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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.
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)
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
"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 |
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!
Ah well, so much for the right not to be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
Seriously...
" I don't know maybe I sound juvenile but punishment for a virtual crime such as this seems like a total overkill..."
I dunno man...if that's juvenille, than I don't know if a word exists for what passes for conversation here sometimes....
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'
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.
WTF are you getting those numbers? 2.5Mbps cable line here in NS, Canada is $40CND/month ($25US). Perhaps the real problem is that the people with the keys to the onramp are being a little to stingy in the US?
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
Two words for you. <b>Shared Bandwidth</b>. If bandwidth was *really* that expensive, you wouldn't see 3MBit DSL connections for $70 CDN/month, including the modem rental.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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."
This is yet another example of how far out of control the FBI has become. This is an abuse of power as frightening as Ruby Ridge or Waco. More so - more so, even. At least in Ruby Ridge and Waco there was at least a pretense that the subjects were armed and potentially violent. These people were just ordinary people working in their homes. It's not like they were distributing child porn, or soliciting 13 year old girls to have sex, or stealing credit card information. They were, in effect, eating "too much" at what was advertised as an all-you-can-eat buffet. The FBI has no business whatsoever being involved here. At most, Buckeye should have sued these people in civil court for breach of contract. Unfortunately for all of us, the cable companies bought themselves laws which basically makes the police their contract enforcement agency.
Shit like this just reinforces my belief that our legal system is broken beyond repair.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Admit to snooping in the company books. Clever. Kind of illegal in many jurisdictions.
Admit to theft. Also clever. Very illegal, just about everywhere.
Post with a link to a website with pictures of your home and pets. Unbelievably clever. (I think it's cute that you ask people to hire you on the web page, by the way.)
Yes indeed, it's a shame that the FBI has trouble finding criminal masterminds like you.
~Idarubicin
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.
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.