I agree, but it does seem like she needed to do significant troubleshooting with them and somehow dispute the contract rather than just cancelling.
This. I see so many stories of people complaining about their services complaining about contracts and such however they almost always fail to mention the details. Any service, I don't care who its from or how good they are could have technical issues sometimes these issues are not apparent especially in intermittent service situations and it takes time to track such things down time they likely never gave their provider or in many cases i hear, even reported it to their provider. Just calling up and saying my service is "down" all the time is such a vague concept it doesn't tell a provider anything from their point of view such a call does not distinguish yourself from someone who just has a crappy router.
I doubt this contract is so much different than other business internet contracts there are probably clearly outlined clauses for up time requirements and reporting of service interruptions, time to repair, and dispute of service level.
On the other side there ARE cases when a provider will simply be cheap on the repair because they won't commit the resources to truly fix something such as just increases the power levels on an amplifier to overcome a signal issue instead of digging up and replacing the actual fault. From what I read here however I don't think thats the case this time.
I just can't understand this. Amazon is Oracle's customer, you don't speak to your customers like that in any business If I had an interest in Oracle i'd call for him to be fired over it. Even if they are a competitor as well if they weren't an ass about it took it with some dignity they'd save face and might more of what they have.
While these boxes are getting more and more expensive ( built in cable modems/wifi/moca/UI ie.. all licensed from other companies not actual hardware cost) the majority of the cost of the boxes are the fact that they have to replaced frequently. A not so small part of the people who have these boxes do not treat them with care, they put them in small enclosures with no airflow or they spill things on them or leave in locations where their animals can get to them. They are also often just lost outright when moving, some people will just throw them away when they cancel their service or put them up on ebay. Very few of these people actually pay for the box they damage or lost so that cost gets passed to someone else.
I do agree the so called "broadcast tv fee" is total junk fee and garbage. I know there are a few lawsuits on that fee I hope they win.
I was about to same the same thing, I hate advocating for ATT/Verizon but the actual speed is meaningless as far as cost. This is why most internet speed packages are close to each other in price ($50,60,70,80 etc..). The real cost is maintenance, which in parts and labor are not any less than fiber(probably more). Customer service, these people do not call in any less than fiber customers(again probably more). Yet these areas are probably rural or have some barrier that makes it more expensive to maintain/upgrade than they can pull in with reasonable monthly rates.
In fact I would propose a counter argument, they should be charging their "upgraded" customers LESS as as it is usually very cheap per person to service heavy pop areas and most of that "cost" is paid for by their other products such as TV/phone that use the same lines.
Just reading that brief description is enough to make me think that group is suspicious. Tor & money donations, overseas money distribution? It just smacks of money laundering to me. I doubt the police would raid on that alone they probably have some tip or informant that's backing up that suspicion.
My #1 peeve with those POS modems is this bridge mode. Let me clarify things, its psuedo bridge mode. Meaning its faked the modem's firmware runs at any given time 4 wifi broadcasts only 2 of which turn off in bridge mode. 2.4 & 5ghz xfinity wifi hotspot, and a hidden network for the home security touchpad to connect to.
To play devil's advocate here it does say you need the customer ID, aka account number for this to be possible. There are only a couple ways to get an account number even if you are trying to get your own account.
1.Steal a copy of the bill. 2. Login to the account online(meaning you already have their account password) 3. Be told the account number by a rep whom you have to have the address/ssn for anyway
So someone who has managed to breach one of these security measures and who already knows enough about their address to have an apartment number or house number seriously someone in this situation has worse things off than their wifi password bring compromised as such person could just call into customer service and order anything.
I feel compelled to comment on this. "Xfinity" is a residential brand name, a marketing gimmick. If you have residential service you have Xfintiy there is no special technology or package or anything else its just a name to reimage the company from the residential point a view.
So in summary of my comment, there is no such thing as non-Xfinity comcast unless your a business class customer and only then because marketing for business takes a different approach.
I love websites and programs that give me the choice to unmask however I'm seeing more and more masking when its NOT necessary to do even for non password related fields.
At my work they seem to think masking makes things ultra secure for all important data items. Fields that require you to input credit card numbers, cell phone numbers, all sorts of data are now masked on the pretense that it makes things more secure. It does not, over shoulder watching is not even an issue, this is a work application accessible via intranet only the only people who can see it already have permission to do so they don't even need to be sneaky by hiding behind me it is a secure workplace after all. Bit of a rant here I'm just a bit peeved as I now have to type into a very unsecured notepad just to make sure my data is accurate before submitting.
Just wow, you quite the stick up your rear. The man has been in a leadership position through most of his life and has done quite well for himself and those who do business with him so I think he is more than capable of managing a country, certainly a better than someone who almost had no experience at all leading people in business or government (aka our current president).
Our country is strong enough to withstand poor leadership with no fiscal or management experience obama is proof of that so regardless of how well he performs it will be better than what we have and will be better than what Clinton would of gave who I still think is a criminal
It probably has a USB and Ethernet slot also, I can guarantee you they are disabled by the firmware. Almost all of Comcast's boxes are made by 3rd party companies so they have extra capabilities that are not used. A few of the boxes will allow you to plug an external HD but its driver support is very specific to certain model numbers.
I agree Windows 10 has a lot of features and improvements that are nice to have. It is the reason I upgraded myself to Windows 10, however I don't do an "upgrade" like most people have I always do OS Installs on a fresh format usually on a new hardrive with the old one still there as a backup.
After using windows 10 for months now however I must confess it also has features that I extremely dislike so I have both gained and lost. Windows update on windows 10 is no longer optional it is a mandatory process with a mandatory reboot. This along with a few other "features" has caused me some headache. I've managed to mitigate most of them. Its much more manageable now though since I figured out how to break part of the automatic reboot process since part of it is controlled by the task scheduler but it required changing ownership of several files and making them read only.
This may have been what Sharp was but I don't think that's the way they are today. Many of Sharp's current products are just rebranded from some other company they absorbed and put their name on it I think you would be hard pressed to find any genuine Sharp researched, built, and finalized product thats not some build on something they made years ago. I often found it funny that on some of their fax machines/copiers I could load another brand names cartridge into it perfectly even down to the software recognition of cartridge's on board chip if it had one.
Good point, even knowing the password for the advanced interface what is the worst that you could do to it? It doesn't let you access any network data or personal details. So you could probably get an idea of how much data I use and a few technical details on the quality of my connection and maybe be able to access my IP address ( which you already have if your seeing the interface). I suppose if you were really nefarious you could probably cause my device to reboot a few times if you wanted to be persistent about it.
It's been a number of years since I've gone into it myself so today I tried to get into the advanced settings again and apparently my connection is being refused I can only see the basic page so I'm assuming I've gotten a firmware update blocking access at some point.
I don't see how you can claim the Lotro movie was faithful. I love the movies but is missing far to much to be faithful. They failed to mention there was a 20-30 year gap between Gandalf telling Frodo to keep the ring secret and his return during which he searched for gollum and he had people protecting the shire and that Frodo was ~60 yrs old when he left the shire. They skipped the entire section of the book for when they left the shire and went into the forest/graveyard. They changed the story on the reforging of the sword. They killed Sarumon before the final battle and completely cut out the battle of the shire. There were quite a few other differences as well but I last read the book 10 years ago so some details are faded.
I'm unique as well, however the it gave a list of what items I was unique in Namely the only thing that I did not share with the vast majority of others was the exact nature of my plugin list. The exact version and names of all enabled plugins apparently had a unique configuration..Personally I don't see a need to broadcast my plugin list is there anyway to prevent it?
I'm not a huge fan of many of Comcast policy's but in this case... They don't need your consent, it is their property, under a lease agreement, and they are allowed to modify that agreement at will with notice (and they DO print notices about pending hotspot activations on the statements). I haven't read the service agreement myself but I'm pretty sure that cost to power leased devices is mentioned somehow. In any case you can disable the feature yourself without talking to anyone by logging into your account online. If your that much concerned about it beyond this you should be using your own modem anyway as the gateway is a POS.
The home hotspots also require login prior to use, they can't be used anonymous by non comcast customers
It's not the cloud that's a danger, as that's easily seen and avoided but what the cloud represents.. Tons of earth thrown into the air at high speed in random directions. The cloud is where it is most dense but there are likely rocks being thrown around in smaller quantities every which way that could easily hit a plane and destroy it.
Was just about to mention he has numbers off when i saw your post. Also would like to point out they aren't avoiding fiber to the home in all areas, I am aware of a few communities that have negotiated for fiber the home for comcast so its not like such an event is not impossible if there's strong enough community demand for it. I personally don't see the need for the cost of it, I'm personally satisfied with my 50mbps as most places I connect to do not saturate what I already have and likely will not for many years. Higher speeds do exist in my area (Comcast offers 505mbps here) but I doubt I would upgrade even if the cost wasn't the massive $300/mo
It depends heavily on what your calling in for, for example if you call in for internet issues chances are your going to get outsourced ( and i don't blame them for this a lot of internet calls tend to be PC/router issues). It also depends on where you live, some areas by contract require certain considerations such as hold time, outage response times..those areas are routed domestically to certain areas that are aware of those requirements. There is also some quality control, if it detects you have spoken to a large number of reps over a short period it has a higher priority to be routed domestically as well as it is obvious your problem is not getting solved.
I think the biggest problem with comcast is that the upper management ignores the lack of quality control and accountability for outsourced support that local agents are subject to. Even if every mistake or bad behavior is reported (which it is not simply because you just don't have the time and have to fix it and move on) the difficulty of reporting that behavior to out of country management team and ensuring that they correct it is alot higher than sending msg to an internal manager/sup.
I'm using a netgear WNDR3800 with gargoyle branded vs of openwrt. Works absolutely perfect, its an older model now but I don't need AC support and it's above average cpu and memory for a router even under heavy usage its barely peaks over 20% capacity and I've never noticed a single time where it has dropped my connection or need to be reset at all in the past 4 years
Am I only one who doesn't think this is all that impressive? A manned ship surviving, yes, a stationary building surviving yes, but a unmanned sealed drone that has no problem being submerged in the water with nothing to collide against it without need to stay upright? I could achieve similar results as this drone by putting some gear in a steel container and letting throwing it out to sea. Its other purposes aside "shrugging" off a storm of any size should be trivial for such an object.
Other than reduced availability for sale I don't think being end of life should really matter you would not get support from netgear on a custom firmware.
I just feels to me like the EFF wants to reinvent the wheel here. There are already routers/firmwares out there that support multiple wifi ssid's just make one of them a guest id public or not.
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I agree, but it does seem like she needed to do significant troubleshooting with them and somehow dispute the contract rather than just cancelling.
This. I see so many stories of people complaining about their services complaining about contracts and such however they almost always fail to mention the details. Any service, I don't care who its from or how good they are could have technical issues sometimes these issues are not apparent especially in intermittent service situations and it takes time to track such things down time they likely never gave their provider or in many cases i hear, even reported it to their provider. Just calling up and saying my service is "down" all the time is such a vague concept it doesn't tell a provider anything from their point of view such a call does not distinguish yourself from someone who just has a crappy router.
I doubt this contract is so much different than other business internet contracts there are probably clearly outlined clauses for up time requirements and reporting of service interruptions, time to repair, and dispute of service level.
On the other side there ARE cases when a provider will simply be cheap on the repair because they won't commit the resources to truly fix something such as just increases the power levels on an amplifier to overcome a signal issue instead of digging up and replacing the actual fault. From what I read here however I don't think thats the case this time.
I just can't understand this. Amazon is Oracle's customer, you don't speak to your customers like that in any business If I had an interest in Oracle i'd call for him to be fired over it. Even if they are a competitor as well if they weren't an ass about it took it with some dignity they'd save face and might more of what they have.
While these boxes are getting more and more expensive ( built in cable modems/wifi/moca/UI ie.. all licensed from other companies not actual hardware cost) the majority of the cost of the boxes are the fact that they have to replaced frequently. A not so small part of the people who have these boxes do not treat them with care, they put them in small enclosures with no airflow or they spill things on them or leave in locations where their animals can get to them. They are also often just lost outright when moving, some people will just throw them away when they cancel their service or put them up on ebay. Very few of these people actually pay for the box they damage or lost so that cost gets passed to someone else.
I do agree the so called "broadcast tv fee" is total junk fee and garbage. I know there are a few lawsuits on that fee I hope they win.
I was about to same the same thing, I hate advocating for ATT/Verizon but the actual speed is meaningless as far as cost. This is why most internet speed packages are close to each other in price ($50,60,70,80 etc..). The real cost is maintenance, which in parts and labor are not any less than fiber(probably more). Customer service, these people do not call in any less than fiber customers(again probably more). Yet these areas are probably rural or have some barrier that makes it more expensive to maintain/upgrade than they can pull in with reasonable monthly rates.
In fact I would propose a counter argument, they should be charging their "upgraded" customers LESS as as it is usually very cheap per person to service heavy pop areas and most of that "cost" is paid for by their other products such as TV/phone that use the same lines.
Just reading that brief description is enough to make me think that group is suspicious. Tor & money donations, overseas money distribution? It just smacks of money laundering to me. I doubt the police would raid on that alone they probably have some tip or informant that's backing up that suspicion.
My #1 peeve with those POS modems is this bridge mode. Let me clarify things, its psuedo bridge mode. Meaning its faked the modem's firmware runs at any given time 4 wifi broadcasts only 2 of which turn off in bridge mode. 2.4 & 5ghz xfinity wifi hotspot, and a hidden network for the home security touchpad to connect to.
To play devil's advocate here it does say you need the customer ID, aka account number for this to be possible. There are only a couple ways to get an account number even if you are trying to get your own account.
1.Steal a copy of the bill.
2. Login to the account online(meaning you already have their account password)
3. Be told the account number by a rep whom you have to have the address/ssn for anyway
So someone who has managed to breach one of these security measures and who already knows enough about their address to have an apartment number or house number seriously someone in this situation has worse things off than their wifi password bring compromised as such person could just call into customer service and order anything.
I feel compelled to comment on this. "Xfinity" is a residential brand name, a marketing gimmick. If you have residential service you have Xfintiy there is no special technology or package or anything else its just a name to reimage the company from the residential point a view.
So in summary of my comment, there is no such thing as non-Xfinity comcast unless your a business class customer and only then because marketing for business takes a different approach.
I love websites and programs that give me the choice to unmask however I'm seeing more and more masking when its NOT necessary to do even for non password related fields.
At my work they seem to think masking makes things ultra secure for all important data items. Fields that require you to input credit card numbers, cell phone numbers, all sorts of data are now masked on the pretense that it makes things more secure. It does not, over shoulder watching is not even an issue, this is a work application accessible via intranet only the only people who can see it already have permission to do so they don't even need to be sneaky by hiding behind me it is a secure workplace after all. Bit of a rant here I'm just a bit peeved as I now have to type into a very unsecured notepad just to make sure my data is accurate before submitting.
Just wow, you quite the stick up your rear. The man has been in a leadership position through most of his life and has done quite well for himself and those who do business with him so I think he is more than capable of managing a country, certainly a better than someone who almost had no experience at all leading people in business or government (aka our current president).
Our country is strong enough to withstand poor leadership with no fiscal or management experience obama is proof of that so regardless of how well he performs it will be better than what we have and will be better than what Clinton would of gave who I still think is a criminal
It probably has a USB and Ethernet slot also, I can guarantee you they are disabled by the firmware. Almost all of Comcast's boxes are made by 3rd party companies so they have extra capabilities that are not used. A few of the boxes will allow you to plug an external HD but its driver support is very specific to certain model numbers.
I agree Windows 10 has a lot of features and improvements that are nice to have. It is the reason I upgraded myself to Windows 10, however I don't do an "upgrade" like most people have I always do OS Installs on a fresh format usually on a new hardrive with the old one still there as a backup.
After using windows 10 for months now however I must confess it also has features that I extremely dislike so I have both gained and lost. Windows update on windows 10 is no longer optional it is a mandatory process with a mandatory reboot. This along with a few other "features" has caused me some headache. I've managed to mitigate most of them. Its much more manageable now though since I figured out how to break part of the automatic reboot process since part of it is controlled by the task scheduler but it required changing ownership of several files and making them read only.
This may have been what Sharp was but I don't think that's the way they are today. Many of Sharp's current products are just rebranded from some other company they absorbed and put their name on it I think you would be hard pressed to find any genuine Sharp researched, built, and finalized product thats not some build on something they made years ago. I often found it funny that on some of their fax machines/copiers I could load another brand names cartridge into it perfectly even down to the software recognition of cartridge's on board chip if it had one.
Good point, even knowing the password for the advanced interface what is the worst that you could do to it? It doesn't let you access any network data or personal details. So you could probably get an idea of how much data I use and a few technical details on the quality of my connection and maybe be able to access my IP address ( which you already have if your seeing the interface). I suppose if you were really nefarious you could probably cause my device to reboot a few times if you wanted to be persistent about it.
It's been a number of years since I've gone into it myself so today I tried to get into the advanced settings again and apparently my connection is being refused I can only see the basic page so I'm assuming I've gotten a firmware update blocking access at some point.
I don't see how you can claim the Lotro movie was faithful. I love the movies but is missing far to much to be faithful. They failed to mention there was a 20-30 year gap between Gandalf telling Frodo to keep the ring secret and his return during which he searched for gollum and he had people protecting the shire and that Frodo was ~60 yrs old when he left the shire. They skipped the entire section of the book for when they left the shire and went into the forest/graveyard. They changed the story on the reforging of the sword. They killed Sarumon before the final battle and completely cut out the battle of the shire. There were quite a few other differences as well but I last read the book 10 years ago so some details are faded.
I'm unique as well, however the it gave a list of what items I was unique in Namely the only thing that I did not share with the vast majority of others was the exact nature of my plugin list. The exact version and names of all enabled plugins apparently had a unique configuration..Personally I don't see a need to broadcast my plugin list is there anyway to prevent it?
I'm not a huge fan of many of Comcast policy's but in this case... They don't need your consent, it is their property, under a lease agreement, and they are allowed to modify that agreement at will with notice (and they DO print notices about pending hotspot activations on the statements). I haven't read the service agreement myself but I'm pretty sure that cost to power leased devices is mentioned somehow. In any case you can disable the feature yourself without talking to anyone by logging into your account online. If your that much concerned about it beyond this you should be using your own modem anyway as the gateway is a POS.
The home hotspots also require login prior to use, they can't be used anonymous by non comcast customers
It's not the cloud that's a danger, as that's easily seen and avoided but what the cloud represents.. Tons of earth thrown into the air at high speed in random directions. The cloud is where it is most dense but there are likely rocks being thrown around in smaller quantities every which way that could easily hit a plane and destroy it.
I think i lost interest in anything this article says when I read " extremely expensive zero-day vulnerabilities".
Was just about to mention he has numbers off when i saw your post. Also would like to point out they aren't avoiding fiber to the home in all areas, I am aware of a few communities that have negotiated for fiber the home for comcast so its not like such an event is not impossible if there's strong enough community demand for it. I personally don't see the need for the cost of it, I'm personally satisfied with my 50mbps as most places I connect to do not saturate what I already have and likely will not for many years. Higher speeds do exist in my area (Comcast offers 505mbps here) but I doubt I would upgrade even if the cost wasn't the massive $300/mo
It depends heavily on what your calling in for, for example if you call in for internet issues chances are your going to get outsourced ( and i don't blame them for this a lot of internet calls tend to be PC/router issues). It also depends on where you live, some areas by contract require certain considerations such as hold time, outage response times..those areas are routed domestically to certain areas that are aware of those requirements. There is also some quality control, if it detects you have spoken to a large number of reps over a short period it has a higher priority to be routed domestically as well as it is obvious your problem is not getting solved.
I think the biggest problem with comcast is that the upper management ignores the lack of quality control and accountability for outsourced support that local agents are subject to. Even if every mistake or bad behavior is reported (which it is not simply because you just don't have the time and have to fix it and move on) the difficulty of reporting that behavior to out of country management team and ensuring that they correct it is alot higher than sending msg to an internal manager/sup.
I'm using a netgear WNDR3800 with gargoyle branded vs of openwrt. Works absolutely perfect, its an older model now but I don't need AC support and it's above average cpu and memory for a router even under heavy usage its barely peaks over 20% capacity and I've never noticed a single time where it has dropped my connection or need to be reset at all in the past 4 years
Memory Usage:17.7MB / 123.7MB (14.3%)
Connections:337/4096
CPU Load Averages:0.07 / 0.03 / 0.05 (1/5/15 minutes)
If a mysterious project from a major tech company gets dropped silently how is this not news for nerds?
Am I only one who doesn't think this is all that impressive? A manned ship surviving, yes, a stationary building surviving yes, but a unmanned sealed drone that has no problem being submerged in the water with nothing to collide against it without need to stay upright? I could achieve similar results as this drone by putting some gear in a steel container and letting throwing it out to sea. Its other purposes aside "shrugging" off a storm of any size should be trivial for such an object.
Other than reduced availability for sale I don't think being end of life should really matter you would not get support from netgear on a custom firmware.
I just feels to me like the EFF wants to reinvent the wheel here. There are already routers/firmwares out there that support multiple wifi ssid's just make one of them a guest id public or not.