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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?
Some people may be wondering why the FBI was involved with this. The answer is simple. This constitutes fraud.
Are you sure it's not 47 U.S.C. 553?
It took some digging but I found the link to their TOS (PDF) click here
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.
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.
will the cops come and take all my phones away?
My brother was convicted of credit card fraud. He was using his Commodore 64 to dial into credit reporting companies and look up people's credit history and then using that information to order stuff over the phone.
The police came to our house and took his computer, floppy drive, modem, hundreds of floppy disks, TV he used as a monitor, phone that was plugged into the modem, phone cable that was connected between the modem and the wall, an MPS-801 dot matrix printer, an old Vic-20 computer that was in the closet, all the game cartridges for the Vic-20, an ancient 300 baud portable terminal that was in the closet, a cordless phones that was in the closet, a cordless phone that was in *my* bedroom, and more.
Out of all that, we got the TV set back. Nothing else.
The computer equipment was donated to the local zoo and the rest was sold at a police auction we were never notified of.
Don't assume that the police will only take items related to the case or that you'll ever see them again if they do.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Do you know how to uncap a modem? Do you know that it requires a computer to do it? I won't go in to the details as I work for a cable modem provider... but the modem must get a new configuration from somewhere that allows it to use more bandwidth. So yes they would need to seize the computers for evidence of the crime.
There is evidence on them, there has to be a server the spoofs the tftp ip of the cable company and serves the cable modem a fake docsis file. This can be done relatively easy with motorola surfboard modems.
http://www.BackYardParty.com
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
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 ?? ;-)