BBC's iPlayer Chief Pushes Tiered Charging For ISPs

rs232 writes with a link to a story at The Register which begins: "The executive in charge of the BBC iPlayer has suggested that internet users could be charged £10 per month extra on their broadband bill for higher quality streaming." The article suggests (perhaps optimistically) that "after years of selling consumers pipes, not what they carry, [tiered, site-specific pricing] would be tough to pull off."

Comments

Re:Don't most ISPs already have tiered service pla

[jrumney]

In the UK, speed based tiering is all but dead. Now you get whatever speed your line can support (up to 8Mbps or 24Mbps - depending on provider), and the tiering is based on download caps (5Gb, 20Gb, 100Gb, uncapped is typical), after which they either throttle you to dialup speeds, charge you per gigabyte, or in the case of the ISP I am with, do nothing, but if you're over a few months in a row they phone you up and request that you upgrade to the next tier if you want continued service.

Credit card numbers

[neapolitan]

I sincerely hope you were joking:

All VISA cards start with 4.

All Mastercards start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55.

Don't believe me? Take a look in your wallet. :)

Thus, iCONICA, if you just shared the last 12 digits of your Mastercard, you now have cut down the search space of your password to 500 numbers. Moreover, credit card digits have to conform to a checksum (double every other digit + add them all up, must be 0 mod 10.) Thus, I'd estimate we could guess your card within 10 unique numbers, around 100 if VISA. There are ways of getting around the "security digits" and expiration date...

Short story is, don't share your credit card number. Even as a joke.

Re:Credit card numbers

[tlhIngan]

I sincerely hope you were joking:

All VISA cards start with 4.

All Mastercards start with 51, 52, 53, 54, or 55.

Don't believe me? Take a look in your wallet. :)

Thus, iCONICA, if you just shared the last 12 digits of your Mastercard, you now have cut down the search space of your password to 500 numbers. Moreover, credit card digits have to conform to a checksum (double every other digit + add them all up, must be 0 mod 10.) Thus, I'd estimate we could guess your card within 10 unique numbers, around 100 if VISA. There are ways of getting around the "security digits" and expiration date...

Short story is, don't share your credit card number. Even as a joke.

Not only that, but the remainder of the digits in the first group of 4 digits are used to identify the issuing bank. While it's not actually a bulletproof method, knowing where someone is can narrow down the list of valid codes even smaller. Just take the valid numbers, cross-reference them with the list of Visa or Mastercard bank codes, and with the smaller list of numbers, find the banks that are in the local area, and use it knock off a few more numbers (someone in the US will probably not have a UK credit card, for example - they might, but it's extremely rare).

The entropy in the first 4 digits is extremely low.

Anyhow, sharing codes is easy to prevent - just do IP geolocation - non-UK IPs should be restricted from using the codes (and for the most part, IP geolocation is reasonably country accurate), and ensure that one code isn't used from multiple IPs in too often a time, or one code used simultaneously.