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Uncap Your Modem, Get Visit From the FBI
FlightSimGuy writes "The Blade wrote this article about how seven men were arrested by FBI agents with guns drawn and indicted by a local grand jury for allegedly "reconfiguring computer systems to access excessive amounts of bandwidth". Apparently the provider, Buckeye Cable Systems, wanted to make an example out of the men. According to the company's attourney, "Cyber crime is potentially very damaging to society. We are taking a firm position on that type of criminal activity. We hope these cases will have a deterrent value...""
Hands up!!! Hand over the bandwidth, punks. *snarl*
The theft of the service - called bandwidth - from Buckeye Express, an Internet provider operated by Buckeye CableSystem, ended June 26 when authorities served search warrants and seized computers and modems at residences in Toledo and surrounding suburbs.
Yeah I remember reading about this the first time, around june 27th.
Sounds to me like the FBI should go after the cable company for using up valuable resources for this kind of crap.
A cable company making an example out of customers, or fighting terrorism and REAL crime... Wonder which the FBI's resources would be better spent at...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
We hope these cases will have a deterrent value...
Sure will, it will deter people from becoming your customers.
-Kevin
Let this be a lesson to everybody. If you uncap your pipe to get speedier access to a naked woman, you end up paying for it in the long run.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
So tell me, how does the allegation that Mr. Runner stole coffee and creamer have ANYTHING to do with stealing bandwidth?
Can someone please explain to me how this is damaging to society? I guess maybe if they were downloading boyband mp3s... but other than that..
*note to self : Do not switch to Buckeyes*
Did they send them some kind of e-mail, letter of something? I know that uncapping is done by software in some case. Did they really do with unauthorized use of computer, cable, or telecommunications property or they only installed some sort of software on THEIR machine.
I hope that case get trown out, cause otherwise a LOT of peoples are in trouble. I mean we see those uncap software ad banner everywhere on the net.
And people are asking why the FBI didn't know about the pending terrorist attacks last year...
I don't see anything in the linked article about FBI agents pointing their guns at anybody.
Can we quit adding sensationalist crap to story summaries? Please?
Isn't this no different the pirating pay-per-view, or stealing cable all together via illegal descrambler.
Personally I think a good lawyer can make minced meat out of the prosecution in this case.
I don't mean the over zealous FBI.
I mean what "stealing" is a crime and is not. I like how everyone likes to only follow the laws they think they should. If you uncap your modem and get 2 Gigabits and I only get 28 Kilobits then you are STEALING from me. When you take extra bandwidth it comes from somewhere.
"Mr. Runner, 55, of 4561 Westbourne Ct., Sylvania, resigned as Waterville solicitor in March, 2001, after a covert police surveillance operation videotaped him stealing coffee, creamer, and paper from village supplies."
:)
From stealing coffee and creamer to stealing bandwidth. This is the downward spiral into crime that the RIAA has been warning us about
Also, from the department of Redundancy dept.:
" "There have been no indications that other high-speed Internet providers have taken such firm steps to prosecute for the theft of broadband theft," Mr. Shryock said. "
This arrest goes beyond any other "computer crime" arrest I have ever seen. If I lived in Toledo (and thank the gods I don't), I would make it my personal quest to do everything in my power to embarrass this company by protests or other methods for what they've done. To borrow a commonly used phrase from the clown running for Governor in Florida, this is shameful.
that the FBI is spending resources on important crimes like this while snipers wander the country and practically have to turn themselves in to be caught.
A lawyer for one of the defendants said, ""They paid for the service. There is a question if the additional software counts as a crime."
If this guy thinks bandwidth==software then it's already over.
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
What this really does is set a bad example for everyone. Just because something which is illegal and involves a computer, doesn't make it "cybercrime".
I wonder if these guys also send the FBI out every time they find out someone has free HBO.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
stealing bandwidth is much less than stealing from a store
And how is that?
Why could they even get additional bandwidth by changing their modem? If the provider wants to impose a limit, that should be done in their own hardware in their own end of the connection. If the system had been designed with this in mind, there wouldn't have been a case.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
This is not the first time one of the defendants has flaunted the law:
"after a covert police surveillance operation videotaped him stealing coffee, creamer, and paper from village supplies."
Whew. I sure am glad people like Mr. Muhammed and Mr. Malvo can kill people all across this country while our law enforcement people are doing stakeouts on the guy taking some French Roast.
you steal something you suffer the consequences. Why is this such an outrage? Why is the FBI involved? possibly because its their jurisdiction? Jsut because the FBI is now dealing heavily in anti-terrorism efforts doesn't mean they stop doing their other jobs.
Look at New York, FBI agents got retasked to anti-terrorism in droves and in the meantime the mafia was busy selling world trade center scrap.
Poor use of resources? no. They're trying to nip this in the bud before it gets out of control like cable descramblers did.
Just cause you can doesn't mean you should.
-
Why is the FBI moving in on this thing? I always thought them goons won't get away from their coffee makers unless there is a monetary damage of one million dollars involved in the crime?
Why is the article posting the FULL names including street adresses of the fugitives (and that is what they are at this point, i guess)? This would be highly illegal in most of the rest of the world (it for sure is here in .de)
What makes people think that they can get away with an uncapped modem? I mean, by uncapping you show a certain sense and understanding of network and IT technology principles. Don't they realize that the cable modem MAC address is unique like a fingerprint? Don't they know that those MAC adresses are registered to their names with the provider? Can't they imagine that a simple script running at the providers location will easily identify them and document their crime basically within a minute after uncapping?
+++ath0
The next step would be sending in the FBI when you run any software that the cable provider does not approve of.
Fight Spammers!
This is rediculous. FBI knocks down your door because your cable provider is too stupid to properly keep its customers from sucking up all the bandwidth?
...fucking morons
What happens when the system is DOCSIS compliant, and the modem you are using is YOURS. Then what? Arrest you because you made an aftermarket modification to your own property?
This is a fucking joke. The solution isn't to arrest the people that uncap their modems. The solution is to install a packet shaper to manage bandwidth usage from a location inaccessible to your customers. Once again, cable companies prove that they are not capable of being competent ISPs.
What I'd like to see is a federal law passed that requires cable companies to share their lines with local competitors, much like the phone companies. I think we'd see a lot less of this crap once we had cable modem providers that did not have a CATV service on the side, or any CATV mentality.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It depends really. The vast majority of "broadband" subscriptions merely mention high speed uploads and downloads, and if you're looking at the unlimited price plans, the fact that it's "unlimited". They conveniently omit tiny details, like bandwidth caps.
True, most consumers of broadband don't use it all, allowing service providers to oversell bandwidth, but most of the time, you don't get what you paid for.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Be kind. There are too many mean people out there already.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Okay, so who thought it would be a good idea to include their full names and addresses? That seems, at least to me, to be a huge invasion of privacy. It would be one thing if it was just a local paper with a readership consisting of people who mostly know who these people are, but this is on the internet. Putting their addresses on the web is just mean. I can only hope that the only thing that comes from it is fan mail and lawyer funding, but I cannot see that happening.
Please, if you're going to post an article like this, respect the people involved a little bit more than that. That was very despicable.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
The question isn't why did the FBI show up at their door, it's why did anyone show up at their door rather than the cable guy coming by to put a filter on their line to block the frequencies not used for television, assuming they had cable TV service.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Toledo lawyer George Runner was among those indicted by the grand jury...Mr. Runner, 55, of 4561 Westbourne Ct., Sylvania, resigned as Waterville solicitor in March, 2001, after a covert police surveillance operation videotaped him stealing coffee, creamer, and paper from village supplies."
This guy should be off the streets. He's an attorney, has stolen Coffee Mate, and now stolen bandwidth. That's a history of theft to me.
Three strikes! Yer out!
In the US, doesn't the government own and control access to the fiber lines?
No. You're thinking of a socialist country, like one would find in europe. Here in the US, the government doesn't own the infrastructure, rather it is owned by private corporations and regulated by the government. Then the corporations buy the regulators.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Here's a question: I just read my Cablevision AUP for the cable modem service I've bought from them since 1996. Now, I OWN my cable modems (I have four) that I bought from the Wiz to replace the LanCity (after that, Terayon) modems I rented from Cablevision.
Nowhere in this agreement does it say " you may not modify your hardware to squeeze more bandwidth out of us." The ads constantly promise "up to 100 times a 56k modem" but nowhere in the agreement does it prevent "optimization of your own gear to increase throughput efficiency" or any such language.
In fact, I don't see anything about uncapping or hardware modification at all.
There ARE stringent rules about reselling the service, running any kind of server, and warnings that routers and home LANs are NOT supported, but nothing saying "altering your own hardware to increase bandwith" is proscribed.
There are rules about "tampering wih the Optimum Online Service" but it would be a far stretch to say that includes optimizing your own equipment.
And even if this was the interpretation, where is the statement that this violates anything but an AUP, which would be at most a civil infraction.
How does this become a Federal crime?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Bandwith is not "air" like so many people believe. It takes work and money to build and maintain the infrastructure that allows communication to take place.
Just because telcos and ISPs are "faceless corporations" doesn't mean nobody is getting screwed when theft takes place.
No sig
Exactly. There was no need for the cloak and dagger takedown here. The ISP simply should have shut down their account and called them up saying, "Hey, you're stealing service and we're suspending the account, you still owe us for this month's service as well. Pay up."
I wholeheartedly disagree with the whole "making an example" stance that courts (and in this case a company) do. It's a perversion of justice. Under the same circumstances, one guy gets a sentence twice as harsh as the next guy, just because some cowboy judge "wants to set an example"?? The law should see everyone as equal and handle every case based on the law, not public perception.
"Yeah kid, we know you only jaywalked, but there's a lot of scofflaws like you out there, and dammit, we're gonna make an example outta you! 20 YEARS!"
I tend to question this attorneys sanity and/or technical knowledge. Uncapping is not just a "additional software". It is additional software, probably hex-editing the original CM config file (which it downloads from a fixed IP during bootup, usually hosted by the provider), reonfiguring your machine to look like the ISPs download server, rebooting and tricking the modem into thinking your reconfigured box is the config file location and doing lots of unusual shit along the way.
This is certainly not in the definition of just "additional software". If that was the case he might be right, and get them out with some phony storys about "accidentally" installing this or something... But a real uncap is not a trivial task and it won't happen accidentally.
+++ath0
Mike Yunker, a Sylvania police detective, said he planned to file delinquency charges today in Lucas County Juvenile Court against 15 and 16-year-old boys for the altering of modems in their Sylvania homes."
Troll count should be lighter today...
Well, every packet you "steal" has to go through their servers. So it's like stealing from a store those behind-the-counter items that the clerk is handing you.
"Hey fbi agent! This guy comes everyday, asks for cigarettes, and leaves without paying! He robbed me 150 times like that!"
Please tell me that there is more to this case, please tell me that the FBI didn't arrest these guys for stealing bandiwdth.
Many questions are unaddressed in the article which would help out. For example, had the cable company given prior notice to these guys, tell them to cut it out? Did the cable company have ANY way of controlling bandwidth on their end? Were these guys downloading information about how to build a bomb? Were they reselling the bandwidth?
I can only see a case if the cable company had given prior notice & had no way to shut off the bandiwdth, or if these guys were reselling it. Of course, the cable company can always shut off service, so what's the big-whoop? If they were actually reselling it, then yeah, arrest 'em. Otherwise, let them go after them in civil court, NOT criminal court.
Assume they weren't reselling the service. Then, the fact that this is a criminal case is a strong argument that there is not equal justice; this business clearly received special treatment if charges were filed in a case so minor as this.
The FBI is a field-oriented organization in which FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ) in Washington, D.C., provides program direction and support services to 56 field offices, approximately 400 satellite offices known as resident agencies, four specialized field installations, and more than 40 foreign liaison posts. The foreign liaison offices, each of which is headed by a Legal Attache or Legal Liaison Officer, work abroad with American and local authorities on criminal matters within FBI jurisdiction.
The FBI has approximately 11,400 Special Agents and over 16,400 other employees who perform professional, administrative, technical, clerical, craft, trade, or maintenance operations. About 9,800 employees are assigned to FBIHQ; nearly 18,000 are assigned to field installations.
So a handfull of agents here is no big deal. Stealing is stealing, bandwidth is not exempt.
Get a free ipod.
Would you mind explaining how stealing bandwidth isn't as bad as stealing from a store? If enough people "stole" bandwidth it could have wider consuqences that stealing from a store. Think about it, if thousands of computers on DSL/cable connections all maxed out their connections then alot of computers would be overloaded, and it would almost be like a DoS attack. I'm not saying it is going to happen, it would be much harder to accomplish than a DoS attack, but it *could* happen.
That brings up an interesting parallel.
You see, "stealing cable," as the cable companies don't want you to know, means climbing their pole, entering their lock box, opening the neighborhood green base, and turning on your signal. Descramblers themselves are not illegal, as the 1934 Communications Act states that any citizen has the right to receive any broadcast signal. (The 1994 Communications Act modifies this to exclude the 800 MHz range to make analong cellular phone eavesdropping a punishable offense.) So long as you have not trespassed on the cable company's property, there is nothing illegal about "stealing cable."
So, if you own your modem and you modify its software to be uncapped, can they really go after you for "unauthorized access to a computer system" and that sort of crime? Obviously, they can ban you from their network, which is exactly what AT&T Broadband does (and makes me think twice about uncapping or modifying the cap limit), but can they seriously bring charges against you?
How might this be different than obtaining a signal via a decoder? After all, they're supplying the signal already.
Jory
It is serious when someone steals bandwidth from an ISP, thus hurting other customers. However, it is nothing the FBI should be involved in; its a matter for the state authorities.
Also, you have to remember, this is not like stealing in the conventional sense. In this case, the defendants modified their own computer software to uncap bandwidth. It seems to me that you should be able to alter you're own property in any way you want to. If the ISP doesn't like that, they should include clauses in the contract which say they can terminate you're account for doing so, and can fine you extra for the extra bandwidth you used.
However, I can see how this can be contrieved as stealing; you're modifying your own computer to be used as a tool to steal bandwidth from an ISP (and from other customers) which you haven't paid for and don't have a right to by the agreement with you're ISP. You may have the right to alter your computer in any way you want, but that doesn't mean you have the right to use those modifications for any means you want; i.e., I can add Nitroboosters to my Boxter, but that doesn't mean I can cruise down the highway at 250mph.
I'm fine with these people being prosecuted. What they did is, in fact, theft; not only from their ISP, but also from other customers. Other customers experience obscene slowdowns to dialup speed because a few selfish customers want to download at 10MB/s. But the FBI should not be involved, and certainly these crimes don't call for armed raids. The FBI should be focusing on serious criminals, like terrorists, serial killers, serial rapists, organized child-molesters, organized crime, and large-scale frauds (refer to Enron, Global Crossings).
This brings up an interesting note on ISPs. Why do broadband companies cap bandwidth at all? Why not just divide up the available bandwidth evenly among all the requesting users. Lets say that there's a 100 users and that the ISP can offer 100MB/s of bandwidth total. If they all request bandwidth at the same time, they should each get 1MB/s of bandwidth. If, later on, only 50 of them are requesting bandwidth, each should get 2MB/s of bandwidth. If only one is requesting bandwidth, (s)he should get 100MB/s of bandwidth. They could also integrate prioritized bandwidth, where you get preference in accordance to how much extra you pay; i.e., if you pay 2x the average, you get 2x the bandwidth at any given moment. Another useful thing to do would be to minimize net wait-times. If person A is downloading a file of 1MB and person B is downloading a file of 2MB, then it makes sense to let person A do his download first, then let person B do his download. This way, the net wait time is 2(1MB / 100MB/s) + 2MB / 100MB/s = 0.04s; instead of 2(2MB / 100MB/s) + 1MB / 100MB/s = 0.05s.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
This wasn't a hardware modification or anything. According to the article they installed "additional software" to speed up their connections.
What strikes me as odd is that George Runner, the lawyer that got busted, had needed to resign from his job as assistant prosecutor after being caught on video stealing coffee and creamer. He didn't get charged but it cost him his job. Then the police chief is forced to resign because he set up the video surveillence without authorization. This really comes across as being the result of some kind of vendetta. Then six other guys get dragged into it, including a 15 and a 16 year old kid, possibly so it doesn't look like they are just targeting the lawyer.
Who knows what's really going on, but it really smells fishy to me.
where does the "guns drawn" bit come in? I don't see anything about guns in that article. The FBI seems to have been there, yes, but it only says:
... How can you steal a theft? O_O
"Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems after authorities received information that someone in the residences had reconfigured computer systems to access excessive amounts of bandwidth."
Still, it does seem a bit excessive to involve the FBI over an incident like this.
My favorite quote (emphasis added):
"There have been no indications that other high-speed Internet providers have taken such firm steps to prosecute for the theft of broadband theft," Mr. Shryock said.
Wha . . ? Oh, so actually what they stole was the theft of broadband theft?
So does this mean I can press charges against QWest since I pay for a 256kbps connection and I have never topped 100kbps cumulative of all my downloads and never 70 on a single download?
I do security
I wrote a really long and, I thought, really good post in responce to this, but Opera just crashed. I guess 6.1 doesnt fix everything, eh?
Just trust me, it was good. I'm going to go shoot myself in the head now. Fucking Segfaults..
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I'm glad that I live in a country were someone wouldn't be charged with a felony if he raped me, but that he will be shipped off to the Pen if he dares to steal bandwidth from the cable company.
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.
Ok, so what do cable companies expect when their only bandwidth capping is done outside of their operation center? You'd think if this were a problem they would engineer a way for them to easily cap bandwidth per account on the upstream level. Instead, we'll just send law enforcement out as a way of capping bandwidth (through fear).
"Mr. Runner, 55, of 4561 Westbourne Ct., Sylvania, resigned as Waterville solicitor in March, 2001, after a covert police surveillance operation videotaped him stealing coffee, creamer, and paper from village supplies."
So, they also spent gawd knows how many hours tailing this guy so they could watch him steal office supplies.
Great. I've got a few pens & a stapler at home that I stole from work. I guess I have to worry about being tailed by the FBI now too.
Big deal! You do the crime, you do the time.
It's like those posts we always read whenever copyright infringement comes up: "You're stealing. Saying, 'Can I borrow that CD for a sec?', popping it into your CD drive, ripping a track, and giving it back to your friend is NO DIFFERENT from breaking into my house and stealing my computer. If one gets you in jail, so should the other."
Likewise: What these people did, stealing bandwidth, is NO DIFFERENT from what it would be if, instead of just modifying some hardware in the privacy of their own homes, they BROKE INTO Fort Knox, weilding NUCLEAR WEAPONS LACED WITH BIOCHEMICAL WARFARE and stole BULLION BANDWIDTHS!!!
It's no different, and I for one am GLAD, do you hear? glad with all my heart to see these CRIMINALS finally come to justice.
An EULA by a private organization is NO DIFFERENT from a constitutionally sound law passed by a majority of our elected senate and subject to the scrutiny, [1] of an impartial office whose members are appointed by a democratically elected leader (and subject to approval by our democratically elected senate.)
I don't know about you, but I'll be GLAD when my tax dollars go toward knocking my door down for modding my xbox (which will be specifically illegalificated by the EULA). I'll be laughing all the way to the electric chair! And then have my sentence compounded (two consecutive electrocutions?) for sitting in the electric chair in a non-authorized way!
How beautiful the world will be when EULA's reign supreme!
~Robert.
[1] against the standard of a sacred document detailing our most cherished rights, and being the only thing separating us from a fascist regime appointed by the majority -- Hitler was elected, don't-ya-know.
i have OptOnline; a couple of weeks ago i was downloading the mozilla source, at a sustained 789K/sec - 6.384Mbits. now, whatis says the top speed of a docsis modem is 27Mbit, so it's not *impossible*, but it's sort of...inconceivable? granted, i own the modem, and i've never actually reg'd it with OptOnline, so i don't know if it didn't have a config file loaded or what, but it looks like it's pretty much uncapped already.
and despite what they say about running servers and the like, they don't seem to enforce things very much - i'm summarily banned from a load of IRC nets for "repeated abuse (sorry innocents)", and they really don't seem to care that i have a router, four computers, and a hacked webserver (listening on port 3000, gets around the incoming-blcok on 80). all in all, a good deal for $40 a month.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Captain Sheth Fourbranes of the Toledo, Ohio criminal investigations division said a search of Kremnall's glove box yielded a cache of thirty three condiment packets from more than a dozen fast food restaurants scattered across six northern Ohio counties. "Ketchup, mustard, relish -- she had it all," Fourbranes, speaking at an afternoon press conference, said. "We estimate a street value on this stuff of nearly six bits."
The attorney general's office, calling this a "major victory for law-abiding citizens everywhere", said if convicted the accused could face up to forty two years in prison. Mrs. Kremnall, who is scheduled to be arraigned later this week, was unavailable for comment, but a friend of a friend is said to have described her as being "two french fries short of a Happy Meal".
From the terms of service:
The Subscriber must not attach any device that permits access to services in violation of the Subscription Agreement. In addition, federal and state laws prohibit the possession, use, or attempted use of any equipment to receive any Buckeye services except as expressly provided by the Subscription Agreement.
The subscription agreement
17. Buckeye has no responsibility for, and is not liable for, the speed, content, or accuracy of any transmissions on the system.
And neither this, nor the Acceptible Use Policy state anything about what download speeds you're allowed.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
I recall from a long time ago, a case where phone companies were sued because if you wanted a 2nd phone, you had to go through them and pay extra. They wouldn't allow you to goto your local department store and buy a splitter for a buck and install it yourself. They eventually lost, and because of that, now you can have as many phones in your house as your want. Once the wire comes into your house, what you do with it is your business.
Similarly, for a long time cable companies would not let you split their signal and have multiple TVs without paying them to do it. Now that has become a major selling point for them against digital satelites. Today when your cable company comes out for whatever reason, they'll happily split your signal for free, replace your low quality splitters with their high quality ones, and leave all your TVs connected no questions asked.
I think this situation SHOULD fall under the same rule. You pay for the cable to come into your house, If you own your cable modem, you should be able to do anything you want to it. If they REALLY want to cap you, they'll have to do it on their end, because you cannot tell me what I can and cannot do with my property. If your renting the modem, then it's a different situation.
However, there was absolutly no reason for a gun drawn storm on these individual's homes. I do tons of illegal things via my cable modem, like downloading mp3z and violating the DMCA on a daily basis. I guess the only way to ensure my safety is to get rid of my cable modem and give my money to a small, privatly owned ISP.
by Kris Olsen
Bored during my summer, I thought I would take this project on. I began my research on June 26, before 2600 published the article on uncapping. Through various methods (mainly IRC), I talked to several people and finally figured out how to uncap my modem. Well, it wasn't as easy as it seems.
I went to a lot of trouble that in the end left me without cable and nearly in jail.
My ISP, like many, uses a system called QoS, or Quality of Service. This means a few things.
1) You can't connect without a config that the ISP doesn't already have (i.e., you can't create a config file with a 10mbit/10mbit line if the cable company only offers 400/200 800/400 and 1.5/512). This means in order to uncap, you can only uncap to a better service plan (i.e., going from 400/200 to 1.5/512).
2) In order to uncap to a better service plan you must get the config for that service plan, as making one with those caps often will not work. Take note, this config file has a different name than the one sent to your modem, and since the TFTP protocol doesn't allow directory listing, you must either have once used the faster service and seen the config file, or you have to know someone who has it who can help you out. Should you manage to get this config file, your problems are still not over.
3) The QoS checks your modem's MAC address every 10-15 minutes (depending on the size of your node) to make sure that the parameters set in your modem are the ones that you pay for. Note: the MAC cannot be changed because you have to register your MAC with the ISP, s they inevitably know who you are. To get around the QoS resetting your modem, one may think "Well hay, let's just change the SNMP ports so they can't send the reboot command to me!" Hah! That pisses them off like nothing else, and yes, they can track that. All it takes is about a day to find your port. The default SNMP ports are 161 and 162. I changed minme to 9999999941 and 9999999942. In two days they were once again resetting via SNMP.
4) So you figure, "Well, that means I have one or two days of uncapped modem, right?" Wrong. There is another way they can reset you that you can do nothing about. In order for your modem to stay connected to the server it must "ping" the server and get responses back. I say "ping" in quotations since it is not your normal 52 byte packet ping. It is a special CMTS type ping. What the ISP can do, should they notice that you are indeed using a faster config, is "suspend" the "pings," meaning that they are lost, and none come back to the modem. This will force an "HFC: Async Error Range Failed" error on your modem's long, which will be followed by "HFC: Shutting Upstream Down," and then "BOOTING: (firmware version)."
So now, this doesn't seem that bad. You may be thinking, "Why is this guy even writing this stuff - if there is a will there is a way." That is true, but my purpose is to show you that if your ISP does use QoS (examples of some that do are: Blueyonder, ATTBI, Cableone, Charter, Comcast, and NTL) then if you ever attempt ot uncap, they will notice and they will call you.
I received my first call the morning after I requested tech support to come out and fix the signal strength of my line (it was way out of spec and kept resetting my modem). Well, as protocol they watch your line to see what they can diagnose before the tech arrived at your house. Well that morning (the 10th of July), I uncapped and within ten minutes I had a call from the headquarters of my ISP, some 600 miles away. This was a "tap on the wrist" type conversation. They said basically, we see that you are uncapping, and that violates our Terms of Service agreement. Don't do it again. So I didn't for a while.
A couple of weeks went by and I used Ethereal, I common network "sniffer", to determine whether or not my ISP was watching my MAC address. Later I learned they were on the entire time and when they saw me "Sniffing" for info, they simply hid themselves behind the IP address 255.255.255.254. Not knowing that information, I decided it was safe to uncap again. And so I did and continued to be reset with HFC errors. I tried various methods to get around it, installed hacked firmware, sent various SNMP commands, even attempted to fake a CMTP server so that the CM would send the "pings" to a computer on my LAN, all to no avail. So when my modem would go back to normal, I would send it a new config, and the process went on and on like that for two weeks or so.
I left early on a Friday morning for a little weekend getaway. While I was out of town, I didn't even think about the status of my cable. No, I did not leave it uncapped when I left the house, but the damage had already been done. My ISP had all the evidence they needed to shut my cable off, and press misdemeaner charges, mainly based on cyber theft.
I returned to find a message on my answering machine from an "Internet Engineer" at the ISP's headquarters. He was not very pleased. The message was over 15 minutes long and contained a great deal of threats and comments obviously designed to scare an uncapped. It worked. I was terrified. After hearing the message, I went out to check the mail. In there was an envelope from my ISP containing a "Declaration of Termination of Service." In this letter were several items, including possible criminal charges to be pressed, two pages dealing every time I uncapped from July 10 to the present, and a long, long list of how I violated the Terms of Service with my ISP. Sure enough, when I went to contact the Internet Engineer by email, (the only contact information that was listed), my Internet service did not work. As a routing check, I looked at my modem's long file only to find this disturbing messsage: 7-Information D509.0 Retreived TFTP Config TRMNT.cm SUCCESS.
I twas clear. My service had been terminated. But my problems were not over yet.
The following day (August 5) I received another call from him, telling me that the ISP wanted to press charges. As soon as I was off the phone I immediately called my lawyer and told him the entire situation. My lawyer spent the rest of the day on the phone with my ISP and came to an agreement that for the two months that I uncapped, I would have to pay for the better service.
In the end, uncapping got me these final results:
Pros:
Cons:
The choice is up to you. This was just my experience.
----
Reprinted from 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, Volume 19, Number 3, Fall 2002 without permission. Even though Olsen's account obviously has some glaring mistakes (52-byte ping? Since when is the payload fixed? He probably means an ICMP ping.), I believe it provides an interesting account into what can happen if you're uncapped. Maybe not as drastic as the visit from the FBI in this Slashdot article, but certainly uncapping is still not worth it. Especially when your cable provider is a monopoly!
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
OK, we can say that cable ISP's should have better security that stops uncapped modems working, and I agree that uncapping your modem is bad, worse then stealing cable TV. I pay my monthly fee, and make full use of my bandwidth.
I also understand that my cable ISP has xMBPS going into them, and if too many people use the system, I suffer.
If I wanted to double my bandwith, I'd pay the extra $15. The ISP can sue part of this to pay for more bandwidth to the cable network, and no-one loses. I'm happy to share my bandwidth to the rest of my house, and if a neighbour buys me an 802.11b access point, they can use it too.
I wouldnt dream of using bandwidth I didnt pay for. Excusing it as "modifying your own hardware" is the equivelent of "modifying your own jumper to steal goods from a store". This isnt copyright infringment. Thsi isnt stealing cable tv (with a decent box that doesnt effect anyone else) The extra bandwidth you use does have a marginal cost.
Having said that, I think that FBI agents is extreme. Sure arrest them, put them in the cells for a few days, then give them 100 hours community service, and stop them using cable modems for a year. That's an appropiate sentence for a first offence, even that's probably extreme.
I have Roadrunner Highspeed Cable Online here in Wisconsin. Mine is uncapped. A lot of my friends have roadrunner and only get about a 10th of the speed i do. I havn't done anything though, the cable guy really didn't know what he was doing, he used the wrong kind of cable, just left it sitting on the ground outside, untrenched. So i'm willing to bet that the cable guy configured it wrong. It seems that i'm getting as much bandwidth as my mobo can handle. My throughput is about double that of a T1, and about triple late at night, my download speeds, if i dont have anything but kazaalite or the opera running, top out at about 400Kb/s. I love it and am not goign to call TW, but would i have any sort of way to defend myself if the feebs came a knocking one day?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If we let cable companies use the FBI to push their customers around then the terrorists have already won!
Don't you miss the good ol' days when it was the FCC's modem bandwidth regulations rather than the FBI's guns that controlled how fast we browsed?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I pay extra for the fastest connection I can get. If you illegally uncap your modem you are stealing pipe that I paid for. Hell I will go so far as to turn in anyone I find doing this also, I pay for mine you pay for yours. Face it people bandwidth is a limited resource and it very expensive.
Got Code?
You are not just receiving a broadcast signal you are actually engaged in a two way communication with them. But if you are paying for the service, the most it could ever be is an AUP or TOS violation. Not illegal.
I thought this type of fraud/theft of cable service fell under the jurisdiction of the Secret Service?
Since 1984, our investigative responsibilities have expanded to include crimes that involve financial institution fraud, computer and telecommunications fraud, false identification documents, access device fraud, advance fee fraud, electronic funds transfers, and money laundering
Emphasis is mine. Is this going to happen more in the future, I wonder, with agencies hopping jurisdiction lines whenever they want to? Perhaps this was routed to the FBI because attention was wanted drawn to this. I can't recall ever hearing about the Secret Service in the news except in regards to the President.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
Is it just me, or are companies really trying to screw their customers over in any possible way? One would expect a bit of respect from corporations for their customers, be it quality of service and goods, or just ethical and friendly ('human') behavior...
It seems Internet, media, music and entertainment companies are working on a system of income without uhm... well, customers. Because that's where they're headed.
And if it's that easy to uncap their modem, well, doesn't that just as much point to a flaw in their own products and services, as in the moral of their customers... Ofcourse people want to get the maximum out of the money they spend. With all the problems my ISPs have had over the last years (network outage, (too) slow connectivity, system crashes, dns misconfiguration, sudden extra restrictions on bw/mailsize/mailboxsize, administrative fuck-ups,...), I'm not surprised some customers do these kind of things.
It's wrong, ofcourse. But is it more wrong than not getting what you paid for?
We need stronger protection of customer rights. Corporations become too big, ubiquitous and have too much influence by lobbying or the sheer power of their legal departements. In theory, everybody's equal in the eyes of the law; in reality, I'd like to see a small individual with a small-town lawyer fight off the legal team of a big corporation. That is, if that person can even afford a lawyer and the legal costs for a case that might last forever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just because your spending forty dollars a month on an internet connection doesn't entitle you to all the speed you wish. It's silly to say that just because tyou are paying twice what you did for dial up access you should be able to connect like the internet was a local network.
If we Slashdot their company webservers will they send FBI agents after us too? Damn it's evil of us using up bandwidth. We shouldn't take deep breaths either.. we might be depriving others in our neighborhood of oxygen. Or would the neighborhood committee have to force us to sign an EULA when we moved in to criminzlize that?
Monopoly companies think they can force anything from their customers but how long until their customers just cut the monopoly out of the loop. Electric companies screw over customers.. alternative power is gaining in popularity. Phone companies screw over customers.. VoIP is on the rise. Cable companies screw over their customers.. kids download movies off the Internet. Internet screw customers.. Mesh computing is on the rise. It takes time but these companies are choking themselves.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Why do broadband companies cap bandwidth at all?
The short answer is because bandwidth costs money. A T1 line costs $1000 per month, a T3 several thousand. When I sign up for a T1 line, how come I don't get T3 level bandwidth? Because the infrastructure for the latter is more costly.
I can go to Circuit City or any of several other computer stores and buy a cable modem. If I don't happen to buy one that is as crippled as the one the local cable company provides, just what crime have I commited? These modems are apparently legal, as they are sold and advertised very openly (and in fact are much more available than DSL modems). It doesn't seem likely that Linksys, Actiontec and the rest will all strive to make the slowest cable modem. How do you keep gun ho yahoos who weren't unstable enough to get into the ATF from breaking down your door if you use a retail purchased cable modem?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yawn . . . .
/. duplicate as well.
This is not only an ancient story, but a
Can we at least make an attempt to keep the "news" timely???
The problem comes when everyone does it, Granted, if one person steals "extra" bandwith no one notices, but if it becomes known how to do, and known that the "faceless" isp's can't/won't do anything about it, then someone will post it on /. and everyone will do it. Now where are we? suddenly 1/4 of the people using the service are getting a lot more bandwidth than they should, and... I think you can follow it from there.
I get the feeling that the Supreme Court is waiting for the right case to come along to put Congress in their place on that one.
Where does all the 'saved' bandwidth go ? What happens to the bandwidth I don't fully use ? does it just lay about in the cable companies phat pipes and rot ? Once again Law Enforcement allows itself to be used like a latex condom to enforce the edicts of a large corporation in a situation they fail to even begin to understand. Not that stealing is right mind you...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I live in Toledo. I have a close family member that works in a fairly high-up government position. Also, one of my friends was one of the kids caught in the sweep. As such, I'd like to correct a few misconceptions.
1. There was no 'gun drawn storm', or whatever. In fact, the FBI was not involved in the actual arrests. They simply worked with Buckeye cable to gather evidence, etc.
2. The FBI became involved because 'theft of services', 'wire fraud', etc., are federal crimes. While I believe Buckeye was overzealous (they could've just warned the users), this clearly wasn't a matter for civil courts.
3. Everyone seems to want to jump down the ISP's throat here, but everyone seems to forget that bandwidth isn't magically created from air. If you're uncapping bandwidth, the extra speed comes from somewhere (e.g., your neighbors). Sometimes corporations aren't doing things just to be evil.
4. This happened a few months ago, and was posted here
[slashdot.org].
5. George Runner is funny =) Coffee mate, heh.
there is nothing illegal about "stealing cable."
That is a potentially dangerous piece of misinformation. You may believe what you like about the Communications Act, but the courts do not agree with you.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
This is a Toshiba PCX2200 Cable Modem, most powerful cable modem in the whole world. I hit you hard enough with this modem and it would blow your head clean off.
... do you feel lucky?
You gotta ask yourself
Well, do you punk?
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I don't disagree entirely. There is "theft" of a commodity involved. A better comparison might be the installation of low-flow shower heads in a large apartment building. The landlord is assuming that noone will tamper with them so people on the upper floors will have as much pressure as those on lower floors. But of course, anyone who has the know-how is going to remove it. What apartment complex should have done is actually designed the plumbing system properly, instead of trying to fix it later.
The cable companies jumped at the chance to offer broadband to consumers, but they didn't foresee the need for bandwidth capping when they designed the system. So when users began to over-tax the company's bandwidth, they decided to implement capping via firmware in the modems. Modems that may or may not belong to them. Suddenly, instead of the brisk refreshing shower you're used to, you're getting a limp trickle.
Maybe it's unfair to the rest of the users on the network. But for me, I was paying, let's say $40/mo for great uncapped bandwidth, and I couldn't be happier. Then one day, the great bandwidth goes away, but the price stays the same. If anything the price goes up. What's fair about that? My cable provider, which has a monopoly in my area, changed the software on the peice of hardware I wholly own, which changed the quality of my service for the worse, and then refuse to lower their price.
Of course the real situation here is the great over-reaction. Why couldn't they simply terminate their service? There are currently thousands of people literally stealing cable, and cable companies offer solutions like "Legalize your stolen cable, no questions asked!". How can they choose to enforce one law while turning a blind eye to another?
Tin soldiers and Fed's are comin'
No longer can they download
Their modems have stopped a hummin'
Dead cable in O-hi-o
Sigs are bad for your health.
Motherfucker. What the fuck? Jesus Christ. Shit. I now have no respect for law enforcement, not that I ever had very much. Holy crap. What a freaking bunch of morons. Motherfucker. Shit.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
I remember Time Warner pulling this crap on one of their customers, and they lost, guy even got to keep the modded modem.
Lawyer got him off, based on Time Warner's statements of up to 50x faster and some others like it in their contracts/advertisements. The stance was that he was only obtaining levels they had advertised.
I have zero sympathy for any ISP that sells accounts and fails to maintain its infrastructure to support them. Instead they just reduce the bandwidth to all customers. I find that significantly more harmful then a couple of people allegedly stealing (read: reclaiming orginally advertised) bandwidth.
And to add insult to injury the unnecessarily involved law enforcement to "make an example". No it's just another example how they dont' want to use their own resources to solve the problem. Like hiring some to monitor and suspend/ban accounts that are abusing TOS.
FBI 'raids' have already occured on people uncapping their hardware to take up more bandwidth. And all the same arguments were provided last time this was on slashdot.
Lets sum them up.
1) This is lame, its not like its a real crime!
Answer : This is a real crime. Uncapping your modem increases your use of the ISP's equipment. Not only does this steal from the ISP, it is also detrimental to the other users of the service.
2) Why is the FBI involved, thats Overkill?
Answer: The FBI are involved because the only two agencies with jursdiction in america over Network Crimes which may pass in and out of normal police lines are the Secret Service and the FBI. Who do you prefer to have knocking on your door?
3) I bought this modem, its my property and I am alowed to change the settings on it as I wish.
Answer: Okay, lets make an analogy. I own some magnetic swipe plastic cards. Using a card programer I also own, I program these cards to match other peoples credit cards. I then go out and buy stuff. I've only used my property to do that, so its not illegal right?
4) They can solve this problem at the router side anyway! They dont have to mess around the users.
This is just flat wrong. Any distributed network, especialy wan systems that share contention, can be damaged by individual network stations. There is no way to get around this. You can only stop them off at the network segments you directly control, but by then the proformance of any network segments prior to that may have been degraded. A badly configured modem/home router sending oddly configured packets in an atempt to 'fix' their access can do bad things to a network.
What the fuck is going on in that little shitburg town? This is how I read the article.
George Runner was a lawyer working as a soliciter for the Village of Waterville. The village police chief, Lance Martin, set up a video camera to catch George Runner "pilfering" coffee and creamer. (I'm assuming this means that Mr. Runner drank out of the community pot without putting a nickle in the jar, or making a new pot when he drained the old one, or some bullshit like that.)
As a result of the coffee pilfering incident, Mr. Runner lost his job, but after the community outcry against the police chief wasting his time trying to videotape somebody stealing a cup of coffee from the office coffee pot, Police Chief Martin also lost his job.
This in June of this year, the local cable company, which like most cable companies is probably a quasi village-owned monopoly run for the purpose of lining council members pockets with kickbacks, decided to prosecute George Runner for theft of service. The local police department and city council were as pleased as punch to discover they could get the FBI to bring federal charges against Mr. Runner also, and they pursued this option vigorously enough to get the FBI to actually do something about it despite the fact that the FBI has to be a little overworked right now...
So now, the guys in the police department and the city council have finally managed to get George Runner to regret not brewing a new pot of coffee when he drained it.
At least, that's how I'm reading the article. Does anyone from the little Village of Waterville know something different?
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
So if **my** modem accidentally starts sucking more bandwidth than a person that is leasing, are they going to come beat my door down too?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
uncapping your modem is like breaking the speed limit!
The speed limit is a government/state imposed limit. Thus, breaking the limit is a criminal offence and the state can put you in jail.
Uncapping a modem would be closer to breech of contract between you and the service provider, and should IMHO be grounds for a civil lawsuit raised by the service provider.
I have no problem with people being dragged to court by ISPs if they uncap their modems and thereby violate the service agreement. I have a problem with FBI throwing people in jail for the same.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Look, as much as I smile at stories of the little guy sticking it to the man, the fact is that these guys were helping themselves to a commercial resource for which they had not paid.
Here's a comparative example: I'm an amateur blacksmith. Not a really good one, but passable. I'm good enough that I've contenplated replacing the 100lb propane tank in my garage with a direct natural gas line from the city. The trouble is, a standard residential gas feed runs at about 3-5psi, while I might need somewhere upwards of 30psi to run my forge at a serious working temperature. Getting the city to provide this high-pressure "commercial grade" service to my house is no easy task. It's not part of their regular business service model, and they're resistant to making such a sale.
Now here's the deal: The high pressure gas line is in front of my house, just sitting there waiting to be tapped. The pressure regulator is on my property. In fact, the pressure regulator is mine. If I were so inclined, I could go out to the street, shut off the line at the main, and upgrade the pressure/flow regulator at my house. In theory, the city's public utility people would never be the wiser -- except that they'd start billing me for, say, and order of magnitude more gas than could theoretically be pushed thru the residential gas tap. Surely within a few billing cycles I would get a visit from the utility people, if not the police. I would be fined for making gas line changes w/o a permit, and probably have to pay the difference between residential/heating gas rates (cheap) and commercial (expensive) rates for the time I'd operated the modified service. I would expect no less from our well-paid and attentive city employees.
So why would anyone expect much different from another utility, even if the nature of the product is different? What if I helped myself to an extra phone line, because the wire was there and the local connection box happened to have extra lines? (I did that when I was a kid, by plugging in an extra card to the old Ma Bell phone control box in my folks' basement). I think the involvement of the FBI is overkill, and the example-making is wholly inappropriate/unprofessional behavior on the part of the ISP, but there's not much question that what these folks are doing is wrong and probably definable as theft of service.
Now there's one big caveat to this: I'm assuming that the rate/service limits are spelled out in these people's service contracts with the ISP. If not, then all bets are off, particularly if the modem/routers are the property of the subscriber. If all the ISP has to offer is an expectation of usage and not a bandwith limit in a contractual agreement, then the ISP's protest won't stand up in a stiff breeze, much less in court.
Jon
Bush & Ashcroft: Saving America, once secret trial at a time.
I think not...(*poof*)
No matter how you slice it these bozo's broke their user agreement, illegally modified regulated communications hardware, stole service, and attempted to defraud the other users on the system. Play fair, or don't play.
Under no circumstances is it ever ILLEGAL to break an agreement. If you decide one day to stop paying your credit card, do you think the bank is going to sequester a grand jury to indict you for... breaking you agreement to pay your minimum monthly balance?
What if you decide one day to stop paying the lease payments for your apartment? Will you go to jail then? Or your car?
This is fundamentally the difference between civil cases and criminal cases. We have civil courts in place to deal with matters of contract dispute.
Think about it. Contracts are ALWAYS ambiguous. These guys can argue so many ways around whatever contract to which they agreed its not even funny. And remember, this isn't a REAL contract we are talking about here. Do you think those people signed anything or did anything to show they acknowledged any contractual obligation on their behalf to do ANYTHING for the ISP? Have you ever signed anything for an ISP?
I would have no problems with the ISP suing the folks here to recover the difference between what they were capped at and what they used. But to suggest SOCIETY should pay $30,000 a year to incarcarate someone for costing an ISP $100 more in a month... Its insane, absolutely insane.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Maybe lawyers aren't all so bad,
I've been telling folks this for a while - the *lawyers* aren't the problem. It's the *marketing* people who ultimately decide where the lawyers are aimed that need to be dealt with.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
I lived in Toledo for years, what they don't tell you si that the owner of The Toledo Blade also owns Buckeye Cablesystem. So the article got painted an even friendlier picture than is normal for such a great media outlet as The Blade. /sarcasm
As for the theft, maybe if Buckeye's cable service wasn't so god awful, then people would have no reason to steal it.
John Block: Go to hell.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
If ya do live in this companies service area, take a look at Amplex's DSL offerings. They're really a smart bunch of friendly people. Their areas of service overlap a lot, and you can get Amplex DSL in more areas than you can get Buckeye Cable. And the speed difference is out fo this world.
Oh, and they offer static IP's with some plans. Nuff said.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Adelphia doesn't advertise speeds anymore, probably for this reason. Also, even "slow" cable modem speeds are much, much faster than any dialup, and plenty fast for most users. Most servers and websites can't deliver more than a certain amount anyway. So even throttled back, most users would be perfectly happy with the service they're getting. So why make claims the company has trouble delivering?
I was getting around 12-1300 kb/s last spring. Because of some DHCP server issues in my region, Adelphia has throttled this back to about half that. I can't say it's affected me at all. A couple of times, I've managed to pull down Linux ISOs at 7-800, and on *one* occasion, around 1M. But that was only once. Most of the time, the sites I connect to can only deliver 50-150, with a few streaming video sites doing better than that.
So, the 6-800 I'm getting now is just fine, and I'm sure it is for most other users too. And if mosr users would be happy with the speeds they're getting, why shoot yourself in the foot by bringing it up?
Apparently this is the second time my city (Toledo) has used the FBI for this. Anyways, I'm pretty sure the Blade always has extensive coverage of this because the same family owns the Blade and the local cable company (which has a cable monopoly in Toleod and its surrounding areas).
Who cares about murderers, snipers, rapists, paedophiles, et cetera? Let's exhaust all of our law enforcement resources going after the true agents of Satan -- bandwidth hogs!
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I remember the case of the fellow who beat a rap of hacking. Came upon a terminal and tried logging in with different names and passwords. Got in, got caught, got prosecuted. Said the system login had said "welcome to blah-di-blah." Obviously, this means he was welcome to login to blah-di-blah, even if he didn't have an account. It didn't say, "authorized users only, welcome to blah-di-blah."
So how much bandwidth do they promise in their ads? 50x dialup? 100x dialup? These poor schmucks were probably only trying to get what the company had advertised they were selling.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
My ISP used to tell its customers that they had 10 MB/Sec download speeds. Indeed they did - on the DSL local loop. The problem is that upstream of the local loops they backhauled on T1 so the design of the system implied that 30-100 customers each thought they had 10MB/sec download speeds when the reality of the situation is that they all shared a 1.5 mb/sec T1 line. An even more important point is that with all the hops involved, nothing comes in anywhere near the speed advertised anyway.
All that a cap on a cable modem does is slow the load times of individual pages and it only slows it IF every hop to the server happens to be able to transmit at a speed in excess of the cap.
Admitedly if someone is using sustained transfers such as if one is running a game or video feed then they _may_ end up using extra bandwidth. But the vast majority of web surfing is to webpages and in this case if the "same number of pages" are downlaoded per day then even if the user does this in a shorter period of time - the user did not use extra bandwidth.
For instance, I read slashdot pretty much each day. If I read it via a modem it might take me an hour. I'm on a high speed link so perhaps I can read slashdot in 1/2 hour. This does not mean I read it twice. It also doesn't mean that I try to surf to more websites. The reason? Content is dropping folks and there are fewer websites worth visiting now than in the past.
Well, my line used to run at 768 MB/sec. Now it is 468 MB/sec. I do not notice the difference. My ISP's expect me to pay the same amount in fact. The difference in speed resulted because the telephone company (telus) decided to switch out paradyne MVS (ADSL) modems and replace them with D-Link. MVS has a 25,000+ foot reach whereas the D-Link system has a 15,000 foot reach. Hense D-Link runs slower. Even so, if I download a Debian install for instance, I do not necessarily get a lower level of service because it has not been established that the packets would have been made available to my new D-Link modem at a rate faster than it can accept them.
Does this mean that I can send the cops in to Telus claiming theft of service? IE. I paid Telus for the MVS solution and they switched it on me!!! So now I only get 1/2 the service?
In order to support a "theft of service" the cable company should be required to demonstrate that the end users actually consumed more content. I'll suggest they likely cannot do this. All that has happened is that the end users _may_ have viewed the content for a shorter elapsed time. But even this idea is really questionable because most people read at speeds under 1000 words per minuet and most computers send at speeds 1000's of times faster. Even in the case of video, a slow link is fast enough for MPEG video. Inceasing the link speed does not mean the end user is going to pull in more content.
Its like saying that if we double the speed limit between you and the grocery store so you can get there in 1/2 the time - then you will go shopping twice as often and spend twice as much money. The assumtions are clearly rong! Continuing on assumptions like this, if we reduce the speed limit or cut the number of fast food restaurants in half, then people should lose weight because there would be less opportunity to get food.
I don't think capping cable modems does much in the way of putting people on an internet content diet. About all this might accomplish is forcing them to waste their time waiting for slow loading pages.
Indeed, junk advertising wastes bandwidth because it is not wanted. Perhaps the FBI should be sent into doubleclick! Mind you - I just firewall the ad servers. Guess I should be able to claim a refund from my phone company huh? Because I didn't consume the content they tried to shove into my computer.
... Don't you think that the FBI would have more important things to do? I mean there are REAL bad people out there and the FBI wastes their resources against bandwith thieves? Can't the local authorities deal with chickenshit like that?
Bandwidth is intangible. Show mw a bushel basket full of it. Things from a store physically exist. Bandwidth is vapor.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Mr. Runner, 55, of 4561 Westbourne Ct., Sylvania, resigned as Waterville solicitor in March, 2001, after a covert police surveillance operation videotaped him stealing coffee, creamer, and paper from village supplies. Hmmm...first they bust him for stealing coffee, creamer amp paper..now it's cable bandwith theft... He'd better be careful.. remember three strikes and you're in jail for life! Seriously, though..it seems to me that the cops in Toledo simply don't have enough to do!
Too bad I can't get this kind of service when someone steals my lawn mower.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
That's much too good for them. Make it a 2400 baud modem in a 286 system, and force 'em to connect via a WWIV BBS -- that'll *really* teach 'em the error of their ways!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Actually, cops go out of their way to AVOID drawing their guns, because in most departments, every time a gun leaves its holster, the cop has to fill out extra paperwork detailing exactly why the gun was drawn.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Guns drawn? Guns drawn? Guns drawn? Like they were ready to blow someone's brains out rather than snipping the coax? Do I really need to RTFA? Fuck the FBI! I said that! Yeah, me! Come and get me copper!
What is broken in the US is the fact that we only get 20-35% turnout of eligable voters. Maybe if people actually voted in the US we'd know the will of the voters a little better.
$G
PS. To all you slashdotters: VOTE DAMN IT! Don't just whine that your candidate lost after you didn't go to the polls. Don't lament that RIAA/MPAA/SPA/Microsoft/GREEN MEN FROM MARS is/are taking over the universe because they own the congress when you didn't bother to vote against their shill FROM YOUR DISTRICT!
-- $G
A quick look in the CIA World Factbook shows:
Sweden - Social Democrats 36.5%, Moderates 22.7%, Left Party 12%, Christian Democrats 11.8%, Center Party 5.1%, Liberal Party 4.7%
Norway - - Labor Party 24.3%, Conservative Party 21.2%, Progress Party 14.6%, Socialist Left Party 12.5%
Finland - SDP 22.9%, Kesk 22.5%, Kok 21.0%, Leftist Alliance (Communist) 10.9%, SFP 5.(SDP= Socialist)
Belgium - VLD 15.4%, CVP 14.7%, PRL 10.6%, PS 9.7%, VB 9.4%, SP 8.9% (Note: PS is the Socialist Party, as is SP)
Germany - SPD 40.9%, Alliance '90/Greens 6.7%, CDU/CSU 35.1%, FDP 6.2%, PDS 5.1% (SPD= Socialist, PDS= Communist/Socialist)
Looks pretty Socialist to me.
Exactly where in Europe do you find socialist countries?? Just about all of them except the totalitarian and overly dogmatic Vatican are democracies these days. I don't know about most of the newly formed states when Yugoslavia collapsed, but my best guess is that these are emerging democracies as well.
Democracy doesn't preclude socialism. If the people vote for state-run industries, then the people have voted for socialism, yes?
But as for who owns bandwidth on the other side of the pond from your perspective: it's a mixture of academic institutions, private and state-owned telephone companies
This is what I meant. In europe, some countries have state-run telephone/datacom (socialism). We do not have that here in the US (not socialism). This is the only point I was making.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And from the Subscription Agreement:
So, it looks like you can't connect a Linux box? The TOS says you cannot even *possess* a piece of hardware that could violate the SA, even if you don't actually *attempt* to violate the SA. Most out-of-the-box Linux installations are NAT-capable and therefore appear to be in violation of this legalese...
How would this get interpretted in court?
Why isn't this just a civil case? Presumably the cable company and the customers had a contract prohibiting this kind of behavior, and allowing for remedies in the event that one party violated the contract. What's the need for criminal charges here, exactly?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Ask yourself, why would any of us typically want to uncap a broadband connection? I know it gets slow at times, but surely even with porn pop ups and flash glitz, your web broswing is fairly smooth for most sites. Email, even with spam, can be transferred quickly enough, so why go to the trouble of uncapping the bridge (cable modem or DSL for most people).
What possible reason besides online gaming would one want a fast connection? Ahh, file sharing!
Yes, I am sure most readers here use broadband speeds for getting the latest UNIX flavor builds for their system, but some people use it to share software and video/music files that are copyrighted.
So uncapping something that may or may not be their property or a violation of the TOS, but that may be the least of the worries when the FBI finds a few thousands dollars worth of software on their collective computers. Just wait until the papers report of the elite filesharing gang that was discovered after this simple test operation!
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
these guys got arrested for busting a cap. ::dodges tomatos::
--Joey
Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail describes one of the early conflicts between cable modem users and Law Enforcement Authorities. The author had not in fact stolen service - she'd bought cable modem service without buying cable television service, and the incompetent combination of the cable tv company, cable modem company, inadequate communication processes between the two, and Maryland's highly aggressive laws against theft of cable modem service led to her being charged with 4 counts of cable fraud, based on accusations by Comcast which the state wouldn't let them withdraw once they understood they'd made a mistake.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No sir! Many newspapers print identifying information about the person besides their name. The purpose is to make sure your reader understands which John Smith you're talking about. In larger cities (like Chicago) they usually say "John Smith of the 3700 block of Main Street" rather than "John Smith of 3751 Main street", just because you worry about psycho vigilantes in the big city.
This has been the case ever since the first guy with a generic name sued a newspaper for accusing him of horrible crimes he didn't commit. Example...
"John Smith was arrested today and charged with killing and eating several puppies."
In any town of more than a couple hundred, there will be many John Smiths. One of the John Smiths who didn't get arrested for eating puppies decides this article defames his character and good name and he decides to sue for damages. Actually, this isn't hypothetical: It has already happened, and the defamed person won.
Who did what now?
From the article:
>>"There have been no indications that other high-speed Internet providers have taken such firm steps to prosecute for the theft of broadband theft," Mr. Shryock said.
There's a Freudian slip right there... =)
Anyway, if this particular cable internet service is marketed as an unlimited usage service, and the people uncapping their modems are paying customers, it's going to be pretty hard to claim that they're stealing service. If the uncappers are tampering with rental modems, it might qualify as vandalism, but that's pretty tenuous, since it's simple to restore the modems to their original state. And that might be moot anyway, since it's been suggested that the modems involved weren't rentals at all.
Also, I have a feeling that this case only involves traffic uncapping and has nothing to do with the actual bandwidth allocation... But would the government prosecution not knowing what the hell they're talking about actually harm their case? =)
1) Get caught up in the legal system, 1/5 to 2/5th's of your life will go down the drain and you'll come out losing faith in all of society and humanity.
2) Be made an example of by the authorities testing out there new piece of legislation. This could be more harmful to you than the first.
I thought about uncapping my modem, only because $80AUS a month for a 3G limit is criminal, but they classify that as stealing, and if it's one thing the authorities know jack shit about it's technology, so they'll enforce the law tougher than anywhere else and make examples out of ppl left right and center. It amazes me that hackers can get equal or lengthier sentences than rapists or murderers.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Bandwidth is intangible. Show mw a bushel basket full of it.
Bandwidth is little different from electricity in its intangibility, yet you can go to jail for stealing that too. For that matter, so is telephone connect time. It is a service, which is metered so the customer can be charged appropriately. Services do not have to be tangible, else everything from Miss Cleo to the shrink you should be seeing now wouldn't be in business.
Bandwidth is vapor.
If that's so, tell me what happens when your ISP disconnects your vapor service.
As this has been mentioned very many other places I'll make it short:
a) Does the contract limit your bandwidth. Does the advertising indicate certain speeds?
b) If I modified my modem to get an average "50x a 56k modem", wouldn't I just be getting half of what was advertised to me in the first place?
Seems to me that the result of of this will be scaring the crap out of a bunch of young kids, and probably further scaring other young kids so they don't do the same thing. In court, it will probably get thrown out, there are way too many counterarguements, but the cable company has already got what they wanted: scapegoats and a message. The most the kids might get is a fine
Of course, the flip side to this is that if it does go through court and the defendants get off 100% (plus, hopefully being awarded damages in a countersuit), then that will set a nice precedent and hopefully backfire on the cable company (which might be the main reason they don't get off 100%, judges hate bad precedents).
Drop your carrier, we have you surrounded!
Under no circumstances is it ever ILLEGAL to break an agreement.
No. You're wrong. If you break an agreement with criminal intent, it is then ILLEGAL to break your agreement.
Intent leads to fraud. Hence, criminal. Hence, illegal.
They won't be able to break into it- but you can check your server logs for attempts, then go to the police and have them charged with illegally attempting to hack your system.
He should be thankful the FBI didn't use this new method of taking care of the "problem".
Think of it, no unpredictable juries, no courts, and no detention costs.
Remember, those who uncap their bandwidth are helping the terrorists!
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.