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Doctorow Tears Up ISP Contract Over Net Neutrality
Burz writes "As a reaction to Virgin Media CEO's promise to violate the concept of net neutrality, Cory Doctorow is declaring his ISP contract void, canceling the service, and calling on other Virgin customers to do the same. He isn't alone. Charlie Stross counts the ways the gang that became Virgin Media is trashing Sir Richard's brand. Myself, I am thinking of stopping my Virgin Mobile service in protest."
Thats nice if there is more than 1 broadband option where you live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers, Doctorow was raised in an activist household, working in the nuclear disarmament movement and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative on Big Rideau Lake in Ontario, helping to run a conference center devoted to peace and social justice education and activist training. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, a free school in Toronto, and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree.
Doctorow moved to Los Angeles, California in mid-2006 from London, England, where he had worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to set up the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time in January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow spent the 2006-2007 academic year teaching as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, despite not holding any academic degree. He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
Doctorow's daughter with Alice Taylor, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, was born on 3 February 2008.
Cory's parents have suggested that he is related to author E.L. Doctorow, but E.L. Doctorow himself could not confirm or deny the family connection.
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Don't know, sounds like someone I'd care about...
Guess I had better educate myself about why we need net neutrality...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Article 82 - abuse of a dominant position.
A82 is directly enforceable in the national courts. VM has a dominant position in the UK broadband market - this is an automatic presumption in the cable market as their share is 100%, and, based on the structure of the UK backbone-network, a reasonable and fair assumption regarding broadband in general.
they are acting in a manor that can only be said to be taking unfair advantage of their position to the detriment of the broadband market in general - and they are doing this independently of us the consumer: ie: we get this crap and there is absolutely nothing we can do.
whilst having a dominant market share, and being in a monopolist position is _not_ illegal - abusing this position is. VM are starting a consumer/isp war that the consumers cannot win. they are abusing the technological development of the UK's broadband system by prejudicing our use in a way we cannot avoid. an utterly artificial creation.
as VM own the cable network, there is no cross elastic supply. the consumer is lacked into contracts which generally fall foul of elastic demand the moment they abuse their position. the good news is that no VM customer is bound to their unfair contracts that stifle the advancement of uk broadband - be it traffic shaping or whatnot.
vote with your wallets - sign up to another ISP!
It's not actually Branson's company, he just (foolishly) licensed the brand to NTL Telewest so they could use it.
Blockbuster isn't doing so great
Pick another company next time
Unfortunately, it's not vandalism. (sorry, posted this under the wrong comment earlier...then Slashdot wouldn't let me post a reply to your comment because the comment ID wasn't found...)
That's the most legitimate reason to censor blog comments. Why, was there some rude comment you really wanted to post?
I've never read his blog, by the way.
Most Mac owners do, however, know the difference between "populous" and "populace." Helpful tip: when you're trying to blast another group of people for being fools and idiots, make sure the barrel of the gun you're firing is pointed away from your own foot.
He wears a red cape and blogs from a high-altitude balloon.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
being one and the same company, have always been bastards. Here's my story.
/per day/ for the period my account was in the red;
/their/ mistake or take it up with my bank. Or face charges of attempted theft.
Not so long ago, I had an 8MBit account and two phone lines with them. £48/mo. Cool. Fine. Everything was hunky-dory, until one week before Christmas and two weeks before my paycheque landed. They applied their Direct Debit THREE WEEKS EARLY. Resulting in;
DD bounce, there being no funds to cover it;
Bank charging £25
The bank also charged me £30 for bouncing the DD;
ntl, as it was then, also tried charging me £30 for "administration costs" to cover the fact that their attempted theft was thwarted. A fact I made clear during a legal planning meeting at which not only the bank representative (the area manager) and the ntl rep (who just happened to sit on the Board) were present.
The settlement went as follows:
ntl were to dismiss the charges. The bank were to refer the charges made on my account to ntl. ntl had to pick up the tab for
In all that, not a single fucking apology from ntl for potentially fucking up Christmas with my family. Luckily my bank manager was a kind soul who advanced me enough cash to get over the three weeks until I got paid.
That was that, or so I thought.
Ten months later, my (now 10MBit) cable and two phone lines suddenly stopped working. Nothing electrical was wrong with them, so I called tech support. They claimed nothing wrong their end. After several weeks of trying to get this sorted out, during which time I informed VM in writing that they were not getitng any payments until the service was restored, I got a letter and statement from VM billing me for the princely sum of £166. A week later it was £260. A week after that it was back to £133.
I called VM and demanded to know what the balance in fact, was. They told me £133, which I duly paid at the bank. After five working days, I called them and asked where my service was. They told me the revised bill was now £166. Yes, they had received the £133, yet they had reneged on their promise to restore the service after payment was received. I politely told them to swivel on my suckstick and sent them a paper bill for the insane amount of money I'd blown in both time and in mobile tariffs calling them to get ripped off, and for the £133 back. I'm still waiting for my fucking cheque.
So yes, two years I've been VM-free, and I don't miss the ripoff bastards one bit. They can rot in audit hell for all I care, and to any shareholders reading this - may your portfolios be eaten by starving termites.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Except that what Virgin wants isn't tiered pricing. I look at net neutrality analogously to UPS delivery. UPS doesn't care who you are, or who you're shipping to, or what (modulo hazardous materials) you're shipping. They care about basically two things and two things only: how big/heavy your package is, and how far you're shipping it. If you and I both go in to the same UPS office to ship the same package to two recipients in the same city, UPS will charge us both the same price. Sure I'll pay more if I pick overnight shipping and you pick standard ground, but if I pick the same shipping as you I won't get nicked for more.
What Virgin wants, though, isn't anything analogous. Suppose the situation is that I'm buying mail-order, and as the customer I've paid the shipping charge for overnight delivery. What Virgin wants is to go to the merchant and go "We know your customer paid for overnight shipping. But if you, Mr. Merchant, don't cross our palm with some extra money on top of that, we won't deliver the package overnight. Oh, and don't think you can just stop offering overnight shipping, because if you ship standard we'll slow that down too unless you pay us.". This is known as "a kickback", and in every other field it gets you in legal trouble. For my money, I'm not willing to do business with someone who's demanding kickbacks.
Most of us geeks would have no problem with Virgin charging their customers tiered pricing based on how much those customers used. We'd probably take our business somewhere that offered a better deal, but Virgin would at least be being honest. Virgin, though, seems to want to extort kickbacks from people who aren't it's customers so that they don't have to charge their customers based on usage. Sorry, but no.
He's a (fairly) well-known blogger and Science Fiction author who has been a big proponent of Creative Commons and Copyright reform. He was the first to release a novel under CC, according to Wikipedia.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
"Am I missing something? Cure for cancer, grand unified theory, anything?"
How about horrendous Disney fanfic?
I'm not kidding.
He started Boing Boing.
Doctorow didn't even start Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair did. He wasn't even on board when it went from a 'zine to a web site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing#History
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Verizon, for one, is known to have special firmware in many of their phones, with various things turned on, off, added, removed, or broken. This doesn't mean they "make their own phones," but it's a more severe issue than carrier lock by itself.
Kid-proof tablet..
You can easily obtain VM cable TV/BB without paying the fuckers a penny.
Step 1: Obtain an NTL 250 Modem such as this one: (check on ebay.co.uk, the fucking autowrap won't let me post a link even if i make it 5 lines long ffs... they go for about £20
Step 2: Not all modems are flashed, so you will have to flash the modem with the INFINITY firmware.
This will lock your modem to the maximum config file (20mbps).
Read the forums here for info on how to do that.
http://forums.digitalworldz.co.uk/forumdisplay.php?f=142
You will have to sign up for a free account.
Step 3: Sniff a new MAC address. You will need a working VM cable connection do to this, and a program. There are links and tutorials on the forum above. You need to change the MAC address on the pirated modem so it appears the connection is coming from the local area and not a MAC address registered 100 miles away.
Step 4: telnet in and change the MAC address to the new one. also change the default telnet u/p or VM will login remotely and brick it, (as in really brick it, not slashdot brick it), ou'll need to replace a chip to fix it
Step 5: Plug your modem into any coax. as long as it's live (i.e. connected to the green box) it will work. You don't need to have a current subscription with them! and the fuckers have no idea who you are as nothing is registered with them apart from the MAC.
It might be a good idea to spoof the MAC address of your router/NIC though incase they do investigate.
It's a good idea to read tutorials and get familiar before you go out and do this btw.
oh, and if VM do knock at your door, just tell them to fuck off, they're not the police.
NOTE - You can also pirate TV and get all the channels for free, with devices like the Dreambox 500c and Eurovox. Flash these with the Digitalworldz image via FTP (they have an Ethernet port), do a scan, and hey, all the channels! use a splitter to use the same coax feed.
FUCK VM! they treat their employees like shit, and spend more money on 1 advertising campaign than they spend on making their service actually work. First peak time capping, then phorm, now this.
Branson, I know you only own 10% of VM and it's still basically NTL, but fuck you.
120 characters should be enough for anybody