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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.
...like I did. Only thing you have to worry about here is US$300 for going one GB over the monthly limit. Connection's fast as hell which allows one to reach that limit in minutes.
Same reason they can arrest you and put you in jail without being convicted of a crime.
Were they really? I'd be curious to know if the service contract mentions anything about modifying your system to increase bandwidth. If it doesn't, can they be prosecuted for anything? My first instinct is "they were taking away bandwidth from the rest of the community and should be punished." But is that even accurate? I have Optimum Online cable, and I understand that they don't cap their modems (I've even hit download speeds of 700kbps/sec). If a competitor's standard is not capping, it's gotta be hard for the ISP to prove damages.
Of course, that the FBI got involved at all is an embarassment. No wonder that DC sniper took so long to find: the FBI is too busy holding the dicks of mega-corporations while they pee on the little guy.
c-hack.com |
It will be very interesting to see how long it is before Bucksnort..er, I mean, Buckeye loses the remaining client base it has. I am sure everyone is in agreement that sending in armed FBI agents over a breach of service contract is overkill. I doubt the intent was to scare away any other customers they have (and potentially could have had, because they overreact. But that's exactly what's going to happen.
What do they do if your bill is two days late? That would be on my mind, even though I tend to pay a hair early just to be on the safe side.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44074&cid=4590 690
The link was oddly.
Does anyone else find this just a little strange? I doubt anyone achieved anywhere near 2.5MBps, and even if they had, I don't think $11,000 is the price to pay for it! And really, 16 hours times 2.5 MBps, thats... 144 GB. What's he transferring anyways? No home user can use that much bandwidth.
This guy got screwed by a litigation-happy company. I hope he wins.
Here is Dallas Attbi.com craps out every time it's windy or raining. The fools have no way of figuring out the cable leg is dead other than schedule a service call then wait for a barage of service calls to alert the local people that something is wrong.
They are stealing my time. Get another supplier? Tough they have a monopoly given them when they testified at the FCC hearing that thy would not increase rates if the requirements for having a second provider got eliminated.
Guess what happened within a year. Did these guys go to jail for perjury, Think not.
Help fight continental drift.
Most DSL ISPs that I'm familiar with cap data rates in their Redback routers rather than in the modem, which puts it safely (for them) beyond the customer's reach.
utter rubbish
Techinically, it is legal for the FBI to do what it did. It might have made better PR to have called, or had a friendly "chat", instead of going in. Sure, the cops can give you a ticket for jaywalking, but in doing that they could be ignoring the maniac speeding 100 in a 40 zone. The FBI surely has better things to do, doesn't it?
I have a question for any Toledo Buckeye subscribers, do you actually own the modem? If you do, can you get charged for hacking your own equipment?
Sure, stealing bandwidth is theft, so ya, slap the perps with that crime...
And I'd like to know how they figured out $250,000 in "extra" bandwidth used.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
"No officer, I didn't uncap my modem speed, it must have been that virus that has been going around..."
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
What's more astounding is that they couldn't understand exactly how it happened...
Huh? It's their network. It's outright stupid for them to not understand exactly how their network behaves. Security-by-lawyer really isn't that good of a network protocol...
I guarantee when they come to the door they will confiscate my music collections w/o first realizing that they are all legal.
Are they going to come and want you to prove that the music you have downloaded is yours? That you don't have the time to rip it but that you actually have the CD (no matter how bad of shape it is in)?
Are they going to check and see if the SHNs I have are of live shows?
These people were doing something that is OBVIOUSLY illegal. EASILY determined. My MP3/SHN collections are not.
So how come I've never heard any stories about
FBI agents busting down the doors of Spammers?
Surely spammers with a 28.8 modem waste more resources than people that tweak a cable modem.
Yeah you're right, an i'll be the first to admit it...
The ceo of one of the dot bombs I worked for had been acting funny for weeks. He started asking me to make availiable the inbox of a paticular secratary he had the hots for, citing she was bringin up a sexual harrassment lawsuit.
Well, on my own initiave I got into the company quickbooks and found out they were so deep in the red it hurt. I gave several co-workers the warning of impeding doom.
Before I left, I grabbed a box of cat5, 2 128 meg dimms, a tone and probe kit, and some cat5 crimpers and a celeron 400mhz system.
The day after I left I recieved an e-mail from the girl we had working HR, with a list of items that were "missing" None of the items on her list matched what I had taken. The e-mail stated I either return the "stolen" items or my check would be withheald.
Upon a quick onceover of my letter of offer, I didn't read anywhere where it stated they could do this. I called my lawer and asked him if this was legal, which is wasn't. I forwarded his response to the HR girl and got my check fed ex'd the next day.
I don't mind being accused of stealing something I really stole, but when it's something I didn't touch it really pisses me off.
Well about 2 weeks after I left, the CEO called up our guys in sacramento with some big speech. "Blah blah blah" was most of the speach and it ended when he said "Blah, can't pay you guys would you work for free?" From what I heard they walked outta there with everything that the company owned (leaving the leased dell laptops)
I dunno, just wanted to support your comment I guess bro, I know i've stolen shit before.
Uncapping refers to increasing the speed between your network device and your ISP's network device because this is generally the bottleneck. At any given time, your ISP generally has extra internet backbone bandwidth to spare, and unless your computer is _REALLY_ old, it's usually just sitting around waiting for data.
With DSL, there is a direct physical line from the subscriber to the ISP. By capping the maximum speed their network device will exchange data on that line, the ISP can effectively control your net access speed.
With cable, it's different. There is a single wire (a loop actually) that runs through the neighborhood and each user taps into that line. A certain frequency block on that wire is set aside for cable, and the bandwidth provided by that frequency block is shared among all the cable modems connected to it. When you hear DSL ads bashing cable companies for delivering shared net access that slows down when too many people in your neighborhood sign on, this is what they're talking about.
Up until a bit ago, this was very valid criticism. Typically, one node could provide 30Mbps to a neighborhood, and a single cable modem could snatch up a max of 10Mbps of that for its own use. It was a lot like being plugged into a hub. When usage spiked, you were in collision city. However, cable providers have started sending out configuration files to cable modems telling them to only snag a certain amount of bandwidth. This allows them to provide tiered service on a shared medium. What the people mentioned in the article did was send their modems an alternate configuration file saying "Hey! I know I (the cable company) previously told you that you could only use 128kbps of bandwidth, but now you can take as much as you want up to 2.5Mbps!" Since the cable company victims only did this when they "wanted to transfer large amounts of data quickly," they generated usage spikes way beyond normal, especially considering how much bandwidth they allocated to themselves.
So why crack down so hard on someone whose actions didn't cause any real and lasting damage to the company? The simple answer is that broadband ISPs are in the business of charging as much as they can get away with, and trying to get you to use as little as possible. Their business models depend upon subscribers buying "high speed internet access" and not using it. Simply put, if you're really a "power user" and want to do any of the things you see on "lightning fast internet access" commercials such as downloading digital video or transferring large files, broadband ISPs don't want you on their network. You're belong to a class of customers that uses what it pays for, and not the vast majority who just chat online and check their email twice a day. The fact that they could scare others into lower usage levels by bringing in intimidating government forces was just a plus.
The only difference between this and the (RI|MP)AA sueing their fans or the BSA sending out "You have ten days to buy our software or we'll audit you and possibly take legal action," letters is that cable companies are prosecuting based on the contents misguided contracts and the (RI|MP)AA and BSA are prosecuting based on the contents of misguided US law.
My ISP fucked up on a friend's CM and gave him a file called nolimits.cm. He got approximately 4megabits down and 3 megabits up because of that. He had it until his power went out, and lost that conf, and went back to like 1.5megabits down adn 1 megabit up. I think it's perfectly ethical (and possibly legal) for him to have saved that file and reloaded via tftp (since afterall, he did buy the modem).
And you think..?
*5 minutes later, feds storm my house*
Fed: Conspiracy charges. You're under arrest.
Me: Freedom of speech?
Fed: No such thing.
Me: Miranda rights?
Fed: No such thing.
Me: god damnit.
Okay, these guys 'stole' something. So charge them with some petty crime and send them on their way. It's not like they stole all the extra bandwidth, setup their own free DVD web site and pirated Harry Potter 2 24/7 for months on end.
IMHO, they should have just had their service cut off. It shouldn't take long to figure out some joker is sucking down way more bandwidth than they've been allocated. Oh wait, there I go again expecting people to be competent at what they do.
Capitalism is a system of economics, it shouldn't be a way of life.
Nope, 'excessive force' is when they smash your face in the process of arresting you for stealing the twinkies. If the police want to shut down 12 city blocks to apprehend you it might be poor judgement, but it ain't excessive force.
A while back near here (central NC) some poor turkey was pulled over by the local sherr'f depptiy because he was driving a truck with a stolen lawn mower or some such in the back. Said master criminal ran into the woods to get away. Unfortunately for him a van full of SWAT team types on their way to a training class saw the flashing lights & pulled over. Called their buddies in another van and a K9 unit that was also headed to the training class. Borrowed a helicopter from the highway patrol that just happened to be completing repairs at an airport nearby. Finally the couple dozen cops, deputy dawg, and bear in the sky flushed a very scared petty thief out of the woods. If I were him I'd have been peeing in my pants too, wondering if they had mistaken me for an escaped child murderer or CEO or some other completely vile creature to be spending this many resources on hauling my butt out of the woods. Moral of the story - it wasn't excessive force, just excessive zeal on the part of a bunch of cops who decided they'd rather chase a bad guy than go to some ol' training class.
When I did a network install of my gateway last year I used a static IP address since dhcp didn't work for whatever reason. I then forgot to change it afterwards.
...
Living in a share household bills sometimes went unpaid and Optus@Home 'disconnected' our service, meaning they disabled the dhcp account. We continued to get internet access for the next 6 months until someone finally tweaked that we hadn't got any bills for a while and called Optus. Boy were they mad, but at least we only got billed for the 6 months (honesty is not always the best policy kiddies).
All this crap, same with uncapping modems, could easily be prevented by the ISPs. If it's such a huge problem for them, why don't they take steps to prevent it happening? Insurance companies wont pay up if you forget to lock your car and it gets stolen
:wq
It sounds like this guy is the victim of abuse by a local government official. When that happens, it's a job for the FBI. He's in pain now, but if the FBI investigates and determines that local officials have overstepped their bounds by destroying the guy's business for having commited an offense that should probably result in a small monetary fine, then the local goverment official could actually be prosecuted. Following conviction (or even following acquital, as in the OJ case) there could be civil penalties. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind.
I can't help but be reminded of Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. In real life, the Dukes could have the FBI take him out.
The same thing has happened in real life with a lot of cases, most noteably civil rights abuses in the South where local governments committed crimes against Blacks.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In case no one here noticed (and it appears no one has), the Lame [Duck] Congress just passed the Homeland Security Act. It was originally 35 pages when it was reviewed by committee. While the Congress was away for the election break, someone added another 453 pages of pure pork.
"An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation," the leader of another country once wrote. "We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland."
That was Adoph Hitler, writing about creation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.
After articles like this I would think more people would get rid of their hard drive and run off a RAM drive. 2GB RAM is enough for most of my computing needs, and all my personal files could be burnt to CD and stored in a secure location. No forensic evidence other than network traffic... Talk about sticking it to the RIAA.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Now the fear mongers are talking up the terrorist in an effort to promote an agenda of world domination. In the process, they are holding persons, sometimes U.S, citizens, indefinitely and without charges. Furthermore, torture is being seriously discussed. The recent U.S. election shows that the majority of the U.S. supports these suspensions of due process. Money is being diverted from domestic social programs. Again, under the assumption that the vast majority of Americans can consume and exist without worry of being subject to these new laws.
And we have the gall to complain that a few people have been arrested for stealing bandwidth. We expect to be taken seriously when we say we believed the laws would only apply to real criminals. Sometimes the hypocrisy of the country is beyond even my cynical belief.
A quote comes to mind
"First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."
Niemöller.
When we are willing to really willing to move beyond our fear, then we can talk about how bad it is the goverment has the power to take stuff without due process.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Actually, that analogy is skewed.
It's more like you bought a CD player at Best Buy, it was broken, they wouldn't take it back, they wouldn't refund your money and the only thing you had to do to get it working properly is break a "no user serviceable parts" seal and reseat a connector. Then the thugs burst through your door and charge you with an EULA violation.
In my opinion, not offering a refund after 3 months of completely unuseable service without a fix in sight is theft.
For the record, that part of town is too far from the CO for DSL, and the PS2 won't work with Satellite, dialup is too slow for the game in question and ATTBI is a legal monopoly in the area. As is Bellsouth, as every DSL provider resells their service and is dependent on Bell's infrastructure and engineers to get up off their lazy asses to actually bring a house live within 6 months of an order.
He *is* looking in to cellular broadband right now, however, as that's being beta tested in our area. 500ms ping doesn't look too good for fragging, though.
Of course he could sell his house and move 6 blocks closer to the CO so he's in a DSL-supported area, but that's overkill -- ain't it?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There's absolutely no excuse for this. If i tapped into the electric lines coming into my house and hooked a bunch of equipment to the line before it went to the meter, i don't think the FBI would show up with search warrants. I'd probably get my service cut off, and the electric company would ask for a lot of money before reconnecting it. Or if you live near power lines and run a loop under them to pick up power- they're not going to do much more than tell you to stop. Same thing if i tapped into the watermain without paying. They're railroading these people.
I'm tempted to order cable internet just so i can let the guy show up, balk at the draconian contract, and tell him to shove it. Luckily i don't have that much time.
That sounds suspiciously like "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I'm fairly sure the economic system espoused by the individual who made that statement has been thoroughly discredited by now. At the very least, it was rejected by the voters earlier this month (in most places, anyway).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Sure, it is slanted somewhat... but I have not seen an objective article in a while and, at least here, would rather see it slanted towards law-breakers when cable company.
Not legal? It's called ILLEGAL. Uncapping your modem is ILLEGAL. "Not legal" is trying to cover it up.
Or perhaps just trying to achieve the advertized "lightning fast unlimited speed, 100x of a modem" internet? They mentioned (in the older article) someone who got away by claiming that he was simply trying to get what was advertized.
So the fact that there wasn't enough bandwidth makes this better? Okay? They basically modded it to use as much bandwidth as possible, to the detriment of others.
No it does not make it ok. But it DOES point out that they must have LIED when estimating the costs/damages to get it up to 250K and involve FBI. Seriously... I have not seen 100Mbit on a LAN...
They broke the law and must now fact the music.
Sure. but does the term "cruel and unusual punishment" mean anything to you?? They did not steal even close to 250K worth of bandwidth.
Passive voice. He's just a victim! Its not his fault! All his neighbors say he's a great guy!
Judging by the article, his life was, in fact, screwed over already with more to come. Enron execs must have been executed by the same logic, right?
Friggin' bummer. You gamble long enough and you will lose.
The question is: what do you lose? No one says they should be exempt. but fine and service termination seems more reasonable.
It is EXTREMELY unfair to make an EXAMPLE out of someone. This is exactly how cruel and unusual punishment occurs.
John Weglian, chief of the special units division of the prosecutor's office, offers no apologies for Buckeye's unusually harsh treatment of the uncappers. "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, given the cost factors for the defendants in successful prosecutions."
The cable operators claim a loss of $11,000 for each of the 23 offenders and absurdity at best as the operators had the power to kill service at anytime, if indeed such losses were occuring. The uncpping was detected and the ISP could have terminated the contract with the individuals in question and fined them the cost of the modified equipment.
Now why is this a bother to Orwell and the authors of the US Constitution? Because it is a great step towards the end of free publishing in the US and towards the thought control of 1984. Violating a "service contract" with a monopoly ISP has been equated with serious law breaking. The same service contract includes prohibitions on running "servers" or electronic publications. Prohibiting electronic publications on a monopoly service ammounts to denial of first amendment rights to free speach. The internet is a public place, built largely from public networks on public land and supported by monopoly structures. The implication is that US citizens in the future will be felons if they attempt to express themselves in the electronic commons by runing their own news servers, email, or web servers.
Some people can't stand any competition, but the Founding Fathers knew that that's what a free press is all about. These services are against the wishes of their monopoly ISP wich also happens to be the monopoly telco or carrier of CableTV and all other significant electronic publications in the area. From the publisher's perspective, this is a nice step towards criminalizing competing with them. Not being able to run a free press is something the Founding Fathers would not find funny at all. The first amendment to the constitution puts free speach and press in the same class as religion and free assembly - inviolate. They also debated extensivly on the evils of exclusive franchise that copyright grants and how to balance that with the good that it can do to promote the useful arts - 14 years only, thank you. They could never have imagined a world of only one large press organization, AP, five music publishers, three broadcast networks and the technological steps those entrenched intersts would take to preserve and extend their power.
Orwell precicted such control through technology and it's ultimate results. These "untaper" federal cases combined with Paladium, are a great step towards 1984. Paladium, with its concept of "trusted computing" will assure that personal computers will spy on their owners, who can only use them to recieve official propaganda. Orwell saw it comming.
The stage has been well set by the large publishers and you are discredited. They have issued a long string of kiddie porn arrests and news storries about the demise of music publishers. These storries have convinced the public that the free internet is responsible for the demise of popular music and an increase in child molestation. "Hackers" have been equated with child molesters, warez losers and other "pirates" and parisites. this wired story does a good job of demolishing the connection between child molestation and the internet, but the readership of Wired is nothing compared to MSNBC/Time-Warner/AOL/McDonalds/AP/Conglomoram/GE. Your neighbors may not pitty you when the FBI coyly knocks on your door. "Why esle would anyone want to have all that bandwith or run a server?" a clueless populance will ask. You have been painted as some kind of pervert that treatens the great public circus, home, harth and the whole "entertainment ifrastruture" without which the US economy would obviously colapse.
I invite one and all to see exactly what I want to do with my internet connection. It's simple, I want to share my life with relatives that live in different states and my interests with anyone who cares. There's nothing Earth shattering here, not even bad music.
On December 1st, my modest site will go black when my contract with Cox Cable expires. The nose has tightened slowly, every six months brought some new loss of service and increase in costs, and it is now intollerable. I'm not willing to pay $75/month to simply surf the great corporate billboard nor am I willing to give money to a company with the same contract terms and philosophy as Buckeye.
Don't worry, I'll keep posting here on Slashdot. Now you know who twitter is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Fair enough, but you need to be One Hundred Percent certain the person you put to death is guilty. Until a time when you can guarantee this, put a moratorium on executions.
Also, keeping people alive for 20 or more years on death row is inhumane. People change over that amount of time, expecially when they don't know if they'll see another day.
>I believe that anyone who intentionally rapes, kills, or
>causes intense suffering to others for fun should be
>destroyed as a defective human being.
That's until, by some law not yet passed, society deems you a defective human being for thoughtcrime or something like that. What goes around comes around; don't support a law or view that you yourself would not like to be the victim/target of.
Good argument, though. Finally, an intelligent post on the subject!
-- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
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?
Hmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with Grandfather Bush's financing the nazis before WW2?
This bit is good:
In 1933 shortly after Hitler took power, an agreement reached in Berlin designated Harriman International Co., headed by Averell Harriman's cousin Oliver, the sole agent for exports from Germany to the U.S. A key participant in the negotiations was John Foster Dulles, who with his brother was a lawyer for the Bush and Harriman families. John Foster Dulles later became Secretary of State, and a leader in the Republican Party. His brother Allan became head of the CIA, helped Prescott Bush in his campaign for Senate from Connecticut, and presumably assisted George H.W. Bush when he headed the CIA himself.
What Buckeye Cable had with these folks is a dispute about whether they honored a clause in a contract. One could say that the real principle was the criminal system favored the business against the individual in the case of my relative, and again here. But in that case it really would be a criminal system. If it comes to that, turnabout is fair play, and there is then no ethical limitation on the individual scamming what he or she can from it. It's like stealing from the mob - hazardous to your health but not wrong. This is why it's so important that the system itself operate fairly, and not tilt towards corporations and businesses. Without fairness, the population my be terrorized, but cannot be governed.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton