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VPN Clients Not Allowed On Residential Service
wayn3 writes "ComputerWorld reports here that two of the major cable companies have language in their terms of service that VPN clients are forbidden for "residential" class, forcing clients on their "business" offering which is at twice or more times the cost of residential service.
Has any been bit by this, and do those companies consider SSH a VPN client? This would stop me from telecommuting since my company would not be able to afford the business service."
Their TOS are terrible, and getting worse every rev. They have always had a 'no servers for the use of others' policy, and I've always run sshd because it's a server for my own use. On the last rev they disallowed 'any servers at all', which I didn't take seriously because IRC is broken without ident. Besides, technically ICMP could be considered both client and server, and the whole freakin' net is broken without it. Finally, my sshd is for my use only, and is configured and firewalled that way.
Also on the last TOS update they disallowed sucking feeds on their mostly-broken newsservers. They really don't know what they're doing, because in the grand scheme of things, they're just pushing those people to a sucking feed on an external newsserver, and eating their head-end bandwidth. Besides, an off-hours sucking feed would probably be more benign, and I'd be happy to adjust my cron setup to cooperate.
AFAIK they have no anti-VPN wording in their TOS, but IMHO that's only because they aren't clued in to its existence to forbid it.
IMHO, Adelphia wants to be in the 'TV for your computer' business.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Uh..in case you forgot, they are the ones footing the bill for just about everything. They layed the cable, maintain the hardware, pay for the link to the rest of the internet. They can tell you EXACTLY what you can fucking do with your service. Don't like it? Go back to 56k. Real internet connectivity costs beaucoup cash and it's retarded to expect a business to offer a service at a fucking loss to make some geek happy. If you want hardcore services you're going to have to fucking pay for it. Voting with your feet as you put it doesn't fucking work in most cities where you've got two options in broadband, the phone company or the cable company. Unless you're planning to move to another city you're not gonna find anything besides what you've got.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Eh? You have several options and you've already stated them.
1. use the crappy 486
2. goto the larger lab
3. use the crappy physics lab
4. buy your own machine for school. If what you do is so important and you say you can do it on a $400 166mghz alpha then invest a few hundred bucks in your education for school.
5. dont use ssh. I doubt anything that you do at such a pathetic school is worth anything to anyone anyway.
6. find a better school (assuming another will take you).