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Bug In Fire TV Screensaver Tears Through 250 GB Data Cap

Posted by Unknown on from the should-have-stuck-to-xscreensaver dept.

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.

1 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why can't by hab136 · · Score: 1, Troll

    Bandwidth isn't like water or electricity. You either use it in the moment or don't. You can't save it for later.

    Not using bandwidth at 3am doesn't help the traffic jam at peak time (6pm). ISPs have to build enough infrastructure to handle peak times - they have to have larger pipes - but it doesn't actually matter how much bandwidth you use except for peak times. There's no good reason to meter traffic during non-peak times.

    I'm not saying metering is a good idea - as I understand it, simply increasing bandwidth is often a cheaper option and better for users - but metering during non-peak times is just greed.