Slashdot Mirror


Cable Firms Limit Users' Freedoms

Passacaglia writes "An article in the Washington Post reports that a coalition of companies, including Dell, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and even the BSA, have filed a report with the FCC complaining about how cable providers are placing restrictions on how subscribers use broadband access. This is in the wake of the recent FCC ruling that cable providers need not open their networks to competition from outside ISPs. The restrictions include limits on VPNs, servers, and many things that would make broadband really worth having." Meanwhile, TWC sent nastygrams to people it suspects are using unsecured wireless networks, skimming the info from the public database of wireless access points.

6 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. You can limit my freedom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    By not letting me get a FIRST POST!

  2. Re:Frothy Peepee by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    You f*cking Dildo!

  3. cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    cool

  4. Re:Looks crumpled... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Naw, he was just making an origami boulder out of it.
    www.origamiboulder.com

  5. Slashdot Karma HOWTO by pwpbot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    It is 10pm Do you know where your karma is Right Let us get startedIn order to get maximum karma from Slashdot posting you can follow a few simple guidelines The University you go to Regardless of where you actually study saying that youre at MIT automagically gains you 2 Slashdot like the glorified student notice board that it is has a special place in its heart for anything from MIT whether it be a teddy bear stuffed with a switch or some wankers wrapping a yellow banner with elvish text around the main dome Even if you didnt go to university qualify every comment with a My professor told me to bask in the warm fuzzy glow of 2 Insightful Linux The basis of the Slashdot Experience Claiming you run Linux also gets you 1 Interesting It doesnt really matter if youve never actually installed it or your Red Hat box still doesnt have PPP running after 2 years of reading FAQs The important bit is Youre part of the community You can bathe in the refelected glory of years of shoddy buggy code You are exempt from the Microsoft penalty see below as of course your Win 98 install is only used for playing games And reading Slashdot And using MS Word And Photoshop And Microsoft Slashbots and the editors hate Microsoft Period Use of a symbol in every iteration of their trademarks gets you a 4 Funny Even though it is far from original it still manages to raise a grin in those people reading Slashdot between episodes of Cowboy Bebop You will get a 1 Flamebait or Troll for any post even hinting that Microsoft products are any good useful intuitive user friendly You will also quickly be shot down with replies about how good GNOME and KDE are which will then in turn erupt into a flame war Freedom Privacy YRO The bread and butter of Slashdot It fits in sublimely with the whole Linux thing Youll get a 3 Informative for any post containing the Ben Franklin quote about sacrificing essential liberty It makes no difference that the quote is totally irrelevant in the modern world Hey youve got karma Miscredting the quote will not end up in a karma penalty as has been demonstrated countless times You will gain extra karma if you make reference to your experiences of being wiretapped by the NSA and throwing in a vague link to Echelon black helicopters or Tin Foil Hat Linux Include a link to the First Amendment for a 1 Interesting mod Give yourself a pat on the back if you manage to include some extra raging paranoia with no evidence to back it up Nice BSD If you use it dont mention it on Slashdot Most of the Linuxusing friendless wonders that inhabit Slashdot wouldnt know quality and stability if it strolled up and kicked them in the throat with a size 13 HiTec Magnum boot Any mention of how a Firewall running OpenBSD with pf is far superior to Linuxs pathetic offering will soon see you as 1 Troll Much like the post youre reading now Yearning for yesteryear Although most comments are written by first year wannabeCSguru students or links to goatsecx there is still the fallout dregs of the dot com boom lurking around slashdot You can get 5 Insightful for telling how you were so badly treated after the bubble burst Whining about the lack of jobs where you get paid to fire foam darts at colleagues is a good start Dont forget to mention how youve now been out of work for months It starts a Im about to graduate and theres nothing going fuckfest which can spill over into hundreds of comments Although all the staff who were any good simply got hired into another company it makes Good Karma Senseto hide the fact that your passing familiarity with Perl and C simply cant get you a job This is also a prime opportunity to show your egregious personality as Slashdot rewards arrogance and elitism DONT FORGET TO MOD ME DOWN

    -pwpbot

  6. Please learn how to present graphics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    JPEG is NEVER acceptable for sending text. Avoid BMP and uncompressed TIFF.

    Don't send color if color adds nothing. Removing the color information (as in switching it to 8-bit grey-scale) made the PNG file 200k smaller.

    If you're going to scan something like a letter, get the dithered color out of the background (usually done by adjusting gamma when you scan the image). I un-dithered the background on your PNG file, and reduced the size to 180k. So far I'm 1.3MB smaller than what you gave me.

    Finally, the size you posted is about twice the size it needs to be. Scale that by 50%. 100 dpi is quite readable from the web.