Stalking is targeted. This is trolling.

A GPS is attached to a specific car. Recording every vehicle passing through a toll booth is not targeting your vehicle or any other vehicle. There is a difference.

The government does lots of things that are not in the Constitution. Check the 10th amendment. Not supporting the recording of all this vehicle data, but I still stand by my assertion that it's quite different from NSA recording and logging of private calls.

HUGE difference between observing a vehicle's location and searching the vehicle. BTW, police do not need a warrant to search your car if they observe an illegal item on the dashboard or passenger seat. If the item is in plain site they can stop you and then search the rest of your vehicle without any warrant.

They aren't recording YOUR movements, they are recording the movements of a licensed piece of equipment on roadways built and maintained using public funds. BTW, I don't condone this data warehousing, I am pointing out the huge different between NSA tracking of electronic communication and government observation of physical movement through open public spaces. They are VERY different situations and the headline implies they are alike. Debating the recording of vehicle movement should be done independently of debating the NSA surveillance program as linking them muddies the discussion.

Tracking the movements of vehicles is quite a bit different than tracking cell phone conversations. There is no expectation of privacy when driving a vehicle on public roads. Operating a vehicle (at least in the US) is heavily regulated, requiring registration of the vehicle, insurance, and licensed operators. In my area, in addition to the traffic cameras there are license plate scanners on most police vehicles. They scan and record the plates of vehicles as the police drive around town, popping up an alert if they get a "hit" on a vehicle with issues (suspended registration, insurance, or involvement in a crime). You're also tracked via tolls (EZ Pass in my area) and gasoline purchases (credit card data), but the police don't have easy access to that data without a subpoena.

That depends on the manufacturer. We used to sell water heaters in our hardware store and a manufacturer rep was the one who told us the units had little or no difference other than the warranty and label.

Yes, I should have pointed out that he/she was comparing apples to oranges. A water heater is not cast iron like the furnace, and is much thinner and lighter in construction. It also isn't always maintained by the homeowner who should be draining the bottom of the heater once a year to remove rust and sediment.

Because it was made 100 years ago. Those furnaces were built like tanks. Gas and electric water heaters leak all the time, ask anyone (including me) who has come home to a flooded basement.

"Enterprise" drives may have longer warranty coverage, so you are essentially just buying an extended warranty that is built into the selling price. This is how water heaters are priced...a 5 year warranty water heater is often identical to a 10 year warranty unit, but the manufacturer has crunched the failure rate numbers and will just wind up replacing a percentage of 10 year models when they start to leak in 8 years.

No offense taken, and I certainly suspected a possible virus. However, this was on my home PC, the only PC that is on 24/7. I ran Wireshark, netstat, and assorted other utilities to check the activity, the PC is clean. I was occasionally running uTorrent, but the torrents I was seeding were low demand (live shows shared via Dime A Dozen) and that program was throttled.

Now I don't know for a fact exactly how much bandwidth I was using. I am basing the 10 terrabytes on the published news stories. Perhaps I was using nowhere near that, and Verizon has not been forthcoming about the limits (at least not to me) so maybe it really was just about Tor.

The Tor bandwidth chart looked like it was pretty much using 75% of my 100Mbps fiber line 24/7. I disabled Tor and Verizon didn't shut me off so my usage must have dropped. I'm not a computer professional, but I have been maintaining web and email servers for my hardware store since 1995 (BBS systems before that) and I know my PC wasn't a bot.

I'm not a math whiz when it comes to computing bandwidth, but it appears to me that 10tb per month works out to an average of 4Mbps over 30 days so that's definitely something that could come just from Tor relaying when there is no bandwidth cap set up in Tor.

Yes, I'm going to set it up again in a few weeks, as a non-exit relay and with a bandwidth cap. I jumped in with both feet without looking, not usually a good idea. :)

Sorry, didn't post the complete timeline. I ran as an exit node for a few weeks but stopped when I received a couple of letters questioning activity that came through my IP address. That was what probably got me blacklisted with Hulu. I will likely reconfigure Tor with bandwidth limits and set it up again in a few weeks.

Tor was configured as an exit relay for about two weeks. I think that was what kicked in the issue with Hulu. Another user posted in the thread that he ran exit relay and was blocked by Hulu for several years.

FIOS advertises as "No limits", and the tos/aup doesn't specify bandwidth. It does, however, specify that you can't run servers on a residential line so that's the tactic they use. And I knew there were bandwidth throttles in Tor, I just didn't expect Verizon to have an issue with the usage since they had advertised "No limits".