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Bug In Fire TV Screensaver Tears Through 250 GB Data Cap
jfruh (300774) writes Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day. Using the Mac network utility little snitch, he eventually tracked down the culprit: a screensaver on his new Kindle Fire TV.
A bug in the mosaic screensaver caused downloaded images to remain uncached.
Why do we still have these antiquated data caps?
Oh, that's right, greed.
Kindle Fire TV is a set top box...
so yes, he did leave it plugged in constantly.
Not a tablet.
Fire TV is a set-top box.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Sorry, Fire TV, no Kindle in the name
with several home appliances going IP. And this was just a bug, not a worm/virus.
Set top box, described here:
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-TV-...
I don't like caps. I don't think they should sell you bandwidth and than charge for data. I also understand the need for ISPs to over subscribe. Its simple economics most users are going to use very little of the bandwidth most of the time.
I suspect a lot of throughput is consumed by malfunctioning stuff that dumbly makes the same requests over and over and things like this. Why can't the ISPs just kill the caps and let customers know in a not so threatening letter, "hey I think you have a problem Did you know your port is lit up at 80% capacity 24-7 if you do that's find but if not there is probably something really wrong on your network"
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I have experienced a similar bug in my iOS devices. Everytime they do a small update to iOS, you're required to redownload the entire operating system, separately for each device you own. We have an iPad and 3 iPod touches (kids...) in the house, and every time Apple issues an Update to iOS we go through quite a lot of extra bandwidth. It's also annoying that we have to clear off 4GB on the device to install the update, as they only come with 12 GB of useable space to begin with.
I know that this isn't really a bug, but just goes to show you how little most device and app designers think like regular people. It's as if the people testing the devices just use the internet in the office and don't think about the consequences of using too much data, and that they only use the 64 GB versions of the devices where it's much less of a problem to clear off the required space for upgrades.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Once we're all paying "by the byte" for metered service, that is.
Why do we still have these antiquated data caps?
I would ask why we still have screen savers. Turning off the monitor automatically after a period of inactivity to save power I understand. Having it still draw power to put pretty images on the screen when you aren't using it is a pointless exercise. Screen burn-in is not a big problem these days, particularly if you have the monitor/tv turn off when not in active use.
Assuming that the rate is constant, that's 7.5 Mbps for image files. Just how large are these imaages, and how much bandiwdth does he have where he wouldn't notice the slowdown?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Feature working as expected :-)
Do you blame the power companies for charging per Kilowatt hour or do you blame the person who left the heater running for the massive bill that will follow? Do you feel that person shouldn't have to pay the power company because it was just an innocent mistake and the utility is just being too greedy?
What really blows my mind is how people willingly give applications and devices unfettered access to their internet connection. Not only can they eat through bandwidth, but it can be used for malicious purposes. How to you know that such apps aren't touching some URL that involve CP? You won't know until the feds come bashing down your door.
That's a lot of image in one day...so I'll assume we mean high resolution porn images...
We don't need no stinking QA on that screensaver. What could possibly go wrong?
A mistake, I am sure.
I would blame the company that made the Space heater if it had a timer that was supposed to shut it off and it failed to do so.
I have a hard time equating the cost center of a power company generating finite amounts of power that is sold to users with the "mostly fixed and generally stable" cost of maintaining connectivity for the IPSs.
You do realize that we're not "consuming 1s and 0s that the ISP has to go out and manufacture, right?
I'm not suggesting that every person should have the ability to have unlimited speed and unlimited capacity(bandwidth), but lets not paint a picture of US IPSs as working tirelessly to upgrade infrastructure and provide lower cost, improved service. It's not a competitive market, driving towards improvement. It's in their best interest to raise prices any way they can, such as through caps. It's Not in their interest to spend billions on new infrastructure to improve services and lower consumer costs, because they have no true competition driving market forces to make them improve.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
They always seem to focus on the wrong things. Content providers are so worried that someone might watch something they payed for once, more than once. Must you buy a DVD to do this. People accept that they can watch a dvd more than once but don't require the same for streaming services. Here is a unit that is supposed to cache content and it gets it wrong. Netflix and others account for 2/3 of our bandwidth at times. They(netflix) do offer some type of appliance that will locally cache things at our headend but it still uses a major amount of bandwidth itself. Streaming is inefficient. This is obvious and correctable but no one seems to be looking in that direction. I hate the cloud concept since it doesn't accurately represent the topology of the internet. However to continue its reign on the masses imagination I give you this addtion. Steaming companies don't utilize the reservoirs owned by the people they are raining on to mitigate their impact on the environment. In the old days that would trigger government regulation. Today?
7 Megabits is not much on a 50 Megabit connection; it's less than 15%. I say... perhaps the more bugs like this in popular consumer devices, the better. Better still if the 'bug' can't be blocked by the SPs without breaking the device.
It will help accelerate the rate at which residential ISPs have to start getting rid of stupid data caps ---- and start delivering more of the promised capacity.
Tech writer Tyler Hayes had never come close to hitting the 250 GB monthly bandwidth cap imposed by Cox Cable — until suddenly he was blowing right through it, eating up almost 80 GB a day.
Probable old school Slashdot troll, but what the hey, I'll bite. I won't even mention their complete refusal to upgrade our decaying infrastructer because that would just be too easy. When you consume a Kilowatt you are consuming an actual resource. This is a unit of energy that requires a certain amount of fuel to generate. There is actually a potential compounding effect with it's usage since the power company has to plan to over produce in order to prevent potential brown outs. So a rising trend in power usage over a long enough period of time will cause a shift in the power generated by the plant. This is why we except that the do-do running the space heater will except the monetary penalty involved with being a moron.
On the other hand a Kilobyte is an abstraction that is used to quantify data, it is not finite resource. This is not a commodity and the cost of it's existence is covered in the static overhead of the entire operation. There is hardly anything (as far as the ISP is concerned) consumed by its use, and if it is not used then it is not wasted and it's existence adds nothing to their cost of operation.
The summary is obviously wrong: Little Snitch, as a local traffic monitor, was only used to rule out his Mac being the culprit. He got to the Fire TV by trial and error.
Another reason I don't use "screen savers", live wallpapers or any of that other "make it look pretty" garbage...OVERHEAD. Live wallpapers eat up GPU resources & CPU resources, screen savers aren't really "needed" these days like they were in the old CRT monitor days. I use a black wallpaper, no screen saver, set my monitor to sleep mode after 20 minutes of non use. Cuts down on CPU/GPU overhead. Also, I keep my desktop icons in a folder, cuts down on screen refresh and keeps the desktop nice and tidy.
FYI, using the Mac program Little Snitch was not what found the problem. He merely used it to verify that the Mac wasn't *the* problem. Admittedly, you can have some grace there because the ITworld article was mistaken, but don't forget to read the original source next time.
At my house, the WiiU gets a lot of exercise streaming Netflix in Ultra HD. My wife also watches on the computer. My data usage, per Comcast, has been as low as 393GB (in May) but 592GB in April and 519GB in June. I'm already at 27GB for July, and it's only the 2nd...
I say keep burning a hole in the Internet!
Try plugging five space heaters into the same outlet. Wires have a limit on how many amps (or kilobytes) they can carry. A kilobyte may not cost anything but it does take up space. Once the limit is reached everyone's service slows.
You're surprised that Mosaic doesn't run well on current hardware?
Fiat Lux.
Fire is burning up your data. Har!
/* No Comment */
I am Mac stupid and I read up on Little Snitch to see if there's something in my world that would have helped.
I use two tools that I would have gone to: TCPView and Microsoft Network Monitor (MNM), both free.
TCPView is very simple and is really a GUI, more-informative, netstat. What it does is show the computer's current connections whether Listening or Established. It doesn't really show bandwidth per connection, but it certainly answers the question, "What the heck is my computer doing when it's supposed to be doing nothing?"
MNM is much more robust and usually reveals way more than we want to know. However, it displays each incoming/outgoing packet, complete with IP addresses and ports. It is so intense that I don't understand all I know about it.
It's like WireShark, except it compartmentalizes processes so we can see, for instance, only what Outlook or Firefox, etc. is doing.
I agree with the general observation that, from Windows 7 and up, the on-board firewall Resource Monitor would probably be the easiest tool.
Also, I agree that these tools would only be good for doing what Little Snitch apparently did, and that was to eliminate a particular computer as suspect.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Isn't it obvious?
No not really. Reliable power save capability should be a built in feature of every TV sold. In fact it should be a mandatory feature. This is the very definition of low hanging fruit when it comes to conservation of energy.
The devices outputting screensavers can't turn off the screen in most cases, that's why.
Sounds like a problem with the TV, not the device. I know some people (like me) have old TVs but there really is no excuse for any TV sold in the last 15 years to not have the ability to power off the screen. I understand what you are saying but I'm not terribly sympathetic to the "plight" of those who leave their TV on when they aren't watching it.
This isn't a monitor, it's a TV.
A distinction without much of a difference these days. I can pipe my TiVO or my laptop through either a TV or a monitor with basically the same results and using the same HDMI cable. The screen resolution is identical (1920x1080) either way.
And burn-in is an issue if you have a plasma TV
Not if you turn it off when you aren't watching it.
I find the problem happens when you're watching Netflix and the show ends and you are off doing something else
Either you are watching Netflix or you are off doing something else. You cannot be doing both. If you are doing something else, turn the TV off if it cannot do it without you. Not seeing anything in your argument I feel inclined to sympathize with. There is no excuse for any TV sold in the last 10+ years to not have reliable power saving equipment. There also is no real excuse for people being lazy about turning it off when they aren't using it.
lets not paint a picture of US IPSs as working tirelessly to upgrade infrastructure and provide lower cost, improved service...It's Not in their interest to spend billions on new infrastructure to improve services and lower consumer costs
1. They are spending billions on new infrastructure. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable spent about $51 billion last year in capex.
2. They aren't focused on lowering consumer costs, but the improved service is definitely there (albeit clearly uneven, depending on location). As an example, Comcast's base broadband service was 10Mbps two years ago. By the end of this year, it will be 50Mbps. Prices have risen about 5-10% over that time, so you're looking at a 75%+ decline in $/Mbps.
Sounds like something that could be developed into a nasty DDOS tool
//ham and egger, don't know if that is actually possible or not...
or, continued to run after I shut the damn thing off...
We already pay for different tiers of speeds.
It's articifial scarcity.
Tangentially related - I have Cox service (and - disclaimer - even worked for them for 9 months until I found my dream job), and since I don't have cable but DO have three kids, we chew through 250 Gb of data via Netflix and YouTube in no time. I get an e-mail asking me to be mindful, but never anything nasty, no threats, no throttling (I've checked), and no overage charges. I'm not saying that some or all of these things will never happen, but so far so good. Of all the providers, Cox has honestly been the one I've seen complained about the least (I wish I could find the graph of Netflix speeds over time, before and after Netflix agreed to pay extra fees to some of the other providers - Cox's speeds were higher than everyone's both before AND after those agreements were put into place). It would be nice if all the fees we as consumers pay (mentioned in a comment somewhere above) were actually used to improve the infrastructure as intended, but at least one company seems to be somewhat lenient and understanding when it comes to its customers given today's limitations.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
Where you located? If in Ontario, check out teksavvy or start.ca. Also check out your provider, a lot of them recently have been offering unlimited for an extra $10-30 a month depending if you have stuff bundled with them or not.
Actually, TekSavvy should be available throughout Canada at this point. Definitely recommended, they know their poop and have built a solid reputation on great customer service.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
I have to wonder about that.
The OP did 79.61 GB in one day, which works out to 7 Mbps over 24 hours. That seems like a lot of images (several a second?) for a screen-saver to download.
you make a valid point, however there is a point where it becomes unreasonable. i dont think streaming netflix 24/7 even would use as much bandwidth as this set top box. There was clearly an issue with the way the set top box is interactive with its home servers
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I like my Chromecast but had to unplug it because it used a good bit of my limited bandwidth to update when it wanted to and to change its wallpaper. I could notice it while gaming; my pings would get high. Not being able to leave it plugged in makes Chromecast much less useful.
My Chromecast displays very pretty nature photos as a screensaver when on but not in use - and they sure aren't local images. It also doesn't appear to shut off after a certain period either (at least an hour or so). Time to check my data usage next time I have it in standby.
That's why you sell by bandwidth and not by data size, which is the whole point of what he just said...
Again is it okay for the government to compete with private enterprise?
Others may disagree, but I think so, yes. (Assuming they compete on merits rather than legislation.)
Around here (Saskatchewan, Canada) the main telco is a government-owned and they have excellent wireless coverage in rural areas. My electricity comes from a government-owned utility, and their rates are controlled to cover costs and build infrastructure. My natural gas comes from a government-owned utility that has huge underground storage tanks all over the province so they can buy gas at low prices and store it for winter. (Important, winters are cold here.) The main vehicle insurer is government-owned with controlled rates, and of course police/fire services are government-run.
The only real complaint I have with a government-run organization is liquor stores--and that's a political issue since there's nothing stopping them from implementing a solution where I could order booze via a website and have it shipped to my house with the appropriate taxes automatically paid to the government.
Ah, that makes more sense. I thought this was one of the TV viewing optimized tablets, not a set top box.
I read the internet for the articles.
So they should be congratulated for reaching levels that some European and Asian countries had a decade ago? AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable are nothing but rent-seekers who use lobbyists as an integral part of their business plan. They're companies who derive revenue by lawyering, not technology.
I have a hard time equating the cost center of a power company generating finite amounts of power that is sold to users with the "mostly fixed and generally stable" cost of maintaining connectivity for the IPSs.
You do realize that we're not "consuming 1s and 0s that the ISP has to go out and manufacture, right?
I'm not suggesting that every person should have the ability to have unlimited speed and unlimited capacity(bandwidth), but lets not paint a picture of US IPSs as working tirelessly to upgrade infrastructure and provide lower cost, improved service. It's not a competitive market, driving towards improvement. It's in their best interest to raise prices any way they can, such as through caps. It's Not in their interest to spend billions on new infrastructure to improve services and lower consumer costs, because they have no true competition driving market forces to make them improve.
This, a thousand times this and everytime I hear people supporting metered internet access this is exactly what I think and I am still shocked to think anyone believes metered billing is fair or for anything beyond pure greed by the ISP's.
This isn't like oil, coal, fresh water, electricity, food or any other limited resource. There isn't a single ISP that has to mine 0's and 1's to fuel the internet reactors. You don't have to drill for 0's and 1's to fill your computer's internet gas tank. You sure as hell do not have droughts because there isn't enough fresh 0's and 1's to go around. If the ISP doesn't have the infastructure to support all the traffic they should actually do something about it instead of just over subscribing and making no investments into their infastructure.
In European and Asian countries you can lay down short distances of fiber and light up blocks of thousands of people. Come to the gas-guzzling car-driven states and you'll see that it gets mighty expensive to run fiber down that long winding road that you wanted so badly to keep pestering neighbors away. Now multiply that by over 100 million people. You catch my drift.
This data cap thing must be some American business? Ridiculous
Here in Sweden i just got upgraded from 100/10 to 100/100 Mbit... and monthly fee reduced from about 13 to 12 EUR.... (Our building-cooperation have a really sweet deal with the ISP)
I will support getting rid of the caps when business costs don't vary with bandwidth usage. Until then, like with electricity or gasoline or water or any other utility, cost should scale with use. I don't have any problem with that. My problem is with the secret no-warning charges.
Yeah.... like most things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Comcast, to their credit, did boost speeds for most broadband customers, across the board, without raising prices for it. Last year in the DC area, one of our offices was given a speed boost from 80mbit to 100mbit service at no charge -- and I recently discovered I was able to order residential 100mbit Comcast service in Maryland at the price I was initially told was for 50mbits.
On the flip-side, there are SO many outstanding examples of these companies NOT doing obviously needed upgrades. In Frederick, MD, for example, the cellular network is still basically on a 2G/EDGE type network, due to a lack of upgrading the cell towers. AT&T works well with 4G data speeds there now, but they seem to be the only carrier who bothered to put newer infrastructure in place to cover the area. Sprint and T-Mobile are nearly useless, and Verizon is spotty at best.
As another example, look at Verizon FiOS. After they took big payments from the government to deploy broadband to more places, they wound up only cherry picking a relative few cities, with a "long term plan" of simply filling out gaps in service in those areas. There really aren't any future plans to expand FiOS to new cities or states that never had it. Didn't stop upper management from taking big pay increases though.
You do realize that we're not "consuming 1s and 0s that the ISP has to go out and manufacture, right?
Actually that's exactly what we are doing.
Good point. So when you run out of bandwidth who gets cut off first, 20 Gig users or 500 Gig users? Or use a sliding scale like power utilities use?
I was wondering how the mac app could intercept the FireTV. Only way I can think off is if it captures wireless transmissions or automagically hacked the router.
They're also making records profits, buying anti-consumer laws, and internet prices have been going up. I just moved. I had to wait two weeks and take a day off from work for the Verizon contractor. I'll be here for 3 months, selected their lowest offering, and am using my our router. The connection speed is 15 Mbps down and 5 Mbps down. The total costs are a little more than $111 a month and that's with around $80 off for a free installation discount. This is near Boston, MA.
$111 is the lowest cost I could get. The internet advertised price is $75. The price when I called the first sales contact was around $50. He told me he couldn't finish the purchase because my apartment number wasn't in the system and gave me another number to call. He assured me the cost would stay at $50. Every time I contacted Verizon and got closer to confirming purchase and scheduling installation the price went up. WTF?
You used to be able to get broadband for $19.99 a month. Sure the speed was lower, but so was the cost. The low price options are disappearing and didn't exist for me. If I wanted to bundle in TV and phone, the price only increases by $20...
The telecommunication companies won't get any support from me, except lots of money :(
On the other hand a Kilobyte is an abstraction that is used to quantify data, it is not finite resource.
It is a finite resource. It's a specific collection of packets carrying specific information, with real and measurable costs to deliver to you.
This is not a commodity and the cost of it's existence is covered in the static overhead of the entire operation.
Well, not really. There are fixed costs in the operation of an ISP, absolutely, but that doesn't mean that there's not a variable cost as well, just like a power utility.
ISPs have to pay to transfer data across networks, and the more you transfer, the more those fees are. The higher the volume of traffic, the greater the needs of switches and equipment, whose power consumption rises when not left idle both in terms of powering the switches and caching servers and the cost of cooling them. The infrastructure is mostly a sunk cost
There is hardly anything (as far as the ISP is concerned) consumed by its use, and if it is not used then it is not wasted and it's existence adds nothing to their cost of operation.
That's really not true. You're mistaking infrastructure cost for variable costs.
You pay a power company for two things: (1) a connection infrastructure and (2) a measurable amount of electricity.
You pay an ISP for two things as well: (1) a connection infrastructure and (2) transferring data. The hardware that delivers the data to you is a sunk, fixed cost, but there are variable costs in transfer fees, maintenance labor, power consumption, and so on for the data itself.
Caps are a way of saying that x amount of data is built into the connection fee, and exceeding that incurs additional costs (although the very course blocking they've done is just greedy). An alternative strategy is to break it into two charges: a flat fee for connection with zero included data, and then an incremental cost for data transferred. The current strategy is simply to charge everyone for the excessive usage of a few, which not only incentivizes customers to use as much data as possible to make it "worth it", but also allows the ISP to blame "freeloading data hogs" for poor service and buildout.
This is what will happen when CO2 accumulation brings down civilization along with the governments that enforce civility to one another:
Anyone who ran a 24/7 screensaver on a high-powered device, and anyone who has mined bitcoin or other virtual currencies, will deserve and will get a bullet in the brain.
Have a good evening.