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".

I'm sure my problem was Tor was running at full throttle. I will set it up again in a month or two and throttle the bandwidth to reasonable levels.

Great advice and something I will look at in a few months once the dust settles. I guess I was too eager to do as much as I could with my shiny new upgraded 100mb FIOS connection. :)

I was running as an exit relay for a while. Trying to do as much as I could, but then realized it was not that great an idea to run exit from a home ISP connection. We received several letters about illegal activity so decided to step it back a notch and just run regular relay.

I've been running Tor on my home FIOS connection for about six months in non-exit relay mode. Last month I received a registered letter from Verizon notifying me that I was using excessive bandwidth and that my connection would be terminated in ten days if I did not cease and desist. From what I read there were less than 100 FIOS customers that received this letter, and it was sent to folks who used upwards of 10tb per month. The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me says that the NSA encourages ISP's to crack down on Tor relays, while the annoyed consumer in me looks on it as a ploy by Verizon to sell me a commercial fiber service. Either way, I don't have the inclination or money to fight this battle, and so I shut down my Tor relay for now. Interesting to note that we were blocked from accessing Hulu Plus from our home as they had identified my IP as a Tor relay. Now that the relay has been off for a few weeks I should try connecting to Hulu again to see how long they blacklist IP's for.

The articles so far seem to indicate the card numbers were encrypted.