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Dispute Over IP Sharing Escalates
This story was sent in anonymously, but has several interesting points. The major part of the story is a dispute over
sharing IPs on DSL lines (this is in Korea, keep that in mind). The scariest part is that they cut off service to a customer using their line to run a petition site to get them to change the policy. Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service! Anyone else see anything scary about that? Obviously I think we should be able to use our DSL lines to host as many PCs as we want up to the bandwidth cap, that's simply our choice. But that's secondary to what happens when you mess w/ the telco!
I would appear the telco says you are renting the lines, while most consumers feel they are renting the bandwidth. My roommates and I take a 640kbps down line and split it 3 ways... but the way it works out is that each of us almost always gets full speed because we haven't used it all at the same time since we downloaded a few gigs of pr0n when we first got it. This must work out the same way for a lot of Slashdotters.
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
"The scariest part is that they cut off service to a customer using their line to run a petition site to get them to change the policy. Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service!"
I guess that trolls on Slashdot that disagree with the way the service is run are treated first-class, eh?
Ah, reminds me of the good old days of cable modem service in Palo Alto and Menlo Park...go obtain a cable modem somewhere, plug it in, claim an IP address you know to be in the Cable Co-Op number range, and voila! you're on. Heaven forbid someone already may have legitimately been issued your IP address. The Cable Co-Op response? "We control the distribution of cable modems, so this can't happen". Ever been to Fry's? I know of at least a dozen people who "borrowed" IPs on the Cable Co-Op network to get months of free service, often at the expense of legit users.
Even in the States we have companies with terms of service such as these. And it is easy to detect NAT running, because so many "odd" port numbers keep passing through. However, as long as the user keeps under the bandwidth cap (which is a legitimate business decision to have one) I don't see why the service would be concerned with why the packets are the way they are. Nor have I heard of someone being shut down for NAT'ting out 2-5 machines. I *have* heard of quake servers being shut down, but there is at least one real concern above bandwidth when a user creates a server - they create an obvious attack point for denial of service and other attacks.
Sig under construction since 1998.
Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service!
What! That's outrageous! Why should the slashdot admins cut off my service just because I disagree with the telecom. I mean, I can understand the telecom cutting me of themselves, but this goes WAY too far!
:)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
and re-selling their high speed access. I mean one customer, may have a couple of boxes at home tied to a network, so the family can surf. but i'd bet a lot of folks in korea are so poor, they wire up buildings, blocks, etc, from one dsl line and are paying the personal use fees. I do think its unfair to not allow 2-3 personal pc's to share a link, and how would they determine if you were NAT'ing? but if you have like 3 or 4 neighbors or more leeching off the same line, come on. DSL doesn't make any money if you're flogging the bandwidth 24/7. Its hardly profitable at all as it is.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
Even in the US, most DSL and cable providers say that you're not allowed to run 'servers' with their bandwidth. Under ANY circumstances, you should be allowed to do whatever you want with the bandwidth as long as it doesn't cause any added liability for the provider. What is really happening is that the DSL provider really doesn't expect to be providing the true bandwidth. Their business model and infrastructure would fall apart if they actually had to provide what they are selling you. In protest, all DSL users should mak out their lines with NON-'server' traffic. Make the providers hold up their end of the deal. We're buying bandwidth, and they had better damn well provide it, instead of hiding behind bogus 'no server' rules.
reads earlier story...
oh... :(
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I may be wrong, but my understanding of the NAT (Masquerading) used by most devices is that they change the source address of the packets they send so that it looks like the data all comes from the device itself. Certainly the Masquerading kernel option in the Linux 2.2 series kernels works this way.
Surely then, the ISP would not be able to detect a NAT/Masquerading box? It would look to them as though you still have only one PC, but you're just downloading a lot of stuff simultaneously. So why are people bothered by any terms and conditions that these ISPs write into their agreements? You could easily turn around to them and say that you are just running one PC, and there's no way they could prove you wrong short of getting a search warrant!
So where's the problem? Unless I've missed something fundamental, this seems to be a non-issue.
The reason the telcos and cable companies can give people broadband cheaply is that they base the price on "average" use. If people start putting 8 systems on there (and..uh..who would do that?) the average goes out the window. Many companies, I know my RoadRunner service does, will give you another IP (you can get another dynamic) for like $10/month to help cover costs.
But, they also don't seem to mind NAT here. I think they should hand out NAT routers with every cable modem, or integrate it in, just for the sake of security. I know I tell everyone at the office to buy one RIGHT AWAY when they get cable or DSL.
Is very simple.
IP space wasn't supposed to be a commodity, but it is now, due to ineffective planning (or whatever you want to call it).
An ISP should *only* ever enforce two rules.
1) How much bandwidth you can use.
2) Reserve the right to terminate your account if you cause them grief (spamming, etc..).
They shouldn't say 'don't run servers' 'only one computer' 'only for casual at-home use' etc.... they should simply make the bandwidth rules and prices reflect this.
I don't see anything scary here.
It makes complete sense that a telco would not allow their bandwidth to be used for someone to protest their company. Would you expect McDonalds to be okay with letting PETA protesters carry their signs behind the cashier counter? Of course not.
If someone wants to run a sight protesting the telco, for whatever reason, they should run it on a server that is not connected with the telco.
Duh.
When I am personally using dsl or better bandwidth, I am certainly not taking full advantadge of the pipe. So If I use 10% of the pipe or 20% of the pipe, or whatever, the service provider can charge me one third of what he charges a business customer, and still make a profit. Even If I use 30 or 40%, unlikely unless I streaming video 24/7, and doing other things, The average usage for most people probably is around 5 or 10% (all numbers are speculative) and so based on this the service can be priced accordingly.
Now if I suddenly have dozens or hundreds of computers using this line, the bandwidth can max out. If I am the provider, I am possibly charged by the number of bits that go overthe wire. This is where it gets alarming, since I had made my profit calculations based an average usage of 10% and charged appropriately. No suddenly I have bunches of people who want to use the personal private lines for their business without paying the businnes rates. Instead of 10% the usage soars to 50% or higher. This is not a good thing.
The options are either to just charge everyone business rate (no private rates) or to crack down on abusers. The personal rates are offered with this balance between business use and personal use understood, at least internally.
Now some people do not understand this. I suppose when it was only one or two ubergeeks doing this, they could let it slide. But when you start promoting this for everyone, then it messes up the business model.
I supposed you could have some sort of metered service, but I do not know how easy it would be to set that up. Even so metering is an added cost, and might not be practical for someone cutting costs a little thin in the above scenario. (price competition and all)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Disagree with the telcom, and we cut your service! Anyone else see anything scary about that?
It seems to me that things need to flow both ways. Why should a company be forced to provide a service to someone who obviously isn't happy with it? Is that not forcing someone (some company I guess) to do something against their will? I see something far more scary about that. I'm also wondering who should do something about it, consumers? Despite all of the talk people really don't vote with their wallets. On the whole we'll buy the product that gives us the best balance between price and features (or price and whatever it is we want) In the case of DSL we probably only have one choice in the first place so buying from a competitior is not really an option. Government is the only other entity that can force the company to change and they seem to be forcing enough people to do enough things against their will as it is.
A cry goes up when we talk about restrictive software licenses and the thinking it usually along the lines of 'you own it, you should be able to do with it what you want'. I think because a company is essentially faceless we think it is ok that even though they own something, they shouldn't be allowed to choose how or by whom it is used. The bottom line is that they own the servers that run the ISP, they lease the lines, they probably own the modem in the guy's house, but we don't want them to be able to shut off his service. Something about that just doesn't jive.
If I had a DSL I would connect as many computers as I'd like (no reselling though) and no telecom company should complain about that, because I am not playing out of the rules; they give me a line with an allocated bandwidth, as long as I stay within the bandwidth I am playing correctly. If they want to charge me a flat-rate instead of charging for bytes, it is their problem.
Can you imagine an insurance company rejecting some long-time customers because they get more sick than average recently?
This is the same, flat-rate for everybody (makes a nice ad) and then if you use too much bandwidth compared to the rest, your line is cut.
Is there possibly a face saving issue involved ?
Losing face in most Asian countries is about as bad as it gets, and maybe the TK folks feared face loss when too many petitioners stated the opinion that they run an overpriced, monopolistic, bureaucratic, crap shop!
Surely one of the Asian /. posters is better able to qualify such an assumption.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The Business Rate is $70 more a month, has the same bandwidth and same amount of IPs. For 1 year and going, they (obviously) haven't seen more than 1 IP address though it's got over 50 users in the building. Of course, the cable company scans the hell out of the gateway, tripping off portsentry all over the place, but no problems. The company is still paying residential rates (US$50.00/month).
Y'know, instead of just selling Business Rate and Residential Rate why don't they just sell by bandwidth?
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Can you imagine an insurance company rejecting some long-time customers because they get more sick than average recently?
No, but I can imagine insurance companies looking at average group expense and calculating out a value that makes them allways win. Thats why many small businesses have really expensive insurance. Only takes a couple of chronically sick people to tip the scales that premiums *have* to go up to keep the agreement profitable.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Why on Earth should it be other users who have to pay for what certain abusers are doing with their broadband connections? If I'm paying the same as them, then there's no way in hell it's fair for me to be basically subsidising their net access.
In this case, running a Quake server is the same as sending out spam. They both waste valuable bandwidth which others are paying for, and neither should be tolerated.
This occured in Korea, but in the US the part of any business that deals with the public (e.g., everything up to the McDonalds counter) is a "public accomodation" and they can impose very few restrictions on the public in that space. It's not as "free" as a public park, but it's not as restrictive as office or industrial spaces.
The space behind a counter is not a public accomodation and McDonald's could have anyone there arrested for trespassing, no matter what they're wearing, but they can't say anything about a peaceful group wearing PETA shirts in the order line. They can ask protesters waving signs to move on, but only because they're disrupting others and only to the extent that they ask other protesters to do the same.
Finally, telcos in the US are "common carriers" and <b>required</b> to carry all content, in exchange for immunity to conspiracy charges for the same. If a DSL drops a customer's service because he criticized their policy, then that same DSL may find itself named codefendant to a murder conspiracy charge because they permitted other customers to discuss a planned murder.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
First, slashdot is not a payed service, ya gets what ya pays for. Nor is it a public utility. Second, slashdot itself doesn't do the smacking down of the trolls, that is done by the community at large (moderators). Third, anyone can browse at -1 to see all the crap. Fourth, do you honestly believe that the trolls really deserve to be heard?
I realize that every other english speaking person uses these confusing words without completely disambiguating them. But because you're the leader of this great site, I strongly believe that you should griped at until you change your ways, and possibly the ways of all the good english speaking people.
In short, I'd rather spend my time complaining at you instead of taking an extra second to determine a word's meaning by context.
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You think you have it bad in Korea? In France we have the dubious honour of having to rely on the national telco monopoly (France Telecom) for the basic DSL line. Then we have a choice of ISP. Two charges, one to FT the other to the ISP.
What's wrong with that?
Well some ISP's (including France Telecom's subsidiary) have managed to solve the problem of nasty thieving customers putting NAT boxes behind their DSL connections and use a PPTP tunnel for your access. So, even though you can connect a NAT box between your home LAN and your DSL modem (and use your NAT box for PPPoE authentication - as this is standard in France), you can *ONLY* use one PC at a time with the PPTP tunnel! Most NAT boxes (like Linksys) allow only one PPTP tunnel to be passed through.
At least there are some decent service providers here that can offer you a service w/o PPTP and allow NAT, but they cost about $15-$20 more per month.
If Korea Telecom were smart (or devious!) they would force all the domestic users to connect via PPTP.
trolling the first world...
If I was the ISP who discovered that a building was sharing one of my connections, I would look at ways to get them to buy a second connection, and then a third etc. until they have as many connections as we would expect. Many of the people in the building may be paying for a service they would never purchase individually and in the long run we could make more money/sell more connections.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I've read some goofy terms of service for ISP that forbade you from using masquerading. Of course, when you look elsewhere on their web site they sell packages that include the ability to do masquerading. So, basically, they'd be miffed if you bypassed their package (and fee) by doing it yourself.
I don't think it's illegal. You really need to read their ToS and find out what they don't want you doing. If they catch you doing something that they specifically didn't want you doing, they can clobber you.
Ain't nice but I don't think it's illegal. Specially outside the U.S. where some countries have some pretty restrictive telecomm regulations and your ISP may just be the government. For example, I'd hate to be a modem user in Europe; the rates are horribly high.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Normal (voice) phone line: I consider this a product; you can get a second outlet for no additional montly cost, this makes sense because you can't get any additional benefit out of it, since you can't have 2 people making 2 different calls on the same line. The second outlet is only a convienience.
When you get a second line and have to pay and additional monthly fee, that's fair since you do get extra benefits from that additional service (can now make 2 simultaneous calls, and you get an additional phone#). Any additonal service on each line will cost more per line, again fair since it's two different products
Cable TV: I consider this a service just like sharing IP on cable - Why pay and additional montly fee when by spending a little money once ($15 for a slipper / a bit more for IP sharing sw) you can already get additional use out of it (watching 2 programs on 2 different TVs / multiple computers on same IP).
It's not fair to have to pay a additional montly fee for basically no added benefit - I don't get any extra channels by paying more, and I my bandwidth is still not maxed out.
Basically, if I can take a service and 'extend' it on my own, I don't see why I should have to pay more without them giving me more (which they don't)
AC comments get piped to
I recently enjoyed ringing around the Irish Dial-Up service providers to cost an ISDN dial-up account. I got the price from each provider and then told them that the connection would be used by a network and asked if that was ok. There were basically four providers two of whom said "oh you need a network account and thats about 8 times the price" while one said "oh we have a network account. You don't want it? Ok the normal dial-up is sound then" and the fourth said "why would it make any difference?" and I told them about their competitors policies. Final prices £90/£120 or £750/£850. So on a 64kb line these guys were looking for an extra £600+ per annum to let you use your dial-up account on a network (sorry you got a few more email addresses etc). Not too surprisingly the ISP who couldn't even understand the concept won the bidding :-)
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
So, apply this to DSL, same thing.
No, it's not the same thing. First of all, DSL providers sell service based on bandwidth - one price for 384 Kbps, a higher one for 512 Kbps, yet higher for 768 Kbps. Secondly, with DSL, you don't share the bandwidth (not until you get to a "main switch" - the exact term escapes me for the moment).
And thirdly, what you did will require you to secure five machines instead of one - using a NAT gateway makes sinply more sense. Not allowing NAT is a disservice to the customer.
It is funny how the lack of competition makes companies behave stupid. Where I live, we have relatively good @home service (if you don't really rely on them for e-mail or Usenet service), so the local DSL providers try to differentiate themselves by providing simmetrical DSL, specifically allowing severs, etc.
I'm so tired of hearing this. ALL BANDWIDTH IS SHARED AT SOME POINT. People with DSL like to say that cable bandwidth is shared. Sure, DSL people have a copper cable from their house to the CO, but once it hits the CO it is SHARED. I have a friend in Texas on GTE. They oversold the CO's SHARED BANDWIDTH so much his ping to his ISP gateway was 500ms.
After months and months my roadrunner ping is 8ms and I still get 300K/sec. I think they are doing a damn good job.
- Napster
- Netmeeting
- ICQ
- etc.
Through a home firewall? I realize you can pass on some ports to a specific machine, but it doesn't work for Netmeeting. It's one of the reasons why I don't use a separate firewall, I just protect Windows with Zonealarm. I also use Windows 98 connection sharing, so my Linux PC, which doesn't need to be a server, has no problems.----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
There are two different things being discussed here - commercial use and complete personal use.
I don't think there is a reasonable arguement for using a "domestic" connection in and for a business.
On the other hand, I can (and do) saturate my domestic bandwidth contantly - whether downloading the latest from LinuxISO.org, game demos, kernel updates - and all within the T&C's of the service.
Further, I can do this all from one PC - so what does it matter if I set up NAT and browse from my wireless-LAN-enabled laptop in my living room (except for making me a sad git). I'm not using any "extra" resources of my ISP by doing so...I'm just making full use of the service I have paid for.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
The term "IP Sharing" in this article is known as NAT or IP Masquerading to the rest of the world. There are a number of companies selling "IP Sharing" boxes that just do NAT.
.05% to 1% of the available bandwidth during any 24 hour period, and their profit calculations count on this. When approached by a non-mainstream use, they don't really understand how it might impact their severely under-engineered systems, so they get very obnoxious and end the discussion. However, if you are willing to spend the money, you can get a professional grade connection with very liberal ToS, but only over leased lines.
It sounds like users in Korea are wiring entire blocks of flats for network access, sharing the cost of a single ADSL connection. That wouldn't be so bad, but then they put a web server on their connection criticising their operator for banning the practice in the ToS. Big mistake, there are tons of other places to put up your web site, like geocities. If you are going to bash a telecom, do it from another part of the internet, not on the wires they control.
This is just another battle between one business who supplies a scarce service to consumers, and other businesses who supply boxes to relieve the scarcity.
I've been trying to find a supplier of consumer grade internet access (DSL, cable or even dial) who will allow "group" access for small wireless installations. These would be similar to groups in major cities all over the world who want to create an alternative wireless internet, with a number of gateways to the wired internet. This has been difficult for consumer level access, but is possible with high cost professional style leased lines and individual ports on router.
The economics of consumer grade connections means that a restricted (in ToS) connection to a single computer can barely use more than
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
How does one detect the existance of NAT?
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
People who gratuitously waste bandwidth, are the reason that they have to set draconian policies. The sooner we get to pay-per-bit, the better.
BTW, unless your music stream is being served by the ISP or someone else who uses that ISP, you are wasting bandwidth on other networks that are beyond your ISP's control. You're costing everyone money. The ISP's service stilpulated a connection speed between you and the ISP, not a connection speed between you and everywhere else in the world. I hope they throttle your connections to the outside, down to 300 baud. It would serve you right.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
trolls are a DoS
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have a business connection through my ISP. I get close to 2Mbs down and 600kbs upload. It has two fixed IPs and services up to 5 machines in my house. (Two dual boot Win/Lin the other three run Linux only.)
The only thing my ISP forbids is subdomain hosting. They have always said that using more than one machine through the connection is fine (even on the basic package) but they cannot offer support.
Supposedly they only support Win and Mac but when I was being upgraded I got cut off prematurely. I called tech support and when the nice lady found out I ran Linux, the whole conversation changed.
"Can you ping the gateway" She said.
Me "no."
Her "I'll get someone on that right away."
Other than this incident I have only been down a total of about six hours in two and a half years of service.
A lot of cable companies have pretty good attitudes towards this. Basically the one I use states that it's 'unsupported' and that if anything gets in or out of your subnet that shouldn't, it's your problem.
I can certainly go along with that.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
That's why I signed up with Telocity. They encourage Linux Servers, firewalls, and NAT. Oh, and no contract.
Of course, it isn't hooked up yet, so I can't tell you about quality. Considering GTE is doing the outside wires, and Northpoint Communications is doing the inside wiring, I assume that it will be a matter of how good GTE quality is -- I doubt the line quality will reflect anything about Telocity itself.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Unless you have more than two arms, you can only do so many things on the internet at once, even if you own 1000 computers.
;-)
I suggest a per-person/per-household cost. ie: 1 person in the household, $20/month. 2 people, $30/month, etc...
This way you can have as many computers as you really want attached, but still pay the same fee (since you should still be using the same bandwidth per person).
That sort of billing would be more in-line with modern cable TV access. A long time ago you had to pay by the television set for cable access. So people bought splitters. Cable co's figured this out and metered lines for resistance (if they really cared enough). So people bought amplifiers. So the smart Cable co's gave up, and simply set the rate per building or household. If you want more than one TV attached to the cable, that becomes your problem.
This is also inline with telephone charges. In some countries you had to rent each phone. Now that phones are readily availible most phone companies have dropped that rule, while raising their per line prices (somewhat) to compensate.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yes, and not just by luck:
and
That's an "s" on the end of "IPs". The plural of "Intellectual Property" is usually just "IP". Then again, it's a Slashdot headline, so I suppose the "s" could have been interpretted as a mess up, but the other cue is there too, so it didn't seem too ambiguous to me.
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Ever heard of honesty? If you make a promise, you had better deliver. If I'm promised 128k upload, I expect it. Judgement has to be exercised in the advert and that's not my job. The economy depends on trust. People who violate trust deserve the burn they eventually get.
The cable modem people oversubscribed my neighborhood and have a sucky ToS. Do I blame my neighbors who might be serving Quake? No, I don't. I blame the cable company for oversubscribing or not enforcing their ToS. I'm dumping them for DSL.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Shortly after I signed up with RR I contacted them concerning servers. I was told that it was ok to run "personal" servers. They defined personal as a server that only I would use. Something like a FTP or HTTP server that I would use to get documents while at work. Their argument was that they don't want outside users using their network's bandwidth. They also said that they would take action if users were using excessive upstream bandwidth (6GB/month was the number I was told) I can understand this argument in a business sense. So unless things have changed you can run servers as long as they aren't accessed by outside users.
According to New Scientist magazine's "Feedback" column 17 Feb 2001 (see http://www.newscientist.com/feedback/, ntl has the following cable modem "user policy" provision for "abuse of the service":
Ridicule is an appropriate antidote to bureaucratic fever.
BTW, readers in Korea who can't put up their own web sites from their apartments, please read from Eldritch Press the English translation of the classic Korean novel, annotated and illustrated, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, at http://www.eldritchpress.org/kim/cloud9.html.
Eldritch Press runs from my home via ATT Mediaone RoadRunner cable modem service in New Hampshire, USA. Thanks, ATT!
>People who gratuitously waste bandwidth, are
>the reason that they have to set draconian
>policies.
Companies which gratuitously advertise exaggerated bandwidth they can provide, are the reason that people use the bandwidth to the max.
If an ISP cannot put up with the behavior and only can provide such and such bandwidth, it should not say otherwise (like "Always Online", "High bandwidth, all the time!")on their commercials.
The situation in Korea is that there are thousands of "PC-pang"'s which are basically pay-by-the-hour PC facilities. I would imagine that this would be a perfect situation for a NAT, although I would expect the ISP's to take that into account in a commercial DSL subscription.
Companies that wire up buildings there work on a revenue-share basis with ISP's, so there's no incentive to let tenants share a line or work around the provider.
Possibly the PC-pangs are getting dirt cheap residential service and NATing it to 10-20 active PC's. I can see some reason for complaint with that, but that's more of a commercial vs. residential service fraud issue.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Originally we were loath to try, since our backbone is priced based on usage. We assumed that if we connected a customer up at 768Kbps our usage might go up that much.
Boy were we wrong! We couldn't even see a difference on our backbone connection in spite of the additional load. After a few days running MRTG on that interface we found out why. The total usage was less than a modem would have been running full speed.
This DSL connection was to a graphic design business with 8 artists connected 24/7!
What we have discovered to be the rule is that most customers don't want bandwidth (yet, anyway!!!) they want SPEED! They don't run servers, they just want fast web page downloads.
I don't know how mulitmedia on the internet is going to change things, but so far we've found the bandwidth doesn't really go up that much. The usage is extremely bursty in nature with orders of magnitude more 0% usage than 100%.
That's why DSL is being distributed at such low costs, because most users don't cause the bandwidth to go up. The phone companies are planning on tax write-offs for the DSL equipment anyway so they aren't worried about it's cost. They just want to keep their service and bandwidth costs under control.
When customers start running servers, the low-bandwidth-usage rule goes out the window and that's why they don't allow them.
If you've got $40/month DSL, you aren't paying for the amount of bandwidth you think you have. If all the DSL users suddenly started downloading service packs, they'd find out that their provider has dramatically oversubscribed their available bandwidth. But in reality that never happens. Same deal with cable modems.
If you need real bandwidth (big company, service provider, etc.) you're going to have to pay for it unless you can "get one over" on your upstream!
Good Luck!
No. What you see as "wasting" can be vital to someone else. If the person who leaves his audio streams on 24/7 thinks he needs to for some reason, it is not wasting for him. A waste or not, it is totally subjective.
Your supermarket analogy does not fit here. A better analogy can be "If the supermarket...., and they only have 20 left, (but they promised 40 to everyone) and I wanted 40, what should I do?
I logically buy all the 20 left (it does not matter to me whether or not the next person will get none).
And, of course, I can do anything with the oranges I bought, including throwing them all on to the ground outside the supermarket if I see fit.
It might look like a waste to someone working at the supermarket or someone on the street, but, if throwing them all on the ground increases my level of happiness, there is certain utility in it. Therefore it is not a waste to me.
This is what bothers me most about the ToS.. I think its difficult to define a 'single PC' at all any more.
I run 5 machines at home, all of which are used, by me, to do various things. This situation arose simply because i haven't thrown any computers away since i started buying them a few years ago.
Now, i consider all these machines to be my 'personal computer' - I'll usually have an X desktop on my LinuxPPC iMac running X apps and terminals off 2 of the others, some 3D game or a DVD movie playing off the drive in another of the boxes and a 3D animation project i'm working on running on another of the CPU/monitor combos.
I have X terminals and MIDI synths hooked up to the same pool of computing resources too.
All these machines are composed of a variety of networks, including serial lines, IDE interfaces, SCSI interfaces, ethernet, PCI busses, MIDI interfaces, analog audio lines and digital audio connections too. There are CPUs on my ehternet card - surely its a breach to attach anything else to that card over a PCI bus, if you follow the terms of this agreement.
Sure, you could say 'but an ethernet card isn't a personal computer', but how do you come to this conclusion - surely it is possible to use the logic on an ethernet card to do useful computation?
The telco has no right to tell me how to organise my computing resources into a functional machine, and the idea that my 'Personal Computer' is a discrete component is ridiculous.
I can understand a condition like 'you may not resell this service', but i reject the notion that a 'Personal Computer' can be categorized as a single Macintosh or x86 machine, since that is apparently what these (and every other cable provider with a similar service agreement) people are claiming.
I'd really like to see it stand up in court - especially when every major computing institution is quite happy to define a cluster or massively parallel multi-CPU machine as a 'single computer'
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
My analogy rocks. It is the sort of analogy people will be naming their children after.
You don't understand what the ISP is selling.
The supermarket is selling oranges at, say, 10 cents per orange.
The ISP is selling burst connection speed at, say, $25 per 256kb/s.
The ISP is not selling data volume. I have never heard of a flat rate ISP advertising raw data volume. They can't deliver, they don't want to deliver, and most of their target clientele don't care or want it.
The fundamental problem is that people are reading things into the advertising - things which are perhaps implied but certainly not stated - and making connections in their heads that don't exist, driven by wishful thinking.
The ISP says that you can get up to 256kb/s. They say that the service is always on. They do not say that you can get exactly 256kb/s 24/7. Some people would like to get 256kb/s 24/7, but all the wanting in the world isn't going to make it economically viable to provide that at consumer rates with today's technology.
And that's what the service contract is for. Read it. Learn. Buy wisely.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
None of these is failsafe - and in particular many of the techniques are liable to confusion by emulators like VMWare - but automatic detection can very usefully help build a case for further human investigation.
The side that benefits from exposure of information always wins.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Another good one is:
I went shopping around for other DSL services, keeping an eye on their legal aggreements, and I couldn't find a TOS that didn't make me want to toss. All of them follow a similar formulation, like "you get to pay us money, but we guarantee nothing, you have no rights, and we can do what ever we want".This strikes me as being very short sighted in a number of ways. It seems very unlikely to me that this "we have the right, but not the obligation" business will survive forever, and if they have to go one way or the other, they'd much rather be in the position of never, ever, monitoring content. That's what being a "common carrier" is about, as I understand it.
And further, though this seems to be a quaint and old-fashioned thought in a lot of people's minds, there really is some value in customer goodwill. If right out of the gate, a company starts acting like a jerk, they really can't expect anything like customer loyalty.
Anyway, if you're really bored, I've archived the whole pile of stuff here: Concentric DSL legal agreements.
Quite so. For a couple days I had a squatter on my home IP address, who parked an HP JetDirect box on it, of all things. Now that just ain't smart. I don't like wasting paper, so I made sure my PostScript art was concise, persuasive, to-the-point, while containing graphic visual aids to overcome any potential literacy gap. The printer disappeared quickly after that.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
IANAL, but I remember an interesting legal case posted to Slashdot some time ago that could be a precedent for this.
Years ago, telephone companies used to do the same thing with phone lines. People were not permitted to connect more than one phone to their phone line. The phone company was meant to do that. The phone company wanted to maintain their service monopoly, so people had to pay the phone company to install extra phones.
Someone, I think it was a farmer in the USA who was a member of a ham radio club, connected a second phone to their phone line. The phone company didn't like this, so the phone company sued.
The phone company lost the case! The farmer enlisted the support of the ham radio club, and was able to fund a good legal defense.
As a result of this legal case, the way telephony is delivered has changed radically. Now, when people get a phone connected, the phone company maintains the phone line only up to the first socket in the home. The customer maintains all the phone lines after that point. The customer can still hire the phone company if they want extra cables installed.
Sound familiar? It should, it's exactly the same as the current controversy with multiple PC's on one link. This suggests that it is possible to beat this restriction by suing the provider under the right circumstances and citing this case (if you can find it) as a precedent. What are the "right circumstances"? That depends on the fine print in your contract, but if yours does not currently have this provision, and your provider tries to introduce it as an amendment to the terms and conditions of service, you could sue them to prevent them amending the TOS.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Anyone in their right mind will not connect to a high-speed Internet link without a firewall of some kind. Suppose I have a simple setup where my dedicated firewall box connects to the cable modem, and my single PC is connected to the firewall. Am I in violation of their TOS?
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
So then I should make sure that I am running VMware as a possible defense if Roadrunner disconnects my NAT? :)
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"