Kumoricon
Convention Events and Programming => Anime, Manga, and Japanese Media and Culture => Topic started by: guspasho on November 19, 2007, 09:24:20 am
-
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/19/0442202
Read the article, read the comments, read the linked AnimeSuki forum topic.
This is disturbing and unusual because, as the anime is unlicensed no one in the US owns the copyright on the anime.
I'm not sure if you've heard but Comcast has been using some software or service for a while now to block and throttle bittorrent traffic. These notices that have been reported do not mention who the copyright holder or agent is, which is very unusual (according to on AnimeSuki forum user.) So it appears to me that Comcast is just spamming these left and right without bothering to figure out if this material is licensed or not. But beware anyway, as you don't want to mess with the law.
This, on top of the bittorrent blocking, and on top of their policy of cancelling users merely for using their high-speed service like a high-speed service (ask Stark if you don't believe me) makes me really wish I had a legitimate ISP option available to me. Comcast is due to connect me on Wednesday, Verizon outright refuses to offer me service, denying my attempts to order service for a full three weeks, Qwest doesn't reach into Beaverton - if I want high-speed, where can I go?
-
How much does that cost? Comcast doesn't seem to advertise it but I don't want to spend a bunch of money for what I think I should be normal service at the price I'm currently being charged.
-
Yeah, I have the powerboost comcast broadband, no complaints, upload speed is 1500 kbs per second and I have been on it for a while now, 0 lag, as for the bittorents I find that I don't require going back and rewatching to many things, so I am happy enough without it. Crunchyroll.com + Onemanga.com = My best friends.
-
I actually did some research on broadband prices back in the day. It turns out that the free verison charges to get DSL through a third party is higher than the monthly rate they charge to get the service though them. Quest, this is not the case I wish we could replace verison with quest in beaverton as they don't have such predatory business practices.
-
As a former Comcast employee, I can tell you that half the crap that comes up in the news about them is pure garbage. And to be fair, cable companies aren't the only ones booting people for ridiculous usage - there are cell phone companies who boot people who have like 6 users constantly on one phone day and night too. My recommendation is not to download so much crap that you can't even watch it all, and when you're done downloading, don't seed a bunch back for too long. Comcast has to pay to maintain the lines and when you sit there downloading day and night and eating up all the bandwidth, it makes hard times for people like me, who want to play online games without lagging out a bunch.
Just something to think about. And yes, you can sign up for a business account and technically they don't verify the social you give them if you claim it's a sole proprietorship. It's $60 a month for comcast workplace, so if the extra money is worth it to you, go for it.
And DSL is even worse than cable, so don't bother IMHO.
That's my .02.
-
Gemineye has got a point you know.
Iv used comcast for the past couple of years. I do use bittorents for Ddownlaodinng my weekly anime/southpark ect. and Iv never had a problem.
Hell my friends download at least twice as much as I do and I havent heard any complaints. They do say that comcast is controlling bandwidth but that they can understand why.
-
I've heard that with some cable modems one can modify them to release the bandwidth restriction which it sets on a file I think downloaded from the ISP.
-
As a former Comcast employee, I can tell you that half the crap that comes up in the news about them is pure garbage. And to be fair, cable companies aren't the only ones booting people for ridiculous usage - there are cell phone companies who boot people who have like 6 users constantly on one phone day and night too. My recommendation is not to download so much crap that you can't even watch it all, and when you're done downloading, don't seed a bunch back for too long. Comcast has to pay to maintain the lines and when you sit there downloading day and night and eating up all the bandwidth, it makes hard times for people like me, who want to play online games without lagging out a bunch.
Just something to think about. And yes, you can sign up for a business account and technically they don't verify the social you give them if you claim it's a sole proprietorship. It's $60 a month for comcast workplace, so if the extra money is worth it to you, go for it.
And DSL is even worse than cable, so don't bother IMHO.
That's my .02.
That's called bait and switch. Comcast can cap my bandwidth (and I don't think that uncapping your modem is legal or fair to the cable company), after all, they sell you the service based primarily on speed, but when they advertise "unlimited" uploading or downloading volume, and they really have a secret volume cap. Even if they no longer advertise "unlimited" they still refuse to say what their cap is, which is still unfair to their customers who have no idea when they are suddenly in trouble. Basically, they don't want you to use the service they sell you, which by rights they cannot do. Instead, they should just tell you what the cap on your volume is.
As an analogy, if this was a meal, the restaurant owner can't just sit there and watch me eat half the meal, and take away the second half when I reach for it because they also sold that same meal to somebody else. But that's what Comcast is doing. It's not my fault they don't have enough to go around, but they can't sell me a meal and tell me I can't eat the whole thing. And I'm not going to feel bad about using what I pay for.
And, no offense to you, gemineye, but I don't hear about Verizon or Qwest doing this sort of thing nearly as often as I hear about Comcast doing it. The only thing from either of them that I can remember is that Verizon once got caught censoring somebody, but they at least backed off and apologized for it when they were found out. Comcast isn't backing off.
-
Wow i didnt know comcast reached all the way over to the west coast...but yea comcast sucks over here too, there internet is worthless.
-
It really sucks here too, because Verizon wants to be all monopolistic and draconian with their FIOS stuff and yank the old POTS lines, which apartment owners just hate, so we have a choice of increasingly decrepit Verizon DSL (usually far from the CO so only the crappy speed) or Comcast in our apartment complexes... Or possibly similarly overpriced Verizon Avenue (it smelled re-branded when I was helping a friend set it up...)
Can't we all just have a local dumb-pipe provider like we've got one local water and one local power company? (And one local system of Roads, which is what Data-Com is Most like.)
-
I have clearwire and we have 4 computers all hooked up at the same time on the net, with two on a MMORG at the same time and never had any bandwidth problems at all, even during the summer or xmas holidays when everyone and their uncle is online at the same time ^_^
-
What's most sad about this is that Comcast has the Fiber-Optics monopoly and government backing to shove whatever they want down your throat.
I have Qwest at home. It's dung. I can rarely get over 1 mbps DL or 700 kbps UL. My dad has Comcast, and I did find that trying to use my 16 mbps connection (my laptop caps at 16000 kbps exactly) that I was able to get when the lines were all free at 2am to download a 5.7GB torrent was completely futile. I let it sit for about 2 hours going between 10 bps and 50 kbps before I finally just gave up on it. I'd like to hear what other options I could look into as well. We're getting comcast again for the time being, but when I move out, there's no way I'm living without my piracy.
-
Well... really short of moving to Japan or someplace else like that... the only option we have is to take on the morally, ethically, and intellectually bankrupt society we, the people, have allowed corporations to create and educate us in to. When the laws no longer promote the welfare and wellbeing of the average individual, let alone the fringes who should be protected as well...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Revolution (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Revolution) Inspiration for us all..
-
well I dun think we need to resort to a revolution quite yet.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080114/comcast_data_discrimination.html?.v=2
noticed this article while I was reading the drudge report.
-
Your worried about comcast check out what Time Warner cable is testing out.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22707271/ (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22707271/)
They are testing out usage based billing.
-
I don't mind usage based billing, under the following conditions:
- Bill me by the actual Guaranteed Available BPS I purchase at the absolute lowest wholesale rate you can negotiate. This should be something in the ballpark of $0.05 per GigaByte, but I've found it very difficult to research a hard cost per bandwidth rate, which is what the actual cost should be since the bandwidth it's self is free, it's providing enough pipe to carry all the data and the equipment to light the pipe which are fixed costs (that's what you're in fact renting a time-slice of when you buy bandwidth.)
- If you want to make some extra cash, go ahead and also add in a flat rate option to 'burst' over the Guaranteed rate if the space is there.
- Let me arbitrarily buy whatever speed-rate I desire based on the needs I have.
- Rent the pipe between me and the Internet at a flat rate based on the latency and speeds it offers... Ideally provide me a standard Ethernet port if I'm in an apartment or large building. Suburban areas are a little more complex... maybe some kind of wireless last block... or have the complex run fiber from the switch box to a standard CPE to decode it in the wire-room.
-
Well the little I've heard of what they are doing on G4 that it will have a tier system. So if you go above the alotted amount of bandwidth you can go up a tier so you are not hit with extra costs. But in the end they will do what makes them the most money and still have customers.
-
My ideal system would look something like this for billing.
- Account Fee: $5 per year
- Network Action Hotline: Free (Automated front end, you dial in the account number, it tells you what they think the status of the network is for you (up, down, area outage, etc) and if you disagree you can dial in details and checkoff a simple troubleshooting list over the phone. If at that list you don't mind being called back by a technician for additional questions you can leave them a callback number.)
- Network Support Hotline: $5 flat rate to do the above with a human. (If they can't help you isolate the problem in 30 min, they deserve to eat it.)
- Data Transfer: Billed by mega-bit (or byte, multiply cost by 8) per second rate guarantee...
- Data Pipe Class: (Depends on the hardware, flat rate lease per month...)
- Service Level: Various types of response packages, redundancy options (basically discount extra-links), and insurance against downtime.
...which means you're leasing that much of a pipe, dedicated 24/7. Rate structure something like BulkRate*(1+1/(Weight^((Speed-X)/(Y-X)))) , where Speed is the constant BPS, X is the speed where rate is 2x, Y is the speed where rate is close to 1, and Weight is how bent the slope is (If the Weight is too high relative to the difference in 2x and ~1x rates, then odd distortions in pricing occur.)
=1/POWER($C$1;(A12-$B$9)/($B$10-$B$9))+1 << Something like how the formula can be expressed in a spreadsheet.
Double 5
Aprox 50
Rate $0.05
1 2.15 $0.11
5 2 $0.50
10 1.84 $0.92
15 1.7 $1.27
20 1.58 $1.58
25 1.49 $1.86
30 1.41 $2.11
35 1.34 $2.35
40 1.29 $2.57
45 1.24 $2.79
50 1.2 $3.00
75 1.08 $4.06
100 1.03 $5.17
-
I suppose I am sort of lucky then. I live outside Eugene and quest reaches out to where I live so we get DSL from them. The price isn't bad because we've bundled with them being grandfathered into a good cell phone deal (I get unlimited texting for I think 3-6 dollars a month instead of the 15 dollar cap everyone else pays now) and we do homephone service with them so yeah the bundling is good. I've never had a problem with my net being too slow or even sensored. I expect huge files to take much longer than smaller ones but most everything makes it in good time even on the wireless net that I run my laptop off of because I hate being attatched to a cord. Quest hasn't ever messed with us so I am happy with their service. I did try to do a 7+ gig file onetime on a bit torrent.. that took forever but I expected it to. Then again I also live 20 minutes outside Eugene so I am lucky I am not stuck with dialup or the dish we used to have... I used to have to knock snow off it in the winter just to use it. Pain in the rear.