Slashdot Mirror
Comcast's War On Infected PCs (Or All Customers)
thadmiller writes "Comcast is launching a trial on Thursday of a new automated service that will warn broadband customers of possible virus infections if the computers are behaving as if they have been compromised by malware. For instance, a significant overnight spike in traffic being sent from a particular Internet Protocol address could signal that a computer is infected with a virus, taking control of the system and using it to send spam as part of a botnet." Update: Jason Livingood
of Comcast's Internet Systems Engineering group sent to Dave Farber's "Interesting People" mailing list a more detailed explanation of what this trial will involve.
As long as they don't act upon this information I don't see any issue with it. I bet most run-of-the-mill users don't know they have the infection and could act upon it if they knew.
Sounds like a win-win for both Comcast and their customers if it's informational only.
Thanks for spelling IP out for us.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
ISPs need to notify their customers. Many customers don't really have email contact from their ISP for various reasons (eg, me!). But injecting a pop-up for notification purposes DOES work.
Yes, the same technology can be used for evil abuses like ad injection, but this is exactly what SHOULD be done.
Test your net with Netalyzr
"The new service will eventually be rolled out in the rest of the country, replacing the phone calls Comcast has been using to notify customers to security problems, Opperman said."
So wait, instead of a personal phone call (which they apparently had been doing before anyway), now it'll be a popup just like the 50 other ones the user sees because he or she's infected with malware to begin with?
Nice.
Even better would be to give me my choice of notification mechanisms:
*pop-up
*email
*sms
*robo-phonecall
*no notification
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sure thing, users NEVER get popup warnings about being infected and promptly ignore them... Unless they are really from the virus itself and are asking for credit card information.
But having to set a cookie on each machine I want to disable their fucking dns redirect doesn't give me much hope. Love the speed.. hate the company!
I think we're slowly but surely seeing the end of what was a really great thing. Open unfiltered internet. In a few years it will be an expanded version of tv with none to little user control about what we want to see. Soon it will be.. we noticed your IP has downloaded X amount of gigs in the last two days. It's impossible that you are doing anything legit and we are going to cancel or reduce your connection speeds for a month if you continue illegally downloading. PS. This may have been a virus and if so please take your pc to an **authorized vendor to clean it.
**Vendor may also scan for copyright infringements on your pc in which case it will be kept at evidence.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
This seems harmless enough to me if Comcast provides an opt-out service (like they do for their DNS-redirection). Someone who's savvy enough to opt-out of this is probably not as likely to get malware-infected, and the rest of the population probably doesn't care very much about the service either way. As for the monitoring aspect, I doubt that Comcast is actually examining customers' traffic any more as a result of this -- they're probably just using their existing heaps of data to implement this.
this proves and solves nothing, its a frogboil tactic they use to get customers familiar with their 'responsibility' on their network. soon it becomes "we kick you off if we find malware." Internet providers are already shovelling this bullshit with port scanning and automated warnings regarding account termination. Treating customers like dirt, redefining what "demand" is in terms of the business model, and shaping the services you supply sure is alot easier than actually scaling infrastructure to meet real-life demand.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't predict a good outcome from this. Comcast will be flooded with incoming tech support calls from customers, half panicked about a virus they don't have and the other half angrily denying a virus they do have. And Comcast will discover that the cost of all those calls far outweighs any benefits they receive from the new system.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
It's really too bad that a cable company doesn't have any other means of communicating with their customers other than the internet. If only some how they could find out where their customers live, which I admit does sound like a startling infringement on their customers' right to privacy, they could convey such a warning with out worrying about web etiquette or spam filters.
-Rick
PS: In case your browser doesn't support them, there are sarcasm tags on the proceeding paragraph.
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Here's a question for the masses here on /.
How would you notify customers that their machine is spewing spam or part of a botnet? Would you continue with the phone calls? Surely paying people to call customers about a virus can't be cheap, and doesn't scale. What is your ISP doing about this?
Even if what comcast is doing isn't the best solution, it's gotta be better than doing nothing, or taking the draconian measures of turning off service until you call in and they tell you, "Sir/Ma'am we turned off your service because your home computer is sending out spam. Once you've fixed it, we'll turn your service back on." I work at a "large database company" and in our labs if a lab machine is detected to be infected, the lab admins will shut of the ethernet drop that server connects to until you fix it.
You mean "trickle UP economics" don't work? Well they did for the rich, the difference between rich and poor has never been greater.
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -