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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.
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.
Haven't really looked into it too closely, but for some reason it requires that I have 4 GB free to do the update. And the download time for the download part of the update definitely seems like it takes longer than doing a 32 MB download. Perhaps the behavior is different on iPod touch and iPad because they aren't downloading the files from the cellular network, and therefore they assume they can use lots of bandwidth.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
When you grow up and buy a house, you're going to be shocked how other utilities work. They charge you for the capacity of your connection, then charge you for the amount of product you move through it. Water for example. My last house was around $62 to have the 1/2" connection. That's it. Just the potential to move water into my house. That cost went from about $35 for 1/4" to hundreds of dollars for larger pipes. Once I flushed a toilet, the usage meter started ticking and I paid $2.73 per 100 cubic feet of water. The usage rate was constant all the way from a 1/4" to 6" connection. That's how all the utilities were set up. A monthly fee for the connection based on capacity, a per-unit cost for the amount delivered. And, if you have a water leak, they rarely give you a warning. They just send a bill.
Cable and internet are the oddballs that charge a flat "connection" rate with no metered usage. That works for cable TV but not so much for internet which functions more like water or electricity. Trouble with internet is they'll cut you off for using "too much" of their product but don't give you a way to purchase more of it. I wouldn't mind the caps so much if they'd give an accurate measure of usage and the option to purchase additional product at $10 per hundred gigs or so. That seems reasonableish to me. But they don't want you paying for the product that you use. They want you paying for product that you don't use.
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.
As others have mentioned, the full download occurs only if you update via iTunes and not on the devices themselves.
However, if you buy the OS X Server app from the App Store, it includes a "caching server" that provides a local cache for all Apple downloadable content. It's US$20, so that's a big bummer. But you only have to buy it once and if you have to pay for all that extra bandwidth it might be worthwhile, not to mention all the other "features" you get with the Server app.
I'd like to see Apple make the server app free - it's reasonable to keep it a separate app - or if not, to roll the caching feature into a future iTunes release.
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
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.
So, you don't have caches in your world?
It's really about data, not bandwidth. Just like your utilities connection is about water or electricity, not pipes or wires.
In fact, that's what this *article* is about--the TV should've saved data for later, but didn't.
And it's also astonishing that they didn't notice huge spikes on their end - does nobody buy these things?
That, or the ISP's caching proxy is dicking the pragmas
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, Wife and kids. I tried to convince them otherwise, but they simply had to have Apple. I got a Surface 2 (rt) and personally I like it a lot better than the iOS Devices. It was a toss up between Windows RT and Android. The only thing that really compelled me about Android was that there was more apps. Other than that, I didn't really care for Android that much. On a phone it's great, but on a 10 inch tablet, it's kind of lacking. You can only have 1 app on screen at a time. No native connectivity to shared folders. Updates to the OS are at the discretion of the device manufacturer.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Meter internet connections are available, it's just that ISPs choose not to offer them because they want to label their products UNLIMITED* for marketing reasons.
One of the biggest issues is that you can't control your downstream usage - if someone picks a random IP address allocated to a home users and floods it with traffic their monthly usage will rocket, even though their router drops every packet. People who use P2P apps discover that even though they closed the app other clients keep trying to connect to them and send them UDP packets, sometimes at a quite terrific rate.
* Limited.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Thanks for letting me know, but since there's no cap, I don't really care and it's not worth my time to figure out why and to fix it.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
with several home appliances going IP. And this was just a bug, not a worm/virus.
You have a funny way of spelling feature...
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.
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.