This is my thought too. I had the hood ornament torn off my car once, and the radio antenna another time. Do I think the idiots did it because they hated diesel cars for political reasons? No. I thought they were probably immature jerks who thought it was fun to destroy other people's property.

If they were willing to change their networks to accommodate things then the proposed solution wouldn't be needed in the first place.

They should actually be grateful it all comes from one source, it's an incredible opportunity for them to buy local caching from netflix to save on bandwidth. if the same volume came from 1000 sources they'd actually have to upgrade their outgoing links which could prove to be much more expensive.

Or they could act like every other abusive monopoly and try to double dip and get paid twice for the same service... which of course is the option they chose...

I have no problem with my ISP "overselling" as long as it doesn't impact the end users. They know that if they have 10,000 customers with 100mbps connections, that doesn't mean they need to be able to provide 1tbps of bandwidth, but just because they used to be able to get away with only having a total of 1gbps and they now need 10gbps to handle the same load is just a cost of doing business. (numbers made up on the spot, and probably not accurate, but the principle still applies) They should be thankful that they don't actually need to provide the 1tbps that would actually be required if people were filling the pipes they sold them.

I would say the ISP has three choices.
1) Admit they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and stop selling that level of bandwidth.
2) Realize they can't provide the bandwidth they're selling, and upgrade the network until they can handle the average spikes in said load.
3) Beg netflix to give them a local cache to save them on having to do either 1 or 2
What they should not be doing is getting paid twice for the same bandwidth.

Which is why you already pay more for a 100mbps connection than you do for a 10mbps connection than you do for a 1mbps connection. If all you do is read plaintext slashdot, you only need the 1mbps connection to do just fine, if you stream HD movies you'll need probably the 10mbps connection, if you want multiple 4KHD streams pay for the 100mbps connection.
Sure the ISPs pay their own upstream costs in terms of what bandwidth they need, but you pay them in a very similar way.

What SHOULD be happening is that the ISPs should be crawling to Netflix hat in hand begging for a local cache to save them on upstream bandwidth, not trying to extort extra money for something they've already been paid for!

And your average home connection, which is quite asymmetrical, would suddenly drop from being able to stream multiple HD streams at once, to not even being able to stream a single SD stream without issues.

Interesting, my 1983 300sd had the throttle jam open on me once too, wasn't grease though, the pedal broke off the metal lever and jammed against it. It's a good thing I was able to think fast and turn off the ignition and stand on the brake because it chose to do this at a very inopportune moment entering a small and very crowded parking lot.
Of course that was back in the days when you had the option to shut off the ignition without using an unintuitive interface to ask permission from the same computer that may be misbehaving while you try to do so...
The brake pedal should include a physical disconnect for the throttle, not implemented in software.

By default android takes an all or nothing approach, it tells you what permissions the app wants, and you decide if you want to install it or not. There are however 3rd party solutions for rooted phones which allow you to deny specific permissions and these work well (for example I told my weather app that it didn't need permission to vibrate the phone, I'm capable of deciding when I want to look at the weather). The problem here is two fold though:
1) you can allow or deny, but you can't fake, which means if an app decides not to run without reading your contact list to show you the weather, you can't show it a blank contact list to trick it in to running, I think you should.
2) and this one is more important. Accessing arbitrary files all over the internal file system (such as what VAC is doing in this case) is not considered a permission, it's allowed by default, and is not one of the things you can block, or even see if the app needs.

This is ridiculous. I could deny every permission in android, and a program like VAC could still read my DNS cache. Now I could stop it from contacting the internet, but obviously that's something I want an online game to be able to do. So even the most "advanced" OSs we have today in this area, STILL don't stop apps from accessing random files that they have no business accessing. This is a major security concern.

Sure it does, it just doesn't do it using the browser. it checks what DNS lookups you've made, and assumes that it's the same thing (which it pretty much is for this purpose)
The problem is, it shouldn't have access to read that file. Only your DNS resolver should. Security on modern OSs is a big problem, the fact that none of them take it seriously, and all of them allow every piece of software to do whatever it likes on your computer is what needs to change.

I think you misunderstand me, I'm actually not complaining about what VAC does, I'm complaining about what our modern OSs allow EVERY app to do. Not using this app doesn't fix the underlying security concern that every app on my computer has the same access and can do whatever it wants with the information.
This is what we need to fix. Our computers need to stop blindly trusting every app.

Then I can give them permission to do so.
The OS should assume the worst from any application asking for access outside of itself, and let the user decide. I should be able to give it access, deny it access, or fake the results.

The problem here isn't what VAC is doing, the problem is that any app can do this without any oversight at all.

As a side note, anti-virus and anti-malware wouldn't be issues if we stopped this ridiculous idea that every app should have full and complete control of the user's system.

So your excuse is because this one application has a use you like, all OSs should allow ALL applications free reign.

This is a technical answer exploiting a security hole that shouldn't exist to try to prevent a social problem. If people stayed away from VAC in protest it wouldn't fix the underlying broken concept in every OS that says apps should have free reign over the system.

The problem here is not VAC, the problem is the OS allowing every single app unlimited access to the system, something we should not be allowing.

On a "sex-party" bus, the clients would explicitly NOT want the bus to have cameras, and, depending on the crowd, may or may not, want their own pictures. The OP wants the reverse, which tells me he either wants a blackmail bus, or he doesn't really expect anything that exciting to happen in the first place and just wants to play extortion with memories of a fun evening.

I can find arguments for everyone records, or nobody records, but the "we want our cameras and they can't have theirs" ideal shows the real motive here.

So you're ok with your word processor telling it's owners every website you've ever visited, and possibly your online banking info that was in your cache too while it's at it? how about your image viewer? that weather widget should be able to access every file on your computer and every register in memory too and phone it home, why not? after all, you gave it "explicit permission" (the same permission you gave VAC, a simple install, your OS didn't ask for more.)

The point is that whatever you think of this particular use, it just shows how we don't handle any form of security from the biggest threat on our computers, the apps we install. This SHOULD have come out when the first user installed it and his OS asked permission, instead it came out after people discovered it through other means. There's just no excuse for our OS (and I mean every common OS out there) allowing this by default for every single app.

The people and companies who write the apps don't trust us, so why do we continue to implicitly trust them?