All any influential(i.e. rich) company or person needs to do is state that they have a copyright over something they don't want distributed, and they can stop anything from being put up on the 'net.
No, you can't. See if I download stuff it costs me NOTHING. If government(s) try to police the internet, it will cost them resources. If they try to take me and everyone like me to court, it will cost them resources. If they tie up enough resources persecuting "downloaders" and letting people get away with violent crime, or let their roads collapse, etc, eventually it will be a big political nightmare.
You realize that when you say it will cost "them" resources you really ought to be saying that it will cost us resources. Where do you think the Government gets it's funding from? I don't particularly relish the thought of my tax dollars being used for these purposes, how about you?
How many thousands of dollars/years in jail because s/he downloaded one movie?
How many thousands of dollars/years in jail because s/he got caught with marijuana?
But most people know they'll never get caught.
Indeed. And that fact hasn't deterred the Government from the 'War on Drugs' either. Maybe this will be different -- I'd guess that there are more downloaders out there than pot smokers -- but I'm not nearly that optimistic.
It's not so much that the wireless product itself sucks -- their arrogance and anti-consumer policies are the problem. Arrogance in that they have the attitude of "It's the network, where else are you going to go?" -- bad policies in that they force contract extensions if you change your plan, keep raising their fees and costs and attempt to extract their ETF out of you even if you are leaving due to service issues that they can't fix.
My specific story with them: When they rolled out their EV-DO upgrades in my area I started having problems with incoming calls. Roughly 50% of them would go straight to voicemail without ringing my phone. If the caller didn't leave a message I had no idea that they called. They were not able to resolve this problem for me -- most of their people just blamed it on my handset, even though I'd tried five different phone models and had the same problem on all of them. They refused to even consider the idea that it might be a network issue of some kind.
Eventually I got fed up and ditched them to switch over to GSM (T-Mobile) and all the advantages that it offers. When I left they tried to charge me the ETF even though I had service issues that they couldn't fix. I appealed it all the way up to their legal department who told me that "If you read the contract you actually have no exception of the service working at any time". At that point I told them to fuck off and fought the ETF through the NYS Attorney General's office. Never did wind up paying it.
The concept that some parts of a company are better than others is relatively new to me and will take getting used to
Well, Verizon Wireless is technically a completely separate company. Verizon owns roughly 55% of it. Vodaphone owns most of the rest. For whatever that's worth. I'll never do business with them again -- and even if I wanted to I've come to prefer GSM and don't see any reason to go back to the walled garden of CDMA land.
None of those stories that you told suggest that they are deliberately throttling those connections. Verizon provisions your line at the fastest speed that their tools/wire database indicate that your loop will support (unless you pay for a slower tier). If there are problems with the local loop or (more likely) the inside wiring at your house, then the modem won't be able to sync up at this speed and will fall back to slower ones and generally not work very well at all.
That has nothing to do with throttling p2p connections ala Comcast. It has everything to do with a physical layer problem, either on the outside plant or the inside wiring in your house. Either way it wasn't something that they did to you on purpose.
They proceed to tell him he's too far from the DSLAM(the same DSLAM my wire comes from by the way)
Just because he's your next door neighbor doesn't mean that his loop takes the same path back to the CO that yours does. It might -- it might also go in the opposite direction down the street and take a completely different path back. And even if it takes the same path it might be a different wire gage than the one you are on. "Loop length" isn't the literal length of the wire -- it's a measurement based on capacitance. A thicker wire gage in the local loop generally translates into being able to provide DSL services further out.
and it's impossible to deliver 1.5Mbps over that length of wire, and he'd just have to deal with it because his contract only guarantees 768kbps.
I don't buy that. The 768kbps is a value tier -- that's not the minimum that they promise. If you sign up for the 1.5/384 service and can't get it then you can back out of that contract in the first month. You can do the same if they promise 3.0/768 at time of order and can't deliver it.
Regardless, I'll grant you that it's a PITA to deal with them to get these types of problems fixed, particularly if you aren't fluent in their lingo. Luckily it seems that you had another option. My choices are between Verizon DSL (which always delivers my promised speed and never goes down) or Roadrunner (which bogs down during peak hours and may start metering traffic soon). There's no CLEC providers of DSL for residential customers around here. No WISPs that are still in business either.
I've had several fights with Verizon that I already outlined to get services setup properly. But I'll stand by my claim that once you do manage to get it all configured and working that it's pretty much rock-solid. In four years I haven't seen my residential DSL account go down once. It was even still running during the floods last year when my whole town (including the CO) had no power for five days. I hooked my modem up to a UPS and surfed with my laptop -- worked the whole time. Time Warner couldn't say that -- their internet and phone customers were SOL the entire time.
You can also replace the ActionTec with any other router, which gets an address via DHCP. You just have to clone the MAC address or call Verizon to tell them to reconfigure their router to talk to your MAC address. I believe that some of FIOS TV's capabilities depend on the ActionTec router (e.g. VOD).
So how does the connection actually come in? Ethernet? So you can easily replace their router with any other router or direct to a PC?
I'd heard that wasn't an option and they forced you behind NAT regardless but I found that rather hard to believe.
I don't buy that as the source of their problems -- at least for Verizon (I've not worked much with AT&T). Most of the CSRs aren't unionized at Verizon. Most of the field techs are. And yet it's the CSRs that you usually have problems with. Beyond that, the tech support phone drones definitely aren't unionized -- and we all know how helpful they are....
I've never had an issue with a field tech for any phone company. Almost all of them are a credit to their occupation and will do everything within their power to get you up and running/address any troubles that you have. The problem lies in convincing the business office and/or the Level 1 phone drones that you actually have a problem serious enough to send it to the engineering group. If I'm facing an outage at one of my mission-critical clients I'll just bypass the business office and call the local CO directly. I shouldn't have to do that but there you go....
In any case, once engineering actually gets your trouble ticket/new order it's usually resolved pretty quickly and professionally.
I still don't get why the general consensus around here is that downloading TV shows and movies from each other should be legal. Can someone explain the reason of why it shouldn't be considered a form of stealing?
I won't even try to argue the point on movies being theft but I don't see why downloading TV is.
If my TiVo misses a recording that I wanted for whatever reason then I'm going to seek out an alternative source for that show. If it happens to be one of the shows that the network puts up on their webpage in it's entirety then I'm going to get it from them. I'll even put up with commercials to watch the stream from the "official" source.
If such a source doesn't exist however I'm going to seek it out on bittorrent. I don't apologize for that and I really don't see how you can claim that it's stealing when they wouldn't have made any money had I watched it on TV directly (obviously this doesn't apply to HBO/PPV/etc, but you get the drift). If they don't want people to bittorrent their shows then provide us with another alternative. The South Park guys did. The Daily Show people did.
There's supposedly a way you can use the Actiontec as a bridge, keep your TVs working, and bypass the overflow bug but it's a pain.
How do they plan on offering commercial services if you can't (easily) bypass their router and use your own? That would be a deal-breaker for me -- I want control over my connection -- not some badly designed NAT box sitting in front of me.
I don't recall which authentication method it uses, though I doubt it's PPOE.
They aren't using any authentication on DSL anymore. It's still PPP but you can enter any username and password that you'd like and it will happily establish a connection. One wonders why they even keep PPP in the loop, given the overhead of PPPoE -- probably inertia more than anything else.
Hahaha, you find me a (legal) torrent that will peg my connection 24/7 and I'll be happy to seed it for you. I primarily seed Linux distros, but they are typically seeded well enough that they don't peg my connection most of the time -- even with tons of upload slots available.
though I'm glad to hear your experience with Verizon has been so positive.
Oh, it hasn't been all positive dealing with them. Verizon Wireless dicked me over in a major way and Verizon Landline is busy nickel and diming people to death (you'd think they'd be DROPPING landline rates to keep people from switching to VoIP/wireless, but there you go)
I'll never do business with Verizon Wireless ever again and it's not likely that I'll ever pay for a landline again unless I wind up having a large family or someone with a medical condition living in my house. It's just not worth paying for living by yourself.
All that said though, Verizon Online has been great. Rock-solid service (no outages in 4+ years of service), no throttling, no limits. Here's your internet connection -- it goes up to X Mbits down and Y Kbits up -- do whatever you want with it. That's how it should be, IMHO.
If you really transferred that much over the course of a year then you wouldn't have had an issue on Comcast either
Except I never would have been able to transfer that much because they have (had?) this nasty habit of conducting man-in-the-middle attacks to reset seeding connections.
For fairness I should probably point out that I likely had similar traffic numbers when I was with Roadrunner and they never complained about it either. I ditched them not because of limits that they had or may have -- I ditched them because I got tired of dealing with pauses and slowdowns when trying to stream live video.
I live in a major college town -- Roadrunner rocks during the school breaks -- once the kids come back you start to notice a real degradation of service during peak hours and even (occasionally) during off-peak ones. It varies depending on which neighborhood you live in but in some of them it's damn near unusable for anything other than basic surfing/gaming during peak hours.
It got better for browsing/gaming once they started traffic shaping/prioritization -- but they don't seem to discriminate between an http transfer for live streaming video and a non-interactive HTTP/FTP download or NNTP transfer. All bulk transfers suffer -- which makes live streaming video a PITA during periods of congestion.
Verizon provisioning sucks, but it has been pretty much my experience that provisioning EVERYWHERE sucks no matter who you go with
Yeah and that's something that the telco's really need to improve. I've been around the telco culture ever since high school. I'm familiar enough with their procedures to put up the provisioning headaches. I also have enough contacts among the local techs that I can generally bypass the Business Office to get things done faster -- though I try not to abuse this unless I'm facing a service outage and the Business Office isn't being responsive enough.
The problem is that not everybody has that experience or those contacts. And Grandma doesn't understand why it takes 7-10 business days to get her DSL hooked up when Time Warner can (usually) just give you a self-install kit that isn't particularly hard to figure out. I don't think the telco's can ever be that responsive but there's no reason why they couldn't cut that 7-10 day window down to 1-2 business days if they wanted to spend the money to hire more people. There's no reason why they couldn't coordinate orders better between their various departments.
In the first week I got Verizon DSL (years ago) I downloaded around 40GB worth of stuff (tv shows, movies, etc). I filled my hard drive. Never heard anything from them. They're good people.
Yeah, I hadn't realized that my bandwidth totals were that high until I looked at them right now. Verizon is offering a great service as it stands. I hope they keep it that way.
This is a very well known issue w/ Verizon FIOS ActionTec routers. It was affecting at least 2 different versions of them. And if you want both TV and Internet over FIOS you pretty much need their gear.
Stupid question, but I've never had a chance to see a FiOS connection up close: Can you put the FiOS routers into a bridge mode and get the globally valid IP directly on your PC? The first thing I've always done with my DSL connections is put the router into bridge mode and run pppoe/pppd on my Linux box.
I'd much rather have the full power of iptables and the HTB packet scheduler at my disposal than use their router. I'd hate to think that I won't have this option when FiOS hits my area.
They had some provisioning problems with their 3mb lines for a while
My experiences with Verizon (for all their services, ISDN, DSL, POTS, centrex, etc, etc) is that the actual ordering/provisioning process is a PITA. You place your order with one department who hands it off to another department who may hand it off to yet another department before it's all said and done. The left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing and some of the customer service people clearly hate their jobs and can't be bothered to even hide their annoyance with you when you run into problems.
I had to go through a three week long nightmare to get my DSL switched to dry-loop when I ditched POTS. Their system couldn't handle it easily because I wanted to port the landline number to my cell and keep the DSL service as dry-loop once the dialtone was gone. Similarly, I had another long battle getting my speed upgraded to 3.0 after a local tech told me the line would support it (their database said it wouldn't -- her line tester said it would). Once they got the service setup properly though I never thought about it again -- it "just works".
If they could cut out some of the bureaucracy and have better internal communications I think they could give the cable industry a real run for their money. They usually have a superior product -- for some strange reason they don't seem to advertise it as aggressively as the cable company does. I've never understood why that is.
At some point, all your DSL connections are aggregated somewhere and that aggregation point becomes the bottleneck.
It seems like every time we have this discussion that someone repeats this half-truth and gets a +5 out of it. Yes, DSL connections are aggregated somewhere. But that's not the whole story.
There's nothing technical stopping a telco from having a 1:1 contention ratio if they deem it in their best interests. Contrast that to cable -- the only way to attain a 1:1 ratio on cable is to segment the network into insanely small slices or devote more channels on the coax plant to HSI services. DOCSIS 2.0 only offers ~42Mbits of downstream -- assuming 5Mbit connections (the standard for Roadrunner around here and actually quite low compared to other areas) it only takes nine people to completely saturate the downstream pipe.
Even without a 1:1 contention ratio it's going to take a lot more than nine customers to peg the backhaul connection from your local DSLAM.
I used to have DSL and I found my connection would degrade noticeably in the late afternoon and evening simply because we had a lot of people in the area connected with lots of kids.
As with anything, YMMV. I've never seen a slowdown in six years of working with Verizon and Frontier (a smaller telco based out of Rochester). I have seen them occur on Roadrunner -- in some neighborhoods around here it's downright painful when the college kids are in town.
Oh, believe it. Verizon and Comcast will be very friendly to P2P
Why is everybody giving Verizon grief? Comcast I understand, but Verizon? To my knowledge Verizon has never throttled or limited any of their DSL or FiOS offerings. I've seeded torrents 24/7 for months on end and never heard a peep out of them. I run a server (sshd and vpn) for my own personal use -- they've never complained about that either. According to Cacti, in the last year I've uploaded 1.3 terabytes and downloaded 741 gigabytes. Not one word out of Verizon this entire time.
Recall when Verizon fought the efforts to subpoena the identity of one of their customers who was accused of using p2p to pirate music. Recall Verizon's statements saying that they didn't believe in content/copyright filtering and didn't want to "police" the internet.
I don't approve of all of their business practices (there's a special place in hell reserved for Verizon Wireless) but the Verizon Online guys are on our side -- at least for the moment. I don't think they deserve to be lumped into the same category as Comcast.
First, Godwin's law doesn't exist. My and your ability to reply proves that.
Split hairs often, do you?
I think it's a silly and dangerous idea to forbid talking about WWII, because we're all of the same nature and should heed , process and discuss the horrific warnings of history.
Godwin's law doesn't forbid talking about WW2. Godwin's law states: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." It is traditionally interpreted as a warning against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons. That you had to specifically cite Godwin's law (when no one else had brought it up) tells me that you suspected that your original post might have met one or more of these criteria.
It's not bombastic to believe genocide and oppression might happen again
No, it's not. It is however bombastic to compare the British surveillance society with Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was a bit more than a surveillance society -- it was an entire political movement that advocated for the violent conquest of Russia, the oppression and subsequent genocide of whole ethic groups (not just the Jews) and a culture of violence used to intimidate political rivals and destroy a functional democracy.
There's nothing going on in the UK right now that even remotely compares with the Night of the Long Knives. There's nothing going on in the UK that even remotely compares with the Nazi oppression of free speech and of the political opposition. The UK isn't scapegoating an entire race for every single problem that they face. The UK isn't planning to invade any of her neighbors. Her citizens are still free to elect their own Government and could throw Gordon Brown and the Labour Party out on their ass whenever they'd like.
It's simply a word of caution and a call to remember and to reason.
Words of caution are fine but you undercut your own argument when you make comparisons to Nazi Germany. The surveillance society scares the hell out of me -- but it doesn't have anything on Germany in the 30s.
I imagine $38 billion is enough for a small invasion. Take control, run it as a colony for say 25 years, then transfer power back to the people when there's a stable system in place. It's not ideal, but at least nobody starves.
And eventually it gets down to the fact that if we faithfully preserved every place that anything interesting had ever happened at it wouldn't be long before our entire society would be static.
I would agree with that, but you have to weigh the "anything interesting" part against the bigger picture. In this case, the "anything interesting" was an Allied effort that saved thousands of lives and probably shortened the war by a year. I tend to think that's worth preserving and that the value to society is greater then allowing a developer to build a strip mall or cookie-cutter condos over it.
Maybe it has something to do with the British government looking more and more like the German government just before WW2 and would like their citizens to forget... Oh, would you like a fresh cup of surveillance with your papers anyone?
On another note if Godwin's law were a law, this entire story would not exist
Godwin's law doesn't exist because of stories about WW2. Godwin's law exists because of idiots like you that make stupid bombastic comparisons to Nazi Germany that are completely divorced from any sense of reality or perspective and serve only to incite passions and flamewars.
That written, I view the demise of Bletchley Park the same way I look at copyrights: Doing something great a long time ago shouldn't guarantee you a lifetime of financial benefits
Your comparing efforts to save an important part of our history to copyrights?
Figure out how to pay your own way.
Am I the only one that sees value in preserving important parts of our history for future generations?
Really? Is that why the Confederate Constitution specifically mentioned it as a right? Is that why the Confederate Vice President was quoted as saying that "our Government is founded upon the idea that the Negro is not equal to the white man"?
The agricultural south wanted free trade, because tariffs at home meant tariffs abroad. They needed to export to Britain to make a living, and also imported from Britain to get things to enjoy life.
Interesting analysis, but you overlooked the minor little detail that the production of virtually all Southern exports (think cotton people) were dependent upon the institution of slavery.
The North was no great friend of the black man either.
Indeed. The North was still light years ahead of the South though.
Slavery never should have happened in the first place, but it was hardly the cause of the war
Really? So it was purely economic tension that divided the country? It had nothing to do with the disputes that 'ended' with the Missouri Compromise or the Kansas-Nebraska Act? It's an oversimplification to say that slavery was the sole cause of the war but to whitewash it away and pretend that it was solely an economic dispute or "states rights" issue is to ignore just how abhorrent the goals of the Confederacy really were.
Part of the reason why Tor is so slow is because people are tunneling downloads through it, which kind of ruins it for everyone else.
You don't have to tunnel the downloads through it. Just the tracker communications. If you tunnel the tracker connection through tor you aren't using much bandwidth (less then the typical webpage load) and you prevent the traffic shaping device from intercepting the details of your file sharing. The rest is taken care of with protocol encryption in bittorrent.
Merely using protocol encryption but still communicating with the tracker in the clear allows the shaping appliance to sniff out the details of the other hosts in your torrent and throttle all communications with them encrypted or not.
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That would never happen..... oh wait....
You realize that when you say it will cost "them" resources you really ought to be saying that it will cost us resources. Where do you think the Government gets it's funding from? I don't particularly relish the thought of my tax dollars being used for these purposes, how about you?
How many thousands of dollars/years in jail because s/he downloaded one movie?How many thousands of dollars/years in jail because s/he got caught with marijuana?
But most people know they'll never get caught.Indeed. And that fact hasn't deterred the Government from the 'War on Drugs' either. Maybe this will be different -- I'd guess that there are more downloaders out there than pot smokers -- but I'm not nearly that optimistic.
It's not so much that the wireless product itself sucks -- their arrogance and anti-consumer policies are the problem. Arrogance in that they have the attitude of "It's the network, where else are you going to go?" -- bad policies in that they force contract extensions if you change your plan, keep raising their fees and costs and attempt to extract their ETF out of you even if you are leaving due to service issues that they can't fix.
My specific story with them: When they rolled out their EV-DO upgrades in my area I started having problems with incoming calls. Roughly 50% of them would go straight to voicemail without ringing my phone. If the caller didn't leave a message I had no idea that they called. They were not able to resolve this problem for me -- most of their people just blamed it on my handset, even though I'd tried five different phone models and had the same problem on all of them. They refused to even consider the idea that it might be a network issue of some kind.
Eventually I got fed up and ditched them to switch over to GSM (T-Mobile) and all the advantages that it offers. When I left they tried to charge me the ETF even though I had service issues that they couldn't fix. I appealed it all the way up to their legal department who told me that "If you read the contract you actually have no exception of the service working at any time". At that point I told them to fuck off and fought the ETF through the NYS Attorney General's office. Never did wind up paying it.
The concept that some parts of a company are better than others is relatively new to me and will take getting used toWell, Verizon Wireless is technically a completely separate company. Verizon owns roughly 55% of it. Vodaphone owns most of the rest. For whatever that's worth. I'll never do business with them again -- and even if I wanted to I've come to prefer GSM and don't see any reason to go back to the walled garden of CDMA land.
None of those stories that you told suggest that they are deliberately throttling those connections. Verizon provisions your line at the fastest speed that their tools/wire database indicate that your loop will support (unless you pay for a slower tier). If there are problems with the local loop or (more likely) the inside wiring at your house, then the modem won't be able to sync up at this speed and will fall back to slower ones and generally not work very well at all.
That has nothing to do with throttling p2p connections ala Comcast. It has everything to do with a physical layer problem, either on the outside plant or the inside wiring in your house. Either way it wasn't something that they did to you on purpose.
They proceed to tell him he's too far from the DSLAM(the same DSLAM my wire comes from by the way)Just because he's your next door neighbor doesn't mean that his loop takes the same path back to the CO that yours does. It might -- it might also go in the opposite direction down the street and take a completely different path back. And even if it takes the same path it might be a different wire gage than the one you are on. "Loop length" isn't the literal length of the wire -- it's a measurement based on capacitance. A thicker wire gage in the local loop generally translates into being able to provide DSL services further out.
and it's impossible to deliver 1.5Mbps over that length of wire, and he'd just have to deal with it because his contract only guarantees 768kbps.I don't buy that. The 768kbps is a value tier -- that's not the minimum that they promise. If you sign up for the 1.5/384 service and can't get it then you can back out of that contract in the first month. You can do the same if they promise 3.0/768 at time of order and can't deliver it.
Regardless, I'll grant you that it's a PITA to deal with them to get these types of problems fixed, particularly if you aren't fluent in their lingo. Luckily it seems that you had another option. My choices are between Verizon DSL (which always delivers my promised speed and never goes down) or Roadrunner (which bogs down during peak hours and may start metering traffic soon). There's no CLEC providers of DSL for residential customers around here. No WISPs that are still in business either.
I've had several fights with Verizon that I already outlined to get services setup properly. But I'll stand by my claim that once you do manage to get it all configured and working that it's pretty much rock-solid. In four years I haven't seen my residential DSL account go down once. It was even still running during the floods last year when my whole town (including the CO) had no power for five days. I hooked my modem up to a UPS and surfed with my laptop -- worked the whole time. Time Warner couldn't say that -- their internet and phone customers were SOL the entire time.
So how does the connection actually come in? Ethernet? So you can easily replace their router with any other router or direct to a PC?
I'd heard that wasn't an option and they forced you behind NAT regardless but I found that rather hard to believe.
I don't buy that as the source of their problems -- at least for Verizon (I've not worked much with AT&T). Most of the CSRs aren't unionized at Verizon. Most of the field techs are. And yet it's the CSRs that you usually have problems with. Beyond that, the tech support phone drones definitely aren't unionized -- and we all know how helpful they are....
I've never had an issue with a field tech for any phone company. Almost all of them are a credit to their occupation and will do everything within their power to get you up and running/address any troubles that you have. The problem lies in convincing the business office and/or the Level 1 phone drones that you actually have a problem serious enough to send it to the engineering group. If I'm facing an outage at one of my mission-critical clients I'll just bypass the business office and call the local CO directly. I shouldn't have to do that but there you go....
In any case, once engineering actually gets your trouble ticket/new order it's usually resolved pretty quickly and professionally.
I won't even try to argue the point on movies being theft but I don't see why downloading TV is.
If my TiVo misses a recording that I wanted for whatever reason then I'm going to seek out an alternative source for that show. If it happens to be one of the shows that the network puts up on their webpage in it's entirety then I'm going to get it from them. I'll even put up with commercials to watch the stream from the "official" source.
If such a source doesn't exist however I'm going to seek it out on bittorrent. I don't apologize for that and I really don't see how you can claim that it's stealing when they wouldn't have made any money had I watched it on TV directly (obviously this doesn't apply to HBO/PPV/etc, but you get the drift). If they don't want people to bittorrent their shows then provide us with another alternative. The South Park guys did. The Daily Show people did.
How do they plan on offering commercial services if you can't (easily) bypass their router and use your own? That would be a deal-breaker for me -- I want control over my connection -- not some badly designed NAT box sitting in front of me.
I don't recall which authentication method it uses, though I doubt it's PPOE.They aren't using any authentication on DSL anymore. It's still PPP but you can enter any username and password that you'd like and it will happily establish a connection. One wonders why they even keep PPP in the loop, given the overhead of PPPoE -- probably inertia more than anything else.
Hahaha, you find me a (legal) torrent that will peg my connection 24/7 and I'll be happy to seed it for you. I primarily seed Linux distros, but they are typically seeded well enough that they don't peg my connection most of the time -- even with tons of upload slots available.
Oh, it hasn't been all positive dealing with them. Verizon Wireless dicked me over in a major way and Verizon Landline is busy nickel and diming people to death (you'd think they'd be DROPPING landline rates to keep people from switching to VoIP/wireless, but there you go)
I'll never do business with Verizon Wireless ever again and it's not likely that I'll ever pay for a landline again unless I wind up having a large family or someone with a medical condition living in my house. It's just not worth paying for living by yourself.
All that said though, Verizon Online has been great. Rock-solid service (no outages in 4+ years of service), no throttling, no limits. Here's your internet connection -- it goes up to X Mbits down and Y Kbits up -- do whatever you want with it. That's how it should be, IMHO.
Except I never would have been able to transfer that much because they have (had?) this nasty habit of conducting man-in-the-middle attacks to reset seeding connections.
For fairness I should probably point out that I likely had similar traffic numbers when I was with Roadrunner and they never complained about it either. I ditched them not because of limits that they had or may have -- I ditched them because I got tired of dealing with pauses and slowdowns when trying to stream live video.
I live in a major college town -- Roadrunner rocks during the school breaks -- once the kids come back you start to notice a real degradation of service during peak hours and even (occasionally) during off-peak ones. It varies depending on which neighborhood you live in but in some of them it's damn near unusable for anything other than basic surfing/gaming during peak hours.
It got better for browsing/gaming once they started traffic shaping/prioritization -- but they don't seem to discriminate between an http transfer for live streaming video and a non-interactive HTTP/FTP download or NNTP transfer. All bulk transfers suffer -- which makes live streaming video a PITA during periods of congestion.
Yeah and that's something that the telco's really need to improve. I've been around the telco culture ever since high school. I'm familiar enough with their procedures to put up the provisioning headaches. I also have enough contacts among the local techs that I can generally bypass the Business Office to get things done faster -- though I try not to abuse this unless I'm facing a service outage and the Business Office isn't being responsive enough.
The problem is that not everybody has that experience or those contacts. And Grandma doesn't understand why it takes 7-10 business days to get her DSL hooked up when Time Warner can (usually) just give you a self-install kit that isn't particularly hard to figure out. I don't think the telco's can ever be that responsive but there's no reason why they couldn't cut that 7-10 day window down to 1-2 business days if they wanted to spend the money to hire more people. There's no reason why they couldn't coordinate orders better between their various departments.
Yeah, I hadn't realized that my bandwidth totals were that high until I looked at them right now. Verizon is offering a great service as it stands. I hope they keep it that way.
Stupid question, but I've never had a chance to see a FiOS connection up close: Can you put the FiOS routers into a bridge mode and get the globally valid IP directly on your PC? The first thing I've always done with my DSL connections is put the router into bridge mode and run pppoe/pppd on my Linux box.
I'd much rather have the full power of iptables and the HTB packet scheduler at my disposal than use their router. I'd hate to think that I won't have this option when FiOS hits my area.
My experiences with Verizon (for all their services, ISDN, DSL, POTS, centrex, etc, etc) is that the actual ordering/provisioning process is a PITA. You place your order with one department who hands it off to another department who may hand it off to yet another department before it's all said and done. The left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing and some of the customer service people clearly hate their jobs and can't be bothered to even hide their annoyance with you when you run into problems.
I had to go through a three week long nightmare to get my DSL switched to dry-loop when I ditched POTS. Their system couldn't handle it easily because I wanted to port the landline number to my cell and keep the DSL service as dry-loop once the dialtone was gone. Similarly, I had another long battle getting my speed upgraded to 3.0 after a local tech told me the line would support it (their database said it wouldn't -- her line tester said it would). Once they got the service setup properly though I never thought about it again -- it "just works".
If they could cut out some of the bureaucracy and have better internal communications I think they could give the cable industry a real run for their money. They usually have a superior product -- for some strange reason they don't seem to advertise it as aggressively as the cable company does. I've never understood why that is.
Something tells me that the "boundary" isn't a major issue for a Tier 1 provider like Verizon or AT&T.
It seems like every time we have this discussion that someone repeats this half-truth and gets a +5 out of it. Yes, DSL connections are aggregated somewhere. But that's not the whole story.
There's nothing technical stopping a telco from having a 1:1 contention ratio if they deem it in their best interests. Contrast that to cable -- the only way to attain a 1:1 ratio on cable is to segment the network into insanely small slices or devote more channels on the coax plant to HSI services. DOCSIS 2.0 only offers ~42Mbits of downstream -- assuming 5Mbit connections (the standard for Roadrunner around here and actually quite low compared to other areas) it only takes nine people to completely saturate the downstream pipe.
Even without a 1:1 contention ratio it's going to take a lot more than nine customers to peg the backhaul connection from your local DSLAM.
I used to have DSL and I found my connection would degrade noticeably in the late afternoon and evening simply because we had a lot of people in the area connected with lots of kids.As with anything, YMMV. I've never seen a slowdown in six years of working with Verizon and Frontier (a smaller telco based out of Rochester). I have seen them occur on Roadrunner -- in some neighborhoods around here it's downright painful when the college kids are in town.
Why is everybody giving Verizon grief? Comcast I understand, but Verizon? To my knowledge Verizon has never throttled or limited any of their DSL or FiOS offerings. I've seeded torrents 24/7 for months on end and never heard a peep out of them. I run a server (sshd and vpn) for my own personal use -- they've never complained about that either. According to Cacti, in the last year I've uploaded 1.3 terabytes and downloaded 741 gigabytes. Not one word out of Verizon this entire time.
Recall when Verizon fought the efforts to subpoena the identity of one of their customers who was accused of using p2p to pirate music. Recall Verizon's statements saying that they didn't believe in content/copyright filtering and didn't want to "police" the internet.
I don't approve of all of their business practices (there's a special place in hell reserved for Verizon Wireless) but the Verizon Online guys are on our side -- at least for the moment. I don't think they deserve to be lumped into the same category as Comcast.
Split hairs often, do you?
I think it's a silly and dangerous idea to forbid talking about WWII, because we're all of the same nature and should heed , process and discuss the horrific warnings of history.Godwin's law doesn't forbid talking about WW2. Godwin's law states: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." It is traditionally interpreted as a warning against the use of inflammatory rhetoric or exaggerated comparisons. That you had to specifically cite Godwin's law (when no one else had brought it up) tells me that you suspected that your original post might have met one or more of these criteria.
It's not bombastic to believe genocide and oppression might happen againNo, it's not. It is however bombastic to compare the British surveillance society with Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was a bit more than a surveillance society -- it was an entire political movement that advocated for the violent conquest of Russia, the oppression and subsequent genocide of whole ethic groups (not just the Jews) and a culture of violence used to intimidate political rivals and destroy a functional democracy.
There's nothing going on in the UK right now that even remotely compares with the Night of the Long Knives. There's nothing going on in the UK that even remotely compares with the Nazi oppression of free speech and of the political opposition. The UK isn't scapegoating an entire race for every single problem that they face. The UK isn't planning to invade any of her neighbors. Her citizens are still free to elect their own Government and could throw Gordon Brown and the Labour Party out on their ass whenever they'd like.
It's simply a word of caution and a call to remember and to reason.Words of caution are fine but you undercut your own argument when you make comparisons to Nazi Germany. The surveillance society scares the hell out of me -- but it doesn't have anything on Germany in the 30s.
What could possibly go wrong with that idea?
I would agree with that, but you have to weigh the "anything interesting" part against the bigger picture. In this case, the "anything interesting" was an Allied effort that saved thousands of lives and probably shortened the war by a year. I tend to think that's worth preserving and that the value to society is greater then allowing a developer to build a strip mall or cookie-cutter condos over it.
Yes, because there is state sanctioned violence against Jews going on in the British Isles right now. There's also state sanctioned violence against the political opposition too. And let's not forget the Enabling Act that Gordon Brown is trying to push through Parliament at this very moment.
On another note if Godwin's law were a law, this entire story would not existGodwin's law doesn't exist because of stories about WW2. Godwin's law exists because of idiots like you that make stupid bombastic comparisons to Nazi Germany that are completely divorced from any sense of reality or perspective and serve only to incite passions and flamewars.
Your comparing efforts to save an important part of our history to copyrights?
Figure out how to pay your own way.Am I the only one that sees value in preserving important parts of our history for future generations?
Really? Is that why the Confederate Constitution specifically mentioned it as a right? Is that why the Confederate Vice President was quoted as saying that "our Government is founded upon the idea that the Negro is not equal to the white man"?
The agricultural south wanted free trade, because tariffs at home meant tariffs abroad. They needed to export to Britain to make a living, and also imported from Britain to get things to enjoy life.Interesting analysis, but you overlooked the minor little detail that the production of virtually all Southern exports (think cotton people) were dependent upon the institution of slavery.
The North was no great friend of the black man either.Indeed. The North was still light years ahead of the South though.
Slavery never should have happened in the first place, but it was hardly the cause of the warReally? So it was purely economic tension that divided the country? It had nothing to do with the disputes that 'ended' with the Missouri Compromise or the Kansas-Nebraska Act? It's an oversimplification to say that slavery was the sole cause of the war but to whitewash it away and pretend that it was solely an economic dispute or "states rights" issue is to ignore just how abhorrent the goals of the Confederacy really were.
You don't have to tunnel the downloads through it. Just the tracker communications. If you tunnel the tracker connection through tor you aren't using much bandwidth (less then the typical webpage load) and you prevent the traffic shaping device from intercepting the details of your file sharing. The rest is taken care of with protocol encryption in bittorrent.
Merely using protocol encryption but still communicating with the tracker in the clear allows the shaping appliance to sniff out the details of the other hosts in your torrent and throttle all communications with them encrypted or not.