There's probably a separate entry for every single element of every single page you visit.
Of course not. All comcast needs to log are the authentication events of which there are under one per day per customer on average. Once logged in that IP is yours to use until it is handed to someone else in another authentication event (obviously there's no explicit disconnection).
Unless each login is given a unique public IP (unlikely), they will be behind some form of NAT.
Yes, it's called Carrier Grade NAT and is what Free has been doing in France for years for its community WiFi.
To reliably point to a specific user, it would require a ridiculous amount of logging. I doubt that Comcast will do that.
If you consider an IP address, a port number, a timestamp and an account number to be insanely detailed then I can't wait to see what you're going to say when you discover all the information Facebook, Google and others keep about you!
Even better, as now all the WiFi users appear to come from a single IP as far as the MPAA/RIAA is concerned,
Which totally protects the home owner where the cable box actually is.
which means the only way they can get more info is if Comcast keeps insanely detailed records about every one of these connections.
If you consider an IP address, a port number, a timestamp and an account number to be insanely detailed then I can't wait to see what you're going to say when you discover all the information Facebook, Google and others keep about you!
You're right its totally reasonable to charge individuals for the right to access a network with specified bandwidth limitations and then set the router up to broadcast that connection to any fool walking down the street or other person in your apartment complex that now gets the benefit of your internet connection without paying anything for it.
This is not an open WiFi hotspot. Only other paying Comcast customers can use it. What you get in exchange is that you too can use any other Comcast WiFi connection. Free actually makes it a tip-for-tat thing: if you allow your FreeBox to act as a hotspot you can connect to the FreeWiFi hotspot of other customers. If you disable your hotspot you cannot use the other customers hotspots.
The my personal bandwidth and signal quality to the the network would have be totally distinct from the public portion of the router.
Easy to do by giving a lower priority to the HotSpot traffic. I know Free is doing it, I don't know if Comcast does.
If my signal quality, bandwidth, etc is totally unchanged and all this thing is doing is stealing some of my electricity... then I'm okay with that.
The change in electricity consumption is going to be so low I don't think you'd even be able to mesure it.
If they require a Comcast customer login, then it's not a public wi-fi hotspot at all.
They do require Comcast credentials. It is indeed not a public / open / free WiFi hotspot.
Unless Comcast assigns a unique IP address to each wireless user (which I suspect they won't on IPV4) sorting out which, of possibly many, wireless users connected at the time of the download may require more tracking -- which I suspect Comcast will do.
Comcast most likely uses Carrier Grade NAT for the hotspot clients, just like Free has been doing in France for years for its community WiFi. That means hotspot users get a totally different IP address than the router 'owner' and that the NAT already tracks which customer is using a given IPv4 at any given time.
This is about making some congressman or senator happy.
So funny. ISPs abroad (Netherlands, France) have been doing this for years. But yes, Comcast couldn't possibly have recognised that as a truly good idea and decided to implement it. It has to be some conspiracy instead, no matter how nonsensical.
If that is the case does that mean I just have to change my mac address and connect to the public wifi rather than my normal ssid, and I can torrent everything I want and not worry about getting hit by a copyright infringement law suite.
To use the Comcast hotspot you have to provide your Comcast credentials on the gateway web page. So no, that won't work.
I'm assuming that Comcast doesn't have 50,000 spare routable IP addresses, but that's not a bad assumption.
Yes, it's a ridiculous assumption. It's essentially the same as saying Comcast will never be able to gain 50000 new customers because they don't have enough routable IP addresses. Besides it further assumes that they are not using Carrier Grade NAT which is exactly how Free, a French ISP that has been doing the same thing for years, is handling this.
The Free French ISP has provided a similar service for years and while it's true that range can make things tricky, it still works well enough to be quite handy. It works particularly well if you visit someone who's with this ISP: no need to ask for the key to their private network. Same if it's an appartment building and one of the neighbors is a Free customer. And with over 4 million hotspots, in dense locations you can quite easily find one that's in range.
How long before someone releases a tool that would have a Linux-running computer or device with a WiFi card masquerading as an official Comcast WiFi hotspot an collecting the usernames & passwords of the users trying to connect ?
That was possible before and it's still possible now. And not just with Comcast but also with Boingo, AT&T Portal, etc. Only solution: ban all WiFi hotspots!
It's a broadcast device. EVERYONE around you is effected. This will just add to the electronic clutter of your neighborhood. If it doesn't annoy you directly, it might annoy the guy next door and interfere with his network.
99.9% of the users would have had the WiFi on anyway so it does not make any difference.
Recounts can be done automatically for close elections, which means that the paper is authoritative.
A system is no more secure than its weakest link. Here we have two links where there used to be only one. So tamper with the paper ballots, force a recount and you win. Yeah this will cause a discrepancy with the electronic records but you said it yourself, the paper is authoritative so it does not matter.
In the 2008 Minnesota Senate election, one precinct's ballots were lost, and the authorities decided to go with the machine count for that precinct.
Yay! So you're saying attacking the other link works too: hack the machine count, lose the paper ballots.
It's hard to modify the contents of a sealed ballot box that has a chain of custody and bipartisan observers; most such fraud involves "losing" ballots, which is more difficult with the machine counts.
I guess that one difference of opinion we have is that I regard anything less than direct citizen oversight as useless. That includes 'chains of custody'. Even with supposedly bipartisan control. By the way bipartisan control makes it too easy for the two parties to make secret deals. I certainly hope there are in fact observers from at least three or four parties (and that car moving the ballot box around is going to get crowded).
Tampering with sealed boxes in a few precincts is going to cause serious discrepancies, which will trigger further investigation.
I also have very little faith in 'investigations'. We should all remember that the ones with the most to lose in an election are the incumbents who are also in the best position to steer the investigation away from embarassing finds. Furthermore we live in a world where investigations conclude that a satisfactory explanation for 4096 overvotes is "the spontaneous creation of a bit at the position 13 in the memory of the computer" and don't cause the election to be canceled.
Or you can have paper ballots that are machine-tabulated with random on-the-scene counts to be on the safe side.
That could work if:
I'm unconvinced that all these (necessary but maybe not sufficient) conditions are actually met. Frankly it seems much simpler to just discard the machines, count everything by hand and be done with it.
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
