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EFF Slams Google Fiber For Banning Servers On Its Network
MojoKid writes "Anyone who has tried to host their own website from home likely knows all-too-well the hassles that ISPs can cause. Simply put, ISPs generally don't want you to do that, preferring you to move up to a business package (aka: more expensive). Not surprisingly, the EFF doesn't like these rules, which seem to exist only to upsell you a product. The problem, though, is that all ISPs are deliberately vague about what qualifies as a 'server.' Admittedly, when I hear the word 'server,' I think of a Web server, one that delivers a webpage when accessed. The issue is that servers exist in many different forms, so to target specific servers 'just because' is ridiculous (and really, it is). Torrent clients, for example, act as servers (and clients), sometimes resulting in a hundred or more connections being established between you and available peers. With a large number of connections like that being allowed, why would a Web server be classified any different? Those who torrent a lot are very likely to be using more ISP resources than those running websites from their home — yet for some reason, ISPs force you into a bigger package when that's the kind of server you want to run. We'll have to wait and see if EFF's movement will cause any ISP to change. Of all of them, you'd think it would have been Google to finally shake things up."
Who cares if it's Torrents or running your own porn site. Don't block it. Be the non-evil medium of transport, not another Comcrap.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
"Of all of them, you'd think it would have been Google to finally shake things up"
Maybe when the do no evil line seemed to ring true, now they seem nearly as evil as the rest around.
Does Google offer a business package? If so what is the cost?
Yes, running a server from a home ISP is great for people to learn technology, sparks creativity, and is great for those of us who are IT focused. On the other hand, imagine the security nightmare a network like Google Fiber could become with 1gb uplinks and tons of rogue apps and sites infected by malware, bots, etc. There are a lot of IT admins not taking security seriously and if you couple that with inexperienced home admins the threat is real. I'm not taking a stance on this issue saying yes or no, but there would have to be tight controls on the network in order for this to work effectively - hence one of the reasons Google may be reluctant to support it.
p.
Just sayin'. I've run three websites out of my garage for years. The router provided by the ISP has dyndns support built in. A little tricky to set up, and then I forgot about it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A server is something that serves data. If it responds to a request for data, that makes it a server.
Does your IP address have ports mapped open for games or other products? It is a server!
Does your IP address respond to ping requests? It is a server!
Does your IP address respond to ANY inbound connection? It is a server!
An ourtright ban on servers does not make sense. It breaks the Internet. Bandwidth limits might make sense in some scenarios, but not in this case for fiber-to-the-home. If the data needed to travel through their servers and other equipment a cap could be potentially justified in not saturating their equipment. But for fiber to the home where the other end is connected to internet backbones, the ISP doesn't bear any traffic so bandwidth limits are nonsense and profiteering.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Google offers 'unlimited fiber to the home' in the same way that Dreamhost offers 'unlimited web hosting': unlimited with some restrictions on the kind of use you'll make of the service. So Dreamhost won't let you use the unlimited space for hdd backup, since it's only supposed to be for webhosting, and Google won't let you use the unlimited bandwidth for hosting an FTP server, since it's only supposed to be for residential internet access.
I would personally like there to be reasonably priced unrestricted fiber to the home. But I suspect it would cost a lot more. Have you looked up what an unrestricted port at these speeds costs at any kind of colo facility? If you really want a 1 Gbps commit, you're going to pay a lot more than Google Fiber's prices, even at the cheaper facilities.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I can live with not running a business off my consumer internet connection but I am mad as hell that I can't run my own mail server.
At this point one wonders if the NSA is involved....
It's very simple. If it's a 'server' that can generate revenue then they want their share.
You can't charge bittorrent clients you are seeding to but you can take credit card numbers, paypal donations, and bitcoins through a web page.
Remember to always follow the godforsaken $$$ whenever you want an answer to anything even remotely related to business.
It's not hard, really.
If you're using the service more, you should expect to pay more. Otherwise, the little guys end up subsidizing your bandwidth hogging ways... rather than the other way around, where the big data guys pay more, and the little data using guys pay less. You expect that with almost every known business transaction.... get off your wallet and pay the extra cash for a business account... (I have Comcast business level internet for an extra $50/mo and I have 30Mbps upload... a terrific deal that I don't expect the little lady down the street to subsidize.)
Wake me when they reach my country. Until then I'll stick with TekSavvy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Your choice. Other people have other reasons to make other choices. The question here is not, "why run a WWW server at home?" but, "why prohibit people from running servers at home?"
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Because.
I wanna run a server at home.
I don't wanna pay $4/month more.
I want to run some non-standard OS.
I want to test my custom hardware.
I want to connect my server to my lights.
What do you care why?
There are a reason there are domestic packages and professional packages: uptime, help desk assistance, troubleshooting and cost. I for one, don't wait to pay extra in my home communication package because the government is messing with and dictating rules to private business. At the end of the day, is a matter of cost, and distributing it - residential have it cheaper, businesses foot a bigger bill. The security nightmare and also extra administration for this to happen in the ISP side has to be paid. There are no magic rules. Unless the EFF wants to foot the bill, it is not the EFF job to dictate who does what. Also most of the residential contracts throughout the world have ridiculous upstream speeds compared to residential contracts who are designed to favour download speeds. Anyway, nowadays who is running services server side must do something wrongunless you are an organisation with considerable resources it is so much cost wise to run it on the cloud.
Fuckheads addicted to high volume piracy, plains and simple.. multiple order of magnitude more bandwidth than anything..
also, the brainwashed people who believe corporate announcements...
First of all, if they didn't want anyone using "orders of magnitude" more bandwidth, then the solution is simple: do not sell unlimited plans! Advertise it as X-GB plans and charge people extra for going over. But they prefer to advertise it as "unlimited" because the commercials have a better jingle to them (vs "200-GB a month plan").
Second, today anyone with active Netflix/Hulu/streaming accounts can easily use a lot of bandwidth without any pirating whatsoever. And these people will be targeted just as much as anyone else. Your average obnoxious webpage without flashblock/adblock will start playing 3-4 decent quality videos and blaring sound! I am sure that uses a lot of bandwidth
So bottom line, let them advertise exactly what they sell and life will be fair once again. But none of this "people who use too much bandwidth will be throttled/kicked-off, but won't tell you what 'too much' is, because that will ruin the surprise"
Browsing the web and such, a person will use full bandwidth for about a second, look at the page, load another in about a second, look at it, etc. Between the time they get home from work and the time they go to bed, the typical web user might load a hundred pages in a day. 100 page loads of bandwidth is what a typical customer costs the ISP, do their bill is based on.
A server can easily serve up 100 pages per MINUTE, 24/7. That's 3600 times as much bandwidth cost than a surfer. If you want to use thousands of times as much, costing the ISP thousands of times as much, you're going to pay more. You're paying more because you cost a lot more. I pay $650 / for the connection I use for my servers, because I use $650 worth of resources.
TFS says "Some heavy BitTorrent users also use a lot of bandwidth, costing more than they pay."
So since they use more, they should pay more, is the logical conclusion.
The same google who gives all your data to the NSA? Who's high on Slashdot today?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I run a server at home because I don't just want web hosting. I want file hosting, email, remote desktop, music and video streaming, video games, and IRC to boot... And I want to access much of that from my home at the same time, and manage it the way I want and upgrade it when I want.
I did once price out what I'd be spending on Amazon to get close to my needs, and it came out to a couple hundred dollars per month. It's cheaper for me to just buy a server and rent space in a data center... and cheaper still for me to run it at home.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Well, it is obvious that Google Fiber doesn't want to allow people to host their own server parks behind that really fast broadband line. (I can understand that.)
I reckon that personal servers (like a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with files for oneself and friends) is OK for Google, but hosting a high traffic business website is not.
well what are they selling then exactly? write some goddamn rules down about it. tell the users of the service the goddamn rules!how many megabytes daily is too much? that's what it's all about in the end. if it's an income generating rule then tell that(if you're making money with the connection).
a fileserver for a few friends can take EASILY the same amount of traffic as a general web service that has let's say 300 daily users.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"Admittedly, when I hear the word 'server,' I think of a Web server"
Sad, eh? Because the WWW is the end-all, be-all of the entire internet. Ports 80 and 443 are all you need to know!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Here at Slashdot, we take pride in our relatively-uncensored publication practices. We rely on the public moderators to appropriately judge the value of comments, and accordingly hide spam comments from most viewers. Spam stories, however, are given free reign over the front page.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Google Fiber Server Neutrality Violation Being Overblown
In short, Google isn't doing anything that the other ISPs aren't doing (it's not like there's any indication that they will actually enforce the ban), and the reason the language is there is that Google will likely roll out a business package in the future.
By making it difficult to run a server on Joe Schmo's DSL connection, you remove the problem of malicious servers (spammers, bots, etc). I'd love to run my own mail server the way things are going. I already use SSH to tunnel home and BTSync to keep myself out of the cloud.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Tend to be victims of traffic shaping and are the first to be throttled if the ISP is low on bandwidth.
Someone transferring 1GB during peak hours will cost the ISP more than someone transferring 10TB off-peak hours. It's not how much data you use, just the shape and timing of what you use.
Because there is no reason to trust your data to "the cloud". What you do with your data is your choice. Be a decent enough person to let others decide what they do with theirs. If they want direct and physical control that is their choice and they should have it.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Why run a WWW server at home, when you can use a hosting service for as little as $4 per month?
Why run Excel at home, when you can use Office365 for as little as $8.33 per month?
Some people lease their cars and have a new one every 2 years. Some buy them new and always take them to the dealer for service. And... Some buy a wreck, restore it to drivable condition, and do all their own maintenance on it to keep it running for literally decades.
When they started this whole fiber deal, Google clearly stated that they had no idea what people might use this bandwidth for. They said it was an experiment to see what creative uses people might find for it. This policy clearly goes against that statement. As someone who will have Google Fiber available in the next couple months, this is frustrating. I am a "tinkerer/pseudo hacker", and that means sometimes running an internet facing server of some sort for pure nerd learning purposes. Sigh...
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
My opinion is that it makes sense for default settings (protecting those inadvertently sharing, preventing a trojan from starting up a common service or opening VNC to the world, etc etc), but a customer should be able to call in and ask that they be exempted from those restrictions. I do understand also non-commercial stipulations and am fine with that too.. but I should never have to wonder if, as a customer, I'm violating my ToS by having SSH and a VPN service sitting on my connection.. it's one of those things where even unenforced it can be used as means for termination and whatnot.
Screw whatever karma points I'm not going to get...I have nothing too insightful to say on this matter; but i'm going to talk anyway.
I, too, feel it's a trumped up way of making customers pay for a higher tier. I too wonder why they specifically are targeting web-servers than anything else. One part of me wants to say it's a "public" vs "private" aspect. Look at a device like a Slingbox for example. When you get down to it; it's a server. It's a little device that sends data over the internet. At the same time; it's "hidden" and not publically accessible. You need two individual logins to be able to connect to it; one for the slingbox website; another for the slingbox itself. It's not like *anyone* can drive by my IP and go "I think i'll stream some video". I don't know of a single ISP that's had issue with this. I'm sure there's a few people with google fiber running one. Verizon has never taken an attempt to block mine. or tell me I needed to stop running it. Hell, having this insane amount of bandwidth is what made me invest in one in the first place. Same goes for my remote SSH access. Yeah; that's a server alright; but again, it's not a "public" thing...and mine isn't even on a standard port. So, maybe there's a distinction between a "public" server; like an httpd; and "private" servers like SSH, games, torrents; etc. I run a VPN on my network...and that's not even raised any eyebrows by my ISP...and within that VPN I've got access to any server running on my LAN. Again, this is what leads me to believe they make a distinction between public servers pumping out data to everyone; and private servers that "just happen to use your residential" account.
But, let me focus on Verizon for just another minute; since it's the only ISP I've used for the last 11 years (12 if you count the year my DSL was technically GTEi). My original DSL TOS was on like...a 4"x4" leaflet...and said *nothing* about servers. I read that tiny piece of paper three or four times.....GTE (this was before they completely merged the networks sometime in '02) didn't care if you ran a server on your DSL. Therefore; I did. In fact, I ran a server a large majority of the time I was on a DSL connection. Verizon never blocked port 80....and I don't think they even scanned. Oddly enough; the only port they blocked was 25. It was for trying to reduce the amount of spam people's PCs were sending out; and they gave a TON of notice about it. I didn't have a business account...they probably didn't have to tell me; but they did. They even called me to make sure I knew about the upcoming block on incoming port 25. I ran web-servers; ftp; ssh; shoutcast, even an ircd; never had Verizon "get after me" or block any ports.
Ok, granted FiOS isn't offering a 1gpbs plan yet; and I don't know what ever happened to XG-PON...but even now, they don't forcibly prevent you from running a server by blocking ports. A buddy of mine up in MA has a residential FiOS account and has been running an httpd for who knows how long. I've tried running services that are public on standard ports and never had an issue.
There's...a lot I don' t know about how they handle; or even if they check. If google's blocking port 80 incomming (which is what I gathered from some of the comments); then how is it Verizon...whose been called extremely evil...not?
Maybe part of it is the "old" way of thinking it seems tech companies don't want to shake. Maybe they're lumping *anyone* who runs a server as a business; completely shunning the fact a home user might want to run a server as a hobby.
Why run a WWW server at home, when you can use a hosting service for as little as $4 per month?
That can just as well be turned into "Why pay $4 a month for a hosting service when you can use any old machine at home and host it yourself for free?" On that same note, this website may very well be connected to other services that you're offering and you may not want to hand all the precious data to a 3rd party that may or may not be trust-worthy.
Exactly! I wish my web hosting would compete with my ISP rather than the other way around. Lots of cheap hosting options for us wanna bees.
all ISPs are deliberately vague about what qualifies as a 'server.' ... because TCP clearly specifies it.
The fact that some programs might behave correctly when implementing a server, or not (eg: skype) or the fact that, in some cases, ISPs allow certain services or ports, does not mean that a 'server' is something arcane. It's you that don't know it.
Isp's care about uploads since it costs them money to send data to another network operator
If transit cost is the problem, then why not just offer users something like "250 GB download and 25 GB upload allowance per month"? That'd solve the bandwidth problem while still allowing low-bandwidth hobby servers.
I find the monthly bandwidth limits a bigger problem. Most months we don't use much, but one or two times a year, we go over.
Agreed and I'd like to expand on the "test my custom" to "everything."
At work I run and admin web servers, mostly Apache. I choose Apache because I have the most experience with it and have developed a feeling for how much I can trust various configurations. I don't have that level of experience with Nginx. However, I like Nginx better and feel like it would be better suited to meeting our business needs. So I need to spend a couple years getting better aquainted with Nginx, what can go wrong, how they find and handle security issues, how quickly patches come out, how easy it is to handle stop-gap measures, etc.
I can only do that somewhat freely at work because there are different restrictions on what I can do with machines at work and what I'm willing to have fail at work. If I can run Nginx at home for a couple years, I don't have those restrictions. It's hardly reasonable to consider my hobby tinkering a business and unreasonable for me to have to upgrade to a business class service just to give me the ability to ensure I understand how to configure the hardware, software and services I am trying to learn.
I tried FreeBSD for a while at home. I absoutely love some aspects of it. After a couple years, I decided I didn't like the upgrade cycle, but I didn't learn that at work and shouldn't have to. I tried OpenBSD too and discovered some drivers didn't like some of the hardware I was using and that would have been a misuse of my time to discover at work since they don't pay me to play around learning new stuff. I'm a better admin professionally because of my hobby experience at home.
I too had to ask and answer "what is a server?" I have an old Cisco router a couple switches and a 1U server with no onboard hard disk. The Ciscos have built in telnet and web server interfaces. Even my wifi router has an onboard web server for configuation. Surely they wouldn't consider the Ciscos and wifi router servers? Of course not. The 1U dell needs a tftp server to function and can run various systems but none of them necessariy have to offer externally available software servers of any sort. That doesn't sound like a server to me either. In the end, I try to keep my homework limited to a couple things I'm tinkering with and not offer anything the general public might be interested in from my home connection and I believe I'm operating within the spirit of the rules. That doesn't stop me from wishing that the rules were actually more clearly established along reasonable lines. As an admin of a network myself, I believe that it is my job to ensure not only that we have clear rules about what is allowed and what isn't but also to ensure that dangerous or abusive use is curtailed by technology, not a "you find out that you broke the rules only after you've gone far enough to be punished" approach.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I get your point that for the majority of people it's not worth your time to setup a web server when a thousand providers offer good service for the price of a specialty coffee. But, when I was 16 I wanted to learn about the WWW, Linux, and CGI, and a local web server with Perl let me host some friend's sites. Nowadays I still have a web server at home plus three racks in our DC for projects.
Controlling your hardware and OS is a good learning environment, plus complete control over things that might cost way more than $4/mo. I learned a lot about tweaking hardware and network security by having to do it early on. Today I use a home web server for some automation projects whose hardware needs physical access to the devices it manages.
So, in short, lots of reasons to host at home. Not even high-bandwidth-for-cheap ones.
--- Need web hosting?
Then they misunderstand. The reason why ISPs block port 80 incoming is not to block "servers" primarily to up-charge people. It's done to protect the internet from XP zombies which serve up ads. My ISP (cox) doesn't charge more for a business account than it does for a personal one. The need to specifically ask for a business account with no port blocking is there to ensure responsibility with viruses.
Yep. All the local providers here it is pretty clear even if it isn't explicit: commercial vs non-commercial use. If I want to run a web/app server I have to purchase a commercial account and fair enough since that's a different product (I generally expect to pay for hosting or a static ip etc).
They are ambiguous on purpose though. One of my friends worked at a one of the big ISPs. Most people could get away with running whatever (heck even a mail server back then) as long as their bandwidth usage did draw suspicion. As soon as they find a bandwidth hog they'd nail them on "running a server" or similar. One example he gave was a customer who's upwards bandwidth was pretty much pegged all the time (this was during the early era of high speed connections when there weren't monthly caps, just speed caps). They checked out where all the traffic was coming from and it ended up he was running the audio streaming service for a local radio station. Definitely not a legit use for a home line, but I could see why someone would try to pull that off (T-carrier lines were 10x the price of consumer high speed connections).
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
Technically my router is a server since I have the router management site open on the WAN side and it has dyndns running. My ISP sold me the router and the firmware is unaltered. The terms of service language is absolutely vague. This isn't just about just WWW servers.
Which sardonic quip to use? I can't decide, so I'll post both.
Of all of them, you'd think it would have been Google to finally shake things up.
"Of all of them," perhaps, is true. Google may well be the least evil of the major providers. And Obama was the less evil of the two major 2012 candidates. Not high bars to get over, and yet they both just graze past.
Of all of them, you'd think it would have been Google to finally shake things up.
I think you may be confusing Google ca 2001 with Google ca 2013. They are two very different companies. The latter is a cookie-cutter American megacorp, money over everything; not strictly immoral, but profoundly amoral.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Explain than to me why *I* as a customer should shoulder the costs of what you don't want to pay. Because at the end of the day, the ISP is a business and has to recover costs somewhere. Maybe hmmm, they will invent *tier* contracts in alternative of having a socialist alternative reality where I share your costs for a service I don't need or want?
My music when I am not at home. Really fuck um.
Your a special kind of stupid. EFF has it dead nuts.
because people will go over the limit and complain and say its not their fault. the cell phone carriers had this problem when minutes were rationed out on plans long ago
Even though cellular voice and text have tended toward unlimited on contract plans, satellite and cellular carriers still cap each subscriber's data transfer, usually at single-digit GB per month.
it is cheaper to sell unlimited plans and set rules limiting what you can do with a consumer plan
The problem is the insinuation that everyone who's not a business should resign himself to "consuming" works created by others. Perhaps the solution is a "hobbyist producer" tier between "consumer" and business, much as PayPal has the "premier" tier.
Average bandwidth (aka data transferred) and 95th percentile bandwidth are both imperfect measures of "how much of our capacity requirements is this user responsible for".
You don't need a perfect measure just one good enough to weed out users who are using far more capacity than they are paying for.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
nobody is perfect. And so the ideologues turn on themselves fighting with each other rather than the greater enemy, cableco and telco, and so dissolve into an ineffectual cacophony. Comcast must be grinning.
You try explaining to customers that they will be charged base on their 95th percentile of bandwidth used during peak hours.
An ISP can deal with simplifying the explanation the same way that sat and cell have for years. Cellular voice plans that bill by the minute often allow the user to pay a flat rate for a "nights and weekends" option that turns off metering outside 0600 to 2100 local time Monday through Friday, occasionally with a second "evening" option for an additional charge that also turns off metering from 1900 to 2100. Exede, a satellite ISP, turns off metering from 0000 to 0500, giving the customer a chance to run large downloads such as game installations, movie purchases, and operating system updates.
What ever happened to Google favoring net neutrality? You know, not discriminating on the type, source, or destination of data? Oh right, they were a data source and now they're becoming a data transport. This suggests they're not all about principles unless it happens to suit them.
ISPs pay by the bandwidth used. The price you pay for your home internet doesn't cover the cost to your ISP if you used the max bandwidth 24/7. If it did, it would be much more expensive.
By making rules like this, they are protecting mom and dad who don't use the internet much from having to subsidize joe hacker running a porn site out of his home.
Imagine if you paid for gas by the month. Would it be ridiculous if they said you weren't allowed to drive a commercial semi and fuel it there? No. You'd have to buy another plan and pay a bunch more.
This really isn't that much different.
No, that's an example of the ISP not having developed a proper economic model nor invested in the gear to enforce it. Any ISP selling "unlimited" data should be prepared for that pipe to be full to capacity. Or in other words they should staple their PR department's dicks to the table for promising what they cannot deliver.
Someone had to do it.
Oooo. He called me stupid. Such an insightful argument.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Ultimately, the only thing the ISP will be able to claim is that your upload:download ratio isn't like most of the others on their network.
That and the fact that the ISP can claim that a subscriber was accepting incoming TCP connections. In fact, some ISPs have installed carrier-grade NAT to block incoming connections.
Why run a WWW server at home, when you can use a hosting service for as little as $4 per month?
A lot of these $4 per month web hosts support only PHP and no other languages like Python or Ruby, or they support only MySQL and no other DBMS like PostgreSQL, or they support only HTTP and not HTTPS.
They did read the fucking Terms of Service, it says they forbid for business servers, ie you make money off it. But no one on Slashdot can read.
You either sell Internet access, or sell something that resembles Internet access, but has road blocks everywhere.
I think grandparent's assertion is that "something that resembles Internet access, but has road blocks everywhere" should be good enough for anyone who isn't running a business.
Running a server just means the data goes in the other direction.
Except that the sender-pays model of long-haul Internet transit implies a different cost for each direction, as alen pointed out.
Explain than to me why *I* as a customer should shoulder the costs of what you don't want to pay. Because at the end of the day, the ISP is a business and has to recover costs somewhere. Maybe hmmm, they will invent *tier* contracts in alternative of having a socialist alternative reality where I share your costs for a service I don't need or want?
Fine by me.
Because I should be able to run a trivial little server that turns off my lights using a webpage. Bandwidth is nothing. I should even be able to run a coms server so I can voice chat with my friends while playing whatever game is hot this week.
Frankly, unless you're hosting porn, your bandwidth usage for hosting a website is likely to be peanuts compared to someone who is only doing 'client' things like torrenting movies.
I'm all for honest limits. Bandwidth limits, byte limits, whatever.
But arbitrarily declaring servers as not being allowed is lame. And lamer still from Google. I ran servers on home machines for years though disallowed. How many ISPs do you know that are competent enough to catch it? But Google? They'll figure it out.
Or maybe this whole thing is miscommunication? You do realize in this case that I am theoretically paying google for internet connectivity, right?
I pay for internet service.
The business tier is Internet service. The residential tier is not because not is cheaper to provide, and the majority of residential subscribers have little need to run a server.
I wonder when the day will come that all people form a business just to not be discriminated against.
Even if individuals as such can't buy the business tier, is it really that hard to set up a sole proprietorship?
I don't know, I might load 200 pages per day. My mom loads four per MONTH.
I have servers that do thousands of hits per MINUTE.
I've priced wholesale bandwidth. I'm getting a good deal at $650 with a quarter rack. I don't WANT to pay $650 / month for my home connection because pricing has to cover people running servers on non-commercial home internet connections.
Small ISPs tend to be more flexible. Find a reseller of Bombastic Cable or your local Ma Bell spin off and see what you can negotiate. I run my own web, e-mail, ssh, DNS and VPN server on a 1.5 mb (down) and .5 mb up DSL connection. What I said to my ISP was, "If I get enough traffic that the connection needs to be faster then that's a good indication I need to upgrade the account." They bought it so I run everything through a single IP address on their fixed IP address, business account. And, yes, it costs a little more than a "no servers", consumer account.
BTW, so far the amount of traffic to my server hasn't been an issue. On the plus side, the NSA doesn't have access to my server.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
In fact the Internet, as originally envisioned, hasn't existed for some years now and may never exist again. It's not just that ISPs are forbidding servers, it's that their asymmetric I/O speeds combined with network-address translation fundamentally changed the game from a peer to peer network to a producer/consumer network. The only way to serve up your own content right now is to buy server in a data center, or use an existing service. Just to route around the fundamental brokenness of our modern-day internet, I have to buy a VPS, which is run by a company that pays the big network providers big bucks for peering. Pretty depressing, really.
I wonder how a transition to IPv6 will change all this. Will all ISPs simply assign non-routeable addresses?
google port knocking http://www.zeroflux.org/projects/knock/
They are screened. They only select the finest social networks to send their spammy users here.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
You just need written permission from Google.
The key is to avoid the big-name assfaces whenever possible; much like the major cell carriers, they don't give a shill if they lose any particular customer, as long as their bottom line isn't affected. Regional places like Sonic.net or DSL Extreme are MUCH better for any geek to go with, for example -- neither uses caps/throttling or minds home servers, and while both block port 25, DSL Extreme's TOS states they will open it if asked.
The thing is, regional ISPs are rarely well known even in their area, so a lot of people have no clue that there's any options beyond the cable/phone companies. Even if you've never heard of any independent ISPs existing in your area, spend some time searching the web for a local one (they can be very hard to find) and ask at BroadbandReports & Craigslist's Forum area before signing up with a national ISP. It takes some extra time, but it's worth it.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
It's not just the running of torrent client/servers it is also all the systems we 'have' to have now.
I have a NAS (Network Access SERVER) for maintaining backups and delivering content to me on demand, it even runs a little security web-cam monitoring system which also... is a server.
I have a PS3, that's a server, I have a Smart TV, that's a server, my printer has a web server, my network interface has a web server.
Home automation: I dont have it, but how do you control these things and turn off your lights when your at work, via the integrated web SERVER!
I would even class some of the Android apps and google glass as a potential SERVER!
Even LED lights now have wifi and integrated web based administration.
I am not a business, I do not need to have a business account just to support the products that every first world home now has and that companies like Google themselves expect you to setup.
Right, and that's a fair workaround if you are only serving for personal use. And you aren't worried about being at locations that limit your outbound ports. And you don't mind jumping through the additional hoops of setting it up. And you are running on an OS that is ported to (or you're willing to put the server behind something else that does run a ported to OS).
But in this particular case it is a workaround that should not be needed.
Unless you have evidence that Google actually ever blocked a server on their Google Fiber network the "banning servers on its network" headline is bogus. I do not know that such a thing has ever happened, nor ever will. The terms of service don't even actually prohibit it. They only discourage it.
The terms do not say "will not". Nor "may not". Nor "must not". Nor "it is a network security violation to", like everybody else. They say "should not", which any kid you know will tell you is code for "you can, you might, and you may, but I'd rather you didn't."
Once upon a time EFF reps could read.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Outgoing FTP is a way to share files, but - for the one holding &
publishing some file(s) via FTP - they must have & run FTP ser-
ver(s).
Freedom of Speech implies a "Right to Serve" IMO.
Being -forced- by ISP restrictions against running servers seems
anti-competitive, since it -forces- the ISP's customer to pay (some-
one) for unnecessary / unwanted hosting services.
By extending the definition of "net neutrality" to -include- a well-
defined "Right to Serve" (since not to have such a right makes
one subservient to external hosting services, by unbalancing
the innately -balanced- TCP/IP protocols, which underlie the
Internet) would let one (with content) choose between self-
hosting & outsourcing the hosting of that content.
Start out self-hosting, until you decide to let someone else
do that for you (eg, after the content becomes popular).
Because.
I wanna run a server at home.
I don't wanna pay $4/month more.
I want to run some non-standard OS.
I want to test my custom hardware.
I want to connect my server to my lights.
What do you care why?
Item two might be: I wanna pay more than $4 per month for electricity, cooling, hardware repair
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I run a server at home because I don't just want web hosting. I want file hosting, email, remote desktop, music and video streaming, video games, and IRC to boot...
That works with ISPs that don't allow servers. The ISP doesn't care all that much about the servers you run, as long as you limit the access and don't run a public server, know what you're doing, and don't turn into a nest for spam and virus breeding.
Their Call Center people on the other hand are a different case. Never ever mention the word "server". Not even "display server". Just remember, that you don't run a server. You simply enabled remote access for that one file manager thing on your home computer. And that other port is open, because your thermostat app wouldn't work on your cellphone otherwise. No, not a server but a thermostat that has something built in, so I can change the temperature through my cell phone. File server? No, it's just my laptop connecting to my external hard drive that hangs on that pogo thing .
My grandma uses less bandwidth than you. WTF should she be subsidizing your use?
"Should not" is only a line in a config script away from "blocked."
The point is that no ISP, least of all Google, should be taking this position. The terms "server" and "client" really just describe the instigator and direction of traffic flow. You start restricting that, the internet further degenerates into consumer and producer classes and becomes cable TV. *shudder*
See why this is a net neutrality issue here?
Unless you have evidence that Google actually ever blocked a server on their Google Fiber network the "banning servers on its network" headline is bogus. I do not know that such a thing has ever happened, nor ever will. The terms of service don't even actually prohibit it. They only discourage it.
The terms do not say "will not". Nor "may not". Nor "must not". Nor "it is a network security violation to", like everybody else. They say "should not", which any kid you know will tell you is code for "you can, you might, and you may, but I'd rather you didn't."
You forgot: "and I will put an end to it if you cause any trouble at all."
Not "any trouble at all"
Google is delivering more bandwidth to the KC area than the entire rest of the US Internet combined. That is potentially a problem if all the people so enabled are rude. It's not a matter of them beating down subscribers, it's about not breaking the whole Internet. Having Gigabit Internet is a dire responsibility as a home user. You can't just fire up wget on your favorite site, even /., without crashing it unless you rate limit. You "should not" do that. To most sites ONE user with a gigabit connect and an itchy click finger looks like a denial of service attack. A whole city full looks like a DDOS.
Google is bringing end users into a new era one city at a time, but they understand that most of the Internet is built on legacy tech that can't handle this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Give an actual data cap. I know data caps are the devil, but if you keep it reasonable, it won't drive customers away, but will eliminate any ambiguity
Or better yet, a few tiers. How about 1/5/10TB per month, just as a few starting figures? Any basic user who surfs the net, streams netflix, pandora etc. should stay well under the 1TB per month mark. Anecdotal : I would consider myself a moderate-heavy bandwidth user, and I still wouldn't need the full 5TB per month.
At that point, google can be completely hands off : it's your bandwidth, do with it as you please. If you want to run a server, that's fine. Keep it under your cap and google can remain blissfully ignorant.
This signature is false.
They advertise being able to play all of my favorite online console and PC games.
Except many have to run their own server (in fact they run server-client model as the base) and this becomes a big no-no, and thus I can't play these games.
Pisses me right off. I'm not paying for a SLOWER business class line which is more expensive and does NOT come with a 5-9 guarantee.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is bizarre and perplexing to me that a company should offer "100MB/s down, unlimited data!", and then be cross when anyone tries to run that connection at its advertised limits for 10 minutes in a row. Apparently I can only have that if I promise to continue to use it as if it were a 52kbps dial up connection...
It's dishonest. If you can't afford to sell me 100MB/s unlimited, don't pretend you can and take my money anyway. Tell me what you can afford to sell me, and your rivals can too and I can decide which provider to use based on who can offer me what I need. The only way to choose between them at the moment is by spurious word-of-mouth rumours...
Google was born out of net neutrality, and now that they've grown into a position of power, they suddendly find themselves against it. What specific words they chose to use has only a secondary importance. The decision they've made is political: you can only be in favour or against net neutrality, and they chose to be against. They don't want you to choose what to do with your internet connection. They want to be in control. In geekspeak, they're evil.
A better solution would be to have a clause for non-personal uses as in you can't use large amounts of bandwidth for business / charity / organisation etc uses.
And to stop this 'unlimited bandwidth' BS, make the limit something that is relevant to quality of service, such as a limit related to contention ratio, measured at peak times.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Words mean things, and in this case they don't mean the things you say they do.
Thank god vocabularies exist.
You are trying to find a way to paint Google "evil".
I speak concepts, and I do not question other people's motivations. The image of Google is painted by none other but Google themselves, with the actions they choose to take. You can't have a cake and eat it too.
You are playing to your audience alone. Actually, the further out there you guys go with the tinfoil hat thing the less credible you are.
Yes, resorting to personal attacks is the best-known sign of having good points.
disclaimer: complainant here: The terms say "prohibited". Look it up.
That's an argument for them banning clients, not servers.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Hmmm, spend $15k on a Carrier-grade NAT to save 10gb/s of bandwidth or spend $10k to get another 10gb/s of bandwidth.
Which one is the recurring fee and which one is the one-time fee?
Phone companies did that because they have circuits. In packet switched networks, you don't charge linearly based on usage
Are LTE and whatever data link protocol satellite uses circuit-based?
so why charge based on data usage when there are way too many corner-cases where the two models don't align?
Because the data usage with free nights model is simpler to explain to subscribers while remaining close enough, and because you have not yet explained more of these corner-cases to me. My going hypothesis is that 95th percentile bandwidth is roughly proportional to usage per customer during peak hours, and I'm ready to read arguments that prove it wrong.
What if she wants to upload 100 photos to her Facebook album without waiting 15 minutes?
Wouldn't the photos have been already uploaded the moment they were taken on a camera phone with a data plan? And in the case of scanned prints of photos taken before the camera phone era, I see nothing wrong with scheduling the upload for the next "free wee hours" period.
Or what if she wants to watch a Netflix SuperHD stream without it periodically rebuffering?
Let me know when more well-known movie studios have released 4K versions of works that people actually want to watch, not just 4K demo reels.
Data caps reduce data usage off-peak
If the goal is to shift usage from peak to non-peak hours while remaining understandable to end users, then run the meter only during peak hours, as I explained elsewhere.
...except IRC servers. Beyond that, they're good.
Dog is my co-pilot.
True, but while looking into stateful firewalls, a network engineer at an ISP would probably come across CGNAT and discover that it not only includes a stateful firewall but can also save the ISP money on not having to acquire more IPv4 addresses for new subscribers.
They become more capable in what interests them.
Tell me - would you want to be "more capable" by learning to read literature? History? Arts? These make you "more capable" in being able to appreciate the world. Or perhaps accounting. Or law (since we can't eve seem to get basic IP law of trademarks, copyright and patents (design and novelty) straight). Or have we gotten to naÃve to think that we know it all? (Given the level of commentary on /.). Or hell, what about mere basic spelling? Or about such niceties as etiquette? (How much are complementary studies courses hated as a "waste of time" when pursuing a degree?).
The thing is - the world is complex. There's way more to learn than one could ever know. And rather than try to learn it all, we specialize. We know IT inside and out (and not all of it - some know how to admin servers, others know how to write an OS, others still write applications that run on top, etc., including databases, web sites, etc.). Then there's designers, blah blah blah.
Well, other people don't care about computers. Being a modern world, you can't AVOID using a computer - there will always be useful websites on your choice of interest for which you can learn, and the Internet took off because no one needed to know how networks, TCP/IP, OSes, etc., worked, and it grew into this whole place where everyone can share information from computers to guns to cars to furries and porn.
The computer is a tool. The vast majority of people see it as a convenient way to access the internet, gather information, share information, keep in touch with family, friends and relatives, etc. It is to many like the car, or telephone, or television - they don't care how it works, just that it works and it enables them to go about their day. They don't care how a car works, they just twist the key and turn the wheel to arrive at their destination. They don't care how the phone works, the basics of circuit switching (or virtual circuits) or ODFM modulation, they just punch a few numbers and in a few seconds, they're talking with someone who can be next door or around the world. Likewise, they don't care about bits or bytes, what CSMA/CD does, or what QAM is - they know they can click an icon, and start perusing information they want to know, or to make contact with someone, etc.
The vast majority of people do not care to learn how to set up a web server just to put a few photos online - they'll use facebook, flickr, picasa or other service. Or if they want to write, they'll go open a Blogger account with Google. Some may want to go into business and create a website - you can do that to without knowing how HTTP works - just purchase some web hosting service, upload a few web pages, and enjoy. None of them need to know how to write an httpd.conf file, what /etc/init.d/httpd does, firewall configuration, etc.
And to be honest, if they had to know it, they'd go "cool" and end up doing things the old way that they always had because they can concentrate on getting stuff done, and not learning unrelated crap just to get stuff done.
That's why smartphones, tablets and consoles are popular - they're good at the "get your stuff done" part and hiding away the crap people don't care about.
And hell, let's say you wanted to learn Linux, so you install Ubuntu, open port 80 on your firewall, and put up some websites. Oh wait, your Linux box suddenly got compromised by some PHP bug and is now uploading at gigabit speeds. Of course, you don't know enough Linux to fix it, your websites are still working and you don't want to take those down (or you copy your stuff off, reinstall, put it back, get infected again...).
I'd assume most business packages have SLAs that consumer ones don't. That's what I've seen, anyway, when looking at what's available. And wait a minute - how does it help with capacity planning, when some home users use far more bandwidth up & down than some companies do? It seems a rather poor technique to me.
It's not a good way of capacity planning, but the general assumption is that a commercial link used for hosting will use up all available bandwidth, while a home account will only use some fraction of the capacity of a link.
Thanks for mentioning the SLAs -- I forgot that part.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
That's why smartphones, tablets and consoles are popular - they're good at the "get your stuff done" part and hiding away the crap people don't care about.
Why are all applications banned from smartphones and tablets and games whose developers don't qualify for a console license necessarily "crap people don't care about"?
And hell, let's say you wanted to learn Linux, so you install Ubuntu
You'd need a computer to do that first. A high school student who has only a smartphone and/or a tablet may not have any way to earn money to buy a computer.
I've never seen this outside the US, and I don't think it's frequent for ISPs to block this elsewhere.
As for me, I'm in Argemtina, and I've had several ISPs in the last decade, and none of them block or forbade hosting server (including web servers, vnc servers, game servers, etc).
Anyone else from another country care to add their experiences? For what I can see, this is pretty much US-only (as is capping GB-per-month, which only seems to have taken of in canada as well).
I think there is a lot to be said for running your own email server to avoid the warrantless dragnet of stored emails at major ISP's. (assuming the ISP's will pass the port 25 traffic along)
Maybe the fiber taps at all the US based network exchange points makes running your own email server less of a defense, but at least the ISP's would not have the ability to turn over your emails all tied up with a bow.
Make the spooks work for their packets!
With due respect, your response is also bogus. That sentence didn't just fall into Google's terms of service. It was intentionally put there so that when Google decides they truly don't want servers on their network, they can terminate your agreement and connection. It's truly naive of you to think this language is completely innocent and has zero chance of being enforced.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
You can say that just about anything is a "server" - drawing a line at what is "served" is a bit difficult - is it port 80? Then just move to a different port. Is it traffic volume? The summary mentions BitTorrent, and along with that there are plenty of other things that can be considered "server" traffic. This is similar to when I was in high school, and the internet use policy stated that we were explicitly prohibited from "downloading," even though every web page that used cookies essentially created a "download," and in fact just viewing pages created "downloads" when a cached version was stored on the hard disk.
My ISPs have never allowed hosting "servers" on their networks, but so far so good as mine hasn't complained about my super-low-traffic web server, nor my SSH activity to my home when I need it. I'm sure if I asked them or if I had bajillions of monthly visitors, it'd be a different story.
I find it interesting to note that your entire argument centers around, not running servers, but abusing bandwidth. One does not necessarily lead to the other, and the latter can be done without doing the former. (And your example doesn't even involve running a server, but instead involves running a client.)
If they want to avoid subscribers abusing bandwidth, then they should say so, instead of prohibiting one kind of thing that could possibly be used to abuse bandwidth, but is often useful without being abusive.
Classic case of medicating the symptoms instead of looking for a cure.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
And to be able to raise the cost to users once they are captured. If they (ISPs, Google, Micro$soft) can control the platform, they can extort more $ from you. The answer is to not let them, or with help from the government, control the platform. up to and including using UUCP in place of Internet Protocols :-) to prevent closed captive markets.
I am BizNew, Destroyer of Business Plans!
Why are all applications banned from smartphones and tablets and games whose developers don't qualify for a console license necessarily "crap people don't care about"?
Stop asking why, because it's simply not something most are interested in. Your interests are not their interests and all your whining about how Nintendo/Sony/Whatever won't hand out dev kits willy to every wannabe game developer with a missle command clone they want to publish, won't change it.
You'd need a computer to do that first. A high school student who has only a smartphone and/or a tablet may not have any way to earn money to buy a computer.
How old are you, and why do you keep focusing so much on the "kids"? If a young person doesn't have enough money for a computer and doesn't have access to one at school, they can wait till they do, won't take long. If they want to be a programmer even some cheap refurb will do.
why do you keep focusing so much on the "kids"?
Because my aunt has kids, and because in my opinion, adolescence is a good time to introduce computer science concepts to sort out who has the most aptitude for coding.
It's very simple. If you're offering an Internet connection and you don't allow servers, you don't get my business. No problem.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
posting to undo mod misclick
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
I am an ass sometimes. Usually not, but in this instance, yes.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This post was voted "troll"? Good grief, all I did was ask an honest question! I did NOT intend this as a troll.
My definition of "server" in the context of this post was a WWW server that would be hosting multiple page sites, possibly even leasing space to others. Obviously, that definition is different than some people's.
The idea of it being a completely PRIVATE "server" where one logs in to control devices in their homes didn't occur to me.
So, if that was worth wasting Mod points to vote "troll" so be it. They're YOUR Mod points. Waste them if you wish.
Willie...