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Broadband Crackdown
MrPeach writes: "In a move unsurprising to those of us who have had interactions with their so-called customer support, AT&T Broadband and Excite@Home are indefinitely filtering all incoming traffic on http port 80 for residential customers. They could have cut access to those running compromised servers, but instead chose to deny the ability to run a web server to all subscribers to their service. DSL anyone?" DSL won't save you. Verizon is apparently also blocking port 80 for their DSL customers, in addition to blocking outgoing port 25 and requiring use of Verizon's SMTP servers to send email. Verizon is also cheerfully paying fines for screwing over their competitors - the fines will be much less than the extra profit they can squeeze out once their competition is gone.
Actually - I didn't.
I'm one of the earlier @home customers in Fremont CA. which was a test city for the technology. The terms of service I signed didn't limit the things I could run on the system. I checked for that before I signed it.
Unfortunately there is the "out" in the contract where they can unilaterally change the terms of service by simply publishing new ones at a given URL:
So is that binding on me? Not sure - IANAL, but it isn't really fair either. On the other hand, it has been true for most of the time that I've been on the service that they "officially" not allowed ANY kinds of servers on the home systems. For that matter, they even had one version of the dang TOS that let them prohibit me from doing any business over the internet - yeah like going to amazon.com and ordering a book was prohibited. That part got dropped like a hot potato because of a ton of public criticism locally.
I do think they are being heavy handed, and extremely short sighted. They are in many ways restricting freedom of speech by such filters. They are probably legal - but they suck!
Have you compiled your kernel today??
If the bandwidth is limited, then quota the bandwidth to each user! It's just as possible to eat up the limited upstream bandwidth by uploading large files to Hotmail, but they don't ban that.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
right after they hit www.mcafee.com:80.. err.. oops
Verizon IS blocking port 80 from outside verizon's network, and the reason verizon has been giving its tech support people, is that this is a temporary port block becuase of Code Red.
The block started yesterday, and affects in bound traffic into verizon's network. I can get to my website from other verizon addresses, but not from outside of verizon's net. I couldn't get a specific time frame on how long the block is going to be up, but the tech support people have been told that its not permenant.
Does Verizon have a legitimate concern about Code Red investation across its network? Maybe...but since I'm not running in MS products on my LAN and I take the time to secure my stuff, I'm pretty unhappy that my services get knocked off the net like I'm one of the clueless masses.
The best solution to get Verizon to hurry up and unblock the port is for everyone who has a verizon DSL account to call them and tell them in a very nice calm manner that if the block stays in place, your business will go elsewhere. I was call 25 this morning. Let's see if the slashdot effect works over the phone as well....I want to see the number of complaint calls jump to 2000 in the next 30 minutes.
Verizon Tech Support:
1-800-567-6789
-jef
Not that I like XP. But I can see this causing lots of angery letters...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Unfortunately that isn't all it is....as I said in a previous post.
"Bundling server software with win2k was stupid, I know several people who werent even aware they were running servers until just the last few day, I guess they were just playing around with add/remove windows components and ended up installing the software which then ran as a service without their ever being aware of it, I imagine quite a few people are in that situation right now. Microsoft could and should have made it a free download for those who knew they wanted it."
I suppose the argument could be made that people were stupid for playing with "add/remove windows components", but microsoft has in many ways gotten as big as they are by claiming their products are almost idiot proof. I guess this is proof they are the idiots.
"PMS is the time of the month when women act like men do all the time"
Robert Heinlein
Yes, that's nice in theory, but in reality, it's must easier to pay someone $75/hour to type in "access-list 101 deny any any eq 80" on each access router than it is to pay them to type in hundreds of such statements corresponding to each specific users IP address on each of their subnets. And never mind the labour costs, the CPU costs to process that access list for each and every packet would be unreal. (Not to dwell on router configuration, but each line would have to be unique, ie. you couldn't group them together in subnets etc as is usually done, and remember, each and every line is processed until a matching one is found).
Even if that were true, so what? I bought bandwidth from my ISP and I expect them to deliver that bandwidth. If my machine has a security problem and starts attacking other sites on the Internet, that should be my problem, not my broadband provider's problem. My broadband provider may choose to limit my outgoing and incoming bandwidth to a previously contractually agreed-upon minimum, but no further.
By your reasoning, the telephone companies should listen in on our telephone conversations to make sure we don't do anything illegal and don't make prank calls. Wisely, we have chosen not to place that authority in them, and we should take a similar approach to security with broadband providers.
So if you must host something but Excite@Home is blocking port 80, change your Apache config to listen on a different port number.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Telephone service is not a privilege. The telephone companies are regulated common carriers and are required by law to offer service to the public on a non-discriminatory basis. The conditions under which service can be refused or terminated are set by state and federal law and regulations, not the whim of some telco executive. The same can be said for other regulated common carriers, such as gas and electric companies.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
From a social standpoint -- where our priorities are less about the "bottom line" and more about providing for a healthy, vibrant, diverse democracy -- there isn't an incredibly good reason why web servers or other content servers are prohibited on so-called "consumer" Internet service providers.
In some cases the bandwidth isn't there-- I understand that, however, in general, the speeds are suitable for most people's private soapboxes... further, overall and in general, home servers do little harm to the network, Code Red notwithstanding.
And in all seriousness, I doubt anyone expects strict uptime SLAs or performance guarantees from your local @Home franchise. I'm not suggesting that "consumer-grade" Internet access claims to offer such things or even really ought to... However, I tend to believe that the prohibition on servers is more an effort to control media content creation & affordable distribution more than it is an effort to ensure network stability.
In effect, a ban on servers prevents citizens from competing affordably for so-called "mindshare" with big corporations and others who don't sweat the cost of dual redundant T3 connectivity.
Broadband internet access has the potential to really revolutionize media distribution by empowering individuals to affordably control & create new and innovative media outlets.
On the other hand, most home servers probably aren't even public servers but private servers used for, say, development purposes or sharing files between office & home. These uses are of course even less stressful on the network and certainly more benign.
Meh... just some food for thought.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
I think that this is a perfectly reasonable response from @home. I work at a large ISP and I've seen how rapidly this code red garbage spreds. The little editorial comment that they can "simply block infected machines" is, quite frankly, garbage. Code Red 2 spreads faster than anyone could possibly keep up with blocking one machine at a time.
Code Red 2 is tearing up bandwidth at these cable companies. Its noticeably slowing down my speeds on my home internet connection. Something needs to be done in a hurry, and blocking port 80 is a fast solution that works.
Instead of blaming the broadband providers, why don't you blame the real culprit in this situation: Windows. Get angry at Microsoft; if it weren't for their lousy code and lousy security this problem would not have been possible in the first place.
End of story. If a few dumb assholes would patch their shit and keep current with it, then the majority wouldn't suffer. But no.......... This is military logic, one person screws up, and the whole unit pays the price. The problem is, we can't give a blanket party to the fucking dumbasses who refuse to keep current with secuity patches. This goes for Linux/Windows/Macintosh/Amiga/NeXT/BeOS/Solaris/CP /M/DOS/HP-UX/AIX/OS9/QNIX/FreeBSD/OpenBSD
I don't care what you run, if you don't keep current on security patches, you are an asshole.
"If it weren't for dickheads like you, there wouldn't be any thievery in this world Pyle"
WTF? Over?
> Granted I don't know how much one costs but I
> figure at around $40 a month a group of about
> 20-30 should be able to gets something way
> faster that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
We have an LADC line (which while only rated for 9600baud, but can do 768k unreliably via HDSL), that runs 4 blocks. It has a heavy distance limitation. It costs $80/mo. This does not include bandwidth charges. Distance matters. A lot. Too far away? Too bad, you'll either need to 56k lease line (haha), or frame relay, or ptp t1. None of these (well except 56k) are in your pricerange.
> around $40 a month a group of about 20-30
> should be able to gets something way faster
> that DSL/Cable and without the bullshit.
Ok, let's say 25 people @ 40bucks, not including the line charge. that's $1k. Call up qwest, or maybe sprint, or maybe a tier 2-N (because that's all you can afford), and if you live near a POP and you're lucky, maybe you can get a full T1.
Ok, now we have a shared T1, for 25 people (who i'm assuming will all be geeks, and will be downloading stuff late at night...) Assume a T1 can get maybe 160k/s throughput (you can't get 100% util on a T1 w/o severe latency problems), you get 6.4k/s. Congrats, you've gotten isdn speeds, for the cost of approximately $120/mo/person. This doesn't include startup costs. xDSL equipment costs a few hundred dollars on each end, and 802.11b accesspoints are a lot more expensive than the cards (no, airports don't count, their distance sucks) and the costs of outdoor antennas are horrendous, not to mention you'd have to find/hire someone to do the professional antenna install for you. You'd need a router for your shared T1, add another $600 in startup there.
> What happens when the network / connection goes
> down. Either we set up some sort of rotation
> but we need an admin to fix stuff and that can
> be expensive.
Expensive is right. You can get a crappy consultant for $75/hr. Say something significant happens once a month for two hours (that's not too unreasonable, given the current codered/sircam problems, and general maintainence, mailserver/dns crap).
Your cost is now $125/mo for slightlyhigherthan isdn speeds. See why this idea isn't that great?
I'm not a big fan of the quality of service of @home or Roadrunner. But at $40/mo, what can you really expect? Does your cable modem/dsl occasionally do over 200k/s? It does? Guess what, just that bandwidth capability alone, would cost you $1.5k/mo to do.
This attitude makes me sick. The idea of capitalism seems great, but it just doesn't work. How can I take my dollars elsewhere, when there's nowhere else to go? Every saturated market ends up in the hands of an oligopoly - not much better than a monopoly. In the case of broadband access, it's even worse, because of the government sanctioned monopolies on cable. Go on, ask me what choices I have for broadband access. [sigh]
One frustrated broadband user, -TobyI'm posting AC because it seems each time I post my opinion on this topic, I lose karma...
I don't see any reason why providers shouldn't block port 80 incoming. The only reason to have that open is to run a webserver -- something most broadband providers explicitely disallow for residential customers. That's one of the reasons why a "business" account usually costs a lot more, even for the same speeds.
Just because they let it ride up to now, doesn't mean they have any less a right to block it now. If they'd been doing this all along, I'm sure most people wouldn't be complaining now.
Sure, it's nice to run a webserver at home, but residential service doesn't usually come with any kind of real uptime guarantees, etc. It just makes more sense to either get a business account, or get a real webserver (lease one, or use a shared provider, whatever).
With the amount of port 80 requests in my firewall logs on my cable connection, I would welcome a block on port 80 personally. I've already bored of looking at 'dir' listings and deleting files on these idiot Windows/IIS machines... but seriously, it's time to put this thing to rest and move on. And get a webserver.
It also creates an artificial market-- why would I buy "business class" bandwidth or co-locate a server for a site that's adequately hosted on broadband for a fraction of the price? We're not talking "enterprise, mission-critical, ecommerce" web applications or anything... we're talking about noncommerical, nonprofit media forums.
I run a site that gets maybe 100 hits a day, is frequented by only a small group of 15 visitors. However, we have very complicated custom web applications the drive the sorts of things we do... free or paid shared hosting is not an option. Nor is it a real possibility to shell out money for co-location or "business class" bandwidth for this sort of thing -- that of course generates no profit. The idea that the home user should settle for less (yanno, the idea that a 5MB, add-riddled, censored, GeoCities account "is good enough") -- that only big corporations should have access to high quality server applications -- is disturbing. It reinforces the idea that the Internet is here for business-- not for culture, not for recreation, not for academia, not for the free exchange of ideas.
Access to the tools big business uses is a real possibility with broadband since a lot of hobbyists, enthusiasts or professionals working in their spare time can put together a lot of the same things that corporate and "ecommerce" sites can...
As I say, I'm not claiming that broadband needs to come tethered to the sorts of service levels that corporate folks are expecting-- nobody suggests such a thing... but there's no good reason to limit people to Geocities because... "pfah! if you're serious, you'd co-locate in an Exodus data center."
That argument is pretentious and elitist. I get no Darwinian thrill from seeing only the moneyed have access to technologies all of us could use, enjoy and share at minimal cost.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Yeh, do the math.
If 99.9% of all security problems are redhat, then the Code Red II worm is only 0.1%. So, you multiply the code red worms by 1000, that is the number of unsecured redhat boxes, clearly a realistic number.
Lord knows, linux is very insecure, switch to NT/2000 today!
And what exactly is a "server"? Is accessing your Pilot calendar remotely using a server? Is using an FTP client a server? What about identd? What about my PC vendor's remote Windows support system? Is running a client connection to establish a VPN to some other host on the Internet and poking out a server socket on that machine "running a server"? Let's be concrete please, because my TOS don't actually say. They are so vague that the provider can make up what they mean whenever they like.
And especially don't start with the geek indignation, because consumer broadband is not meant, nor sold, under the pretense of running home servers.
That would be true if broadband providers fully owned all the rights of way and infrastructure. They don't. They tear up public streets and use public spectrum only because the communities where they deliver service let them. They can be kicked out if they don't satisfy the needs of the community. And peer-to-peer and servers are crucially important in particular for non-commercial and non-profit uses.
Furthermore, for broadband providers to try to control whether you may run a "server" is the beginning of content controls. The next thing you know, you'll only be able to connect to the commercial sites of your provider's choosing.
Broadband providers should be legally required to provide universal Internet connectivity and set rates and limitations based on bandwidth and volume only. Possibly, there might be two rate structures, one for non-commercial and another for commercial customers. But providers should have no business deciding what content or packets travel over their networks, as long as the packets are properly addressed and their format is according to spec.
@Home and others had the exact same philosophy that we did, "we really don't care, unless it starts to become a problem." We (as in the ISPs), were quite lenient (yes, i have a webserver running at home) because we believe in the exact same things you do, we're geeks too.
But frankly, you guys failed. If everyone had just patched their servers regularly, and knew the least bit about their computer, and wtf it was doing, then this would never have been a problem, and we wouldn't have to do such rediculous measures such as this. Yes, i think this is a rediculous measure, but so is leaving your computer unpatched for any decent amount of time. So please, stop deflecting the blame when really you yourselves (or your friends who don't patch) are at fault.
If I pay $50/month for a 256k pipe, and if I want to do my own personal development and want to be able to show others my site from work, or setup a private FTP so that I can grab files offsite, they sure as hell better not stop me.
Or what? You'll beat them up? They can do whatever they want, and if you don't like it you can look at the competitors (which in this case would be one of the many tetering on the edge of bankruptcy DSL providers). Let your dollars do the voting for you, but as the previous poster mentioned indignation is just sad: They don't owe you anything, and you know what the deal is every month that you pay the bill.
you know, t1s and t3s have been around for a while. it's just that in the old days you had to Know Things to get access to them.
now, the idiots have broadband. is this better? I am not sure. I suppose in a way. I now have DSL whereas a few years ago I was running SLiRP on my university's sun box for free 'net access.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Could you provide a URL for what you are quoting?
The explanation given and the clause given as an excuse are (quoting from the above links) an extremely long stretch in IMO:
Why Can't AT&T@Home Residential Customers Run Web Servers?
The AT&T@Home residential service offering is a consumer product designed for your personal use of the Internet. Customers must ensure that their activity does not improperly restrict, inhibit, or degrade any other user's use of the Services, nor represent (in the sole judgment of AT&T Broadband) an unusually large burden on the network itself.
The benefits and privileges available from the AT&T@Home, and the Internet in general, must be balanced with duties and responsibilities so that other customers can also have a productive experience.
Under the terms of the AT&T Broadband Subscriber Agreement customers are not to restrict, inhibit or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy the AT&T Equipment or the Service. See Prohibited Uses of Service (g) in the AT&T@Home Subscriber Agreement.
The clause referred to:
g) restrict, inhibit or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy the AT&T Equipment or the Service, including, without limitation, posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a virus or other harmful feature; or generating levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information;
So, where do they get off filtering a small, low-bandwidth server that doesn't do what "clause g" prohibits?
However, use of so-called "shared" or "virtual" web hosting services limits greatly the sorts of applications you can create and run. It also limits your ability to administer your machine and configure the applications you use the way you see fit.
Some hosts are more forgiving than others, but, for highly specific development environments any shared host is less than ideal. Also, censorship considerations by [corporate] hosting providers may also be a concern...
Further, shared web hosting says nothing of other content servers which may be unavailable completely or available in shared configurations only in highly restricted circumstances.
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
99% of cable modem and DSL subscribers do NOT need to run servers of any kind. By leaving them open across the board you open the door for this kind of worm to propogate across misconfigured systems where people have gone and accidently installed IIS or even an unpatched UNIX box. Does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to run servers period? No! What should be required is for your to sign a consent statement that says you are responsible for any damage caused by attacks taking place from or to your machine and will pay any cleanup costs needed to deal with attacks against a server on your network. There should also be a formal risk assessment and penetration test conducted against your server setup to determine if it is indeed ready to be connected to the Internet. Too many people are putting these god damned buggy open machines on the Internet and then bitching about censorship when an ISP filters them. If people would take responsibility and make sure their systems are constantly updated it wouldn't be an issue, but most DON'T. And no, I'm not talking about the uber geek average Slashdot guy who upgrades their kernel every night to the latest version and has a cron job setup to do an apt-get update. I'm referring to Joe Average who installed his first Linux box to fiddle with or the guy who installs IIS during the Win2k install because it was there and he wants a full install of the OS. These people should not have full unfettered access to the Internet. You guys are starting to sound like the people I have to deal with who absolutely demand to have complete unfiltered access to the Internet so they can run whatever god awful program of the day they've come up with as a business requirement that is blocked by the firewall. Netmeeting anyone? Oh, you want to punch IPSec holes through the firewall? Uh huh.. no... FTP??? You want an FTP site on your desktop? Uhhh.. no.
And for anyone complaining, read your TOS first. As several other people have pointed out, it specifically prohibits running servers, and allows this in other ways as well. You're not guaranteed an unbreakable or complete Internet connection for your $35 a month.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Sure it pisses them off. So they call you up and say "Why can't I access the web?". And you look up their ISP and say "Because your computer is infected with a worm that is taking up significant bandwidth and trying to infect other computers to do the same. If you fix that, we'll let you surf the web again."
At least if they're pissed off, they'll go and get the fix so they can surf to their pr0n again.
[TMB]
Here's an idea: people who ask can get ports unblocked for free. That way you protect the idiots without restricting the people who want to run a real server.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Bupkis.
99.9% of security issues comes from companies that don't believe they are at risk. There are those running unpatched linux boxes at home. But compare that number to the number of companies with admins who either dont know any better or just don't care and it pales in comparison.
If you think the AUPs are that strict for any other reason than marketing, then you don't know corporate america well enough.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
what will this do?
@home users can still infect other @home users, along with the rest of the net.
Its great. So instead we just let the network FLOOD. But good thing we aren't blocking port 80, that would SCREW over like what, .1% of our cusomters?
What, me worry?
The hide behind clause will most likely be the one that says 'you may not run a server in connection with the @Home residential service'. http://home.com/support/aup/
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Actually, cable and DSL providers are already blocking port 80 (and most lower ports) for months. I am a Charter cable customer. When I first signed up, all ports below ~1500 where blocked. (With the expection of 53, 113, and a few of others) Customers where forced to use there proxy server. Even outbound port 80 was blocked.
After complaining for 4 months about it. and many phone calls to there head techs and managers. I finally won. I proved to them why blocking all of those ports was insaine. I simply wanted to run NTP on my machine. (Well, my entire LAN, but they didn't know anything about that :) Which requires 123/UDP.
As the months went on, more and more ports started opening. One thing that they have relized is that people will run servers regardless. People who abuse it (setting up high traffic sites) will be shutoff. Personally, I think its insaine. I should have the right to run a personal site, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. If it did get to that point, I wouldn't be hosting on cable.
So, they blocked the ports. I wonder how long it will stay. I would be very carefull, they may use this as an excuse to keep the ports blocked.
Working with the large companys his difficault, tring to convince them that they should unblock them. I can kinda of understand there postion. But, then again, it kinda upsets me.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Officially Rogers@home does not allow web servers, but that URL beside my name is hosted on Rogers in Ottawa, and has been for quite some time. Yet here in London, I've heard its a different story. So I guess maybe they are selective about it.
Personally, I think its my god given right to use allocated bandwidth however I choose. Its one thing to limit bandwidth, quite another to censor what bytes are allowed in my incoming or outgoing tcp segments.
Now they're doing the sensible thing to contain potentially hundreds of thousands of machines running IIS (Mostly run by people who probably have no idea about worms and the like anyway - even if they knew they were running a web server in the first place).
Seems pretty sensible to me, although my DSL ISP has no problems with me running servers, so I'm happy either way..
It would mean them having to to do real work shutting down accounts of those who are not smart enought to run a 1mo old patch on their systems. I't makes me angry, because if there was another option for a high speed connection, I would have done it a long time ago. All day I have recieved calls from clients wondering if my dev machine dropped off the web. I called att and what they acually said was "when we installed the service, we set up with NT Based systems because it was the fastest way to get it working, not because it was the most secure", then the tech followed with "all of our servers have viruses",, I'm not sure but it sounded like she was'nt too happy with her job..
Seriously people... Most, if not all, broadband providers prohibit running servers from home accounts (it's definitely that way for @Home users, even if they do generally turn a blind eye to small time web servers). They generally also have some sort of clause which basically doesn't guarantee unlimited or uncontrolled inbound or outbound access. For that matter, most broadband (and thinband) providers provide a clause which basically exempts them from any sort of service level agreement.
Signing on with a domestic oriented ISP means that you are essentially "users" on their network. Blocking inbound port 80 access is a good starting point for at least protecting their internal network segments. If you were running what is essentially a DHCP/DNS/proxy service for thousands of users, wouldn't you at least take this step to protect the integrity of your network?? (I admit it doesn't begin to solve all the problems, but...)
If you want to run your own "mini NOC", then pony up the cash and get ISDN, a T1, or something faster put into your basement. But if you are subscribing to a consumer grade ISP's offerings, don't be suprised when this happens. And especially don't start with the geek indignation, because consumer broadband is not meant, nor sold, under the pretense of running home servers.
Imagine if the phone company checked your lines for "business use" and shut you down unless you got a business contract.
Or how about the power company, charging you differently depending on how you use the power, and limiting you to, say, 10 amps peak if you don't have a business contract.
I wonder if it isn't appropriate to have a little (eek) government regulation when it comes to these things? Like not blocking any ports for any customer unless it is clearly marked in advertising or something?
I always wonder when my ISP will decide, for the good of all customers, to shut down this or that port or filter or monitor traffic. They'll probably not even notify me, they'll just update the terms of service buried in their web page someplace.
The average American is a mere couch potato which the corporations feed information to the unwashed masses the same way the inhabinents of Huxley's Brave New World were fed soma. The average consumer has nothing to say unless what they have to say is under corporate control. While people running web servers were tolerated when what they did was not attracting the attention of the corporate suits, they are being cut off by those who feel that people really shouldn't be running personal web servers.
I am also annoyed that, while Apache and other UNIX web servers are able make a web server without countless remote root exploits, all UNIX users on these cable modems suffer because Microsoft did not make a secure web server.
Thankfully, this is easy enough to work around. E.G:
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
From their service agreement.
AT&T Broadband does not allow servers to be connected to the cable modem. This means that no computer in a personal network can be used as a server.
Hmmm, sounds like a pretty good clause to hide behind, eh?
IANAL... But I play one on
If anyone can explain a good reason for banning servers rather than limiting data volumes, I'm all ears. I think it's either a combination of laziness and sloppy thinking on the part of the providers, or a desire to force the "users" to also be "content consumers" rather than "content providers". Hanlon's razor, I believe, favours the former explanation.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Or, alternatively, consider this translation: "It is a known fact that upstream bandwidth in a cable network is an extremely scarce resource. At the market's current price point, we are forced to have a modems-to-headend ratio that only permits a typical web surfing workload on the upstream. The decision to actually enforce the no-server policy was made only after empirical data was gathered, proving that even a single file-sharing server could severely disrupt the service level for hundreds of other customers."
(Disclaimer: I have no association with @home)
You might have a leg to stand on if @home was bringing in huge profits and denying you features just to bring in a cent more. But guess what, they aren't, and those downsides of cable modem service are precisely what's enabling them to offer it at the price you are paying now.
Don't like it? Tough. Go out and buy some real Internet bandwidth. It will cost you at least $200 per Mbps per month, in addition to the circuit costs.
Marko Karppinen
http://www.directvdsl.com
Formerly Telocity.
1.5 down. 256k up.
They don't care what you do.
They don't block any ports.
Their terms of service even say they don't mind what you do. It's your bandwidth.
They only have one rule. If you run something funky, don't go crying to their tech-help for support.
That's MORE than fair.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.