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Washington Wants 10,000 Web Surfers
crimeandpunishment writes "This one sounds too good to be true: surf the Web, and you'll be helping the government. The FCC is looking for 10,000 volunteers to take part in a study to determine if broadband providers are really providing Internet connections that are as fast as advertised. The broad look at broadband will involve special equipment installed in homes across the country to measure Internet connections and compare them to advertised speeds." Here's where to go to apply.
Hide the fileboxes kiddies!
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
If you get selected, can you call up your ISP and give them a head's up? Maybe you could get a ... special price for a big upgrade in speed.
More seriously, since my only realistic option to get decent Internet speed is Verizon Fios, and they've basically given up on rolling that out, I'm basically screwed for at least another few years. Serves me right for being a loyal Verizon customer for over a decade, my fault.
Comment of the year
This thing doesn't look at your surfing habits, and it's not available to those who download more than 30GB/month, which probably excludes many Slashdotters.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's a trap! Are we actually supposed to believe that even if they *do* find foul play, the ISP's are actually going to get punished with any efficacy?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
In your hearts, you know it to be true.
Are you sure this isn't an effort by the *IAA crowd to 'happen upon' illegal file sharing or other such frowned upon activities?
;-)
Call me stupid, paranoid or even bat-shit crazy, but I don't want the government (or *IAA) installing a device that my "bandwidth" goes through. If they want that level of access let them get a warrant
Why would I help the government? Are they going to pay me? If not, it's hardly "too good to be true", more like doing their work for them.
Adverse selection anyone?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
surely the equipment or its traffic (even just the destination ip or range, if data is encrypted) will give away its presence on the provider's network. then the provider(s) will make sure that those particular customers get at least what's advertised, if not a little more, so they like more like santa instead of the grinch.
So now helping the government = good. Wow. What country do you live in?
Argh! for the 8^56th time!
- "Washington" is a US State founded in 1889.
- "Washington D.C." is the Capital of the United States.
This article was obviously not written by anyone on the west coast.
I care about speed, but I also care about transfer caps. Note that I'm not saying we should legislate this (I'm about to pay for "business class" service without a cap), but I'm saying 250 GB a month doesn't cut it for me. I transfer large disk images (server backups, even compressed, they're big) several times per month , move virtual machine images around on a routine basis, use streaming video services in lieu of television, streaming audio on top of that, etc. The list goes on, and my #1 concern isn't the transfer speed anymore. It's the transfer cap.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I'm on DSL and I never hit my paid for maximum. More or less I expected never to actually reach this rate because it was stated up front this was a theoretical maximum and it is what it is. (Read, haha sucker.)
The 20% less then advertised speed I can actually live with. It's the latency that I find horrendous. In addition their hideous network of latency hell I also get interleaving. I love a little boost of 32ms added to an already slow and hoppy network.
Well it is unfortunately this or some awful awful ISP that has changed it's name to hide from the bad reviews.
On the bright side there is a new WiMax provider in the area and it may be a promising alternative.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
it sais to promise not to unplug your modem. thats much to hard, if my look at mine funny it falls over and the power cord falls ou
..."is looking for 10,000 volunteers" to monitor for all kinds of stuff.
why cant the government run a few bandwidth meter tests to decide that?
I don't...
Comcast frequently throttles connections. Aside from that, I am supposed to be at 22 Mbit per sec. It usually idles around 17 18 in tests and drops to 8-12 about 30 minutes into large downloads.
That is definitely not what is advertised.
If this helps the government come down on those practices then great.
But yeah... I'm not signing up...
And we're supposed to trust the government on this why?
Another version of Big Brother?
There's no way in hell that I would voluntarily give the feds unfettered access to my web surfing logs. I'm a pretty innocent guy, but imagine the expansion of this program if it "succeeds".
Who hasn't heard of speakeasy.net?
Sounds like Bill Gates is ready for another MS/AOL email giveaway! Yippee!
I dunno, I'm not sure I feel safe with all of my web traffic going through a little box, no matter who it's offered by. I like my privacy, and having it go through Comcast is bad enough.
How about a bunch of ACORN volunteers bitching about poor service so the Government (e.g. YOU) need to step in and shovel money at yet another "problem"...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What's so good about this? Getting a monitored net connection and a few bucks that will make NO difference to your life; and in the bargain throwing away your privacy? And trusting people who should never be trusted? Did you ever hear of "Never talk to the police?"
Yeah about that... Actually it's completely what's advertised, and what's more it isn't even in any fine print: it's in the FAQ: ...customers' accounts must exceed a certain percentage of their upstream or downstream (both currently set at 70%) bandwidth for longer than a certain period of time, currently set at fifteen minutes.
Emphasis mine.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
http://www.testmyisp.com/
How many surfers does it take jump start SKYNET?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
How does this affect my security and privacy? The unit operates as a normal router and exposes absolutely no services to the Internet. It's similar to installing a print server or a NAS on to your home network - it's a cut down device that serves a very specific purpose. We should point out that assuming the unit is installed as per the instructions, all network traffic will be flowing through it. However, the unit simply acts as a standard switch or standard router and does not look at any of the packets flowing across your network. It only monitors traffic volumes for the purposes of deciding when to run (or not to run!) the tests and to measure consumption. Testing information uploaded from the unit to our servers contains no information about you whatsoever. Furthermore, all such communications are encrypted, ensuring that results cannot be tampered with en-route. Your individual unit's test results will be available to you alone. Your unit's results will also be aggregated with others from the same ISP to form a larger average set of results that can be viewed publicly. We have absolutely no intention of doing anything that may adversely affect your privacy or security. If you have any concerns please feel free to contact us to discuss them. SamKnows, on behalf of the FCC, is collecting and storing broadband performance information, including various personally identifiable information (PII) such as the street addresses, email addresses, online usage patterns, and broadband performance information, from those individuals who are participating voluntarily in this test. SamKnows will not release, disclose to the public, or share any PII with any outside entities, including the FCC, except as is consistent with the Privacy Act of 1974, Public Law 93579 (5 U.S.C. 552a(b)(5)). For more information, see the SamKnows privacy policy. The broadband performance information that is made available to the public, including the FCC, will be in an aggregated form and with all PII removed, in compliance with subsection (b)(5) of the Privacy Act of 1974, as amended (5 U.S.C. 552a), and the SamKnows privacy policy. The broadband performance information that is made available to the public, including the FCC, will be in an aggregated form and with all PII removed, in compliance with subsection (b)(5) of the SamKnows privacy policy. The FCC is soliciting this information under authority of the Broadband Data Improvement Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-385, Stat 4096 103(c)(1); American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA), Pub. L. No. 111-5, 123 Stat 115 (2009); and Section 154(i) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended.
https://www.testmyisp.com/faq.html If you consider this flaimbait, I don't care. But for once, stop being paranoid and actually take the chance to help out. And before anyone asks, yes I am new here.
I don't claim to be a hard-core network tech, but it seems that this device is just a router/gateway, which you could presumably just attach to your existing router, rather than replace it. This way, you wouldn't be passing your traffic through it, and it presumably wouldn't be able to see anything beyond what your router decides to route in its direction, and it could still perform its tests.
Let's assume that there are bandwidth shenanigans going on. What do you think is going to happen here?
1) FCC sends out boxes
2) ISPs put a high bounty on finding a box-recipient to cooperate with their engineers for testing
3) ISPs use what they learn to identify every box-recipient via the boxes' reporting data back to the central server
4) All box-recipients get double speed broadband, to the detriment of everyone else.
When the plan is that obvious, it really makes you question the FCC that much more in this. What do they honestly expect to happen? And wait, doesn't the government already have the capability to monitor the Internet at a much more fundamental, back-bone-esque level? Isn't there some way they could measure this from there?
But then, why would they send the boxes out, if they could just monitor our traffic from that same level?
When you realize that there is NO WAY the ISPs wouldn't cheat the distributed-box system if they were already cheating on bandwidth, this whole thing really makes no sense at all.
Do the companies provide as much speed as they advertise? Umm... no, not at all. I'm lucky to get my Charter Cable connection to work at all between midnight and 4am. I usually lose my connection 4-5 times daily (during the normal day, not the 12am to 4am). It is a POS but my only option for high speed. I have had 15-20 techs out at different times, and the last one finally admitted "no one gets the full speed" that is advertised. After talking to many of my "less tech savvy" neighbors I found out they think that the internet just goes out like that. And conveniently enough my internet connection just hates Hulu or any other video streaming site. I would be very surprised if anyone has a different experience with Charter (I love them!)...
Member of American Sarcasm Society - Motto: "Like we need your help!"
microsoft scam email
which still does the rounds. classic stuff.
Waiting for the other shoe to...
These folks - http://www.samknows.com/ - do a similar thing in the UK conencted to ofcom (similar body to FCC), and a look at the website indicates it actually probably is them.
Well this is pritty simple in the UK for any BT based isp. They advertise up to 8mbit or up to 24mbit for adsl 1 / 2+. However BT have an ip profile which is always slightly lower that the archives dsl sync rate. This is the maximum data rate that will be delivered across the BT atm cloud. Therefore it is impossible to actually achieve the advertised speed using anything that is based on the BT 20cn and BT 21cn types of connections. Why do they need volunteers when "technically" is it impossible to work?
From what I understand, the word "volunteer" implies that no payment is involved. How exactly is this "too good to be true?" If the government wants to collect bandwidth statistics of people jerking off on the web all day, can't they just survey their own employees?
I aborted my run in the former instance, because the measurement saw only a high burst speed that immediate degraded to piddling one, well below the supposed high rate being advertised. Little different this time, register and run with no real point to communicate. I will fore go this opportunity to help buttress spurious statistics in support of the status quo.
We won't trust the monitoring box until we can get our hands on one and monitor it for untoward behaviour.
Who watches the watchers of the Internet? The geeks do.
I'd definitely go with the random data. Only a pirates use Linux so you'd be determined guilty right from the start!
I think it would be fun to start naming Ubuntu releases after the latest movies. Then we could have 'Avatar', 'Hurtlocker', 'Toystory3' etc
Debian releases are already named after Toy Story characters. But then perhaps we could tie each Ubuntu release in with some well-known cartoon character: 4.10 was Pumbaa, 5.04 was Sonic, 7.04 was Bambi, 9.10 was Blinky Bill...
Comcast is going to get into some deep doodoo on this one. They advertise a speed, but don't make it readily apparent that you only really get that speed for a short burst of time, and then the connection falls back to some very slow speed.
Verizon Fios, on the other hand, advertises a speed, and at least for me, that's what I get, all the time - and sometimes a bit more.
I pay something like $38 for my 5/20, and I get 5/20 very reliabily. Comcast sells 3/16 for $65 in my area, and it's only 3/16 for the first 5MB or so of traffic, then it falls back to 768k/3.
Extremely-High-Def-Mohamed-Picture--you-can-see-his-hair-follicles!!!11!.iso
Is Ali (2001) on Blu-ray yet?
I've been with a few different ones and never get what I'm paying for. Bandwidth Speed tests don't prove very much unless you're expanding your testing to check points of origins of requests back to requestor. If two different providers take different paths, then the comparisons are poor. If I use 3 providers at the same time to access the same info from the same point of orgin and they take the same path, then I can provide a more accurate picture of what the results are. But as I understand it, the internet is designed such that if one path is not available, the request will look for an available path until it either finds one or not.
I want to see this test done, not because I want the FCC to have a case to make to gain control, but to help show what all of us are already aware of, that internet providers do not live up to their service agreements.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
account.
My given captcha was 'fishy company'. True.
You think the FCC didn't already have consultants who considered this possibility? It seems like there would be a variety of ways to defeat this sort of 'gaming' of the system.
Regardless, this is the sort of thing that would have been unthinkable just two years ago. Glad to see the FCC is working on improving the Googles. The United States has fallen behind many other countries in the metrics of delivery of internet access (speed, price, access). It is a competitive advantage for the U.S. to have it widely available, cheap and fast.
Best regards.
In for three!
probably refurbs. :(
No.
Thanks for your time, glad to inform.
I'm not even in your country and I know, THIS CAME WAY TOO LATE.
Please also check out VOIP and sharing over a home network, various ISPs turn these features on and off at will when they feel threatened or just hostile.