely interested in hearing from anyone who can confirm, deny, or provide further insight into the current availability of port 22 from Comcast’s network. Leave a comment on this post, or contact me through this page if you’ve anything to say.

If you follow Defense Department news, you probably know about the Early Bird, a daily compendium of military-related reporting produced by the American Forces Information Service, or AFIS. Now, not just anyone can get access to AFIS’ website; despite the Early Bird being entirely open-source, it’s intended for people in .mil land, and other lucky sods who’ve requested and been granted access.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the Marine Corps has come to the rescue, and some time last year began making copies of the Early Bird available - with USMC-specific annotations - on their website (along with a lot of other public-affairs type stuff, as well.) I admit, I don’t know where it’s linked to, if anywhere, but I eventually managed to find it through Google. Simply point your browser here, and look for PDF files with names like “eYYYYMMDD.pdf” - where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, and DD is the day. For some reason, the Corps’ hasn’t updated the files since the end of the year, so to fill in the gap I’ve, ah, “acquired” copies of this year’s Early Birds from another source. You can read them here:

02 Jan, 03 Jan, 04 Jan, 05 Jan, 06 Jan, 07 Jan.

Enjoy!