Provo, Utah. The same fiber network is available up north in Midvale, but I'm not sure if the pricing is the same, since access is through a different company.
Not all ISPs hate their customers;) Mine gives me 15Mbps up and down, for $41.90/month. I asked if I can host a server, they said yes. I asked if there's a bandwidth limit; the answer was "yes but we don't have a way to enforce it right now. We'll let you know when that changes."
Contrast that with what Comcast told me when I called. 7Mbps down, 3Mbps up (or something along those lines) for approximately the same price. Can't host a server. "No bandwidth limit, but if you use too much we'll cut you off." (I understand that Comcast recently made their non-limit limit official, but it's still lame that they told me that.)
I don't think you could successfully sue someone in court for not making an inherently unreliable protocol reliable. UDP does stand for "unreliable", after all, and it's silly to expect an ISP to make it reliable.
Of course, I wouldn't have thought you could successfully sue someone in court for making hot coffee hot, so I may be way off base here.
IIRC DNS queries are sent over UDP, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
So if this is true (a quick google search seems to indicate that it is), deprioritizing UDP packets would result in DNS queries getting deprioritized as well. On a congested link, that would result in DNS queries getting dropped or at least delayed, which could cause all sorts of issues on the client end. Anyone else here ever had Windows time out on a DNS query? It's kind of annoying.
Comcast used to say "there's no limit, but if you go over it we'll cut you off." I actually spent twenty minutes trying to get a Comcast sales rep to explain this logical inconsistency to me. (He eventually went off on some story about some customer sending 5000 e-mails per day... I don't think the CSR realized that 5000 e-mails per day couldn't be more than 50MB, if every e-mail were 10KB...)
Now, though, they've taken their previously undisclosed limit and made it public knowledge. (What is it, 250GB per month?)
Companies shouldn't be allowed to misrepresent their services in their marketing material, regardless of what the contract actually says. If I say in my commercial "I'll sell you up to 1 Gbps for $100/month" but the service contract says that you can only get 1 Gbps on days when there's both a full moon and a solar flare, and you only get 3Mbps on all other days, should I be allowed to get away with it? Sure, it's an extreme and highly unlikely example, but it effectively portrays my point.
Yeah, as far as I'm aware, the easter eggs in our software were put in before the company was created out of the local university's Civil Engineering department... before this particular manager was in charge.
My co-worker implemented an easter egg only halfway. All it does is make a button move back and forth in a particular dialog; he said he was going to do something more but never did.
On the other extreme, my *other* co-worker implemented a fully functional Sudoku game (optionally using icons from our software instead of numbers).
In the software my employer sells, there's one error message that is the Gilligan's Island theme song lyrics instead of the error description... To be fair, it is an extremely rare, obscure error.
Come to think of it, that's only in the debug build.
Actually that's *not* the longest Dvorak word typed with only the left hand. Several other people have mentioned "okupukupu" which is some kind of fern or something.
You've hit on exactly why I abandoned all attempts to learn Dvorak - programming. I got up to ~30 wpm when typing English with Dvorak, but the odd punctuation used in programming was harder for me to type, for the same reason you mentioned - {}[]-=_+ aren't "hit this key" in my brain, they're "move this finger here".
Yes, it is my interpretation, but chances are if it can be interpreted that way, it can be used that way in a court.
Remember, if a telco is caught snooping on customer calls, they're not going to say "oops, I guess that was illegal", they're going to point to the law and say "see, if you interpret it this way, what we did is legal". Or in the more likely case, they already know the law, so whatever they do they could simply say "it's for quality monitoring." Yes, I realize that's a loophole - but loopholes are extremely important to take note of in the legal world.
My original statement still stands, though; all a telco has to do is say "we're monitoring call X for quality control purposes", and they can monitor whatever call they want. All an ISP has to do is say "we're monitoring connection X for quality control purposes". They can't give the call or data to anyone, but that wasn't my original point - my original point was that legally they can listen/monitor.
I didn't realize you were asking about Canada, though. The way I understood your post I thought you were asking about the US; I assumed you already knew Canada's law on the topic and were thus interested in comparing it to US law.
They're allowed to, as long as they claim it's for "quality control checks". Seriously, if the telco says it's for quality control checks, you cannot prove them wrong. Thus, they effectively have free license to listen to calls.
The second snippet only says they can't give the contents of the communication to anyone except the parties involved. The telecommunication company is implicitly an involved party (by actually transmitting the communication).
IANAL, but here's what I've found that may help you:
Employers may monitor employees' phone calls and location (using cell towers or GPS).
(from the same link) Cell phone companies are required by the FCC to have the ability to track your location to within 100 meters for the purposes of 911 calls.
From this page: Telephone company employees may listen to your conversations when it is necessary to provide you with service, to inspect the telephone system, to monitor the quality of telephone service or to protect against service theft or harassment. Also, employers may monitor and even record their employees' phone conversations with few restrictions (18 USC 2511(2)(a); California Penal Code 631(b)).
Note that the above paragraph gives telephone companies free license to listen to phone conversations, they simply need to do it under the premise of "monitoring the quality of service".
I don't think there are any laws regulating ISPs inspecting customers' packets; if there were, we wouldn't be having the trouble we have now with companies doing it; for example, Comcast not only used Sandvine to do DPI, they actively interfered with connections, and lied to customers about it - but none of that was illegal.
Perhaps I should clarify: Anything you do on anyone else's property loses the expectation of privacy, except as specified by law or contractual agreements.
There are no laws prohibiting phone companies or ISPs from monitoring the content passing through their networks, and their contracts do not restrict such activity. While it may be a morally questionable activity (and I agree with you that they shouldn't do it), it's not illegal - if it were, ISPs would have been sued for it a long time ago.
Again, just to clarify, I'm not trying to say you're wrong as far as ethics go - I'm trying to say you're wrong about the (il)legality of ISPs looking at packets and telcos monitoring phone calls.
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Provo, Utah. The same fiber network is available up north in Midvale, but I'm not sure if the pricing is the same, since access is through a different company.
Agreed. Programs that slow down their background processing when I interact with the UI quickly become footnotes in my history of computer usage.
Not all ISPs hate their customers ;) Mine gives me 15Mbps up and down, for $41.90/month. I asked if I can host a server, they said yes. I asked if there's a bandwidth limit; the answer was "yes but we don't have a way to enforce it right now. We'll let you know when that changes."
Contrast that with what Comcast told me when I called. 7Mbps down, 3Mbps up (or something along those lines) for approximately the same price. Can't host a server. "No bandwidth limit, but if you use too much we'll cut you off." (I understand that Comcast recently made their non-limit limit official, but it's still lame that they told me that.)
That's more or less what I see from my ISP. Low end lines for $20, midrange for $50, high end for $80, and "even God wouldn't need this" for $180.
I don't think you could successfully sue someone in court for not making an inherently unreliable protocol reliable. UDP does stand for "unreliable", after all, and it's silly to expect an ISP to make it reliable.
Of course, I wouldn't have thought you could successfully sue someone in court for making hot coffee hot, so I may be way off base here.
IIRC DNS queries are sent over UDP, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
So if this is true (a quick google search seems to indicate that it is), deprioritizing UDP packets would result in DNS queries getting deprioritized as well. On a congested link, that would result in DNS queries getting dropped or at least delayed, which could cause all sorts of issues on the client end. Anyone else here ever had Windows time out on a DNS query? It's kind of annoying.
Comcast used to say "there's no limit, but if you go over it we'll cut you off." I actually spent twenty minutes trying to get a Comcast sales rep to explain this logical inconsistency to me. (He eventually went off on some story about some customer sending 5000 e-mails per day... I don't think the CSR realized that 5000 e-mails per day couldn't be more than 50MB, if every e-mail were 10KB...)
Now, though, they've taken their previously undisclosed limit and made it public knowledge. (What is it, 250GB per month?)
TCPs flow control is trash.
... despite continual demonstrations to the contrary? TCP isn't right for every situation, but when it is, its flow control is superb.
I choose option three - Sue them for falsely advertising regular beans as magic beans.
I haven't once gotten full speed on my fiber connection, no matter the time of day.
My ISP's advertising material doesn't say "up to 15Mbps", it says "15Mbps [down] / 15Mbps [up], 60Mbps within our fiber network".
There's a speedtest.net server within their fiber network. I've never even hit 10Mbps on it, let alone 60Mbps.
Companies shouldn't be allowed to misrepresent their services in their marketing material, regardless of what the contract actually says. If I say in my commercial "I'll sell you up to 1 Gbps for $100/month" but the service contract says that you can only get 1 Gbps on days when there's both a full moon and a solar flare, and you only get 3Mbps on all other days, should I be allowed to get away with it? Sure, it's an extreme and highly unlikely example, but it effectively portrays my point.
Yeah, as far as I'm aware, the easter eggs in our software were put in before the company was created out of the local university's Civil Engineering department... before this particular manager was in charge.
Where I work, fixing bugs without explicit permission is grounds for dismissal. I know, because it happened to me.
Good thing the company president likes me; he put me in charge of IT (with a raise) instead of letting my ex-manager fire me.
Tell them you used your lunch break to do it.
My co-worker implemented an easter egg only halfway. All it does is make a button move back and forth in a particular dialog; he said he was going to do something more but never did.
On the other extreme, my *other* co-worker implemented a fully functional Sudoku game (optionally using icons from our software instead of numbers).
In the software my employer sells, there's one error message that is the Gilligan's Island theme song lyrics instead of the error description... To be fair, it is an extremely rare, obscure error.
Come to think of it, that's only in the debug build.
Actually that's *not* the longest Dvorak word typed with only the left hand. Several other people have mentioned "okupukupu" which is some kind of fern or something.
Ironically, "okupukupu" can be typed by just the right hand with QWERTY...
I'm certainly not the first person to say this, but:
http://slashdot.org/help
click "Sections" under "Index" on the right
choose the first radio button across from "Idle".
click Save.
That'll be $45.
You've hit on exactly why I abandoned all attempts to learn Dvorak - programming. I got up to ~30 wpm when typing English with Dvorak, but the odd punctuation used in programming was harder for me to type, for the same reason you mentioned - {}[]-=_+ aren't "hit this key" in my brain, they're "move this finger here".
Yes, it is my interpretation, but chances are if it can be interpreted that way, it can be used that way in a court.
Remember, if a telco is caught snooping on customer calls, they're not going to say "oops, I guess that was illegal", they're going to point to the law and say "see, if you interpret it this way, what we did is legal". Or in the more likely case, they already know the law, so whatever they do they could simply say "it's for quality monitoring." Yes, I realize that's a loophole - but loopholes are extremely important to take note of in the legal world.
My original statement still stands, though; all a telco has to do is say "we're monitoring call X for quality control purposes", and they can monitor whatever call they want. All an ISP has to do is say "we're monitoring connection X for quality control purposes". They can't give the call or data to anyone, but that wasn't my original point - my original point was that legally they can listen/monitor.
I didn't realize you were asking about Canada, though. The way I understood your post I thought you were asking about the US; I assumed you already knew Canada's law on the topic and were thus interested in comparing it to US law.
They're allowed to, as long as they claim it's for "quality control checks". Seriously, if the telco says it's for quality control checks, you cannot prove them wrong. Thus, they effectively have free license to listen to calls.
The second snippet only says they can't give the contents of the communication to anyone except the parties involved. The telecommunication company is implicitly an involved party (by actually transmitting the communication).
IANAL, but here's what I've found that may help you:
Employers may monitor employees' phone calls and location (using cell towers or GPS).
(from the same link) Cell phone companies are required by the FCC to have the ability to track your location to within 100 meters for the purposes of 911 calls.
From this page: Telephone company employees may listen to your conversations when it is necessary to provide you with service, to inspect the telephone system, to monitor the quality of telephone service or to protect against service theft or harassment. Also, employers may monitor and even record their employees' phone conversations with few restrictions (18 USC 2511(2)(a); California Penal Code 631(b)).
Note that the above paragraph gives telephone companies free license to listen to phone conversations, they simply need to do it under the premise of "monitoring the quality of service".
I don't think there are any laws regulating ISPs inspecting customers' packets; if there were, we wouldn't be having the trouble we have now with companies doing it; for example, Comcast not only used Sandvine to do DPI, they actively interfered with connections, and lied to customers about it - but none of that was illegal.
Perhaps I should clarify: Anything you do on anyone else's property loses the expectation of privacy, except as specified by law or contractual agreements.
There are no laws prohibiting phone companies or ISPs from monitoring the content passing through their networks, and their contracts do not restrict such activity. While it may be a morally questionable activity (and I agree with you that they shouldn't do it), it's not illegal - if it were, ISPs would have been sued for it a long time ago.
Again, just to clarify, I'm not trying to say you're wrong as far as ethics go - I'm trying to say you're wrong about the (il)legality of ISPs looking at packets and telcos monitoring phone calls.
You have a very valid point. What that means, though, is that we (as customers) need to do one of two things (or both):
1) Refuse to sign any service contract containing that clause.
2) Make it illegal (through legislation) to include that clause in service contracts.