Slashdot Mirror
Toledo Uncappers Getting Shafted
Jacob writes "Broadband Reports has a well written article detailing the plight of those Ohio cable modem users who found themselves facing gun wielding FBI agents for uncapping their cable modems. Buckeye Cable has clearly crossed a line and the tech community and consumer groups should be all over them like a wet, angry rag. Kudos to Broadband Reports for not letting this thing die." Granted, those who were indicted were violating their service contracts, but having their posessions siezed by FBI agents is overkill.
Since when do armed agents of the law sieze private property without the owner having been convicted of any crime?
What a sad state of affairs.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
This is the same old, same old... People violating contracts or laws and then getting angry when the heat finally comes down on them. "Man, I can't believe office [insert local cop name here] stopped by for going 8 over the speed limit".. Fine.. go out and be an activist and try to get the speed limits upped. "Damn.. My webhoster [insert webhoster name here] shut down my account cuz I was serving MP3s and Warez". Copyrights laws are just that.. laws. People uncapping their cable modems when it violates their service agreements should be stopped. Follow the rules or find a provider with better rules.
Computer crimes like this simply astound me...Its not the physical crime that shocks me its the punishment. What did they do that was so dead wrong? They in essence gained access to some extra bandwidth in which they were allowed to use. Consequences should immediate termination of the account end of story. WTF is wrong with society today. I don't know maybe I sound juvenile but punishment for a virtual crime such as this seems like a total overkill...
.[[erax0r]].
No, and if the IT dept. at Buckeye wasn't a bunch of inept mouthbreathers, it wouldn't have been possible on their service either.
Since a similar article like this was posted to /. before and I brought up the same point I'll bring it up again. Where in the article did they state that the FBI agents came in with guns? It's just sensationalism and it does not belong. Now I know someone is going to claim that it's SOP for agents to bust in with guns however it is not. Instead of just rewriting my whole rant here... I'll just add a link to my previous /. comment...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44074&cid=4590 690
-Cardoe
OK to all the sladhotters stating "They deserve what they got, they are thieves! plain and simple" TAKE A LOOK AT YOURSELF. I be nearly 90% maybe more of you have "stolen" something regarding computers multiple times. You've downloaded mp3's for sure...for example. How bout when the fbi comes knocking at your door for that mp3 you just downloaded? GET REAL.
.[[erax0r]].
I think companies are going to take advantage of people until the people wake up. We are due for a revolution but not to break away from the government. We need a "corporate revolution". One where the world, not just America, stands up to Big Business and tell the to go to hell. They might buy government support but if __WE__ are not giving them the money they will not be spending it.
I miss small "Mom and Pop" shops they are disappearing at a alarming rate. I think we need to be more aware of this and support your local "Mom and Pop" shop even though CVS might have a better deal.
I always support the little guy in my town. I will go to the local butcher shop before I go to "corporate grocery" store.
I didn't use the preview button, so get over it!!!!
Mike
Ah well, so much for the right not to be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
Seriously...
*cough cough* third party *cough cough*
:)
I hated gore more than bush but that doesn't say much (didn't vote last time). If anything Gore vs Bush proved that America is fucked either way. Worried about throwing away your vote? Hah, jokes on you - either party is going to corn-hole you good, it's just a matter of what position.
Something to consider next election: PLEASE vote for who you think would actually make a good president. If you can't find a good third party candidate, vote for Wile E. Coyote. Voting for a bad candidate because the other guy is worse is NOT helping America. Something to think about.
okay, I'll get of my soapbox now
This is simply a case of corporate greed. These guys uncapped their modems and the company sends in the FBI. The article stated that at least $250,000 in damages have to be incurred before they FBI can be invoked in local affairs. I don't see how a handful of people can possibly cause that much damage in such a little time. The article states that the one man only uncapped his modem to 2.5 mbps. That is a reasonable speed for a cable modem. If someone simply utilizes a service that they are given to a greater potential, I don't see how this is a "crime" worthy of FBI agents arresting you as well as confiscating your computers. As far as damages incurred, that is total BS. The ISP has a certain amount of bandwidth availiable no matter if 100 people share it or one person hogs it. It may be wrong to use it all for youself, but it doesn't cause any monitary damages to the company. If you are using up something that would be accounted for under normal conditions, you shouldn't be arrested by the FBI. Perhaps disconnected, but not arrested. This is a simple case of the ISP showing their greed as well as their corporate muscle to use the political system as they see fit. Corporate control of our government is, IMO, what plauges our political system the most. This is America...we are better than this.
SIGFAULT
Impounding your car for speeding? For the Americans out there, vote libertarian and support the ACLU. I'm afraid for my children.
Fear is the mind killer.
Once again, we see an example of people doing something that is relatively harmless and given an unusually strict punishment simply because it is labelled as "cyber crime." The people who create some laws seem to have little understanding of the technologies that we use and their lack of knowledge is leading to some sort of irrational fear of any individual who commits any sort of crime using technology that they don't seem to understand. However, what makes this so disturbing is that modem capping was not said to be illegal in the article. It was referred to as "not legal." So has there been any legislation against this? Anytime? Anywhere?
And of course, even if there were then we should be disturbed. Was this "crime" any reason to confiscate so much of the offender's equpiment? Even a VCR was taken, but strangely, an XBox gaming console was left behind. I'm not sure what exactly it is that's motivating these steps in the wrong direction. Is it some sort of irrational fear that leads to those that commit computer crimes being put in the same category as terrorists (which they have been, BTW) even if their crime is simply that of "stealing" bandwidth? Ignorance may be bliss for those at Buckeye Cablesystems and other corporations and the governments that make laws protecting them, but it certainly isn't for the rest of us.
This is bad news, people. It seems that if you're committing anything that can be labelled "cybercrime" you can be given absurdly strict punishments just because your crime has that label.
Yes, stealing is wrong -- which is exactly why the half million dollars worth of equipment should be returned to the individual it was pilfer--er, confiscated from.
Sounds like a good way to get back at the big evil cable companies that slashdotters are angry at. Certainly they couldn't prosecute hundreds of people who were infected with a virus. I bet entire ISP's could be taken out with just a few virus victims on each service. What an interesting idea.
I very much agree that sending in the FBI (that in itself shocks....local P.D. couldn't have handled this?), weapons drawn, was abuse of authority. There should be some ramifications for the people that authorized this resopnse.
HOWEVER.....I don't want this to be just another situation where someone knowingly breaks the law, steals (it's bandwidth, but it DOES cost money), and then Slashdot readers start screaming "Free them! Fight the Power! Stand up to the man!". These guys knew what they were doing. Their ISP should not only drop them, but they should face legal sanction of SOME kind. Not prison, obviously, but a hefty fine and some community service time at least.
The way they were busted was indeed extreme. Don't go to the other end of the scale and insist there should be no punishement at all. By calling it a "virtual crime", you seem to mock the idea that it was a crime at all. It was, and proper punishement is still deserved. Only the scale of the reaction and the level of punishement should be called into question here.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
So, if one were to manipulate a bank so that they had a million dollars now, since that is "virtual" it shouldn't be illegal?
By that measure, most of what Enron did was "virtual". Insider Trading and stock price manipulation is "virtual".
Pointing a gun at someone when the pointer has no intention of firing is a "virtual" crime. There's no assault or endangerment, it's "virtual".
While I agree that the suspects did wrong and deserve a punishment, I also agree with essentially every other poster in claiming excessive force in the search/arrest of these suspects.
Personally, I think the individual(s) at Buckeye should be held accountable for their estimate of $250,000+ in damages, assuming that the figure is inflated (and it seems that it is). What if my neighbor was being too loud when I was trying to sleep, and as a result, I called the police and reported multiple gunshots and screams coming from his house? While this case isn't perfectly analogous, the desired result seems to be the same. In essence, I'd be "teaching him a lesson." Unless this quarter of a million dollar figure is accurate, should someone at Buckeye not be held responsible? The FBI is not at the beck-and-call of every mid-size corporate goon with a bone to pick.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Yes the FBI got involved but BUSH and ashcroft's policies had nothing to do with this. absolutely nothing. No more than Clinton and Janet Reno were responsible for the beating of Rodney King. Get a life. Loser.
The loses could not be anywhere near what they are claiming.. Here's the way I see it..
.0875kbytes/sec slowdown per violator (assuming they were all using it at the same time and maxxed out their own cable lines). You also have to assume that the CM companys outgoing pipes are already saturated, if they were not, the loss to everyone else is nothing. Again, this is bandwidth the company is already paying for regardless.
The cable provider has a certain amount of bandwidth they provide their customers to the outside world. This is what they pay for. They pay that amount regardless of WHO is using it and when. The only loses the cable company should be able to claim is from the customers who cancelled their services because they were not getting expected rates and it can be proved these rates were lower because of a direct result of what these 11 people were doing. That is a very hard thing to prove. Compare the cancels/month directly related to bandwidth concerns before, during, and after these offenders were uncapping. If they are no different, there is no loses.
Even if they were originally capped at 1.5/128. The most you could really get out of a CM is what? 5mbit/500kbit maybe? The have the potential to get roughly just over 3 times what they were paying for. Divide this extra 3.5mbits among say 5000 subscribers and you get a potential loss of 700bit/sec per customer or roughly
Okay its late for me and my math may be off so please be easy if I made a dumb mistake and fell free reply with a recalc with your estimates if I am grossly underestimating something.
I am not saying what they did was justified, but the damage estimates are WAY off..
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
What the *FSCK* does a VCR have to do with broadband theft? Evidence? Evidence of what?
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
So what happens when somebody uses, say, the recent Microsoft IE hole to create a web button that (while also doing something plausable) silently snifs whether the user is on a cable modem and uncaps it if so?
You could easily find the bulk of the subscribers on the cable company's line with uncapped modems through no fault of their own.
Of course the FBI could go after the owner(s) of the sites(s) with the link. (But suppose their sites had it because it had been installed by a nimda variant, so it wasn't THEIR fault, either?)
Or suppose somebody constructs and launches an email virus that, as its payload, uncaps cable modems? (Probably disguised as an add for faster internet access, ha ha.) Similar story, but no web sites to chase. (HOW MANY new viruses per day? HOW MANY authors actually caught?)
Whack-a-mole will only work for a little while.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I bet if it was 1776 would be shouting to the British soldiers:
"That terrorist George Washington went that way! Quick get him! Long live the king! Down with those pot smoking revolutionaries! King George pays more taxes than all the colonies combined! Ben Franklin just spreads liberal myths! Long live the King!!!"
Sucka.
It seems to me there are two important facts in this case:
First, that a powerful family is able to call in favors from the FBI and others in local law enforcement. Particularly stunning are the details of the unequal treatment of offenders (i.e. George Runner).
In a free, democratic society, those in government would have someone to answer to if among tens of thousands of people who committed the same crime, many were given wildly different responses depending on their background (i.e. ethnicity, religion, relationship to wealthy families).
Second, and this is something I hear a lot about lately, that the FBI is apparently empowered to s ieze property practically at random (his Windows CD's?) and hang on to it indefinitely (i.e. Wirtz's possessions "may never be returned"?).
In a free and democratic society, there is oversight regarding what law enforcement officers can take away from you - they have to have a legitimate reason for every article taken, and they absolutely have to return it promptly after their need is concluded.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
This is a totally inaccurate use of facts and figures.
First of all, these guys pay $200/Mb. That's true. It's usually on some kind fo 95/5 basis, where the top 5 percent of sampled bandwidth is discarded.
Second, in order to be charged $200/Mb, you'd have to have that pretty much sustained. Unless these guys are literally serving porn out of their house, their average bandwidth utilization over a month is somewhere between zero and none. Bursts high, yes, but average monthly utilization is nothing.
The whole reason that DSL and Cable Modems and dialup are even possible is that no one uses their slice of the pie 100% of the time. It gets aggregated and shared. This is why a two T1's (3Mb/sec) can serve a few hundred modems (56K * 300 == 16Mb/sec). And those utilization ratios are MUCH higher than cable/dsl.
So they uncapped their modems. They could theoretically use maybe 10Mb/sec. The first thing I'd do as their lawyer is say "How much bandwidth did they ACTUALLY steal, not what they could have stolen." Because those are two, REALLY REALLY differenty numbers.
So the FBI only gets involved if there's 250k lost. The ISP "estimated" just about exactly that for 23 people. The FBI turns up and finds nothing at 6 of the places, and they don't get indictments of 10 more. So the ISP seems to have actually lost at most 77k, and they fraudulently claimed be a substantial margin to have lost enough to warrant FBI help.
Claiming that you've lost a lot of money when you've in fact failed to be paid a lot of money for services you accidentally provided beyond your contract is inherently somewhat suspect, and you should be in serious danger of legal action against you if you turn out not to have been due as much as you claimed.
Time Warner putting a stop to a monopoly? Now there's a first!
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
All of this fuss would have been prevented if the cable company rate limited their customers on a router 1 or 2 hops downstream. They might be able to uncap their modem still, but the distribution layer router would limit things before they passed on to the core router.
That was Adoph Hitler, writing about creation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
:)
Your point being?
I'm critical of invoking the Nazis as a metaphor for every excess of government, but in truth the immediate choice of the words "homeland security" made me squirm. It's much like his dad's "New World Order." I don't know if there's any awareness of the echoes of the past. Those who did not study the past are doomed to quote it?
There is nothing wrong with Germans, which is precisely why we need to take seriously their example of nationalism turned ugly. As in the McCarthy experience, we have seen these things get away from us before.
Many of those who voted for or supported the bill have good intentions. Hell is paved with these.
I think we need to do some calculations here.
The best information we have is that the cable modem was capped at 128kb/s, and that they illegally adjusted it to 2.5Mb/s. So basically, they increased the cap by a factor of 20. Since they are using a shared-bandwidth system, in effect, they had one share but gained 19 extra shares illicitly.
How much would it have cost for them to buy that service at the regular monthly rate? What if they had actually have signed up for 19 additional cable modems? Buckeye's web site is here, and it turns out that the monthly cost for one cable modem is $44.99. So, assuming they had it enabled all month, this increased cap would have cost them 19 * $44.99 == $854.81 per month if they'd gotten it legally. (And the cap is the only thing that matters here, network-wise. Whether they're using one cablemodem or 20, the effect is the same if they download 2.5Mb/s, because either way, they are sharing pieces of the same bandwidth.)
Since there were 23 people involved and the company claimed over $250,000 value of computer services lost (the FBI minimum), let's examine how long the problem would have had to go on for that figure to be accurate. 23 * $854.81 is $19660.63 per month for all of them. (This assumes every last one of them left their cable modems at the maximum of 2.5Mb/s for the entire month.)
For them to reach the $250,000 mark, they'd have (all) had to do this (continuously) for 12.716 months, or about 12 months and 22 days.
An article from CableWorld says the investigation began in Februrary, and the arrests took place in July. Let's give them an extra month to notice and start an investigation. That totals 6 months, and 6 is less than 12.7. Therefore, I'm inclined to believe the claim is inflated by a wide margin.
My opinion: the cable company would have been basically within its rights to threaten a lawsuit unless each customer paid an amount of up to $854.81 per month (depending on the individual case) that they left their cable modems uncapped. If legal costs were incurred, they would have been within their rights to sue for a little more. And that is, basically, just about it.
You've obviously never seen a celebrity out on bail for murder and an ordinary citizen denied bail for public intoxication.
Yes, I suppose there would be a *serious* conflict of interest in asking the FBI to investigate itself. OTOH, asking the FBI to make an inquiry as to whether or not the local government was justified in requesting their services might have value. Perhaps the Department of Justice is the better venue. As you might have gathered, IANAL. The basic point I was trying to get across is that there is recourse for this guy. Also, I'd like to point out to the "America is coming to an end" crowd that throughout the history of the US, things like this have happened and will continue to happen. Who knows, maybe Runner vs. Ashcroft will be a landmark Supreme Court decision right up there with Brown vs. Board of Education. Or maybe it would be Runner vs. Toledo. The point is, the guy has a long and important fight ahead of him, and may come out OK after all. Stay tuned for the obligatory EFF or ACLU backed legal battle.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
A proceeding is made directly against the property. Something like U.S. v. 1353 Elm Street, Skokie, Illinois, or U.S. v. one Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. When the property is found to have been used for, among other things, "the distribution of narcotics," the property is forfeited to the United States. States have their own versions of forfeiture laws. Conservative forces in Congress have been instrumental in enacting asset forfeiture laws as part of the war on drugs, and in doing so they greatly increased the ante. I guess Congress thinks taking drug dealers' houses, cars, and guns away will help . Will it? who knows. You know those ads in the classifieds that say "Cars, Trucks, boats, all starting at $50!" This is asset forfeiture in action. They hold a sheriff's sale and put the proceeds in some sort of general fund, like public education in Missouri (adopted 1990, revised 1999). The law enforcement agency doesn't get the money directly, but sometimes they have in the past, and now they are being reformed. What do you think your local police do with unclaimed property in the lost and found that's taking up space in the station? They sell it after a certain period, like 6 months. Understanding the rationale behind the law is important. Proceedings directly against property, e.g. for the collection of unpaid property taxes, have been around at least since the 1800's. Nothing unusual.
Here, the uncappers probably violated some sort of federal wire fraud act. If they are even charged and convicted, they'll get a few months in prison. You have to understand that it's completely within the U.S. attorney's discretion in that district whether to charge them or not. Most of them will probably walk. I suspect the worst couple of offenders might be charged and "perhaps" convicted, but even then they'll get the 12 step program since there's nothing courts like more than reducing the number of bullshit cases that go through them, like this one. Yes, it sucks to have your life disrupted by such an arrest. However, this does happen every day, and it's a reminder that it could happen to any one of us at any time. The fact that few people are caught doesn't mean the feds won't crack down on those they do catch, just like any other crime. I would suggest writing to your legislators and asking them to revise the law, but unfortunately they don't give a shit about joe blow who uncapped his cable modem. As far as asset forfeiture, that issue has already been settled, and if you have issues with that, the ACLU has many interesting articles on the subject.
These power users fall under Pareto's 20-80 principle: 20% of the users account for 80% of the bandwidth use (and vice versa. Think about it, this rule applies to just about every aspect of life). I wish ISPs would go ahead and accept this and deal with it some other way than bashing in doors. The best way is to simply send offenders a nasty note and reset their modems to their proper settings. That's all the scare you need to get most nerds to cut it out--we don't continue doing stuff once we know we're being watched!
You'd be upset too if someone was taking your money.
Like this cable ISP is taking my tax money by bringing in the FBI for this? Theft of service is wrong, however calling in the Federales before making any attempt to send them a stern letter or just disabling their account is a bit of overkill.
Duffman can never die! Only the actors who play him!
And apparently dont have anyone familiar with the concept of security either. From a security standpoint physical access equals control, period. There are no security measures that can protect you if the user has physical access to the hardware. They might as well have a big red switch on the front of the box saying 'press here for fast cable, but you're not allowed to press this button'.
Never, _ever_ trust the client side to be secure or in your control.