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.
...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.
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)
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]].
I think we can add the Founding Fathers to that as well.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
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
r u mad??? The freakin' FBI in your house coz you uncapped your modem?? Sheesh! :|
"Man, I can't believe office [insert local cop name here] stopped by for going 8 over the speed limit"
And I'm sure he called for lots of backup and confiscated your car, too, right? The problem is not that the law was broken; the problem is that the tactics used were those akin to what would be used against a terrorist, when in reality the suspect was nothing more that a petty thief.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
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 |
they are making examples of these folks. Try modding your x-box, downloading mp3s, violating TOS, cable theft,etc. and maybe you will be the next example.
Certain entities don't like it when you break their rules. In one sense you are not paying for their service, in another sense you are not stopping them from selling it to the neighbors. But, I don't think they would have been caught if they weren't causing some problems by using excessive bandwidth.
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
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!
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]].
These people were stealing a VERY valuable commodity.. bandwidth. For those of you who don't work near the ISP industry, bandwidth is --VERY EXPENSIVE--. $200 per megabit per month is an absolute STEAL (to get that rate, you need to be buying it on the DS3 level). $400 per meg is more realistic on lower levels.
Cable companies simply cannot afford to let people steal this stuff. Quite literally, someone who is uncapping a cable modem and mooching 10 megabits of bandwidth could easily be costing them several thousand dollars a month.
I'm sorry, but I have no sympathy for these people. What they did not only violated their agreement, but it cost someone else a LOT of money. Stealing is stealing, folks. And unlike the arguments that may apply to software piracy, this really does directly affect someone else's pocketbook.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
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...
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
cable modem users who found themselves facing gun wielding FBI agents
Hate to break it to ya, but FBI agents usually wear their sidearms even when off duty, and having them out when raiding a residence is standard (and smart, too - don't want agents being shot while they scramble for a weapon.
The gun wielding thing was added to the original article for sensationalism - the linked article in the original writeup didn't make a single mention of guns.
Sheesh... the outrage here over SOP (on behalf of people clearly guilty of theft of services). Bandwidth costs $$$ and I hope they get in a nice amount of trouble for what they did.
Exactly. Just like if I stole some twinkies from my local store so the police create a dragnet and shut down 12 city blocks.
Its called Excessive Force.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
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
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.
"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
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.
I'm glad the FBI puts so much effort into stopping people from uncapping their cable modems, instead of ohh, say preventing aircraft from flying into buildings.
FLR
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.
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.
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
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.
Not necessary. Anyone with sufficient technical ability can set a CMTS to only accept a few possible QOS configurations. Apparently, no one at Buckeye had the wondrous skill called "literacy" or the amazing object called "the manual". Cheap don't factor into it, these techs are stone stupid.
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.
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
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
yes and no,
Although people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, there is often need to collect the evidence to verify the facts of the case. If you go out and shoot someone, and it gets caught on video tape, they're going to find all your guns, round them up and send them off to some balistics lab for testing. You woun't see me argue with that. It makes sense and part of me sleeps a little better at night knowing that this is the way it is.
A lot of federal laws cover severe things that need elevated levels of attention.
The same would go for someone hacking into a bank. If they catch traffic from your computer hacking into a bank and stealing money, wether or not you're doing it, they need to take your computer. It needs to be analyzed and the people responsibe tried.
The true travisty here is accusing these uncappers of a Federal crime, this is realistically at most a misdemeanor. What the users did was blantantly wrong, I'm sure there's some 'no tamper' clause in one of the service contracts.
I think it would have been far more appropriate to black-list these people from local broadband, maybe the local Cable co work together with the local dsl providers, make it so these people can't get back online. That should be a deterrant enough.
There was absolutely no need to drag the feds in for this, it's little more than publicity stunt and a huge waste of our money.
What laws need more than anything else they can never have, true common sense, if they had that ninety-nine percent of the court systems would be pointless.
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!
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.
They were violating a civil contract, which is different.
I guess you are not a lawyer. While you may have violated a civil contract if you uncapped a modem, the fact is that you ALSO broke criminal laws. For example Texas has several state laws that include penalties of up to 6 months in jail for theft of cable services.
If I walk into a store and shoplift, say $500 worth of merchandise and get caught the consequences can include a felony conviction.
The fact is that what these people did was just as severe a crime. Now maybe the concept of the FBI actually making the arrest bothers some people, but in reality is that any different from the local or state police making the arrest? Probably not, in fact I would expect that the FBI would be a lot more professional about the whole thing.
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.
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
You've obviously never seen a celebrity out on bail for murder and an ordinary citizen denied bail for public intoxication.
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.
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"?
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.
...you have exactly 30 seconds to recap your modem and delete the porn from your hard drive.
stoners have it easy, how long does it take to flush a baggie down the toilet?
whatchoo gonna do when they come for you?
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Well, next time you get caught speeding on the highway, I ask that you be executed on the spot. After all, it's called ILLEGAL.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
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
On another note, I always read that the Iran-Contra affair was about selling *weapons*, not drugs.
It was about selling drugs to get the money to buy the guns to trade to the Iranians for the return of our hostages. It was illegal to give Iran military weapons. Any government department that has any legal money whatsoever gets that money from Congress since that is one of the major roles of Congress. So since they were not authorized to give weapons to those countries, they had to come up with another source of income. So they imported and sold large amounts of cocaine to fund their illegal operation. This, in a nutshell, is what happened.