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Comcast Allegedly Asking Customers to Stop Using Tor

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-tor-for-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes Comcast agents have reportedly contacted customers who use Tor and said their service can get terminated if they don't stop using Tor. According to Deep.Dot.Web, one of those calls included a Comcast customer service agent who allegedly called Tor an “illegal service.” The Comcast agent told the customer that such activity is against usage policies. The Comcast agent then allegedly told the customer: "Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that aren’t so-to-speak legal. We have the right to terminate, fine, or suspend your account at anytime due to you violating the rules. Do you have any other questions? Thank you for contacting Comcast, have a great day." Update: 09/15 18:38 GMT by S : Comcast has responded, saying they have no policy against Tor and don't care if people use it.

43 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Call to disconnect does not seem to work.

    1. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm sure they'll come up with some BS term. Something like "Active services suspension" Yeah, that's it!

      "Sir, we've placed a hold on your active account. You're still a valuable customer, and will be billed as such, but your connection has been disconnected" We will re-enable the connection when you agree and signed a form stating you will stop using Tor. Good day"

      Brilliant. I make for such an evil villain!

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    2. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Jade_Wayfarer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wait, why is this modded 'Funny'? You really think that they won't do it? I'm really surprised that they aren't doing it right now.

      --
      Absence of proof != proof of absence.
    3. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Having worked for comcasts I can say, without doubt, your services can be suspended for less than this. If you try to use the internet while suspended you'll meet the walled garden. You won't be able to free yourself until your services are restored or you use another modem provisioned by comcast with internet service.

      Comcast garuntees service to the house. Not to your modem. They garuntee the modem will work, if it's rented from them, not that it will be able to surf the internet. Everything within the house is your responsibility; which is why, unless you have their tech service plan, you are charged anywhere from 20-30 dollars for a tech visit per issue. Don't believe me? Open your cable box, remove a component or two, close your cable box, call in for troubleshooting. When they eventually conclude it is their cable box they'll send a tech. When that tech arrives and sees that the signal to the cable box is fine, he'll swap your cable box. This is a clear case of "it's your problem comcast"...even though it was crafted by you. After he reports the work completed your automatically charged a service call fee. It'll be on your next bill.

      In the end, you signed a contract and are legally bound to continue to pay for almost any type of service inturruption. Even if the tech from before fixes your service and then destroys your equipment on the way out you are still charged for service to the house. It is possible to get a refund for most of these occurences, especially the one just detailed. Take your month service charge for internet (say 50 bucks for ease) and divide it by the number of days in a month (we'll go with 30) and you'll get $1.60 for each day without service from ANY rep that answers the phone. I seriously doubt you'd get a refund for this though. Even when internet becomes an unrefuted utility you'll have a hard time selling your desire for a refund to the powers that be outside of Comcast if the reason you were disconnected was due to fraudulent activity. Come to think of it...it'd probably be pretty stupid to say anything to any governement official, in regards to this, if Comcast has not already done so.

    4. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by LoRdTAW · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The point he was trying to make is they charge you for a service call when the problem is with faulty equipment they own. It is then their responsibility to eat the labor and fuel costs to fix their problem.

    5. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Lothsahn · · Score: 4, Informative

      So if you rent a car, and then it breaks down, and you call for repair, and they:
      1) Arrive within 3 days to give you a new one
      2) Charge you 20-30 dollars for a "car tech visit"
      3) Break it on the way out the door (yes, it happened to me)

      This is OK? ...because, they had to incur employee, vehicle, and gas costs to replace the device they rented you which was faulty?

      (Ignoring the statement in the parent where he suggested breaking the cablemodem--that's a different issue entirely).

      Full Disclosure: In my case, I was able to get the fee removed each time by calling in, because it's not my fault that their tech refused to follow clear instructions (both written on his form and from my wife), and it's not my fault that the modem was faulty.

      --
      -=Lothsahn=-
    6. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This.

      Comcast came out and fixed my neighbors internet ( which they managed to kill with a shovel ) by removing my very active connection from the pedestal and connecting my neighbor to it :|

      When I called Comcast about it, they said it would take at least TWO WEEKS to have a tech on site to fix the problem and it would also incur a service charge for their trouble. Even though it was Comcast's fault the service went dead to begin with and I explained their tech was why it went down during the service call next door from earlier in the day.

      ( This axed my internet, alarm system and cable btw )

      Long story short version, I went out and fixed the damn thing by isolating which homes were what at the pedestal, labeling them for the incompetent techs that Comcast hires, and attaching my neighbors to a connection point that was not in use.

    7. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by mr_mischief · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A VPN? That's hiding internet traffic from them, which is precisely their problem with Tor.

    8. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Richy_T · · Score: 3

      Where you can pay the regular bill but you can't afford to pay the penalty and reconnection fees? I believe that's called the A.S.S. hole.

    9. Re:This may be the way to escape from Comcast by Bengie · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They'll just send you to collections where you can pay $10/month for the next 5 years. I've found collections easier to work with and typically reduce the amount owed. I prefer to work with collections. I've dragged some collections for several thousand dollars out with $10/month for several years until they contacted me and said they'll remove 20% of the amount remaining if I pay at all once and that's after they already removed 10% when they're were trying to get me to pay more per month.

      Don't think I was trying to skirt paying, I had other more pressing bills and a lot of health issues during that time of my life.

  2. So-to-speak legal by Gaygirlie · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that aren’t so-to-speak legal.

    They have no evidence of you doing anything illegal, they cannot prove that everyone using Tor is a criminal, but even the hint of suspicion is apparently enough for them to cancel your subscription. I must ask, however, if such behaviour is "so-to-speak legal?"

    1. Re:So-to-speak legal by Nerrd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They're not a utility - they damn well can terminate service for any reason.

    2. Re:So-to-speak legal by guygo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's the State of Comcast. They have no such niceties as "innocent until proven guilty". They can do whatever they want, because they own everybody who could possibly be effective in trying to do something about them. So let's let them swallow Time-Warner, too! All hail Comcast!

    3. Re:So-to-speak legal by thaylin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For now, hopefully that will change soon.

      --
      When you cant win, ad hominem.
    4. Re:So-to-speak legal by JenovaSynthesis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, because who needs clean air, fresh water, safe food, safe working conditions, fair pay and other such "Big Government" regulations?

      --
      Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch :)
    5. Re:So-to-speak legal by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Quit spreading FUD. You know the difference between Big Government "regulating" the Internet and "Big Cable" controlling the Internet? With government, you can complain on Constitutional grounds if they infringe your rights. With Comcast, you're shit out of luck!

      --

      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

    6. Re:So-to-speak legal by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Because the ISPs already have used "Big-Government" to get paid for rolling out "broadband" service, preventing muni ISPs, and any number of other regulations that benefit them.

      You worry about big government but we pretty much already have all the worst parts of government regulation with none of the benefits.

      --
      See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
    7. Re:So-to-speak legal by hjf · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh, you're an idiot. You don't understand. It's not the Government God Damn Business to interfere on what I do!!! Any person should be allowed to engage into any sort of transaction with anyone else! It's a private contract between two entities!
      If I want to pay my neighbor for mowing my lawn, why should the government get in the middle?
      If I want to buy from comcast, I should have the right to do it if I please! I also have a right to terminate said contract whenever I please, and I can negotiate the price too.
      If my neighbor wishes to die but she cannot kill herself, I could kill her provided we both agreed to!! It's our LIBERTARIAN RIGHT! If the cops find her dead, I should NOT be investigated. All I need to do is explain that we both had a VERBAL CONTRACT and that should be enough!
      Cops shouldn't exist! Government shouldn't exist! I am a person and I should have the right to do anything I please with anyone, if we both wanted to.
      Jesus. I don't understand the "extreme" libertarians like that. What will they do once they find out you can't really have a fair contract against a corporation (or anyone else) if there aren't laws or an arbitration system AKA "the judiciary system"?
      Ah yes: The Free Market Will Solve All Those Issues®
      (oopsie, no ® there. There's no government to ®)

    8. Re: So-to-speak legal by Tx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "Then TOR will be wrapped by a VPN service, and Comcast will be fscked."

      Let's not forget that rights holders are already calling for VPN users to be assumed to be criminals. So it's far from impossible that what they're doing for TOR now, they may do for VPNs later. Sure they would have to have some sort of system to allow "approved" VPN connections, so that people who need them for work wouldn't be screwed, but I wouldn't rule it out.

      --
      Oh no... it's the future.
    9. Re: So-to-speak legal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can easily see that some *is* using Tor, you just can't see where they are going or what they are doing. Well, unless you are a well-funded organization with the time, equipment, and money to set up lots of exit nodes.

      You don't need a lot of exit nodes. You just need to monitor the metadata. Packet sizes and time of sending together with packet sizes and time of arrival makes it possible to trace the packets well enough without decrypting them.
      As long as the packet never leaves their network they can connect the decrypted packet with the original sender.
      NSA gets metadata from multiple ISP's so they can probably trace all the communication they want.

    10. Re:So-to-speak legal by Predius · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, but they can reference their TOS and note preclusion against running 'servers' on residential service.

      Actually, they have a few rules in their Acceptable Use Policy that specifically go after TOR: http://www.comcast.com/Corpora...

    11. Re:So-to-speak legal by Nimey · · Score: 3, Informative

      I think you Poe'd most of the people who responded to you.

      --
      Hail Eris, full of mischief...

      E pluribus sanguinem
    12. Re: So-to-speak legal by NotDrWho · · Score: 3, Funny

      Introducing Comcast's new ComVPN Service! All your VPN services, delivered directly from Comcast, for only the modest price of $10/month! Because at Comcast, we are always adding new services benefit you, our loyal customer!

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
    13. Re: So-to-speak legal by Curunir_wolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      Then TOR will be wrapped by a VPN service, and Comcast will be fscked.

      Didn't you read the article? VPN is against Comcast's terms of service-- it's a proxy.

      The TOS only restricts you from running a proxy service, not for using a proxy service as a client.

      --
      "Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
      --- Jerry Garcia
    14. Re:So-to-speak legal by CrashPoint · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Anonymous anything will be the first to go! The legal ( and its sound reasoning ) will be sure the first amendment provides you can say pretty much anything you want but it says nothing about you being able to do it in anonymity.

      McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission says hi.

    15. Re:So-to-speak legal by thaylin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Umm, you mistakenly believe the government does not have the ability to do all the things you mention now...

      --
      When you cant win, ad hominem.
    16. Re:So-to-speak legal by N1AK · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Private organisations providing internet service in the US has done what exactly to stop government monitoring/filtering/etc so far? The government could already regulate just like in China just as easily as it could if the internet was classified as a utility, let's not pretend those businesses are doing anything to stop it.

  3. Quiz by AftanGustur · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Human rights for 100 points:

    It is 2014 and anonymity is a crime, what country are we thinking of ?

    --
    echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
  4. Locked doors by kruach+aum · · Score: 5, Funny

    People with doors that can be locked are often engaged in activities that are not, so-to-speak "legal". As a result we will no longer mortgage houses that have locks.

    1. Re:Locked doors by freezin+fat+guy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Also, people who spy on others are often engaged in activities that are not, so-to-speak "legal".

  5. why? Better for Comcast to not know by raymorris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This raises the question of why Comcast would care. For many years at least, the conventional wisdom among service providers and other carriers was that they'd prefer to NOT know what a customer uses the service for. If the ISP doesn't, and can't, know which sites customers are visiting, they can't be held responsible either legally or in regards to PR. I was shopping for a colo facility for the backup service I offer and the contract for one facility said "no porn". That was a definite deal-breaker for me - I most definitely do not want to look at what my customers are having backed up, and therefore become responsible for it. It would be a huge waste of my time to deal with any copyright violations, verify age reqirements, etc so the business is better off not know what the bits are. Just store the bits (or transfer them, in Comcast's case). That would save Comcast a bunch of money compared to monitoring and therefore needing to moderate the content.

    1. Re:why? Better for Comcast to not know by Exitar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Probably Comcast cares because NSA told them they should.

    2. Re:why? Better for Comcast to not know by JohnnyDoesLinux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They care because they are content owners/producers now (NBC).

    3. Re:why? Better for Comcast to not know by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This raises the question of why Comcast would care.

      Excellent question. There are a few things that an ISP can reasonably complain to a customer about:

      * Excess use of bandwidth (I am not going to discuss what 'too much' is)

      * Loss of IP address reputation, by this I mean getting their IP range blacklisted by spamming, etc

      * Using up too much of their admin time. This might include dealing with copyright/DMCA type requests (again not interested here in rights/wrongs)

      So, 2 reasons for wanting to know (roughly) what content a customer is moving. But these go away with TOR since the TOR IP addresses have nothing to do with the ISP, so they should not care. So what other reasons are there ?

      * Requests from FBI/NSA/... that they comply with, willingly or otherwise

      * Want to know what a customer is doing so that they can profile them to better monitise the customer (eg sell more targetted adverts)

      Anything else ?

  6. Re:What about Incognito mode? by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Funny

    It isn't an onion routed proxy network like For.

    Fhe Onion Roufer?

  7. Dont cancel by phone by voss · · Score: 5, Informative

    Turn in your equipment and cancel in person. Comcast has figured out if your willing to sit in their DMV like customer service center for 30-45 minutes they aint gonna keep you. Id rather sit quietly at a customer service center than try to argue with the phone guys who get paid to keep you.

  8. Comcast says this never happened. by Nonesuch · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Via DSLreports:

    I reached out to Comcast and was told by spokesman Charlie Douglas that the report is "wildly inaccurate."

    "The anecdotal chat room evidence provided is not consistent with our agents’ messages and is not accurate," said Douglas. "Per our own internal review, we have found no evidence that these conversations took place, nor do we employ a Security Assurance team member named Kelly.

    Douglas proceeded to state that "Comcast doesn’t monitor users’ browser software or web surfing and has no program addressing the Tor browser. Customers are free to use their Xfinity Internet service to visit any website or use it however they wish otherwise

    --

    I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
    1. Re:Comcast says this never happened. by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is believable up until the sentence"Comcast doesn’t monitor users’ browser software or web surfin" which we know is false since Comcast sends out notices to people downloading pirated software, and they were in court for monitoring and blocking bittorrent traffic.

      It is weird that they throw an obvious lie into what would otherwise be a nice clarifying statement that would put the issue to rest.

    2. Re:Comcast says this never happened. by jratcliffe · · Score: 3, Informative

      For the copyright alert notices, they're just forwarding on notices from the copyright holder, when the copyright holder says "hey, IP address XYZ is downloading Captain America." Comcast just sends on the notice to whomever has IP XYZ (or had it at the time in question).

  9. Dear Comcast, by LoyalOpposition · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Users who try to use anonymity, or cover themselves up on the internet, are usually doing things that aren’t so-to-speak legal.

    Dear Comcast,

              I notice that your customer list, vendor list, inter-company agreements, and engineering drawings are concealed. Why are you committing illegal acts?

    ~Loyal

    --
    I aim to misbehave.
  10. Solution by fulldecent · · Score: 3, Informative

    The solution is not to cancel your Comcast service (assuming you live in the United States in many of the places with no legitimate competition).

    The solution is to record your phone calls (when legal). For Android, my dad uses https://play.google.com/store/...

    Then post your calls online (instead of transcripts).

    Lastly, and this is the important part: call your local utility regulation board.

    Don't forget: you are not the customer, the utility regulation board is the customer, you are just the one paying.

    --

    -- I was raised on the command line, bitch

  11. Illegal Service? by PPH · · Score: 5, Funny

    The TOR protocol was developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to protect secure government online communications. So when a Comcast rep contacts you, ask him what business they have intercepting secure communications channels. And then ask him for his name and current location and request that he remain there until FBI agents can respons to his location. Then hang up.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  12. Flaw by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Funny

    The greatest flaw is that the person at the call center would understand what Tor is.