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FBI Raids Homes and Seizes Bandwidth Pirates' PCs
Saturated Subnet writes "Recently in Toledo, OH FBI agents and a local police task force raided 13 residence and seized 23 computers. Some users of the local cable broadband provider had uncapped their cable modems." It appears to be a smaller ISP, and the
article says these 23 people cost them a quarter of a million bucks. Who
has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
What happend to just cancelling their service?
Who's going to use buckeye cable after it is known they have their customers arrested? Who's to say they didn't make the mistake? Someone complains of high ping, tech tampers with modem, and a few months later, the customer goes to jail? There's service with a smile. Thanks, but if I heard that, I'd certainly be looking at my DSL providers.
Must have been a slow crime week in Toledo.
If you drove down the highway at 300 km/h (180 mph) and thought it was perfectly alright because it's your car and you can tinker with it if you want, should you get caught?
No, the roads are governmentally (and thus publicly) owned.
"It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said.
ANd the article says that no arrests were made..... sounds like some enforcing to me.
Great Linux Site
Just a thought ... I haven't heard of a law saying that it is illegal to uncap a cable modem. Its certainly against the cable modem provider's policy (obviously), but this doesn't entitle the cable company to get the FBI involved, does it?!? This seems like a gross miscarriage of justice. I don't condone uncapping cable modems (as that would screw up the bandwidth of those that don't uncap, such as myself), but in the same sense, there's a big difference between disconnecting someone's service/banning them from your network (as we've seen reported on slashdot before) and RAIDING a person's house!
What's going on here?
Since there is so many other less-important things they could be wasting their time on - like stopping terrorists from bombing our cities, finding the scumbags who kidnap little girls from their houses, etc...
Alot of us were privy to the methods of uncapping cable modems many moons ago. Some of us did. It was nice to be pulling upload speeds of 1 Mb/s (as opposed to 128 Kb/s)...
.02
Everything was fine and dandy until we received email addressed to the account owners basically stating "We know what you are doing. You've broken the terms of service by uncapping your modem. We are going to cap it again. If you abuse our network one more time we will ban your modem's mac address."
Wow! We played the game and lost. We got busted. But... I mean.. shit... I didn't see any mention of legal involvement in letters from our cable provider. They didn't steal our hardware as punishment (which apparently was well withing their means). We learned our lesson and our modems will remain capped.
my
Since no arrests were made, this seems like a scare tactic to me. And if as small ISP can get the FBI to scare off 23 customers, just wait and see what the RIA can do ...
Fault loves the past, worry loves the future, but content enjoys the present.
"OMFG they arrested me and all I did was hack a system and steal resources!"
*shakes his head*
Stealing is ILLEGAL!
I almost want to sue the cable company for wasting the time of the FBI. Next time, cut off their service (A pair of wire cutters will do just fine) and take the losers to court and sue them. I couldn't believe the FBI showed up and didn't arrest anyone! Just took the guys computers.
The only real question is did any of their "non-stealing" customers notice that their net connections were slower because of these "bandwidth theives"?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Paul Shryock, director of information services at Buckeye CableSystem, estimated the loss from the illegal use of the bandwidth at $250,000. "Some were using a little bit, and others were using a lot," he said.
His name sounds awfully similar to a Shakesperean character (Shylock)
Rapid Nirvana
Its right in the article
I sure hope the FBI gave those people better information than that story gave us. It sounds to me like they raided peoples' homes, and then didn't charge them with anything.
This wasn't a case where they should have been involved. The cable company could have easily just disabled those users' account.
So much for the focus on homeland security, eh? I'm sure the FBI has much, much better things to follow up on than a couple of high school students ripping off their local isp.
:wq
This makes no sense at all.
These users did what, broke their licensing agreement with their ISP? How does this give the FBI jurisdiction to do this? Where is the criminal behavior? Where is the law stating that it's illegal to tamper with this ISP's modems?
Why wasn't it up to the ISP to SUE these customers themselves to prove wrongdoing based on an AGREEMENT, not a LAW.
INAL, is there a lawyer in the house who can shed some light on this? This just screams of abused/misused powers, unless of course there's alot more to the story than we're getting...
No Comment.
If the $250k that the ISP says they lost was so important, why didn't they just cancel the users' accounts and charge them for a week's usage or whatever?
Oh.. because that wouldn't be news.
The ISP(s?) wanted to make an example (or several examples) of these users.
After *ahem* "backing-up" all the pr0n and w4r3z off these stole^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscated computers, the local police and FBI will use this incident to drum up more support for more arcane laws to restrict the rights of American citizens.
Since 9/11, has *everyone* lost the backbone to fight for personal freedoms and civil liberties?
How about something simpler? I suggest the following:
Dear customer,
We have detected that you have uncapped your cable modem, and are using more bandwidth than specified in your contract. You have 3 days to revert the changes you made to your cable modem, or your service will pernamently be canceled and you will be billed for the excess bandwidth you have used at a rate of $XX.XX per megabyte.
Any reason why this wouldn't work? Sending the FBI to investigate is a waste of time and resources for our govt IMHO.
Keep in mind that the quarter million dollar figure may have nothing to do with the actual actual damages incurred. Companies often make up figures like this in order to get the FBI's attention, since nothing under $5000 worth of damage is worth investigating. It also makes for better headlines, especially with a politically ambitious prosecutor.
Sure, this would be lying to Federal agents, which is a felony; but several companies got away with it in the Mitnick case, too.
Finding God in a Dog
Who has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
How many replies will this story get from people saying "I could"?
How many replies will say something say something referenceing the simpsons
Marge: "Who would need all that porn?"
Homer: "Hmmm, A million times faster"
and then the general cliche "Hmmm, pr0n"...this could reach 1000 comments filled with thouse jokes alone.
Umm, you know our policy system is f'ed up when this happens. They are probably going to be tried as terrorists. (I am serious about that!)
I wonder how exactly did these user manage to get more bandwith? I guess this kind of bandwidth stealing is not possible on DSL.
Who has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
Taco, some things in life you make time for.
How about invonlatary DoS? Didn't the fact that they uped there modems deny service to other users? Or at least cheapened it ?
--=.=-- www.cyber2000.qc.ca
How to UnCap Motorola Surfboard Cable Modems
Also covered was this previous article on slashdot: Security Focus on Cable Modem Uncapping
It's not surprising that their computers have been seized - they're criminals stealing from other cable users afterall.
Since when does FBI do the dirty work of ISP's? - Think of the precedent here - use to much bandwidth - go to jail ... WTF?
Sure these dummy's had to know they were gonna get caught - All they had to do is send a cable guy out there and snip, snip end of problem
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Questions that instantly arise are :
Were these abusers served a notice informing them they were violating the TOS and if they continue they would be taken to court and their connections terminated ?
Why is the capping done on the modem level and not at the router level ?
Consider this : Detective Beavers said the users are tricking the cable company into thinking they are entitled to more bandwidth than they are
This is only true if the Cable company had a tiered system. Otherwise this Detective does not know what he is talking about.
And why did they sieze the computers ? Does the cable company people have a fixation towards the smut and the illegal warez thats in the computers ? How are they gonna convince a jury that the stuff in those computers was exactly what was downloaded by tricking them ?
I understand that if you had a car and go over 100 miles per hour that you could get pulled over. But does the cops have a right to take away your car leaving you in the middle of nowhere ?
Rapid Nirvana
Some people may be wondering why the FBI was involved with this. The answer is simple. This constitutes fraud.
If you were to wire up a box on your phone to enable you to get free calls then you'd find your self in the same situation. And its escentialy the same crime as uncaping your cable modem/dsl router. As stealing phone calls detriments the ability of the whole network from ordinary users, so does stealing bandwidth.
I find myself stressing this again, Bandwidth Is Not Free. Bandwidth is not an artificialy restricted resource. It is a true limited resource, there is only so much you can put over a cable, and you need to ofset the costs of maintenece on that cable and the initial cost of laying it in the first place.
Doing it is illegal. Its also easy to trace. So they called the people who have jurisdiction for wire frauds and computer crime. its as simple as that. ISPs regularly warn users not to do this, and when they do, its justifyable to take it up with the authorities.
Wether its rational to do search and seazure of equipment is another matter, that may put the FBI in the wrong.
"The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone or will not stand. The clear distinction between this type of theft and the theft of cable services is that there is a finite amount of resource. The more the customer uses, the less there is to go around for other customers. These customers were impacting the performance of all our other customers," Mr. Shryock said.
Which strikes me as funny, as AT&T Cable did have people arrested earlier this year/late last year on charges of stealing cable (TV) service. In one case local to me, it was demonstrated in court that some of the arrested individuals not only did not have AT&T service, but the AT&T techs later showed that there was no physical way for the person to have tapped into the service.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Looks like they mis-spelled shylock
Maybe you live in interesting times
Thank heavens they've completely beaten the terrorists and reorganized so they're an effective terror fighting machine.
Because now that they have all the free time, they can raid homes where kids uncap cable modems.
God bless america (...one nation, under god, indivisible...)
because dude, you're getting a Dell.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
I didn't know this was even possible, but heck now that it is, why not. Do you have to be a pig about it and hog all the bandwidth or can you just take a little at a time to stay under the radar?
Sure, notice that they had search warrants to enter and seize equipment, rather than in some countries where no search warrant == no problem, enter and take anyway.
BTW, if you were one of their neighbors using DSL and wondered why your service sucked so bad for what you were paying, you might be thinking this was a good thing and overdue. Now you can get back to your pr0n viewing, without competing for bandwidth with your unscrupulous neighbors. ;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You're anology has this huge gaping hole in it...
1. Speeding is a crime...
2. Breaking TOS is a breach of contract
One of these subjects you statuatory court, the other subjects you to civil court.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Where does seizing customer equipment have to do with this issue?
Granted its the FBI s favorite thing to do I guess..
Only thing that was a right to take would be the
isp owned cable modem.
If an isp is that shoddy to not notice instantly a customer exceedeing his quota, they deserve to get hit with some extra bandwitdh bills.
I know I have.
Fuckers. They take FOREVER to give it back. and then it has cool stickers on it.
...that sometimes they will get caught and will have to pay the consequences for their actions?
I am very comfortable knowing that the cable companies are being proactive about nailing those who are stealing service. I pay for my all my services. Why should someone else get a free ride?
I have nothing against classical hacking, but when it comes to service theft, it's what it is: theft.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
...it is breach of contract, nothing more. And, since it is a breach of contract, as numerous others have pointed out, a pair of wire cutters (or a flip of a switch) would have more than sufficed to put an end to this behavior.
... you are merely in debt for the difference still owed. No theft committed. None.
If you agree to drive 10 truck on the expressway for a certain, flat tax, and instead drive 500, you haven't stolen anything. Not even the taxes you should have paid. The road is still there, the taxes you did pay are still there
You've violated your contract (and failed to pay taxes that are due), but once again, that is not theft. The same is true in this situation.
Your other point is very good: wonders how many Al Q'aida sleeper cells are going to go undetected here in the U.S. because of American companies like this one who feel it somehow appropriate to appropriate the FBI's services as an enforcement arm of their End User License Agreements and service contracts.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Perhaps they siezed the computers because they believed somthing bigger was going on? Perhaps they were hoping to catch some hacking or warez distrubution? I don't know, it just seems unnecesary, all they needed to do was grab the modems to prove they were modified and get the use logs from the ISP to prove breach of contract and see how much bandwidth was illegally used. Either that or I've been hanging around here with the conspiricy theorists too long.
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Furthermore, we are sending the FBI to your house, they will confiscate all your credit cards, bank books, and put a lock on all your bank accounts to prevent you from going into any more stores, and we will press charges in Federal court.
According to their statement, Buckeye should stand the bandwidth usage, or condone it - "The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone or will not stand."
Since they called in the FBI, they clearly aren't standing for that kind of thing. So I guess what they're really trying to say is that they condone cable modem uncapping?
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"I find myself stressing this again, Bandwidth Is Not Free. Bandwidth is not an artificialy restricted resource"
Yes yes, we all get that. Its why bandwidth costs $40 a month. We really really really really understand it.
What's not at all clear is if this is against the law. Just saying "its stealing" doesn't mean anything. "Its stealing" defines payroll taxes as well, but nobody is prosecuted for it.
So while we really really really understand that bandwidth is limited. And we really really really understand that its against the TOS for guys to uncap their cable modem, we really really really don't understand why the FBI is involved, since we really really really don't understand what laws were broken.
Okay? You can go on again about bandwidth being a limited somethingorother that you enjoy.
BTW, if you were one of their neighbors using DSL and wondered why your service sucked so bad for what you were paying, you might be thinking this was a good thing and overdue.
And how would my DSL performance be related to my neighbor's cable theft? Perhaps you might want to read up on the distinction between the two.
Bart Beavers, a member of the task force based out of the FBI office in Toledo, said search warrants obtained for six other residences were not served because the occupants were not home or for various other reasons.
;-))
... it's ... just not the same anymore *tears flow* ;-)))))
Ohhh....this is just beautiful...I can see some (six?) seriously scared script kiddies in front of me trying to get their modem to work normally again *g*
...or just getting rid of everything which looks like a modem / computer
Imagine their parents: No...no mommy, I'm not into computers anymore...you can really throw them away...yes I know that I spend all my time in front of it for the last 10 years...but you know...it's
Lets see, max bandwidth for a cable modem 3 Mbits. Average Charge per month for a Mbit = $350 bucks.
10 users X 3 Mbits = 30 Mbits.
That leave 10,500 dollars worth of damage in the worst case. This provider must need a better bandwidth arrangement.
Call me crazy, but I have to beleive that there was somthing going on here that we don't know about. I'm not talking about anything sinister on the FBI's part, I just think that they had a more important reason to investigate that they arn't saying to the public, and this violation was a good excuse to infiltrate. Imagine if the Feds suspected one of those 23 people of a more serious crime like writing viruses, child porn, financial idenity fraud, etc. They have been watching them for some time, and still don't have enough evidence to get a warrent to search the house, but they say to themselfs "if we could take a peek at thier computer". They decide to check with the ISP and see who in the neiborhood was violating the law, and one thing leads to the other. Suddenly they have access to the computer they were looking for, and they didn't alert anyone else involved in the REAL crime that they were aware of what was going on. This sounds much more plausable to me.
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Why do the Slashdot Editers [sic] insist on adding vapid commentary to articles they post. Taco's miny tirade ads no value to the article whatsoever.
Making snide comments must be their way of bolstering their low self-esteem.
By the way, Taco, LNUX at $0.82 per share.
This makes them all felons if they did UnCap their Cable Modem.
Sorry, home-slice, but the FBI don't need no warrants, yo!
Am I the only person here wondering WHO at the local FBI office actually authorized this little jaunt? I would love to see an agent explaining to his boss that the spent the day 'executing warrants' and didn't arrest anyone...
Also, how did they know that customers were communicating between themselves? Reading your e-mail I presume? What ever did happen to Omnivore, Carnivore, VoreOfTheWeek?
Oh well, I just hope they get their comps back in a resonable time-frame... (See Steve Jackson Games incident...)
Bad guys uncap modems: $0 (they're h4x0rs after all)
FBI arrests bandwidth stealers: $4,000
Bad guys sue FBI for violating their ( choose one, civil rights, first amendment rights, blah blah) and win settlement: $25,000,000
So let's recap:
Uncle Sam: Out $25,004,000
Cable Company: Same as before
Bad Guys: You can buy a hell of a lot of bandwidth with $25,004,000
Another wonderful example of our legal system at "work".
" The more the customer uses, the less there is to go around for other customers. These customers were impacting the performance of all our other customers."
If there is not enough to go around, then everybody gets throttled back. The bottle neck would occur at the ISPs up link and the capacity should be scaled evenly between the connections - not just the one with the extra burst. If they can get more than their share out of the pipe, then everybody else can get at least their share. The only way that they could have impacted other customers if they were running a web server or something that may be serving up hundreds of connections at one time or if they can change a routing QOS setting through the modem. Otherwise they are just using unused bandwidth.
It took some digging but I found the link to their TOS (PDF) click here
Who has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
Indeed, I only manage to look at about 30 seconds of porn at time. I'd go blind if I had $10K's worth.
Ideally the government wouldn't have been involved at all, but instead have the parties settle it among themselves. However, I guess after having to deal with so many people trying this more drastic, newsworthy measures need be taken to let users know they mean business and not to try this for kicks. If the only punishment is a cancellation of service, a lot of people will try and get permanently banned, a fate which results ultimately in the ISP not getting money from that user who might have behaved himself if he thought he had more to lose than his account.
All this said, I'm not sure why this is FBI jurisdiction rather than local law enforcement agency. I suppose the main body of the ISP is proabably not in the same state, but you would think they would operate through their local presence. Of course, the FBI is more newsworthy than local police.
At this stage they say they have not charged anyone with anything, but confiscated systems for evidence. My bet is that the systems will be returned and charges never filed. This is more of a scare tactic. Really scare the perpetrators, and spread more awareness of the seriousness of the issue among the people. In the end they will let them off, making the company look better while acheiving the wider scare they wanted. They really have nothing to gain by punishing those individuals except bad publicity.
This whole scenario just goes to demonstrate that cable providers as a whole went into the ISP business unprepared with a lack of understanding of the problems an ISP faces. Routers should cap this stuff, not endstations, and their network infrastructure has proved in many cases to crumble under the stress, kind of like what happened when AOL first offered unlimited time plans. Now cable companies are more and more going to charge for extra bandwidth because they have been unable to figure out how to regulate network usage from a technical perspective without losing their peak rates. The Telco companies with DSL were not able to match the peak rate of cable modem, but now with the improvement of DSL technology and the saturation of both types of networks, DSL has proven to frequently provide more consistant, reliable service, even if peak DSL throughput is not equal to cable, the realistic throughput is on average better than Cable.
Now to see if cable companies can mature as ISPs, or if DSL will come to dominate in the coming years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...unfortunately, it was the "Star Trek:Nemesis" trailer, and the Trekkies did them in!
-Ed
docbrown.net
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Ed Wedig
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Quote: "It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said.
Who needs criminals when you have the police out there enforcing crime themselves, eh?
...I don't think he could find his ass with both hands and a roadmap.
Legally speaking that is.
No arrests, no charges? Whatever happened to due process? Did they take that part out of the Constitution while we weren't looking? How are the cops going to justify taking the computers and other equipment without charges having been filed? This is annoying and frightening.
The law suits should be fun to watch.
slashdot broke my sig
Did the FBI let the CIA know about this?
Where I do have a problem is with what actually happened and the lack of due process associated. Look at the sequence of events:
- The ISP notices the uncapped modem (I gather they use SNMP to ask the modem what its set to: nothing sophisticated).
- The ISP calls the FBI and alleges that this crime has cost it over $10,000. Hmmm. Where did that number come from? I'm on a 512kbit service for £25/month. Suppose I uncapped my modem to get the theoretical maximum of 64Mbits (the full channel bandwidth that is shared between all users on a spur). That is in theory a 128-fold increase in service, so I should be paying £3,200 per month, or around $5,000. So that may be two months service at 64Mbits. Maybe not too unreasonable, although I don't know how they estimated the time.
- The FBI get a search warrant based on the ISP's complaint and seize computers. This is perfectly legal: the authorities are permitted to seize the "instrumentality of the crime". If a PC was used to uncap the modem then it is an instrumentality of the crime. Also, if the case came to court then the defence could ask what evidence the prosecution had that the supposed perpetrators were actually responsible. Maybe it was a prankster thinking to do a "favour". Any prosecution is going to need smoking-gun scripts found on the suspect's PCs.
-
No charges are filed. Despite what I said just now, the whole thing is never tested in court. Confiscation of the computers (and any private data thereon) is considered enough of a punishment, and doesn't require the expense of a trial.
All of this is perfectly reasonable and legal, but it is never the less an end-run around the due-process principle. Based on a complaint and a search warrant your property can be effectively confiscated, and you have almost no come-back. Of course in theory you can sue for the return of your property, but all the police have to do is claim an "ongoing investigation" to make the suit fail.Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
...to deal with people stealing bandwidth.
One case I remember being mentioned in a discussion long ago involved users hacking their routers so their bandwidth usage would be billed to the ISP's nameserver; IIRC, the ISP disconnected the users' lines (can't remember if it was Cable, DSL, or T1) and hooked them up to 120VAC.
I tend to think more on a moral level than a legal level. Morality is important as the law is the bare minimum of common conduct. We wouldn't have all the corporate fraud stories in the news right now if we had executives that not only followed the law but a moral course.You can still cause pain and suffering following the law. Granted several are just plain rat bastards that didn't even care about the law that make Capitalism look real ugly.
Morals do not have to be religious based. Doing no harm to others is perfecting acceptable moral course that doesn't involve God, Xenu, Vishnu or Buddha.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Do u guys think its a bad idea.. that im "borrowing" ips from ATTBI.. anyong think im gonna get pwned?
I was going to say I don't understand the opposition here, but in fact I do. It's the same mentality that says "I" should get everything for free, and "I" am entitled to everything for free.
In fact, this is far more clear cut than, say, the arguments about copying mp3s. In this case, something of real cost was stolen from someone. Maybe you can't hold bandwidth in your hand, but the bandwidth these people stole cost the provider real money. I don't care if it was really $250,000 or $98.54, it's theft and those people who stole that are getting what they deserve.
"It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said.
Shouldn't they be enforcing the law?
Point A:
Shoplifting *IS* a crime, which will land you in CRIMINAL COURT.
Breaking a TOS is a Breach of Contract, which will land you in CIVIL court.
Point B: (Any reason this wouldn't work?)
If a cable company's user breaks thier terms of service, it's very easy to disconnect thier service and bar them from causing futher loss. Recovering losses is as easy as small claims court.
Of course it won't work for a grocery store as they have few reliable options to prevent people from coming back into thier store to steal.(That's if you're not arresting them)
So, yes it wouldn't work very well with the grocery store, but it would plently fine with the ISP.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
"Most of the broadband providers are really just beginning to learn how the networks perform, what the possibilities are, and how they deal with theft," he said.
My sides hurt from laughing at this. How many years do they need to be in the business before they figure out how their networks perform? Even better question... How can they feel justified to sell us a service they don't understand? How do they know $225000 or whatever amount of money was stolen if they can't explain a simple thing like networking??
Just a thought
Now for those of you who plan to point it out, excessive speeding is usually charged as reckless endangerment which is a crime, and hence will go on your criminal record, and will likely get you jail time.
"*shakes his head*"
I find that people who write stuff like this are the kind of people who like to argue a lot.
When you say its "stealing", what do you mean by that? How do you know its illegal? I think they violated the TOS and should be TOSsed, but getting the FBI involved?
Puh leese. The FBI clearly likes raiding these homes because these little pimply punks don't shoot back and mostly cry when they knock.
Heaven forbid they would like, y'know....catch the guys who planned the 9/11 attacks.
Did anyone else notice that the name of the officer in the picture is "Bart Beavers" ? You couldn't make up a better porn-name if you tried.
Make sure you report any known cable thefts here: cabletheft.com
This help keeps your cable costs down and provides valuable funding for the community.
</idiot>
That's fine as long as the ISP wants to negotiate a CIR with me. Otherwise they are stealing from me! When they say broadband it should have to be enforceable in a contract and none of this best effort shit.
I'd like to know where this number came from. It sounds a lot like the "figures" thrown around with Kevin Mitnik. There should definately be a law against THIS kind of behaviour. Artificially inflating damages is worse, IMO, than what these kids did.
"It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said."
You heard it here: Corporate profits are the law.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Did anyone else that read that article get the feeling it was a hoax? It all just sounds so campy and hoaky. Like some sort of cheesy propoganda.
I can almost hear they counselor from South Park now, "Stealing bandwith is bad...MKay... Hacking cablemodems is bad...MKay..."
You know what I mean?
Casca
"I tend to think more on a moral level than a legal level."
I tend to believe your knee jerks more than your brain thinks.
But I believe I'm being too kind.
Did you catholic upbringing allow you to simply state things, claim they're moral imperitives and that removes them from any further debate?
You don't get the moral high ground that easily.
P.S. Aren't you shocked, just *shocked* about all those priests? I mean, who could believe that a guy who willingly gives up sex could be repressing pedophile urges. I'm just shocked!
is if the FBI comes in on TOS violations like this, how are software companies going to pervert this into a way to get the FBI to enforce their EULA's in a similar manner.
no courts, no trial, no jury...there's nothing like the land of the free. at least not around here, apparently.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
When FBI agents entered the residence to confiscate the equipment, they noticed ape-like grows on the bandwidth thieves. Agent Yugot B Kidden said, "I couldn't believe my eyes, this guy had hair down to the floor. I didn't think it was possible, but I guess the old wives tail is true after all. It's a good thing we came when we did. Another month or two and this guy would have been swimming in hair. I mean how can this guy type with all that hair."
Detective Beavers said the users are tricking the cable company into thinking they are entitled to more bandwidth than they are.
"It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said.
this is not against the law -- this is seriously fucked up scary police shit. there are no laws on the books anywhere in the united states that give those officers the right to search those houses. the limit of any liability would have been for the user's service to be terminated. that's it. a good attorney is going to eat those fucking loser police officers alive when this goes to court.
god damn communist motherfuckers.
ok I'm not about theft of service. I buy what I use. NOW with that said.. the question is does the cable company have bandwidth limits in their service level agreement. If those bandwidth numbers are not there.. then really is it theft of service? It may still break their agreement but I don't think its theft of service if the cable company doesn't specifically give you bandwidth limits to use.
Who makes you Sig?
Am I the only one that zoomed into that picture to try and see what hardware was in those computers?
:)
They looked like some pretty sweet systems. I wonder what thier specs were.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Cable Theft is a crime because it was legislated as a crime.
This isn't Cable Theft, this is breach of contract.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Cable already sucks when you consider a saturated network.
Now consider a saturated network, where some portion of the network has the tech savvy-ness to garner more than his fair share of the bandwidth. That leaves less for everyone. So now my service, being a normal user, is even further lessened. Not only that, but to keep out of the red, the company is going to have to raise its rates to off set their own costs, costing me money.
If this company is willing to take action to insure my service, and my low costs, why would I not like it.
People do not have the right to steal from a service provider, just because they know how. Might does not make right. Yeah, I am glad they are smart enough to do it, but when they start using their intelligence to steal, then yes, arrest them.
These people are the same people that will break out your car window, just to steal a couple of CDs. It takes that much intelligence to uncap your cable as to break the window, and is that reasonable of an action. When you take the steps to uncap your cable, you know you are commiting a crime, or at least getting away with something you aren't supposed to be doing.
The fact that the FBI got involved probably has to do with wire fraud being a federal crime, and most local jurisdictions don't have the specific laws.
following your line of thought uncapping is just like speeding.
OTHO you ARE using more recources to which you are not entitled, so theft it still is.
Privacy is terrorism.
From the article - "They searched all but three residences in Sylvania Township, two in Toledo, and the one in Monclova Township."
I can just see it now:
"OK, who was supposed to search that one residence in Monclovis Township?!? Only one residence in that whole township, and you couldn't even get that right! No more donuts for you!"
or possibly:
"...and, Johnson, you search all the residences in Toledo - except for mine." "But Sarge, _I_ live in Toledo." "OK, except for yours and mine - and remember, no overtime, and dibs on any drugs or money (winkwink) found!"
Acts of massive stupidity are almost never covered by warranty. --me.
Sorry I wasn't able to post sooner regarding this story, but I got home from school, and all my computer shit was confiscated! I had to go next door just to check my e-mail!
This blows, and shit -- is my friends cable internet connection really this slow?
dmarien
Bart Beavers, a member of the task force based out of the FBI office in Toledo, said search warrants obtained for six other residences were not served because the occupants were not home or for various other reasons.
My inner cynic thinks raiding unoccupied apartments makes for lousy press and lousier video footage.
(Self-moderating down due to troll capability for Det Beavers' name)
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
The Toledo Blade article lists the ISP as "Buckeye Express" which appears to be a Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) company. According to thier Corporate Information/Company Overview page they also own Madison Square Garden (and related teams), The WIZ, Radio City Music Hall, and Clearview Cinemas. Think carefully about with whom you do business.
Cable theft is a crime because it's been legislated as a crime.
This is a breach of contract with an ISP who just happens to be a cable company.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
What makes this scarry is the FBI can swoop in and grab all your hardware with little more than a "by your leave." Even if you are innocent they will hang onto your hardware so long it will become obsolete. There in lies the "threat". Now others out their who have tampered with their hardware for personal gain at the expense of others will have to tread lightly. Hopefully they will just obey the law.
Other highly moderated posters have stated that the cable provider should have sent some kind warning letter. That is a load of liberal crap! That is like telling a theif who breaks into your home that if they do it AGAIN there is going to be a penality. The people who modified their cable modems knew what they were doing. Theft is theft pure and simple.
They strung their own fiddle. Let them dance to the tune the police will be playing for them.
The wages of sin are unreported and back taxes are hell to pay.
So he contacts the FBI about it. They ask him some questions, like how much money they cost him (basically only a few hours of admin time because he interceeded before any damage took place (the cracked had installed a script to rm -rf / ))
The FBI declines to do ANYTHING about it because it wasn't high-dollar enough to warrent investigation.
We hear all this talk about cyber-crime and the potential threat to our national infastructure, but the FBI won't prosecute unless the case is high-profile enough to get them headlines. I don't think this is the message we ought to be sending, that it's OK to root someone's box and nothing will happen to you if the dammage doesn't exceed a certain dollar amount.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
only terrorists uncap their bandwidth!
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
I live in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo and use that same ISP. According to the article they served 6 search warrents in Sylvania.
Geez, I sure am glad *I* decided not to uncap my modem. Wow.
Oh, and on a completely seperate note I noticed yesterday that I was downloading a file at 125 kb/s. I've never gotten above 110 kb/s before on that ISP...
I guess those few bandwidth hogs really do affect other users.
In other news today, we find that the FBI is overbudget by $59.5M this year. Independent analysts and slashdot readers point to the increased costs of equipment siezure and storage, then transport and return of same said equipment.
Story at eleven.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Yes.. the uncapping itself is just a violation of the Terms of Service.. BUT..
The way the article is worded, the small ISP the 23 used had to pay a quarter million dollars worth of extra bandwidth charges to their ISP because of the uncapped usage.
Basically, this would have happened to anyone who broke a LEGAL, BINDING contract and caused $250,000 worth of fraudulent loss because of it.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
This isn't Cable Theft, this is breach of contract.
Why?
Due to these actions, cable internet service providers around the world quake in fear of the tens of thousands of people who have just found out that uncapping your cable modem is possible.
::.. check out some Cell Phone Reviews
Great. Somewhere in America there is a guy strapping C4 to his Hyundai and speeding towards a daycare center. But as we are all becoming corporate "profit property," the Feds are more interested in stopping high end internet access to people who abuse a cable system.
America is safe tonight. Too bad the cable company could have just turned off the service, and never, ever called the police, much less the feds. After all we are talking about abusing a private contract between two parties. The cable company should have terminated the contract.
You know, I have have been screwed unnecessarily on employment contracts before... did the feds come out? Hell no! Nor why should they? Apparently I should have called, and call them the next time someone steals pens from the office supply cabinet.
In the wake of all of the things that the US has to deal with, we really need to get a defined role for these guys.
Way to spend all of that extra terrorism money that the president gave you. Real proud of this one, guys. As a newsman I hang around the FBI all the time. They just look bored. After all, America is a pretty sane place compared to many other places across the world. This raid however was way beneath them.
"Now for those of you who plan to point it out, excessive speeding is usually charged as reckless endangerment which is a crime, and hence will go on your criminal record, and will likely get you jail time."
WRONG. Breaking the speed limit by a rate above a certain pre-determined point is usually charged as 'reckless driving'. In most cases, especially for a first time offender, no jail time is given. You just get a heavier fine.
Back to the topic... Calling the FBI in to confiscate computers because someone uncapped their cable modem is ridiculous. The cable provider only had to do what AT&T does...disable the guilty party's account! There you go...problem solved.
Either something else was being done with those computers that warranted the FBI getting a look-see at the contents of said computers, or I know an ISP that is gonna be knee-deep in legal trouble.
Come on, people... this happened in the Police State of Ohio. You can't do much of anything there anyway.
Those aren't pirates.
These are pirates.
Free registration required, except of course for pirates. Yarr!
Calling these land lubbers pirates gives the real pirates a serious reputation problem.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Here's your chance to talk to Jack and tell him what you think in person. He is coming on the Diane Rehm show on NPR *now* in Wash. DC. Phone: 800-443-8850
Alright, I was born in, and lived in Toledo for 23 years. Strange that I have used their service at someone else's house (someone who needed my help plugging the modem in to the computer). I was getting 250k/sec downloads, so compared to my Ameritch DSL, that's pretty fast. I think the real reason these guys did it, is because they could. The thing is, a friend of mine use to work for the company, and he laid a fair amount of the fiber throughout the city. Basically, for most subscribers the T1 is at your doorstep, and the only limitations are the maximum hardware speeds of the modem and the cable running to it. Nevertheless, those modems looked like the one I saw at my freinds house. If they are the same, I think they are may only be capable of about 8 mbit/sec, so even if you uncap the thing, you're only doing a little better than quadrupling your bandwidth.
Buckeye Express is owned by Blade Communications. Blade Communications owns the ISP, the newspaper, and Buckeye Cablesystem (the cable company).
I don't understand why people have any sympathy for these people at all. This is a crime with a clear victim. The ISP is paying for the bandwidth and so if you pay for a certain amount and then take considerably more then you have cost them money. In many cases, the word theft is wrong (such as copyright theft) but here these people are deliberatly taking a resource for which they have not paid and is exactly the same as any other kind of theft.
Sig is taking a break!
Hmmm...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is right in my back yard, since I LIVE in Monclova. As for why people here on /. are questioning why the FBI is involved, most people wouldn't hack a cable modem to get ultra high bandwidth unless they were moving metric ass loads of information. The cable company just got pissed because they suspected the purpetraitors might be moving MP3, illegal copies of movies (DVD, TiVo, or whatever), child porn, or in the snow ball's chance in hell, terrorist plans - but I doubt it. The FBI's just there for when the REALLY illegal stuff is discovered. Stupid scare tactics that cost tax payers money.
The FBIs next target should be those thieves at fast food joints that take more that their share of fountain pop. Or, even worse, they should lock up people who order a water, then fill it up with coke.
I can see the quotes now...
"We figure that people who take more that one free refill, which is what out agreement allows for, costs our company more 1.5 million dollars a year."
or
"These kind of people have no regard for others. When they steal pop they degrade the experience for all the other customers, most likely someone will not get the flavor they want and have to settle for the grape drink. And it causes more labor for the restaurant because they have to change the syrup more often. We must prosecute the criminals"
you get the picture.
from the article - "Investigators believe cable modems that connect Buckeye Express customers to the Internet
were altered, allowing computer users unauthorized access to excessive amounts of bandwidth"[emphasis mine]
also from the article - "It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective
said. Mr. Shryock said changing the modem to use more bandwidth is a violation
of the customer service agreement. [...again emphasis mine]
(very simplified)Example:
Max bandwidth that Buckeye has = 1Gb/s (with customer cap at 100Mb/s)
4customers online -
1st (with cap) downloading at 100Mb/s
2nd (with cap) downloding at 100Mb/s
3rd (no cap) downloading at 400Mb/s
4th (no cap) downloading at 400Mb/s
---
When customer 5 comes online it's not like his cable modem is going to go
"sorry all the bandwidth is being used, try again later".
And you can correct me if i'm wrong but what should happen is something
about like this:
1st (with cap) adjusted to ~ 95Mb/s
2nd (with cap) adjusted to ~ 95Mb/s
3rd (no cap ) adjusted to ~360Mb/s
4th (no cap) adjusted to ~ 360Mb/s
5th (with cap) downloading at ~ 90Mb/s
the uncapped customers speeds dropping rapidly to matched the capped customers
speeds.
--- diplomacy - 'the art of saying "nice doggie" 'til you can find a big enough stick'
No mention of bandwidth anywhere. I'm not allowed to alter their Equipment, but what if I were to buy my own cable modem and uncap it (assuming it's capped in the first place?) The ToS does not say I have to use their modem. The ToS does not impose any limits on how much bandwidth I may use. I doubt these people had thier own modems, though.
I can get Verizon 768/128 for 39.95. I can also get Verizon 7100/680 for 189 a month. It would take me many months to rack up 10,000 dollars worth of stolen bandwidth if I were somehow able to uncap my DSL modem!
"Who has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?"
i have no idea, but..
well, i have 10,800pb (pornobytes) worth of pr0n on my current machine at home.
this is ridiculous, how do they know it wasn't the companies fault, i use roadrunner and through some miracle my account is uncapped its nearly twice as fast as a T1 at times, i did nothing and its been like this since i got it 9 months ago, this is the cable comanies fault, not that i'm gonna complain, but now the feebs could be knocking down my door for the comany's mistake, they could disconnect our service, cuz we split the line for basic cable, but the cable company could call the feds for their screweup, beurocratic insanity
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
the code reads:
/. WAY too much these days...), but it seems that they were already authorized to recieve the service (they were paying for aceess), but they violated the terms of said service. which is purely a civil matter. although since bandwidth is limited and a commodity, *not* a God^H^H^Hunspecified-Deity-given right, i suppose they could be nailed for theft...but like i said, IANAL. peace.
No person shall intercept or receive or assist in intercepting or receiving any communications service offered over a cable system, unless specifically authorized to do so by a cable operator or as may otherwise be specifically authorized by law.
IANAL (that acronym seems to be popping up on
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
User A broke the law -- he was caught -- computers seized. The article says that no arrests were made (to bad). I am sure they will have there day in court. A crime is a crime. Just because it involves computers and this is a techy site (thus spurring some "sympathy" posts) doesn't make it any less of a crime. Commit the crime..do the time. What kills me is that people who pirate software or in this case steal bandwidth -- or in years past with people like Mitnick cell phone service -- still know that it is wrong to steal a car or break into someones house...Yet seem ignorant to think that just because they are "experts" in tech -- that they can commit computer or tech related crimes and have them not be crimes. That is like someone on Wallstreet thinking that it is OK for them to steal money because they are "experts" in the field.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm curious...how much is "excessive" when it comes to broadband, bandwidth? I mean, the name "broadband" implies that you've got a broad amount of it, right?
Webster's dictionary uses words like Spacious, Open, Full and Liberal to describe "broad." I guess I'm curious to see what their EULA/SLA that they signed up for says about their bandwidth caps.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
everybody seems to be saying this is just a TOS violation, and they should have their service cut and be billed for the trouble, but it should end there.
now...these guys were sold a certain amount of bandwidth, which is basically a commodity. they uncapped their modems, which gave them access to more bandwidth (a commodity) than they had originally purchased. regardless of whether or not they actually used it...isn't that theft? IANAL (yet again i say it), but this seems analogous to paying for $10 of gas but pumping $15 worth. i mean...bandwidth isn't free. it costs money. and you bet i'd be DAMN pissed if i was paying $40 a month for 1Mbit, and the guy next door was paying the same, but stealing an extra 4Mbits...to the point of wanting him arrested (although sending in the FBI is way over the top for this...they don't do it to cable theives).
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
That would be when the FBI (federal baka & idiots) raided Steve Jackson Games because they were writing a new Gurps (Generic Role Playing) book for the Cyperpunk genre (Gurps: Cyberpunk). The FBI tore open the filing cabinets, stole the files & computers, ate the donuts, etc. This resulted in several things. Including an eventual "apology" from the FBI, a payment of a few thousand dollars (I don't remember the amount, but it was way below the damages.), the return of less than 25% of the stolen computers, and the creation of the Electronic Freedom Foundation to aid SJ games in their lawsuit. And this all happened more than a decade before 9/11. Looks like they haven't improved any.
Either Sylvania is a REALLY small town, or they got alot of use out of those six search warrents.
Never confuse volume with power.
OK, I'm not condoning uncapping cable modems, as we all know it's theft and it hurts the other users. However, an FBI raid?????? Don't we have drug dealers, and murders that need to be put in jail, not necessarily bandwidth whores? I don't believe it warranted an FBI raid, the cable company should have handled it themselve by terminating service do the fact the users violated their end-user agreement. Just think how many FBI raids Microsoft will cause after this situation.
But Dexter and Mandark aren't teenagers yet!!!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
From the article: (Bold added by me)
In all, they seized 23 computers, including three laptops; three hard drives, and 13 cable modems.
No charges were filed and no arrests were made.
Really? The government was used to sieze property, not owned by the provider, and not one charge was filed.
I don't believe this was a legal action, at most the cable modem was something that that could have been taken, not computers, at least not without charges.
It's so nice to live in Amerika.
To make entry and sieze equipment, they had to have warrants, and you can bet there were a whole lot more than 23 uncapped modems in Toledo. Sounds like there may have been something more seriously criminal involved than stealing bandwidth, and they are looking for kiddie porn or serious crackers amongst those raided. This sounds like a rather more focused raid than most posters are giving credit for, and they probably have specific things to search those hard drives for.
Slashdot is notorious for only telling half of the story if it can work the slashbots into a frenzy, and this is a perfect example of it.
if one to use his modem 24/7 he will take as much as those people in their limited time on uncaped modems... there is more to this story than it seems....
Who controls the information, controls the world...
This is nothing more than excessive force and illegal use of public law enforcement to go after civil/corporate criminals.
The cable to provider should have simply disabled the cable service to these sites, secured the service equipment against tampering, applied fines to these customers, and informed these customers that they are now banned from cable service (from this company) for 2 to 5 years. If these former customers try or do hack into the service before that time than let law enforcement deal with them.
Damn I hate it when corporations use law enforcement to enforce TOS and other civil documents.
Most likely, the were trying to serve some kind of website through the ISP...just a speculation...maybe it had to do with some other illegal activity on the site...or maybe it was pr0n or something. There may have been a conspiracy against the cable provider too...several people working together to host one or several pr0n sites. It was definately more than just casual (or even heavy) Kazaa usage.
Is he giving you crack whores free rocks if you mod him up?
This is no more insightful than Scientolofy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Technically, these guys may be charged with Cable theft as the definition is vague enough.
It's right here... I'm looking for something in the wording, which may exclude our friends, but I can't find it...
No person shall intercept or receive or assist in intercepting or receiving any communications service offered over a cable system, unless specifically authorized to do so by a cable operator or as may otherwise be specifically authorized by law.
Sounds like the Cable companies have it made.
1. Don't have to provide open access
2. TOS is enforced by federal law, subjecting violaters to criminal charges.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
"The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone or will not stand. The clear distinction between this type of theft and the theft of cable services is that there is a finite amount of resource. The more the customer uses, the less there is to go around for other customers. These customers were impacting the performance of all our other customers," Mr. Shryock said.
The other difference is that they can actually detect theft of bandwidth.
I think this is a little different than speeding... Speeding is illegal because doing it is potentially dangerous, not because the driver of the car may be going so fast that there is no road left over for other. And if someone is downloading something at high rates, its not like an exceptionally fast packet is going to swerve out of controll and injur someone
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
I can't understand why you all get your panties up in a bunch because the FBI got called in on this. First of all, it is not overkill. Stealing cable doesn't affect a cable company, stealing bandwidth on the other hand, does. If a hand full of people are using large amounts of bandwidth, the ISP would need to buy more to support the rest of its honest customers. By the way, did any of you ever think that this might be oh... Grand Theft. You know, when you steal more than $4000 worth of something, and it becomes a Felony. Geeze, why oh why would the FBI (F as in FEDERAL) want anything to do with a felony.
Actually, unauthorized use of services on a cable system IS a crime, probably. Coming soon to a judge near you: does uncapping a cable modem meet all the requirements of a law against watching cable channels you haven't paid for. Looks like it to me but IANTCJOTUSSC.
USC 47(553)
Thanks for the info...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Un caping donsent jsut meen your .AU untill
downloads.. over hear in
recently the bigest advantage in uncaping
was removeing your upstream limit..
why pay for a line when you can
uncap your cable upstream and use
that to host ftps..
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
Since it is against the TOS (Assuming this without checking) to alter the cable companies' modem and not necessarily to alter ones own cable modem (you own it after all), is it possible this is why ATTBi is now charging an extra monthly fee to those who won their own modem?
Afterall, if you tweak your pinto to go 190MPH, but never actually exceed the speed limit - is this wrong? If so, then perhaps we should have an extra tax imposed on performance parts and acessories as these might enable one to break the law (only a short step away from claiming these performance parts as contraband and only used by criminals).
Silly thoughts, but worthy of note. You comments are welcome, but not your insults.
It's simple, state and local jurisdictions have no say over anything that involves interstate communications - such as the internet.
For more clarification, if you steal a car and drive it around the city it was stolen in, even the state it was stolen in, then it is a "local" crime and the county/state authorities will prosecute you for it.
If, however, you steal it and decide to drive it to the neighboring state, it is now "interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle" and subject to Federal Jusrisdiction.
SInce the ISP's pipes are connected to the world at large, it becomes a matter of "interstate" and hence the Feds. This is why the States have thus far not been able to able to (nor will they ever be allowed to) regulate ecommerce, etc. The states are prohibited by the constitution from attempting any regulation of "interstate commerce" this is strictly- and for good reason, a Federal matter.
Thus it matters not whether they own the cable modems or not, what matters is that took, without due payment, bandwidth (which is a commodity) which is not local in nature but, in fact, international in nature. Hence the reason why it is theft, you moron chips, not simply a breach of contract.
Does cable theft laws apply to cable modems???
Apparently so...
No person shall intercept or receive or assist in intercepting or receiving any communications service offered over a cable system, unless specifically authorized to do so by a cable operator or as may otherwise be specifically authorized by law.
Sounds like the Cable companies have it made.
1. Not require to provide open access to infrastructure.
2. TOS contract enforcable by federal law, subjecting violaters to criminal charges.
Talk about having an ISP with special government privledges...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Don't be a cluefuck.
People aren't saying it isn't right, what they're asking is why the FBI is involved with something that is a violation of the TOS.
And, mike, while in principle, there's no difference between stealing $98.54 and $250,000, in practice, if the cable company told the truth, there would be no investigation because the FBI wouldn't care about $100 worth of bandwidth being stolen.
Its like this, mike. Go to a store and steal a candy bar. Now go to a store and steal their daily receipts of $250,000.
Check with your police what they care about.
Now mike, pay attention here mike, because its the key point that you seem to have missed (the way the FBI missed the 9/11 attacks) is that nobody is saying "Gee, that's okay to do". What people are complaining about is that Bucky's ISP (a) should just have cancelled their service along with a nasty note (b) Its not clear what, if any, laws were broken (c) Aren't we at war? Isn't Bucky thwarting the war effort by involving the FBI with inflated damage claims?
I'm against what they did mike, but I'd really really really rather the FBI be involved in defending us against another attack where BILLIONS of property was lost along with THOUSANDS of lives.
Kind of puts it in perspective, eh Mike?
where do they come up with the value for this ? Bandwidth is NOT a comodity, it has NO FUTURES, you have a certain amount, it is used or it goes by, no saving it for later. This is like the value that the RIAA puts on music pirating, pulled totally out of someones ass, just to involve the FBI because of value.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
In the article: Detective Beavers said the users under investigation are a mix of high school students and adults. Some of the users communicated with each other and shared their knowledge on how to hack the system to enhance their personal computer use, he said.
I live and work in the Toledo area. EVERYTHING is over the top here.
Ever since 9-11 every mayor in the nation has gotten some sort of death threat. Our current mayor, Jack Ford (lovingly called J-Fo by the local radio stations), now will now long do in-person interviews. Everything is done via phone. He also has a 24-7 bodyguard, paid for by the city of course.
A new mall was coming into the area so the city began a huge smear campaign against it because they're afraid of it will take jobs away from the 2 of the failing malls in the area.
The same situation arose from a pending arena complex.
It takes a minimum of 2 to 6 months to get a T1 put into your office in Toledo.
We recently lost a big Microsoft R&D contract for Toledo to a little town to the south of us simply because we would not return calls because no one locally knew who was in charge.
None of this surprises me, not even calling the FBI for a simple TOS violation.
What next, phoning Homeland Security when a women who has a towel on her leaves dog pop on your door step? For the love of Pete, its terry clothe, not a Middle East wrap.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Since when do you have to be home to have your house searched? I don't think it ever stopped the FBI in the past.
And I certainly don't see, even if this is theft of services, why the FBI comes into the picture. It certainly seems like a local or state crime, not a federal one. And there seems to be no valid reason at all to have taken the computers, it's the modems that were uncapped. Taking the computers is just abusive over exercise of questionable authority. (sure, they might find instructions on how to uncap a modem still on the computer, but that knowledge isn't illegal in itself, and they have the modem as proof. And if I bought my own capped modem I would expect it to include printed instructions in the manual on how to change the cap for my particular system, so what?) Looks like the FBI wants to appear to be doing something to counter all of the bad press they got recently; too bad they chose to abuse people outside of their rightful jurisdiction.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Hello Mr. Shryrock,
In the event of me possibly violating any of
the enumerable EULA privisions in the Buckeye Cable Systems contract, would it be possbile for you
to simply refuse my service and turn off my cablemodem
BEFORE you have my house raided by the FBI and scare the sh*t out of my 13 year old?
Perhaps you could even have your crack IT department
install a monitoring program that would detect and disconnect uncapped modems.
I am sorry your services have been stolen, perhaps if your front door was not quite so WIDE OPEN you could have spared a few folks, mostly kids, from getting a brand spanking new FBI file.
Thanks,
Your ex-customer.
Here is their Editorial Forum ...
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
You are so wrong it's obscene. When you signup with an ISP, what do you get? You get an internet connection, and X amount of bandwidth. You have BOUGHT that bandwidth, it's yours... If you take more than that it's stealing.
Your thinking is so muddy it's obscene. The Mississippi River is pristine in comparison.
Let me use another real world analogy that should clear this up:
If you are a shipping company using the limited capacity of, say, the Panama or Suez canal, and you have a contract that allows you to send 5 ships a day through the canal for a particular price, and you decide to slip 10 ships through instead, have you stolen the canal?
No.
Have you stolen money from the canal operators (assume for a moment there is no way for them to easilly charge you each time a ship passes through, ie. no toll booth on the canal itself)?
No.
Do you owe the canal operators money?
Yes.
Are you in violation of your contract?
Yes.
Are you absuing the services of the canal by taking up more of its capacity than your contract allows?
Yes.
Are you "stealing" capacity?
No, because capacity is a numerical measure, not an object that can be stolen. You are misusing the canal's limited resources, but you are not taking them anywhere.
To make this even more crystal clear for those who are still unable to shed the mental shackles of the Newspeak definitino of theft that the media cartels have been feeding them for the last two decades, consider this.
If, instead of filling the canal with ships and using up its capacity in that fashion, are you engaging in theft if you blow the canal up and turn it into a dry river bed?
No, obviously not. You haven't engaged in theft at all, you've engaged in vandalism, sabatage, and perhaps terrorism, but you have not engaged in theft, even though you've reduced the canal's usable capacity down to zero.
How about if you build a damn to block the canal (but don't destroy it)?
Again, no, you aren't stealing anything, you are merely abusing the canal and making it useless to others, ie. are reducing its usable capacity to zero.
Using something in excess to what your contract allows, such as capacity, is not and can never be theft. Indeed the very nature of what we are talking about precludes the possibility of theft as such, without rewriting the definition of the word itself to mean something different than it does, which is exactly what you, and the software and entertainment monopolists you so transparently represent, are trying to do. Which is muddy thinking at its worst.
Allow me to reiterate for the remarkably dense: You haven't stolen anything, you haven't taken anything. Capacity is not an object that can be taken, no theft can be committed.
Your inability to think clearly is a direct result of your misuse of the English language, probably because of your inability to question the misuse of the same language software and entertainment monopolists have been feeding you for years.
BANDWIDTH isn't a thing, it is a measure of capacity, and just as your overuse of a canal's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind, so to your overuse of a network's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind.
It does, however, mean you are in violation of contract and very likely owe a serious debt to the providor whose equipment and network you have misused.
It is plain and simple misuse of the English language and common sense that truly results in muddy thinking, exactly like the kind you are displaying here.
Yes, bandwidth is limited. But it nevertheless cannot be taken, and cannot be stolen (without rewriting the defintion of those words), it can merely be misused or abused.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Pathetic. Terrorists are running free in the USA and the FBI has time to go after bandwidth hogs. Do the nation a favor and stop using Buckeye Express or other service like it.
If each contributed equally, that's $19230 each in bandwidth. $19k buys a lot of bandwitdh... much more than a single home could potentially use, even over many months. For example, this budgetary pricing for Verio (a backbone provider) shows that the monthly charge for a 155 Mbit/sec OC-3 line is somewhere around $44k per month.
For that 13 users to have consumed $250k of bandwidth over a period of one year, the "bandwidth cost" would have been equivilant to using one half of a 155 Mbps/sec OC-3 line. Even if all 13 contributed equally, I doubt each of them sustained a 5.7 Mbit/sec stream of data for a whole year! Cable service can rarely run at this speed, and many small groups of houses (like mine) are connected by a 1.2 Mbit/sec line (I saw the At&T tech when he was installing our neighborhood's hub a few months ago). If you consider the "theft" to have occured from February (when "cable officials" claim they first became aware of the situation) until today, that's just 5 months for a "loss" of $50,000 dollars worth of bandwidth each month... equivilant to just 13 users consuming the entire bandwitdh of an OC-3! Even to a someone who has no idea what kind of bandwitdh $250,000 dollars buys, it simply defies imagination that 13 home users would normally consume $50 to $100 per month, could somehow "steal" 1/4 million dollars. It's as rediculous as a claiming someone robbed a 7-11 store and stole 1/4 million dollars from the cash register.
I wonder if it ever occured to Christina Hall or Mark Reiter to ask Paul Shryock how Buckeye figured these 13 home users "stole" such a massive amount. Even if it's larger group of users, it's still an absurd claim. Saddly, they were probably fed a press release with lots of "sound bites", and they threw this scare-tactic story together without even the slighest questioning and investigatave journalism into such an absurd claim.
One thing is for certain... Buckeye CableSystem certainly didn't take a loss of $250,000. If they really were losing that much money, they certainly would have contacted the "others [that] were using a lot". No ISP these days (except perhaps AOL) can afford to take a $250,000 loss and just sit back for five months and wait for the cops to investigage and bust a dozen users.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
"And if someone is downloading something at high rates, its not like an exceptionally fast packet is going to swerve out of controll and injur someone"
Hahah! I love that image! It's so cute to think of a packet zooming down a highway! I salute you!
(This post is not sarcastic- I do really love your post)
The worst thing you can do to them is force them to use dial up.
ender-iii
So-called metered bandwidth, e.g. fractional T1s or T3s, are still the responsibility of your upstream provider to limit your bandwidth. The only exception I've seen to this is when you are buying a fractional T1 with "free" 100GB transfer -if you take a deal like this, you've made the bed now sleep in it.
Bandwidth limiting is built into many routers and switches, and it's now part of BSD distributions (altqd). There is NO excuse for a cable ISP to not limit their own upstream bandwidth usage at the router, and limiting -or cutting off- customer bandwidth is also likewise trivial.
Finally, if they became aware of uncapped modems back in Feb, why didn't they just cut them off? Simplest thing!
I think the reason they didn't is, they wanted to scare the rest of their customers into behaving.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
"Detective Beavers said cable officials became aware of the situation in February. "
So they let them keep going for 4 months? When the company found out they should have killed the accounts. IANAL but I would argue that any extra cost incurred after the Cable Co. found out are less the responsibility of the users and more so that of the company itself. If someone was stealing from me I wouldn't let them keep doing it for four months so I could nail them for a bigger crime. Isn't that entrapment or something?
I am here to help you.
Please do not resist me.
A Transmission From PlanetJIM.[end trans]
If they had used another 300 megs of bandwidth, they would have had to call in an F-16 and bomb all the houses. Bandwidth is serious stuff people, that's why the FBI is spending time going after bandwidth abusers instead of terrorists.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
If it's a crime to use more than the bandwidth allotted for your service, (TOC or not), then it should also be a crime if the allotted service is not provided.
only seems fair, doesn't it?
So when is the FBI going to bust in my door for violating my service agreement by running ssh and an FTP site with pictures of my baby girl? I'm going to renegotiate my contract with COX or cut my line before the fucking FBI comes and takes all of my computers for "evidence" of "excessive" and "illegal" bandwith use.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Sorry I don't have any modpoints, buddy!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Yes, but if you uncapped it, then split the line into many and sold off uncapped broadband to people in your building, your connection use would then amount to the total sum of all your users' bandwidth use.
This could be why the FBI are involved - the dutchcappers were selling off that broadband to others, taking away revenue from the ISPs as well as increasing their bwidth costs. Perhaps they were using their PCs as switches/routers, which is why they were confiscated. It's unlikely given the 100m limit between switches on Cat5 cable, but who knows what goes on in those yankey apt blocks!
It means we own our networks.
I have a couple of bonded Ts, for example. Verizon owns them, sublet to AT&T, who resells it to me. They provide me with an ethernet jack, and that's where their turf ends.
These raids mean that I can dictate, without question, every aspect about that 36 inch Cat5 running into my Nic. I sure as hell can dictate what happens after that Nic, also.
These raids also mean that a person's ability to do something has no relation to their authority to do it.
Unsolicited mail that attempts to sell or notify us of products or service is strictly disallowed by our TOS. Spam, therefore...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
First, test your modem to find out the up/down speed: http://dslreports.com/stest/
/
Next, if you're a Windows user, there are registry tweaks you can make:
http://www.cable-modems.org/articles/speed_tweaks
Mac and Windows tweaks:
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks
Note, however, these are all legal -so far!
Uncapping a 3Com cable modem (what AT&T uses)--
http://online.securityfocus.com/news/353
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
... BEFORE the word God was inappropriately inserted into a pledge from which it was previously absent.
I have Buckeye Express at my apartment right now, and this is making me wonder. I have not/will not unlock my modem because I haven't paid for it, but I also don't know if I want to be affiliated with a group that wont solve issues with their customers on their own. Why did the FBI even need to get involved.
Normally, when something like this happens you dont let is run for a few months and then get the people arrested. They should have noticed right away that this was happening and can the users accounts, or at least give them a warning. Either way this is gay.
And whats with taking their computers? I can see this being prosecuted as a DMCA issue but thats still pretty far. I would be suing if I were them.
Now onto my question. Should I leave Buckeye-Express because of this, and will anyone else do so? Voting with our wallets would work if enough people did so?
Just a thought.
another poster displayed this.
So I will just have to renegotiate of cut. I'm not going to pay $65/month for services I can't use.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
user allowed 1.5 mbit
user uses 2.5 mbit
user gets raided by the fbi
ISP claims 1.5 mbit
ISP gives 500 kbit
user get's screwed by ISP and has no legal recourse to the 1.5mbit they paid for.
If these people were stealing bandwidth, then the ISP is also stealing bandwidth from the users.
Anyone else find it amusing that also in this latest issue of 2600 they have an article on how to uncap your cable modem bandwidth ?? ;-)
He's becoming a recluse and has hired a body guard? Now that doesn't seem like the behavior of someone who tried to jump off the Hi-Level Bridge, does it? Compared to Ford, Carty "Deaf people should live by the airport" Finkbiner seems rather tame.
"I drank what?!?" - Socrates
While I have the utmost respect for good, REAL cops, the fact that a bunch of lazy cops with nothing better to do felt the need to bust a bunch of kids and adults because a company SAID they we're stealing $250,000 worth of bandwidth just shows you how stupid they are! And another thing that I find it amusing is where Buckeye said it was "illegal" what they were doing. Anybody have a link to the state law or DMCA where it says that getting yourself extra bandwidth which you were PAYING FOR in the first place is illegal?! If you noticed, they never said they were STEALING the bandwidth, because how can you steal a service if you were paying for it already? And why didn't Buckeye just cut them off in the first place like everyone else has been doing, when catching people who uncapped their cable modems??
Well, maybe they were using the "stolen" bandwidth to upload hundreds of copies of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, before it gets changed.
On a side note - Anyone who is offended by the words "In God We Trust" on their money, please send it to:
I Don't Mind
PO Box 123
We've Grownup, USA 12345
Is that not the funniest name ever. Is this guy on Porn detail for the FBI?
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
The FBI doesn't have their hands full chasing terrorists, murdererers, and child abductors afterall.
>> Drug money sponsers terrorism? Who's laundering the drug money? (Click on homepage)
WorldCON's?
I grew up in Toledo,OH and my parents still live there. Few little known facts for you
1. Toledo used to be really big for the mob. There is a book called Unholy Toledo that talks all about it. If only they were to comb the bottom of the Maumee River. The FBI has been heavily involved in NW Ohio for as long as I can remember (22 years) making all kinds of busts.
2. Buckeye Cablevision is owned by Block Communication which also owns the
Blade (where the article was published)
3. Buckeye has been the only cable provider in the Toledo area until recently. They have really crappy service (my parents perfer dialup as opposed to buckeye cable internet). They need to make up for it somehow.
I'm so glad I moved to Cleveland!!!
-MK
the word is spelled "sponsor"
Of course, if you're using your system as a server or to feed a vast library of MP3 or video on a p2p network, the model changes. But from my experiences I would expect this would already be in violation of the ISP's "acceptable use agreement". If that the real issue then that's what should be targeted, not people who figure out that there is an artificial limitation that they can easily bypass.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Theft of service? I checked all the documents for residential service including their Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Residential Agreement. I was unable to find any reference to bandwidth limits or excess use fees. In fact, the cable service is provided as a fixed price:
_ ht ml/bexpspecs.html
http://www.buckeyeexpress.com/bci_html/internet
In fact, the Acceptable Use policy does not mention anything about the modification of equipment on the client end, limits to total bandwidth, or limits on bandwidth rates. I hope somebody makes an archive copy of the edocuments before Buckeye goes in and changes them to suit the needs of the prosecution.
If the service does not specify limits, how can you be charged for overusage? It's theft of something you have already paid for. You may disagree with bandwidth hogs, but if there are no stated limits in the terms of use then that's Buckeye's fault. Imagine if you were arrested for using the new MCI or AT&T unlimited LD service to set up a 24/7 voice link to your buddy's apartment on the other coast. It may be a drain on the system, but it's not illegal.
Unless this is an excuse to get at the data on the machines, I foresee crippling civil litigation against Buckeye in the near future.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Wake up. Smell the coffee. Bad things are happening to our liberty. They aren't even arresting these people, they are just stealing their computers. Ongoing investigation? My ass--even if they never prosecute, those system will not be returned of years, they will just sit in a warehouse somewhere, or be sold on the auction block. This IS theft. Sure, it maybe technically legal, but what is legal, and what is right, are often different. These kids did something wrong. They should have their service cut off (idiotic ISP would have shut off their service in Feburary if they really gave a damn about their customers(no, not for the defendant's sake, but for the other customers sake, "Oh yeah, we wanted to stop them from using excessive bandwith, so we let it go on for 5 more months, impedeing your service, so we could have the FBI confiscate their systems and then NOT EVEN PROSECUTE THEM")). They should have fines levied against them. Maybe even community service, couple weeks of jail time. But confiscation of property before trial, without due process, with little to no hope of it ever being returned? This is a dark, dark road we begin to trot down.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
... I thought my ping times in Quake were unusually good last night.
"Derp de derp."
nevertheless != never the less
I personally work for a Very Large Cable provider (take a guess at a large one, think merger early this year), so I guess I know a little about how the company would be affected, etc...
Anyway, the Cable company SHOULD have been using a program to track data and bandwidth usage from their users. At our place, we can look up the top 10 bandwidth users by area, and look at their charts then. They should have seen these guys from the first week they were doing it.
Secondly, there is normally so much bandwidth in the pipe leftover it isn't even funny. The cable modems all have 10mb ethernet connections OR USB connections on the back. Even the Cisco uBRs use 10mb connections. So they aren't getting more than 10mb/sec max.
Also, take note that bandwidth doesn't cost THAT much. Not a 1/4 million anyway.... Sprint in this area is charging 159/month for their DSL lines that offer up to 8mb down/1 mb up. And I know that they are making a little money from that even. So, I am guessing that 8/1 costs them actually 50 a month.
Moreover, why doesn't it say WHAT they were doing? They mentioned illegal, but why are they just being charged for Bandwidth ganking instead of that ALONG with piracy, and acting as a Top site for movies (which they probably were), or stuff like that. You don't tear up bandwidth that much unless you are serving something...
Personally, I don't think that it cost them that much money. They should have also been watching their network closer. I am willing to bet that they LET this happen for a while, so that they could claim higher losses (geez, and I thought WorldCom was the only one misreporting things... and Enron..)
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Let me use another real world analogy that should clear this up:
If you are a shipping company using the limited capacity of, say, the Panama or Suez canal, and you have a contract that allows you to send 5 ships a day through the canal for a particular price, and you decide to slip 10 ships through instead, have you stolen the canal?
The problem with your examples are that they don't apply at all to the matter at hand. You make the connection that "oh, the internet is kinda like the panama canal, so ergo, bandwidth is a canal, and all laws which apply to a canal apply to bandwidth--the physical aspects make no difference irrelevant." And on a side note, you make an incredibly spurious jump from stealing capacity to "stealing the canal". If that's what I was claiming for cable modems I would have said that you are "stealing the cable wire" .. the physical aspect is irrelevant in this argument--no one is claiming that the cable modem abusers physically stole anything. And in your canal scenario, you would certaintly be robbing the canal owners (do you agree?). I also disagree with your fundamental assertion that capacity cannot be stolen.
Using simple wellfounded definition, stealing is "To take or appropriate dishonestly (anything belonging to another, whether material or immaterial)" (OED if you find fault with it..). When you uncap your cable modem you are taking..dishonestly..something immaterial, belong to someone else. When you uncap your modem, you're taking more bandwidth than you paid for--you are using more capacity than you agreed to, depriving others of their capacity, and using capacity that would otherwise be the cable companies to sell--this seems a clearcut case of theft to me.
Do you agree that using a cable descrambler to get extra channels is stealing? Because it's the exact same thing.
I would worry less about "newspeak" of corporations and focus more on logic.
It is worth noting that The Blade is also owned by Block Communications, which owns the cable company.
This is undoubtedly scewed to that effect.
While I have no doubt it COULD have cost them 250,000, It would have had to have been a long term thing. They only have 2 DS3's last time I checked, so 250,000 would have been using both DS3's solid for several months.
Jason
Maybe I'm just way up in the technical clouds here, or not? The way I see it is that this might be a "theft of service". However, the modem is the evidence, not the seized computers. What did the FBI do exactly, the article is unclear: did the FBI seize all the computational devices in the home (aka calculators, computers), or where they loooking for modified cable modems? The way to uncap a cable modem is to upload a new rom-image via tftp. The cable modem is then at the control of the modems' owner. Clearly modifing ones own personal property is 'fair useage' of the equipment. It is the networkign equipment that should be confiscated, not the computers.
The seizure of PC's in this day and age is paramount to cutting off a criminals hand. Especially if the person is an 'at home worker', or telecommuter. Now I will say that a tele-commuter shouldn't be taking risks on their connection like that, unless they want to start driving to work.
The ISP's must be confused to think that the customers must be responsible to manage the network usage for their own. THis is an issues that shoudl be solved on the ISP side of things.... as in they should shape their own packets, and not relly on the public to shape their traffic. Honsetly, saying a person is breaking the law just because the IPS doesn't understand how this simply thing to do is done is not the fault of the end-user.
br.
Clearly this case(s) won't hold up in court. There is no serivce aggreement that can prevent a owner of property from doing as they wish with said property. And if the ISP is capable of monitoring the bandwidth, they are capable of shaping the bandwidth just liek any other firewall, or filter does. If a user exceeds their prescribed bandwidth usage for a give time slice, then increase their rates, like a long distance company, or simply prevent anymore forwarding of packets for the remaindure of the time-slice (normally one month).
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
DAmnit, porn created the internet. I masterbate to the damn shit everyday.. time to steal more bandwidth...
Right?
hrm. then again. maybe not.
There's someone I could take seriously...
In all, they seized 23 computers, including three laptops; three hard drives, and 13 cable modems. ok, and the 3 hard drives had what to do with anything? give me a break, i could transfer 40 gigs of pr0n from cd to my hard drive and not even use the cable modem.. so if they think this is evidence, they are sadly mistaken...
I write code.
Yes.
You have stolen a resource via your vandalism. You have taken that resource away.
Reducing its usable capacity to zero means you have stolen all of its capacity, no?
Detective Bart Beavers, working on behalf of Buckeye Express. Now that is funny, and I'm not afraid to admit it.
these days things are as bad here as they are in the fucking socialist western european countries.
-- the world would be a better place if the snails ate the frenchmen
Looks like it to me but IANTCJOTUSSC. That has to be the longest "acronym" I've ever seen. I just can't figure out exactly what it stands for. "I Am Not The County Judge Of Tennesse University's South Southeast Campus"?
I think the government should start a federal agency called the Citizen Outrage Service. (The word Service would serve the same purpose in this case as it does in Internal Revenue Service.) The COS would send out teams of specialists to raid 100 random homes each day and jack whatever they see fit, citing federal authority under "The new privacy laws" or something. When citizens get outraged that their stuff is getting jacked, their only recourse is to fill out a "How are we doing?" form and file it in a government suggestion box. To arrive at this suggestion box, you would have to file a form COS177389B, providing personal information in 132 different fields, and sign the form in 92 places, giving the government permission to read the answers you're filing with them. Then, you'd mail this (certified mail, of course), and it would be processed within 90 days. Actually, it'll take more like a year or so for them to process it, because they'll be backlogged from day one, and the backlog will perpetually increase. Then, they'll send you another form to fill out, COS117348K, Application to Enter Queue for Citizen Outrage Service Suggestion Box. Then, you'd fill out this form, and within 90 days (or two years, whichever comes last), they'll contact you two hours in advance of your appointment to notify you that you must travel 1,000 miles to their nearest "convenient" office. Once there, you'll have to wait in line for about eight hours to arrive at a window where you produce paperwork to prove that you have official business to carry out at that office. Once you have proven your innocence, you'll be sent to some obscure location within the building, given crappy directions that have you wandering around endless bland government hallways and elevators, until you finally arrive at some over-crowded office. There, you wait in line to arrive at a ticket dispenser, where you pick a number and wait to be called. Once you're called, the impatient clerk who has no decision authority whatsoever asks you a couple of questions, and when he (or she) realizes that your problem is outside their realm of authority (as are all problems, as they have no authority), they explain why things can't be done, hand you a form COS177389B, and explain that you have to file that and wait to be called by the Citizen Outrage Service.
Now, you might think this is ridiculous, but if you remove the part about them raiding your house and stealing stuff, and change some of the names around a little bit, you end up with something that looks a lot like the Immigration and Naturalization (you guessed it) Service. Perhaps the FBI should raid their offices and jack a bunch of computers, to investigate why the INS is burning up tons of government funds, and then fails to do their job correctly.DISCLAIMER:THIS POST IS SATIRE, SARCASM and HUMOR, in no particular order. So if you got a problem with what I said, take it and shove it up your rear end. Oooooooooooooh well.
once you become suspected of a crime, all of your assets plus any assets around you automatically become subject to civil forfeiture nowdays.
FYI - The bastards who own the cable company in Toledo also own the only city newspaper. They cry about how they have to continuously raising cable prices but somehow manage to put several full-page full-color advertisments in the newspaper daily.
I live in toledo and am on this ISP's service using their cable modem. From what I understand an article on /. a couple weeks ago about uncapping surfboard modems could very well be where these people got the information. Hell i almost uncapped my only reason I didnt wasd because i didnt want to deal with finding the programs that the faq site needed to do it. This is actually really surprising because about a year ago buckeye (the ISP in question) caught me running a server on their service and was really cool about it. They just asked me to take it down and actually offered me a job. Just because of some stupid warez server. Oh well good luck to all those that got caught im amazed that buckeye would overuse authority like this.
Why must bandwidth be throttled at the modem? Why not limit bandwidth consumption at the ISP's end?
This seems to be part of a recurring theme, of companies using government to enforce technology in spite of its limitations, and making it a crime to circumvent those limitations:
This to make up for analog cellular's privacy deficiencies, and give the illusion of cellular phone privacy.
This to create a scarcity that does not exist naturally, so that prices can be inflated.
Next thing you know, it will all be done in software, and any reverse engineering or modification of software will be a crime. All of your executables will be scanned for checksums, under a Palladium-like scheme, and if it indicates one of your executables has been modified, the ISP will be notified through spyware, and the FBI will be called out to seize your computer. If their investigation finds that you intentionally modified the files, you will be arrested and all of your property (not just computer) will be seized.
We're living in a police state.
Let's see, steal billions, defraud 401K pension plans, no problem. Steal otherwise-unused bandwith, get arrested.
Yep, One Nation, Under God has sure served as a good moral compass these last 48 years.
Infuriate left and right
The FBI is not in the business of protecting citizens any more. They haven't been for years. Want proof? Look at what happened in Arizona last summer. An FBI agent there thought it was a bit strange that Arabs were paying cash to take 757/767 flying lessons but only were interested in learning to fly the plane once it was in the air. In other words, they didn't need to learn how to take off and land. His supervisors not only weren't interested, they moved him (and many other agents) to an arson case involving luxury homes on the outskirts of Phoenix. WHY was the FBI involved in what was clearly a local police matter? Because $$$ was involved. Same reason here. When you view a videotape of DVD there's always this "FBI warning" at the beginning warning of copyright infringement. Apparently the FBI has read too many of these as they truly believe that their only job now is to protect the money!
I get the feeling you are either being deliberately obtuse here, or the misapplication of the English language the content cartels have subjected you to all these years has truly made you incapable of applying the correct, dictionary definition of the words "theft" or "stealing."
Do you agree that using a cable descrambler to get extra channels is stealing? Because it's the exact same thing.
Of course not, because it isn't, regardless of how many times the Cable and Content industry misuse and redefine the word.
It isn't theft.
It is unauthorized access to privately owned information, and as such punishable under the law.
You are partially right, the two concepts are similiar (though not the same thing), but neither one is an example of theft.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
IANAL - but...
I just finished reading all of Buckeye's Terms of Service (pdf) , Acceptable Use (pdf) , Residential Agreement(pdf) , etc. Nowhere in the text does it say that you have a limit on the amount of bandwidth you can use nor does it limit the type of use other that 'illegal activities' (Warez,etc.). I'll be interested to see what type of charge they come up with. It can't be theft of any kind - unless they didn't even subscribe to the service.
This is just another example of Cowboy police (local,State, & Federal) not even researching if any crime was committed before reacting. They are just trying to intimidate citizens and use gestapo tactics. I think we all should let both the company and the law know how we feel. Then these people should file a class-action lawsuit against them.
So AlQueda stole those buildings in NYC, huh?
Land of the free and home of the brave!
Of course Ken Lay hasn't been charged with anything.
None of the Toledo bandwidth thieves are socialites with a history of making donations to political parties. Nor can they afford fantastic legal advice. If they could, they wouldn't need to steal bandwidth.
President Bush said something about how "95 percent of American business is run honestly and fairly, without incident." Too bad that other 5 percent is stealing MILLIONS OF DOLLARS from people who never had it to begin with.
Why is this in the "Your Rights Online" ....
This is not some clueless senator banning
linux, or something of that sort. This is a
bunch of losers stealing a service (or
level of service) that they did not pay for.
This is flat out wrong, and these guys ought
to pay the price for stealing.
Does everyone in this generation think that this
stuff is theirs for the taking? What happened to
right and wrong? (As someone in this generation)..
Losers.
Showed 'em how to steal bandwidth from Buckeye Express :)
Toledo Blade Forum
I had the same experience with a local DSL provider, only no FBI. I had been waiting for this damn DSL for nearly a year while they were setting up their operation in my dinky town. When I finally got it it lasted for a whole month til I got my service taken away for excessive bandwidth consumption for running my hotline server. Not only did they shut it down, but they called my parents, even though I was 18 at the time and felt the need to tell them I was running a porn server. Grr... it still makes me mad, these local ISPs try to watch every computer connected to them with a magnifying glass. I say don't support local ISPs, I've been with Charter broadband for the last year (formerly @Home) and haven't had any problems
-Alex
The ISP had the option of cutting off those users. They didn't have to add more capacity.
Even if for some retarded reason they couldn't cut off those users, now that the bandwidth is no longer required, because these 13 users are no longer on the network, they have full use of this equipment. If they use it, it's no longer damages; one can argue they would have purchased it eventually.
In short, if these are really upgrade costs (as the damages), there are two possibilities:
1) They're not damages, the ISP had other alternatives
2) They are too high. Since the fraudulent users are no longer on the network, the ISP must sell off the equipment now that it's not required.
Regards, Guspaz.
[quote]You have stolen a resource via your vandalism. You have taken that resource away. [/quote]
Bullshit.
To steal something, you have to take it away and keep it for yourself. If you blow the canal up, nobody has it - not even you - so you haven't stolen anything. You've simply destroyed something.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
I live in Toledo, and a good friend of mine was one of the people targeted.
A couple of months ago, he uncapped his modem for 1-2 weeks, then stopped. The FBI showed up yesterday, with warrant, etc, and confiscated his modem and 3 of his computers.
He IS being prosecuted, along with the others, for wire fraud (federal offense, which is why the FBI was involved). As he's a minor, and was cooperative, the agents said he'd probably get away with just probation. Who can say for the adults, though?
By the way, he said he was getting about 4Mb a sec for the two weeks--I don't know about the others.
I have a DSL line. In the ads they brag about you being able to be online 24/7. As very few people are awake 24/7, I suppose that means you may also download when not in front of the computer. I, and most of my friends on similar connections, do.
When I read about people (for instance in Australia) getting their bandwidth reduced (or receive a bill, termination of service and similar) for excessive usage within their regular bandwidth, that would in my case be a breach of contract by the ISP.
So, does your contracts contain something along the lines of 'Well, we told you 768/384, but that's actually a lie. If you use your bought and paid for bandwidth, we'll punish you'? In my country that doesn't exist, at least that I know of.
I'd be thankful for any enlightenment regarding this...
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
All of the computers have been taken.
On the face of it, this looks like overreaction, but that's assuming that things are all open and aboveboard. But now all of the evidence is in the hands of the prosecution.
Would you trust them to be honest? What if there weren't any evidence, would you expect them to admit it?
If I were on the jury, I'd be very sceptical about any case that was presented.
And if I were a customer, I'd dust off my 56K modem before I paid the DSL provider another cent.
These are supposedly teenagers. You don't get very far by trying to put the fear of the state into them, because the next lot will never have heard of it (and besides, teenagers never believe that it can happen to them). And throwing them in jail doesn't do any good for society. (True, slave labor helps some corporate bottom lines, but that doesn't count as a social good.)
So...
Well, if they are guilty (not proven, and possibly no longer provable) then they should be punished. A civil suit and a few nights in jail sounds about right. But what about the police? Were they acting legally, or just grabbing everything they could lay their hands on? They should also be subject to civil suits for any loss of property that occurred. And if they have lost or destroyed the records, then they should be criminally liable. Do you believe that they will be held to that standard? Why not?
This whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I don't know the evidence, but too often in such a cases it seems the police end up looking more corrupt than those they are persecuting (they may prosecute, they are persecuting). And I certainly wouldn't want to do business with their service provider. A quarter of a million $ sounds like a lot, but these days houses go for that much all the time. And there are supposedly 23 people that this is divided up between. And I don't really trust the accounting that gave them the "quarter of a million" estimate.
A lot of this is just my immediate reaction, and proofs could be supplied that would radically change my opinions (e.g., proof that they were running a stock market simulation model sharing the computation across the net, and using the results to speculate on the market. That would make it look like a crime meriting the response.)
But until I see the evidence, I'll consider that in this case the ISP, the cops, and the feds acted as puffed up bullys. And corrupt ones, at that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Maybe they uncapped their modems to 38Mbit/s instead of 1Mbit/sec, WHO CARES? At the ISP where I work, we have found that our customers that switch from 56k dialup to 4Mbit/sec DSL connections don't use any more bandwidth, they just surf quicker. Instead of taking up our lines for hours and hours, they use a DSL and grab their files quickly. Maybe these kids/adults uncapped to 38Mbit to share BETWEEN their machines... maybe they were taking up too much bandwidth on the internal backbone as opposed to the ISPs main upstream.... regardless the article says that some of the kids/adults didn't use their allocation or barely went over. This means that yes, they downloaded information FASTER, but did not use MORE. Maybe they grabbed 5 GB of stuff in a day instead of over a couple of days... that doesn't really hurt anybody because I would ASSUME that this ISP has a fractional connection that can handle a LOT more than what their customers use in a day. We for instance peak at about %55 or our total capacity... thats a GOOD THING.
Blade Communications Inc.
541 N. Superior St.
Toledo, OH 43660
Phone: 419-724-6000
Fax: 419-724-6080
Online: Web Site
Mr. Paul W. Shryock
Buckeye Cablevision, Inc.
5566 Southwyck Blvd.
Toledo, Ohio 43607
Fax: 419-724-7074
" You're welcome to try Buckeye Express for yourself in our Customer Service lobby at 5566 Southwyck Blvd [Toledo OH]. "
Buckeye info: 419-724-9800
Tech Support: 419-724-3278
-=Ivan
That $45/month is what they charge their customers, and they cap you at 1Mbps.. fine.
That doesn't mean everyone uses 1Mbps 24/7.
1Mbps sustained for 1 Day is about 10.5 GB/day.
If they sustaied 10 Mbps instead... because they uncapped their modem...
105 GB/day
At , say, $5/GB, that's $500/day in bandwidth fees.
30 days in a month.
That's $15,000 a month.
Some cable modems are faster than 10Mbps.
Though we can all look at the pricing model and see howt he cable compnay will lose money.. they didn't SELL you "1Mbps of bandwidth". They most likely sold you a cable modem, and hooked it up to their cable network, and said "It's our internet package".
They probably never mentioned speed in the contract.
If they can show the agreement that shows how these people ripped them off, if they modified stuff on the cable company's end, then I agree with you.
If they modified a modem they bought and paid for, that does NOT belong to the cable company...
If you don't notice that much BW erroneously movving around on your network, you've got other problems to worry about...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
Just a thought... I haven't heard of a law saying that it is illegal to put stuff into your pockets. It's certainly against your local supermarket's policy to take more goods out of the shop than you're paying for, but this doesn't entitle the management to get the police involved, does it?!? This seems like a gross miscarriage of justice.
'...search warrants obtained for six other residences were not served because the occupants were not home or for various other reasons.'
Be somewhere else, or have "other reasons"...
Windows Update is customizing the product updates catalog for your computer. This is done without sending any informatio
I wonder how many terrorists boarded airplanes.
This would be true if they'd said "The use of excessive bandwidth is something that Buckeye does not condone xor will not stand." Since an OR is true even if both arguments are true, it can't be determined weather or not they condone the use of excessive bandwidth
If I had seen this story on April 1, I would have skipped over it. This shows a braindead company aggregiously abusing law enforcement to enforce a civil, not criminal, matter by making up ficticious charges and providing fabricated evidence. I think there is a law against THAT too. I think that one is a felony. Someone should pay for this, but since no one will ever do any buisiness with this stupid company again, justice will be done if only via their bankrupcy. Unbelievable.
For those of you asking this question, the answer is "evidence". The people who were busted had been communicating with each other, presumably through email. That email will quite possibly be sitting on their computers. That alone would justify the cops taking away the computers for examination.
Not to mention evidence of tampering with the modems might be somewhere on the computers too. Things like cable modem mod HOWTOs, software, etc.
In the words of some random person on IRC I once saw:
"If I'd known a few box cutters was it all took to turn this country into 1930's germany, I would have done it myself years ago"
All I can say is, I thought policemen were supposed to enforce laws, not crimes.
I get the feeling you are either being deliberately obtuse here, or the misapplication of the English language the content cartels have subjected you to all these years has truly made you incapable of applying the correct, dictionary definition of the words "theft" or "stealing."
..
It isn't theft.
It is unauthorized access to privately owned information
You can make bold statements like these all you want, and you can spout your anti-company rhetoric and how I've been brainwashed into not using the "dictionary definition" all you want--and yet I note you couldn't refute a single point in my argument INCLUDING my citation of the Oxford English Dictionary since you now seem to want to deal in the realm of facts and definitions.
And btw, I assume you're making this argument as purely hypothetical? Because from this occurrence's terminology and "cable theft" as a term, it's pretty clear what the actual legal system thinks of these issues.
And if it weren't for the junk filter you could've quoted websters to back it up. Seriously, if anyone disagrees with you, send them over here and look up the definitions for steal (which requires TAKING), and take, and hell even take it down to the root if you want. Language isn't subjective, and if I had mod points I'd have modded up every post you made on the subject man.
You can't say "under god" any more... heh
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
SOOO if they were stealing premuim cable with a blackbox, would the feds have confiscated their tv's?
I would imagine not.
this sort of thing i believe you'll only see from a small time bandwidth provider, sure it might have cost them a little extra $$, probably nothing too grand. larger providers would certainly just shrug it off and have kicked the users off.
i'd figure if they were reselling bandwidth via cable to customers, they prolly have multiple t1 or t3 line/s peered to some large network/networks (ATT SPRINT), I couldn't imagine a savy (or remotely inteligent) company would attempt to run such a network over partial or bandwidth limited lines. I mean you're already paying for service, paying for infrastructure, they'd probably have some form of BGP routing for a multipoint failsafe connection, nothing of this operation is cheap, why would they skimp on the pipes?
even (especially) if they do run over partial lines, i find it outlandish that they wouldn't watch their bandwidth in real time. What, did they not know they had leaks until they got their bill for that month? This isn't a water provider! This screams lacksidazical administration. Heh, i used to monitor my business' router with MRTG like i was paying for the companies bandwidth out of my own pocket.
I really have no sympathy for any company soo lax on security and bent on making examples out of it's customers. These guys don't deserve to be service providers. Bigger ISP's have bellied up. These guys can't be far behind. 250k my arse, that gets you multiple t3's for a year.
Don't get me wrong, if these users cracked their modems, they certainly deserve some form of punishment, Getting kicked off or fined. (one or the other not both mind you) If they want to prosecute them just do it, there was no reasonable cause to bring the feds in. Such a waste of time and federal money.
I still have yet to figure out why exactly all of these cable providers are limiting bandwidth via these DOCSIS modems, It can't possibly be cheaper to do it that way then over routers can it? Then again, I guess limits at the modem work much in the same way cable boxes do.
So, do you think that if these people would have been stealing cable with a blackbox, if the FBI would have taken their TV's? I've never heard of that happening. (then again i really don't know anyone who's gotten caught either) oh well i guess i have to end my rant and find something productive to do
--Meat
the email address for the dept. Toledo.Police@Ci.Toledo.Oh.Us
I love the fact that we don't have anything like terrorists flying planes into our buildings to distract real dedicated professionals from thier duty. Don't get me wrong, the majority of cops out there are hard working people doing a thankless job, but all it takes is a few bozo's like this to make a bad name for em.
Spazdot-1 in 10 insightfull articles, and 1 in 10,000 insightfull comments ain't bad.
Going by the market rates for cable Internet at Australia's largest ISP Telstra, if you choose the middle plan where you get 3 GB per month and excess MBs are charged at US 7 cents.../ pr icing.asp ) -
http://www.bigpond.com/broadband/products/cable
13 people charged for a 1.2 Mbyte/second service. An hour at this rate would cost US$3931.20
A month at this rate would cost US$2,830,464
Five months of this nefarious action would cost US$14,152,320
If all of Telstra's broadband cable customers (about 80 thousand) had cottoned onto this scheme it would have cost them US$1,132,185,600,000!
Except the judge that wrote for the majority was a Nixon appointee. Hardly a leftist.
People have talked about the chilling effect of calling the FBI to kick in the doors of some kids. Perhaps Slashdot can show companies how this chilling effect can backfire. Here are the useful names and numbers to return their favor:
From their webpage:
We look forward to hearing from you!
Or by phone: 419-724-9800
Or visit in person
5566 Southwyck Blvd
Monday through Saturday from 8am until 7pm.
Sunday, 12 noon until 5pm
And don't forget to make sure to bite the hands that feeds them, here is the parent company's info. Block Communications Incorporated has these happy numbers listed:
Phone: 419-724-6000
Fax: 419-724-6080
Or from their earning press release . We can find these info tidbits:
Jodi Miehls
Treasurer of Block Communications
419-724-6257
jmiehls@toledoblade.com
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The swing vote was a Carter appointee, and besides, this was the most liberal court in the country. Oh, and Nixon wasn't exactly a right winger, given that he founded the EPA, raised taxes and so forth. The only reason he doesn't count as a Democrat is that he didn't lock up all the Japanese like FDR did.
Jesus fucking christ, karma mother fucking whores sooo love the sound of their own voices.
Done splitting hairs yet? Why not just say "technically it's fraud, not theft." Dipshit.
or the misapplication of the English language the content cartels have subjected you to all these years
I see, if someone disagrees with you, you say they're nuts or under mind-control. Good debating tactic, Mr. Troll In Karma Whore's Clothing.
When are you freedom loving Americans going to just stop the play acting and admit you leave in a police state?
Anarchists never rule
Dayum nigga! It be da troof! Mistah Jesus, he touched me balls and said, "you be da realness, yo."
...or something like that.
I kind of doubt that all of those arrested were running full bore 24/7. I also doubt that any of them were connected with greater than Ether speed.
Bad assumptions do not make a great argument. Of course, I'm making wild assumptions, too, so feel free to ignore everything I've just said!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
At least in Colorado, you're damn wrong.
Traffic violations under the state code (of concern to park rangers and state troopers, mainly) are usually civil infractions. Traffic violations under municipal codes are almost always criminal.
Run a stop sign in my town. Then, fail to pay and fail to appear. There WILL be a muni court arrest warrant out for you.
And the city loses money big time doing that. We have to pay for the extradition if someone's picked up on our warrant in Denver or wherever. However, someone has correctly noted that letting FTA's run free is not exactly fair to the people who do the right thing and either pay their tickets or appear and contest them.
And I usually charge excessive speed as excessive speed. The points from one cite for 40MPH over the limit is enough to suspend an adult's license here.
Being from the ^&%$hole that is Toledo OH, I can state that there is nothing small about Buckeye Cablesystems, or their parent corp, buckeye telesystems. They run the cable TV, the internet, and the local newspaper is even under their indirect control.
Worst part is, they are bad for bussiness around here. All the smaller ISP's buy bandwidth and coloc from these guys, and there is network bottlenecks that could literally be solved by running a line from 1 rack, to another, 3 feet away. But Buckeye wants to charge "transfer fees", and so none of the small local isp's can solve a very easily solvable problem.
Any money that these uncapper's cost John Block and his vast Northwest OH empire is all for the better. The economy here sucks, the job market is completely dry, and quite frankly, a big chunck of it is their fault, they deserve what they got. I hope someone finds other ways to cost them loads of money, cause they do not deserve it.
Sorry, I might call myself a little bitter....
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
They should also be subject to civil suits for any loss of property that occurred.
Ha! Are you a lawyer? Or do you really know honest lawyers that will hold such cases?
Is it easy for people completely unprepared to run lawsuits to make it? They will probably know nothing about how to start that lawsuits, probably even their basic legal rights. Attorneys are people that make big bucks and your question cost YOU big bucks- that's that they know...
Its hard to say they exceeded if they did not.
They should be allowed there maximum speed 24/7. With cable at the isp advetised speed thats still a lot of bandwidth if maxed all the time.
Uh, $450 will buy you one megabit, not 10. 10Mb will run you at least 3 grand, probably more.
--
Chris Lambert
Standard computer crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer - most anything that remotely resembles a computer - plus most any and all written documents surrounding it. Computer crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the works.
Elsewhere it talks about the actual process of seizure. They do take photographs of the configuration before disturbing anything. However this is for their benefit, not yours. You are assumed to know how to reassemble your own kit.
(Aside: I recall a case in Guernsey where a new sports car was bought in to the island. The Customs disassembled it in a search for contraband and didn't find anything. Then they told the owner that he could take it away. Not only did he have to pay to have it put back together, but the warranty was now void. Neither of these two things was considered "damage" worthy of compensation).
On passwords, I'm not sure about the US. I suspect your Fifth Amendment protects you. In the UK the Regulation of Investigative Practices Act authorises the police to demand your passwords and encryption keys on pain of two years imprisonment for failure to comply, and if you tell anyone other than your lawyer about it then you can be put in prison for five years.
The Hacker Crackdown is probably the best book on computer cracking I've read, even though it was written over 10 years ago. It looks at the subject from the POV of the crackers, the cops and the civil libertarians. If you are interested in the subject then read it.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Do you agree that using a cable descrambler to get extra channels is stealing? Because it's the exact same thing.
No, that is not the same thing, because if I use a descrambler, all other people can STILL watch their channels without qualityloss. In fact, they won't even notice. I don't say that it's right to do so, just that it is not stealing.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Reducing its usable capacity to zero means you have stolen all of its capacity, no?
No, because he can't use it himself.
He has destroyed all of its capacity, not stolen it.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The group broke a legal contract, they COST the ISP $250,000 and to top it off they were probably leeching warez & illegal german pornography.
How the F**K can people defend these degenerates. They deserve everything coming to them.
Whats the alternative? A representative from the ISP to knock on your door and telling you nicely that you broke the contract by uncapping the modem and we need to cancel your account?
These pricks will think twice if they try to uncap their modems again.
There are two kinds of relationship in the ISP world: peering and transit.
In a transit relationship a larger ISP provides a smaller one with long-distance connectivity for a fee, in exactly the same way that you pay your ISP. So local-ISP pays, say, UUNET for a connection that gives it access to the rest of the Internet. Such connections have a maximum bandwidth and typically include a per-megabyte charge element as well.
Peering relationships are used between ISPs of similar size to reduce the costs of transit. Two ISPs will agree to exchange traffic, but only where the source and destination are within those two ISPs. A cannot send traffic to C via its peering arrangement with B.
However all of this is irrelevant. When service is stolen the cost of the service is taken as its retail cost, not its incremental cost to the provider. Otherwise people stealing cable TV could argue that they have done nothing wrong because they didn't increase anyone's incremental costs.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Detective Bart Beavers
Hahaha
nice name man
In the TOS aren't you agreeing to pay for a specific amount of something? Like broadband providers will try their best for perfect discrimination of their target market by having various bandwidth solutions available at varying costs....
well, as for your analogy...im not so sure it applies in this case. You don't have to pay for access to the canal so of course it's not stealing. But, what if the canal was divided into shipping lanes that you had to pay a per usage fee for? Okay, so let's say you pay for unlimited use of 1 shipping lane. You reverse engineer the lane markers and find out that it's possible to use two shipping lanes to increase your capacity. You didn't pay for the extra shipping lane, but you are using it. Is that stealing!? I think it is.
Well, all in all, this seems like such a petty crime. I'm sure the figures these companies used to calculate how much bandwidth was stolen was something like... (Total Expenses/Total Possible Bandwidth)*(Bandwidth Used by User) or something to that effect. It's not a very accurate formula because of the way a limited amount of bandwidth is allocated to bunch of users who actually pay for more bandwidth tht is actually available. (If 500 users on a 20Mbit segment all have max 1.5Mbit bandwidth, can they all get the 1.5Mbit they paid for? Hell no!). So it's just unfair for companies to blame people for causing their network problems when it's their own network setup that is the root of these problems!
Finally, FBI would not get called in for trivial crap like this. In my experience with law enforcement and the internet, if they suspect something they will audit your account by mirroring your downloads and then seeing if you are doing illegal stuff. Come on now, all you people know that there isn't that much HTML crap to download on the internet. There probably is enough pr0n out there to saturate cable networks many times over but you can only watch it soo much before you need a break. What else is left? I would bet that there was some illegal movie trades or illegal software distribution going on here. Pr0n trades, movie dump site, and warez/iso server would probably warrant the FBI to come in a take the computers.
I know that they are really trying to crack down on the copyright infringements now.
This is fraud, plain and simple.
The ISP [i]trusted[/i] these people. They broke this trust, to the tune of $250,000 (or possibly less, if some posts are to be believed).
If someone steals from the till, is it the managers fault for not securing the till? NO. The manager trusts his/her staff, just as the ISP trusted these people.
This is fraud, plain and simple, and they should be made to pay for exectly what the ISP lost.
Not sure about confiscating computers though, seems a bit OTT
Barto
Here's the rub. They have no right to prosecute people for uncapping cable modems.
What they're looking for is illegal software, and where's there's smoke, there's fire.
I mean, think about it. Somebody's downloading 80gb a day straight, what the fuck do you think they're getting? The latest Mandrake ISO's? I think not.
It's the same reason they do inquiries when suspicious patterns of credit card activity pop up.
They know (and yes, the FBI isn't stupid) that when somebody's downloading that much, it's pretty much guaranteed (99 percent of the time) that they've got something illegal on their computer. Give the warrant-issuing judge a few reams showing the direct correlation between bandwidth over-usage and piracy probability, and that thing's signed faster than Robert Downey Jr.'s traveler's cheques in a Tijuana crackhouse.
This was just a weak excuse to bust a piracy ring. Or something. Who the fuck knows what goes on in the FBI's collective head?
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
And the city loses money big time doing that.
Do you think that all law enforcement should be profitable, or just traffic related offenses?
It's a contract violation at best. The authorities have no business getting involved.
I would love to see this happen to some spammers I know though. :-)
You can make bold statements like these all you want, and you can spout your anti-company rhetoric and how I've been brainwashed into not using the "dictionary definition" all you want--and yet I note you couldn't refute a single point in my argument INCLUDING my citation of the Oxford English Dictionary since you now seem to want to deal in the realm of facts and definitions.
... you are violating a contract and misusing a service, and in so doing are in violation of the law, but you are not a thief.
... including a 5 year old dead tree edition Oxford English Dictionary a friend of mine owns (I cannot verify your defintion via the online version as I am unwilling to pay the subscriber fee, when there are several free alteranatives available onlie, including Merriam Webster quoted below).
/'stOl/; stolen /'stO-l&n/; stealing
This is inaccurate, as anyone reading this thread from start to finish will be able to see for themself, but I guess I'll repeat it one more time for those who have difficulty grasping it:
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, not an object (material or immaterial) that can be stolen.
If you dishonestly turn the heat down in the winter are you stealing temperature?
If you dishonestly set off the fire alarm in a school or building, are you stealing the school or building? Are you stealing 'time.'
Not by any reasonable, rational, non-self-serving definition, you're not. You are doing all kinds of reprehensible things, but none of them, not one, is theft.
So to with uncapping one's cable modem
As for definitions, I looked up the definition of 'stealing' and 'theft' in several dictionaries, and not one included the words 'material or immaterial'
Either the OED is reflecting a change in the language, which in turn reflects the very deliberate misuse of the word I have been discussing here, or it has made the change as part of its own corporate strategy (it is, after all, a publisher, and as such a member of one of the very copyright and media cartels engaged in the very campaign of newspeak-style redefinitions of the language I have mentioned in this thread).
Main Entry: theft
Pronunciation: 'theft
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English thiefthe, from Old English thIefth; akin to Old English thEof thief
Date: before 12th century
1 a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
2 obsolete : something stolen
3 : a stolen base in baseball
Main Entry: 1steal
Pronunciation: 'stE(&)l
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): stole
Etymology: Middle English stelen, from Old English stelan; akin to Old High German stelan to steal
Date: before 12th century
intransitive senses
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as an habitual or regular practice
2 : to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly
3 : to steal or attempt to steal a base
transitive senses
1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of
2 a : to move, convey, or introduce secretly : SMUGGLE b : to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner
3 a : to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring b of a base runner : to reach (a base) safely solely by running and usually catching the opposing team off guard
(Merriam-Webster)
None of these, not one, mentions 'immaterial' objects which, by their very nature, cannot be taken.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I said should be liable, not would be liable. I agree with your point. If I was unclear, then I regret it.
Your comment is unfortunately true. I despise that feature of the current legal system, but please remember: This system was created to keep powerful lords from revolting against the king. So the main interest was to make sure that powerful people didn't feel their interests were being neglected. I know that's not what the idealistic rhetoric claims, but if you follow the historical development, that's where it comes from.
In claiming that a historical process resulted in a particular feature, I am not endorsing that feature. In this case it is a continuing source of injustice. But it has acted to prevent civil wars in almost all cases since it was adopted. Think of it as an example of the legal codes not being debugged --- though really it's more a matter of the purposes of those in control not aligning with the purposes of those being controlled.
Do not trust centralized authorities in any system. Avoid designing systems with single points of failure. Include error checking even at the cost of some execution speed. Apply this to all code that you right. Now generalize this to non-programming practices. This isn't easy, but it is "best practice".
P.S.: The end user is also a point of failure. So design for recoverability.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Bandwidth is a numerical measure, not an object (material or immaterial) that can be stolen.
This is simply not true. When you uncap your modem you receieve more bandwidth. You are becoming more of a load on the cable company, depriving the company of the bandwidth that they bought, and depriving other users as well. Bandwidth is not simply a number, it is a resource that is bought and sold--as a commercial item, it can be stolen. When you take that extra bandwidth, other people can't--you're depriving them.
Just to recap, bandwidth is something that is bought and sold. When you take more than you buy, the person selling to you has less to sell--you are depriving them of additional income from either you (for buying more bandwidth) or from other users.
By your definition of stealing as strictly material, if someone hacks my bank account and transfers money, I've had nothing stolen--it was digital money.
If you dishonestly turn the heat down in the winter are you stealing temperature? If you dishonestly set off the fire alarm in a school or building, are you stealing the school or building? Are you stealing 'time.'
Once again, just like your canal example, these are irrelevant and don't connect to the matter at hand. Here's another off topic argument: If I'm paying you by the hour to work for me, and you don't ever work but only browse webpages, are you stealing from me? Yes!
I would be more than glad to copy and paste the entire OED entry--it's rather large though in its entirety, but just ask and I will. Getting free OED access is one of the good things about going to a university with too much money for its own good :)
Incidentally since you didn't comment on it, I again assume that we're debating on a purely hypothetical level here? Because it is quite clear what the law says and has said about this issue (and not just in America). As another immaterial theft example that is quite well grounded in law _historically_ as well as today, try intellectual property theft (again, one of the examples in the OED using "steal" is "1824 SCOTT St. Ronan's xxvii, You not only steal my ideas,..but [etc.]..No man like you for stealing other men's inventions."..stealing of ideas is an old, and very legal concept)
One additional followup
... etc.
Since I'm unwilling to subscribe to OED's online service (as noted, there as many free alternatives available, none of which include the word immaterial int their definitions), I borrowed a colleagues dead-tree copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. It too lacks the words immaterial, and agrees with the other definitions presented here (and thereby disagrees with the definition you presented).
To wit:
steal v. & n. --v (past stole; past part. stolen)
1. tr (also absol.) a. take (another person's proterty) illegally. b. take (property) without right or permission, esp. in secret with the intention of not returning it. 2. tr. obtain surreptitiously or by surprise (stole a kiss). 3. tr. win or get possession of (a person's affections, etc.), esp. insidiously (stole her heart away). 4. intr (foll by in, out, away, up, etc.) move sep. silently or stealthily (stole out of the room). 5 (in various sports)
There isn't a shred of evidence I can find, in any dictionary, to support your claims, or the 'newspeak'-style definition of theft you have been advocating throughout this thread.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Absolutely no arrests were made, no charges filed, so it appears no criminal act was committed.
... in other words, the law does not recongnize the so-called "theft" of ideas, it instead recognizes the temporary restriction of their dissemination (or use, depending on which portion of IP law the idea is being hoarded under).
... it is merely newspeak rhetoric by concentrated intersts used for propoganda purposes to promote their own agendas, both in and out of the courtroom. It is not codified into law, or even recognized by any of the publicly available dictionaries quoted here.
The theft (using the correct defintion of the word, as presented by every publicly available, referenced dictionary in this thread) of these users computer equipment from the FBI is a 'feature' we've inherited from some of the very unconstitutional operating procedures given to us by the War on Drugs and the Reagan administration, and is basically an end run around the law (and the constitution) to punish the offendors even though no criminal charges are being filed.
Finally, as to the law, the law does not define theft the way you do (at least not here in the United States), courtroom antics and rhetoric aside. Copyright violation is not defined as theft under the law, it is defined as copyright violation, which is something different, and it is defined differently for a reason. The same is true of patent violation
The use of the word "theft" in all of these contexts has no legal foundation (at least in the United States)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The theft (using the correct defintion of the word, as presented by every publicly available, referenced dictionary in this thread) of these users computer equipment from the FBI is a 'feature' we've inherited from some of the very unconstitutional operating procedures given to us by the War on Drugs and the Reagan administration, and is basically an end run around the law (and the constitution) to punish the offendors even though no criminal charges are being filed.
A good point, let's see how this runs out--it's possible that they believe the users acted in some kind of concerted effort, and are maybe to look for who started it, etc. Unfortunately, the government moves in mysterious ways, and we can't know what's going to happen yet.
Finally, as to the law, the law does not define theft the way you do (at least not here in the United States), courtroom antics and rhetoric aside. Copyright violation is not defined as theft under the law, it is defined as copyright violation, which is something different, and it is defined differently for a reason. The same is true of patent violation ... in other words, the law does not recongnize the so-called "theft" of ideas, it instead recognizes the temporary restriction of their dissemination (or use, depending on which portion of IP law the idea is being hoarded under).
... it is merely newspeak rhetoric by concentrated intersts used for propoganda purposes to promote their own agendas, both in and out of the courtroom. It is not codified into law, or even recognized by any of the publicly available dictionaries quoted here.
The use of the word "theft" in all of these contexts has no legal foundation (at least in the United States)
You are correct here--Copyright and patent piracy is generally not considered theft--another area of IP is though, and that is trade secrets. Trade secrets aren't tangible (just making sure we're on the same level). I'm sure the DOJ, probably Bar association, legal publishers, and any number of web sites discuss IP theft if you want me to back this up.
I again offer to quote the OED entry as it's more or less indisputable, but if you want to use another dictionary...from dictionary.com:
stealing: To take (the property of another) without right or permission
where property can is defined as "a. Something owned; a possession ..[snip].. c. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks."
Bandwidth is something bought, and therefore owned. It's intangible and fits the definition of property. So given these definitions of steal, and property, it seems clear that something intangible CAN be stolen. And taking more than the bandwidth you paid for is very clearly without right or permission.
Bandwidth is something bought, and therefore owned.
... this happened to a colleague of mine with his once 1.5 MBit/1.5Mbit SDSL line that was quietly switched to 768kbit/348kbit ADSL, and (b) if the contract wasn't 'rewritten' on the sly, using the very controversial, and likely unenforcable, clause stating something to the effect of 'we can change the terms of this contract on you any time we like and you agree to this.')
Here is I believe the core of our disagreement (and I suspect we are going to have to agree to disagree).
Bandwidth isn't a possession that can be possessed, or stolen (indeed, in any real sense it can't really be bought or sold as such, though, just like 7 days in the sun, it is perhaps being represented as being bought or sold when in fact you are purchasing, and selling, something quite different).
To clarify, you cannot buy or sell 7 days in the sun, but you can buy and sell a ticket for a flight to Bermuda, and 6 nights in a hotel, with the expectation that this will mean the purchaser will enjoy 7 days in the sun (but perhaps won't).
Bandwidth, like temperature, air pressure, or voltage, is a measure of capacity, and while you can sell (or rent) equipment, cabling, and so on, along with a contract that specifies how you will (and won't) use said equipment, you cannot sell the actual capacity in any meaningful sense of the word (though marketers often like to represent that differently).
The equipment was (perhaps) misused (though one wonders (a) if the sale wasn't made representing the full bandwidth, which was then reduced on the sly
Getting back to my point, bandwidth is not something that can be possessed, any more than time, sunlight, or air temperature, and those who represent its sale as such are really selling you something quite different (e.g. a contract agreeing to some form of behavior and payment, and perhaps some equipment).
What these people did may have been a breach of contract, but (if any of the suspicions voiced above are true) perhaps even is so doing they did nothing illegal. Certainly nothing whatsoever was ever stolen, except their equipment, by the F.B.I, at the behest of their ISP.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I guess we just will agree to disagree. Glad that it didn't fall into ad hominem attacks and the like, good luck.
No, you're not measuring the "damages"... You're measuring the scaled price of the bandwidth they obtained, if they had payed for it. That's totally different from the damages. For that, you have to find out the ISP's rates for upstream bandwidth, and work backwards from that.
Your argument is based on the assumption that 45/mo pays for you using your maximum capped bandwidth 24/7. In reality, the cable company charges 45/mo but expects you to use only a small percentage of your total bandwidth, because if everyone used their up to the cap, their bandwidth costs would skyrocket. ISP's always sell more service than they can actually provide, betting that only a percentage of their customers will be using their allotment at any time. It may not be right, but you can bet they'd charge even more money if they had to guarantee you your maximum throughput at all times. Now you know why they don't.
What this article failed to mention was that uncapping your modem does not use bandwidth, it simply increases the maximum speed of the modem. Just because they increased the maximum speed doesn't mean they used any more bandwidth.
I'm not sure if this ISP has monthly transfer limits or not, but if they do then uncapping the modem does not affect them - The modem itself is not responsible for maintaining transfer limits, only restricting the maximum transfer speed. If the ISP doesn't have monthly transfer limits then these people are within their rights to transfer as much information as they want!
I agree that uncapping the modem is against their EULA but doing so does not mean they transferred more data than they should have.
Why pull a raid instead of just pulling the plug?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If you're aware of any law enforcement being profitable, and have real evidence, let me know. I've had my head up my ass actually doing it for so long that I don't bother to read the NORML website anymore.
If you're aware of any law enforcement being profitable, and have real evidence, let me know.
I don't have any evidence, but I would guess that traffic enforcement (at least in CA) is profitable. Normal speeding tickets (+10Mph) run between $120 and $250 plus court costs. The vast majority of people don't fight them, so the only costs are the officer and minimal administrative work. I do know for a fact that all successful DUI prosecutions are profitable (in CA), because the state/county/city sue in civil court to recoup all costs (officers time, DA's time, etc).
I think this is a disturbing trend, and thats why I responded to your comment that appeared to be lamenting the loss of money while enforcing laws...
Lets say there is a web site that talks about some of the registry settigns that you can do on windows to help speed up net access. Now lets assume that this same web site says if you have a cable modem, you can make the same change by loading a different config file. If that site then goes on to explain how to get the config file from the cable compaine (by tftp or asking them) but then provides a sample and that sample jsut happens no to trun on the cap, then it is reasonable to expect that this action could be done with out knowing its illegal or violates the terms of service. If pages to descibe optimizations (without mentioning the cap) exist on the web, the cable company could have a very hard time in court.
this is the same government agency that was too busy trying to shut down bonsaikitten.com to pay attention to terrorist threats to destroy multiple buildings just seven months later...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Yah, and the real crying shame is, they all have close personal relationships with that inflated doll. But because it's the country, not aides, getting fucked, the Republican party just stays quiet. Besides, they got THEIR guy to write "The Death of Outrage", so no fair getting outraged at _them_. Hell, it's probably illegal or something. I'm probably using technical means to violate copyright protection, right here, using the book title without permission, so you probably won't hear from me any more. I expect the FBI by tomorrow noon. I probably stole more than a quarter million dollars of the American Taxpayer's money already, just in FBI salaries to hunt me down for this heinous crime. Better bend over and kiss my laptop goodbye.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Hahah criminals, you got what you deserve! Nobody in jail says they are guilty either. I hope they never get any of their stuff back and that the police wrecked their homes in the process. They should be blacklisted from any future ISP use as well. I hope the 1/4 figure is inflated and they have to pay back every penny of it. They can afford $45 a month for cable and a dozen computers they can afford some restitution payments coming out of their paychecks for the rest of their lives.
Right there is a warning sign. And I'm sure he paid for all his machines right? His parents should be processed too for their ignorant involvement in the crime. I hope your friend get's into more trouble while on probabtion and his life is ruined forever. Maybe his parents should actually have done some parenting instead of just buying computers to placate and sedate their evil little hacker spawn.
It's nice to see your friend not only sees nothing wrong with theft but also with snitching as he told on all the people he could remember giving him info on the subject in order to keep his own lilly white ass out of jail. I would make sure your own pc actions are on the up and up if you're gonna continue to associate with this person, as he is now property of the state, the FBI's bitch and will rat on anybody to reduce his sentence.
It does not appear to contemplate getting a service you have paid for in a manner which the cable company does not approve of (i.e. you've paid for all the channels, but you use your descrambler anyway). Of course, given the current propensity of lawyers and judges to stretch out the applicability of statutes, I would not be surprised to see the case made for it. (One good example is the commerce clause in the Constitution: "avoiding interstate commerce affects interstate commerce, so the Federal government can regulate said avoidance." And the multiple indirections that inevitably follow...)