The Comcast Banhammer. Welcome to insanity.

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Originally Posted by x88x

Great for her, bad for the ISP.

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It's not all bad for the ISP. They want to bring people high speed internet but they don't want to upgrade the infrastructure. $10 a month from people who pretty much do nothing is like $10 a month free to them. There is no cost to them if the internet isn't being used.

It also solves a big problem with ISPs, which is getting money to upgrade infrastructure. If everyone is using all the bandwidth they can 24/7, their bills will go up and the ISP will get more money to get those people more speed, which will get them more money.

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Originally Posted by d_stilgar

It's not all bad for the ISP. They want to bring people high speed internet but they don't want to upgrade the infrastructure. $10 a month from people who pretty much do nothing is like $10 a month free to them.

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True, but if they stick with their current model, they get $40 off that person. :P


I agree that it would be a great idea, I'm just quite pessimistic about the actions of ISPs. They're businesses, and more often than not, centered solely around turning a profit. Since the majority of their customers would probably end up paying them less with your proposed plan, and most of the customers who would use a lot of traffic probably already have an expensive plan, I doubt that their net profits would go up that much.

Idk, I'm looking at my internet usage, and my bill would go up by $10-30 if we went with this plan.

The plan is more fair in the end, and encourages people to watch their internet use in a positive way. It doesn't have to be implemented the way I described it either. There are infinite ways that it could be set up with different flat service fees and different data rates. And there are plenty of options that will make the ISP the same amount of money per month (or more) and have the majority of people paying the same bill within a 10% margin.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think it's a good idea. I just think that if an ISP were to go the route of charging for data used instead of by speed hierarchy, that they would do it in such a way that it ended up costing the consumer a lot more (like, $0.50/GB, or something). I would love to have an ISP prove me wrong though! :D

That's why most presidents get two terms. We don't like the guy we have now but we're more afraid of how bad it could get if we vote for the unknown new guy. If things are bad, but tolerable, most people are happy to stick with it unless they are certain change will be for the better.

I'm afraid of what ISPs would charge as well.

When my grandparents went to AT&T Yahoo DSL, they got it for $10 a month for the first year. It's their slowest one, but it's cheap and better than dial-up. AT&T offered that deal for a few years for people upgrading from dial-up as a concession for buying one of the bell companies. They're paying around $20 a month now, but it's still much better than $40 a month for cable internet.

So.....it happened again... I thought I put adequate safeguards in place, but it turns out my calculations were off by a factor of 10..oops. :P Unfortunately, I didn't find this out until I got home tonight at ~9:20...I managed to get one call in to the "24 hour" 800 number before they closed (hint, they aren't actually open 24 hours a day. They close at 9. -_^ ). And of course, the 'abuse' department closes at, like, 7 or something, but they don't actually tell you that, they just dump you into an endless hold music with a voice coming on every 5 minutes or so to ask if you want to leave a message instead.


...I f***ing hate Comcast....

EDIT:
In the mean time, I got my N900 hooked up as a modem over USB. Not all that fast, but decent.

lol, this thread is pretty funny. You guys have been spoiled with no-strings-attached internet.

Up here in Canada, I've been on a 5 Mb/s down, 800 Kb/s up profile since what feels like the dawn of time. My ISP blocks all p2p/torrenting (they can tell if you use encryption) between 4 PM and 2 AM.

Thankfully though, I do get a nice 200 GB cap (better than the common 60 to 100 GB cap most others are on).

Also, just out of curiosity... what's the point of downloading rainbow tables? It can't only be to retrieve unsalted encrypted passwords, can it? I hardly see that something worth blowing 1.3 TB on if that's all they can be used for. :p

That sucks about your ISP. IDK, maybe we are spoiled, but considering that the history in most of our country is for ISPs to offer uncapped, unmetered, unrestricted (besides speeds) internet service, I think we're justified in complaining about companies that start to change that.

Your ISP can certainly tell if you're passing encrypted traffic, but there is no way that they can tell what that encrypted traffic is without the keys on your end (ie, the whole point of using encryption). As far as they know, you could be running a VPN or just streaming a crapload of HD video over a proxy or something.

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with the rainbow tables. :P While there aren't many OSs that use unsalted hashes anymore (well, other than Windows... :whistler: ), there are plenty of applications that do. Besides, it's sort of a hobby of mine and unless my internet usage is capped, I'm not 'blowing' the traffic, I'm just using what I have available to me.

I am pleased to announce that this saga is finally coming to a close. Two weeks ago, I discovered the Verizon does actually have month-to-month plans..they just hide them.. -_^ So, after a long wait till last Thursday to get my service turned on, then another wait till today to find out that they never actually physically hooked up my line... :facepalm: ...and a few hours messing with it getting it to work correctly (DSL modem bridged to router #1, which acts as the master router, DHCP server, and wireless AP, then my gigabit router over by my two towers in wireless client bridge mode joining the two routers...) I am now (finally) a happy customer of Verizon DSL. :D It's not the fastest thing in the world, but I can use all the traffic I want and the 'internet police' won't cut off my service. *glares at Comcast*