[ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

[Brian Mathis]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at dsservices.com>wrote:

>   Saying things done by corporations are not stupid or unethical or
> illegal doesn’t match my experience at all.
>
>

I like how you linked those 3 concepts even though they are distinctly
separate.  Being stupid is ignorance, and being unethical is frowned upon.
Neither of them are illegal.



> Just because it would be “obvious” to people that think that things should
> be a certain way is no reason to believe that they are that way.    Most
> corporations are more interested in rolling out new things quickly than
> they are in insuring they don’t do them stupidly.    Assuming that they
> might actually NOT gouge you by charging you for the bandwidth they are
> providing to others would be foolhardy.   Whether they would do that by
> design (which is feasible) or by lack of attention to detail (which is also
> feasible) would be anyone’s guess.   I’ve had to call Comcast on more than
> one occasion after seeing the antics they’ve played with my bills.
>


I don't say it's obvious because I live in a world of unicorns and have no
basis for such an opinion.  It's obvious because if they didn't do those
things, they'd be getting sued left and right and you'd already be hearing
about huge class-action lawsuits against them, especially given the
increased scrutiny Comcast is receiving lately.

Services like this take a long time to be developed in a company -- it's
not some guy who just decided to stick extra wifi chips in cable modems.
Anything this big would have to go through all sorts of internal hurdles,
and given the size of my Comcast bill, I'm sure they have plenty of money
for lawyers and engineers to make sure things are implemented correctly,
both technically and to minimize liability.  One thing you can say about
Comcast is that, given the number of customers they support, the service
generally performs well and is technically sound (video on demand
notwithstanding).



>  If you don’t think corporations do things to maximize their profits I’ll
> point out the recent article mentioning how very large banks (Chase, Wells
> Fargo, and Bank of America all mentioned) are posting transactions that
> overdraft your account from largest to smallest rather than chronologically
> to insure you end up paying more overdraft fees on smaller (yet
> chronologically earlier) checks.   They were previously caught doing
> exactly the same thing with debit card transactions but I think that got
> outlawed when they did some of the hasty banking reforms back in 2008/2009.
>
>
>
> Or look at the fact that GM is only now recalling parts that have been
> known to kill people over a long period of years.
>
>

Way to setup a huge straw man here.  No one said that corporations don't
try to maximize profit, or that they don't do illegal things (and neither
of those things you mentioned are currently illegal, even if unethical).
I'm saying that **in this case**, there's just no way to do it otherwise
without a huge backlash.  Also there's no profit motive for them to
comingle network traffic on the same subnet as opposed to making it
separate, unless you try to say that they want public users to run up your
personal data cap so they can start to charge overage fees, in which case
you're really descending into conspiracy theories.



> Corporations are in business to make money and pretending they don’t do
> shady if not outright illegal actions to that end is silly given all
> evidence to the contrary.
>


There's simply no, or very little, profit to be had in this scenario
(comingling network traffic vs. keeping it separate), and when compared to
the risk it wouldn't be worth it.


❧ Brian Mathis



>  *From:* ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] *On Behalf Of *Brian
> Mathis
> *Sent:* Friday, April 25, 2014 11:23 AM
>
> *To:* Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> *Subject:* Re: [ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 14:40 -0400, Boris Borisov wrote:
> > Yesterday I've noticed Comcast silently enabled additional wireless
> > network on my cable router named "xfinitywifi". I didn't get the
> > reason behind the idea but is open with web based login. Someone else
> > with same issue.
>
> Congratulations.  You just became the newest member of the Comcast
> wireless internet cafe provider club.  Someone with a Comcast login can
> now log in through the Comcast app gateway and take advantage of their
> expanded WiFi footprint through your free bandwidth that they're
> offering up!
>
> This has been mentioned in a number of forums over the last several
> months.  I don't recall if you can or how you opt-out of them offering
> your bandwidth to all comers.  Since I don't have Comcast, I can not
> test and say for sure from first hand experience.
>
> Regards,
> Mike
>
>
>
> Please stop with the conspiracy theories.  Comcast may be evil, but they
> are not stupid, and anything they do is most certainly going to be legal.
>
> Adding this service from a customer location is:
>
> 1) Most likely in your customer agreement somewhere
>
>
> 2) OBVIOUSLY not going to count against bandwidth caps on your own account
>
>
> 3) OBVIOUSLY isolated to a different subnet/channel, just like any
> neighbor of yours could not see your traffic
>
>
> 4) Uses a totally separate wifi subsystem, which is why they need to
> "upgrade" your equipment for this service to work.  The new cable modem
> needs to have a totally separate AP, or at least a chip that can support
> multiple wireless APs.
>
>
> 5) Your own service speed will not be affected any differently than if
> your neighbor was using their own bandwidth.
>
>
>
> No, I don't have a source for any of this, but these are clearly the first
> questions anyone would ask inside a company when they decide to roll out a
> service like this.  Common sense isn't all that common, but this stuff is
> just bloody obvious.
>
>
>
> If they didn't do any of these, they could easily be sued by customers for
> either exposing their networks to security risks, and/or using up the data
> caps they paid for.  The only possible complaint you could make is more
> power usage, but at only a few hundred milliwatts for the additional wifi
> network, that's barely costing you a penny per year in power usage, if that.
>
>
>
>
>  ❧ Brian Mathis
>
>
>
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