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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.
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.
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 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
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.
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
with several home appliances going IP. And this was just a bug, not a worm/virus.
You have a funny way of spelling feature...