Slashdot Mirror
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."
feels great!
Yeah, that'll hurt 'em. They'll go down in flames just like Blockbuster did when they drove out all their unprofitable customers.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
as Doctor who?
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
Thats nice if there is more than 1 broadband option where you live.
I wonder if there will be a day when net neutrality has been usurped, despite all the protests, and we've come to accept as the status quo. And then, all of a sudden, another *unconscionable* development of corporate greed takes place, in which we have the same uproar, and the same eventual defeat. Can anyone think of examples in the past where has taken place? I'm not coming up with anything that passes a basic coherency test, but this has to be some cycle we go through on a regular basis. Do these things ever lead to positive outcomes, or are we just the man in front of the tank?
Perhaps this is not such a bad thing, it may bring more attention to the issue than there is currently. Maybe if some people start to experience and understand what the lack of net-neutrality actually causes, they will be more likely to be more involved in ensuring net-neutrality is enforced.
However, I must admit that if net-neutrality is lost, it may be impossible to re-gain--much like public health-care in the US will be next-to-impossible to get.
What consumers need are more consumer lobby groups. I am certainly very willing to pay an extra 1% tax just to get the benefit of such a lobby group. Oh, wait, we are already paying for the government, why not get them to do something?...oh...right...never mind.
Huh? [devShell.org]
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.
----
Don't know, sounds like someone I'd care about...
I dont have a virgin phone service. A billing "discrepancy" from last year, an offer I bartered for, was fixed last month with Virgin claiming to shoulder the costs. What actually happened is they added the XL phone package to my discounted XL TV + XL Broadband offer. I have been a customer for 18 months, and I bartered for my previous deal of £41.50/pm only to have them add the Phone package without informing me, and charge me £70.
I rang to cancel and let them know I intended to move to sky and and was offered my old £41.50 offer at a no-contract rate of £49pm (I'm not sure where I'll be living in 3 months, so I can't get a contract). Problem fixed, or so I believe. The debt collection team phone me this morning to inform me my direct debit had bounced - and it would do if it was in excess of £50 as the account is for bills only, and is credited with a standing order for the appropriate amount each month.
It transpires (I guessed it instantly), that after billing me £70 and changing it back to the negotiated rate of £49, they discounted next months direct debit by £20, so that the net 2 month charge would be equal to my negotiated rate over 2 months.
But! That doesn't mean I can pay £70 in one month for a problem they have caused, because I subject to cash flow issues. To make things worst, I have been charged by my bank for the defaulting direct debit, wasted £15 on the phone last time I called, and £10 today.
Today was awful! I was called this morning by the debt collection team who would not let me pay £49 or change my direct debit, until I settled the £70 mistake, even tho it was obvious the real amount was £49 based on the remedied discount applied to the next bill. I'm forced to pay for their mistake!?! They told me there was nothing they could do, and that I had to phone them back and fixed the issue. I got through to India twice and was told the same thing, only that the team that called me was the team that dealt with it. In the end I gave up. I asked to be put through to the cancellation team.
The cancellation team were great. The credit was applied to this month, and my outstanding balance returned to what I should pay/can pay. I've praised VM in the past, and will continue to do so in the future - but only their cancellation team, as they're the only ones with the power to resolve your problems.
I am contemplating billing VM for the saga cost me £20 in phone calls (I have a mobile phone, and no one would phone me!), and the bounced direct debit penalty stemming from their inability to resolve the problem when I called them and they called me.
Matt
Guess I had better educate myself about why we need net neutrality...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
www.purevolume.com/martyd
Meh. Can't hold a job. Can't get a degree. I may or may not be kidding about this.
That really is the issue here. You're never, ever going to get enough people to dump an individual ISP over this sort of thing to make their brass go, "Whoa! We'd better not do that!". The issue is simply too involved for the 'average' net user to really understand well enough to care about.
Some things require legislative solutions, and this is clearly one of those things. While I'm not saying that users of Virgin Media *shouldn't* change providers, it should be recognized that it's nothing but a symbolic step. If you really want to see this sort of nonsense avoided, contributing to the EFF might be a far better use of money.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I was duped by my ISP into saving the rainforest by switching over to paperless billing so I do all transactions electronically.
I've rethought this and will once again deal with paper so that I can receive the satisfaction of "tearing up" any documents that I deem unsatisfactory.
If you can't convince enough customers to switch providers, perhaps that is a sign that the issue is not as dire as you think.
I'm always annoyed when people jump straight to the legislative "solution". Get the word out, start web sites, educate people. If the populace is ignorant about the problem then remove their ignorance.
These companies love making money above everything else. There are still enough choices left that you can make them realize that the way to make money is to be a good citizen. If they all band together to be evil together then it's time to start looking at legislation, but until that time you should at least try to fight them through other means.
And I should note that if the general public doesn't care about your issue then your chances of getting laws passed about it are slim to nil anyway, so the same techniques serve both purposes.
Of course if your purpose is just to whine on slashdot about how Something Must Be Done then you don't need any popular support at all.
Why do I care? Am I supposed to be impressed that submitter is "considering stopping [his] Virgin Mobile service in protest"? On my way to work today, I considered pushing a fisherman off the bridge so that I could giggle whilst watching him splash about in the water -- it's a far cry from doing it.
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.
That's what she said!
I doubt you have a contract with Boing Boing agreeing that they will not censor reader comments, and I doubt that you are paying them all that much.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Is this a case of Wikipedia vandalism, or does his insatiable attention-whoring extend to ruining his poor daughter's life?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Public apathy does not mean that an issue isn't worth fighting for. Fortunately, we're set up as a republic for just such an emergency.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"..Greenpeace campaigner as a child. "
That's not a plus. Greenpeace puts peoples lives at stake, and lies to bully large corporation. Green Peace lost any vestige of what it was around 1980.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Think for a moment how incredibly inefficient what you are proposing is. Every single time a company does something stupid that's detrimental to the rest of us we have to organize a boycott and start educating everyone else? No thanks.
We have government to make this process easier. It makes laws and it enforces them. We elect people run it for us. It collects taxes to finance itself. Perfect? Hell no. But government is certainly a of a lot better and reliable than having everybody trying to police everybody else. I don't know about you, but I prefer living in an advanced modern society instead of a cave.
So, now, go out and educate your law maker as to why they need to pass a net neutrality law and we won't have to revisit this issue again.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
How about instead of ranting and talking about boycotts, he and his gang of tech-hippies start some sort of movement where they either flat out block requests from certain ISPs or at least throw up a "Here's our complaint about this ISP and why you should be using them" interstitial? That's the sort of thing that gets people to sit up and take notice.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
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.
excuse me, this aint gonna be a smooth, politically correct post. im gonna flat out say what im feeling and thinking, as a customer.
you invent something new, you build an entire telecommunications infrastructure, hell, even a new medium, a way of life (internet) over it, it becomes a big success, and after a while a few FUCKTARDS comes up and and try to scuttle the CORE principle that made that big success for their personal greedy agenda. and furthermore, there comes a total PRICK, so PRICKY that he harbors the courage to SINGLE HANDEDLY trash and abolish those principles (net neutrality) in lieu of ENTIRE internet, internet tradition, all functioning services, companies and agreements up to date, in lieu of the LAW, in lieu of what they promised their customers, and anything.
im not a violent person. im a hippie in concept even. has history as my hobby and whatnot, and like classical music. but even i know that such people, who are that selfish and greedy enough to commit bastardizations like these in lieu of EVERYthing, deserve one single response : a strong, sharp kick in the middle of their face. literally.
Read radical news here
I think it's about time some major websites made an agreement to block all traffic from any ISP that distinguishes based on website. A deterrent besides "we'll tell our family and friends not to use Virgin" is something we really need. Normal people won't stick with an ISP that can't reach youtube.
[I don't actually know the technical details of how or if this can be done]
Err, no. Tiered pricing isn't like renting a better storefront. It's like having to pay the owners of the roads outside the houses of your customers so that they won't slow down your customers' cars whenever they try to drive to your store.
I can understand paying my ISP for a better connection for my server. But isn't it a bit perverse to have to then pay random other ISPs so that my customers are able to see the benefit of that better connection?
He wears a red cape and blogs from a high-altitude balloon.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
We've gone from the Electronic Frontier to a bunch of company towns run by greedy bastards and populated by idjiots who are happy as long as their YouTube videos play OK.
Sounds a lot like the historical Western Frontier.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yeah this was actually the one examples that came to mind while I was writing the original post. I couldn't formalize it well enough to post it. I was thinking about the Google bid for the 700mhz spectrum. Seriously, a *corporation* had to fight to keep the bandwidth open by guarunteeing to pay billions of dollars for that "privilege?" When the governement is trying to make money and business is watch-dogging itself then I'm not sure what we've come to. Seems like doing The Right Thing takes a bunch of economic clought these days.
Allow me to continue with your storefront analogy.
You pay rent on your storefront, and I have to ride the bus to get there. We both pay depending on what we want.
You want more people in your store at a time, you pay more rent.
I want to be able to get there faster, I hire a taxi instead.
Where the problem lies is that now the bus/taxi companies want to charge you, the store owner, for the bus/taxi to stop at your shop.
If you don't pay, your customers will have to walk the last 1/2 mile, despite the fact that your shop is on the main road, and all traffic goes right past you.
In fact, it's not a far stretch to imagine the taxi driver suggesting alternate destinations.
Me: Take me to the local grocery store.
Driver: You're going shopping? Why don't I drop you at Walmart, It's 20 minutes faster.
Me: No it isn't, walmart is in the next town.
Driver: Yeah, But we have a contract with them, we drive everyone there first.
This isn't capitalism anymore, it's extortion.
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.
After the unreliable Virgin trains, it has to be his dumbest move. What next? Virgin logos on anti-personnel mines and cluster bomblets?
Perhaps the Bearded Demon himself could redeem himself by coming out and publicly supporting net neutrality.
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.
Yeah, I'll admit. That was the first time I heard about him. And that's still the only thing I had heard about him, until this story.
My loss, I'm sure, but I can only be influenced by so many bloggers. The list is finite, and tearing up a contract isn't going to do it for me. Maybe if he told me to burn my pants. He might want to try that one.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
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.
Who wants to grow up normal? What sane parent would inflict normality on their children?
Infuriate left and right
Is this a case of Wikipedia vandalism, or does his insatiable attention-whoring extend to ruining his poor daughter's life? If I ever had a daughter, I would name her Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fana Bobesca III but I'm not sure if it's because I like Animaniacs or hate children.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Look, I don't want to piss you off or anything, and I'm sure Cory is smart, but... what exactly has he done to prove it? I'm really not trying to be facetious.
He dropped out of four universities. He's a blogger. He writes science fiction about as well as Alan Dean Foster. Which is to say, mediocre science fiction. He started Boing Boing. He occasionally writes non fiction articles.
Am I missing something? Cure for cancer, grand unified theory, anything?
I'm sure Cory is both nice and smart, but his importance to a certain set of geeks seems blown way out of proportion to his actual accomplishments.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As an American who hasn't been extremely well-exposed to English pop culture, I cannot say with certainty what the term "wanker" means, but there's a feeling deep inside of me that Cory Doctorow is exactly the person the term was created to describe. He and several more or less pretentious bloggers run the Boing Boing blog, each with their own running obsession--Disney, Tibet, kitsch, Internet memes, etc. This is a spot-on parody of him.
Dude, just look at his glasses. Look at all of the smart people's names he saddled his kid with. Can't you see that he's full of innovation and smart thoughts?
First, I like Alan Dean Foster. I was actually being charitable to Cory comparing him to Foster. Foster is a talented word smith with a good sense of pacing and dramatic tension. But he writes fairly pedestrian space opera.
Cory writes about some fairly interesting ideas, but they aren't really that original. And he doesn't know how to flesh them out into an interesting plot. It's almost as if they aren't really his ideas, and he didn't listen that carefully when they were being explained to him. His sense of pacing is a bit off, and his characterizations are flat. Especially women, who come off as caricatures.
I haven't had anything published, but I've read over two thousand speculative fiction books and stories. I've discussed the genre quite extensively. I'm objective enough to recognize a good author even if I don't like their style or subject. I think Cory is a halfway decent author, and I can actually finish his books without throwing them across the room in disgust. If there's no new Bear, Benford, Banks, Baxter, Egan, Gaiman, Gibson, Hamilton, Mieville, Pratchett, Robinson, Rucker, Simmons, or Vinge around, I might consider reading something he wrote.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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