When you send somebody an email you're doing them the courtesy of pre-organizing your thoughts
Not everybody pays for a $500 per year smartphone plan. For example, sometimes it might be hours before I can get to an open Wi-Fi connection through which to send an e-mail from my laptop, but I can leave a voice mail from my $80/year flip phone. What would be the most polite way for someone like me to call you?
There is still a ton of people around thinking leaving a message is some kind of race and you have nearly 10 seconds to tell about your whole life.
That's probably because they're calling you on a pay-per-minute line and want to finish their message as fast as they reasonably can in order not to be billed for a second minute. Land line providers charge extra for long distance. Cell phones have free long distance, but less expensive plans charge per minute for airtime. Finally, international calls are expensive on pretty much any popular provider. This is made even worse by the lengthy instructions that many carriers append to the greeeting: "At the tone, please record your message. When you're finished recording, you may hang up or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5."
I would like to see phone plans without talking minutes and a base rate for SMS/text
Pay as you go plans are like that. Or try Ting, a Sprint MVNO operated by Tucows that separates talk, text, and data billing into three independent bins. But good luck sending text messages to or from a land line.
if i see you called
A lot of people who rely on voice mail don't pay the extra $8 per month for Caller ID.
and i want to talk to you, i call you back.
"Hello?"
"Hi, this is Staisy, What's going on?"
"I explained everything in the voice mail I left."
What's the polite way to continue?
Then what do people put in for the "Recovery e-mail address" when signing up for other-than-ISP-provided e-mail?
imagine all the people complaining when they can't connect to their financial institutions and e-commerce sites?
Do people likewise complain when they can't get to "financial institutions and e-commerce sites" on the local public library's Wi-Fi without first logging into the hotspot?
Since the DNS *is* "poisoned" (redirected), hosts SHOULD work
That'd be true if DNS poisoning is the only layer that a provider uses to corral users into their captive portal. But based on my own experience with captive portals, that's rarely the case. Say you have 123.45.67.89 www.example.com in your hosts file. Any HTTPS connection to 123.45.67.89:443 will produce either "Connection refused" or a certificate error. Any HTTP connection to 123.45.67.89:80 will produce a Location: redirect to the page for expressing filtering preferences.
How is not hijacking HTTP any worse than doing it once ? My ISP just sends me an e-mail if they want to tell me something
You'd be able to access your ISP's mail and its billing department. Everything else, such as third-party webmail and POP3 or IMAP connections, would be hijacked or blocked until the householder expresses a filtering preference.
Where's the need to mess with everybody's HTTP connection ?
To save on costs of fielding telephone calls from people who can't get through to any web site because they don't know where to go to express a filtering preference, and everything but expressing a filtering preference is blocked.
Good luck. The modem rewrites the MAC on the way out as part of its data link duty, and either the modem or the ISP-owned router on the other side of it drops outbound packets that don't have the subscriber's IP address in the from field.
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The ISP can just drop all packets to the Internet on port 443 until the householder has confirmed his censoring preference.
How are you going to actually your HTTPS-only web sites when every single site you visit gives "Certificate error" until the householder has confirmed his censoring preference? This happens on open hotspots in hotels and restaurants, for example. The answer to "Why is HTTPS Everywhere preventing me from joining this hotel/school/other wireless network?" in the HTTPS Everywhere FAQ recommends visiting an HTTP-only site first in order to be redirected to the login page.
The down side (as others have pointed out) is that little Timmy might be the first one onto the family Internet connection one morning.
That depends on whether the householder trusts Timmy with the account's billing username and password.
Well, then why don't Conservative parents fuck off, do their own parenting
Because the cost of living has increased to the point where parents have to work instead of staying at home and parenting.
DNS and HTTP to all IP addresses other than your ISP's customer support producing "Connection refused".
this would not even happen if they were using a different DNS such as google, it only happens with their DNS server
If all other IP addresses give "Connection refused" for customers who haven't yet expressed a censoring preference, then you can't even get to Google Public DNS (8.8.4.4 and 8.8.8.8).
A hosts file has many uses, but defeating a captive portal isn't one of them. A competent captive portal will produce "Connection refused" on all ports of all other IP addresses until you've completed the authentication and preference-setting process.
He who is content with his lot probably has a lot.
