Don't bring chargers with you!
Clearly you won't be able to power on these devices if you're not allowed to plug them in. So under these new rules the TSA would clearly have to confiscate them. Furthermore you'd likely oppose their common sense move which would delay you going through security; increasing the risk that your phone's battery runs out, leading to it being confiscated too...

Oh, that's bad. If they keep this up your neighborhood could get infested with pedestrians. And who will pay the pest control bills then? Really. It's like those government guys don't think at all!

I should probably clarify this because it's not really that obvious.

The naive solution would be to assign a random public IP+port for each connection. That would require creating a new log entry for each connection a customer makes which would be a lot of volume indeed.

I think the solution is to instead give out leases to public IP+port combinations to the customer and associate those to his session. When establishing a new connection, check if there's an unused public IP+port in the session pool and if so extend and reuse it. If not, allocate a new IP address+port lease and add it to the session pool. With long enough leases and given that most users will only make a handful of concurrent connections (and it's a context where it's pretty ok to limit the number of concurrent connections anyway), that would limit the logging requirements to just a few entries per session per customer which is pretty tractable.

Note also that if I'm not mistaken a lot of mobile phone operators already use Carrier Grade NAT for 3G/4G and thus have already faced these issues. Yet they presumably found a solution otherwise everyone would know that the 'safe' place to pirate is from a smartphone.

Governments have realized that they can collect vast amounts of data about their citizens using smartphone apps that passively monitor the citizens as they go about their daily business. A prototype for opponents is planned to be tested out soon on Long Island. The Tia trial will look at behavior patterns (tracking movement, sleep, and conversations) and correlate them with data gathered from past opponents; researchers hope the data will reveal the "signature" of a citizen who is about fall off the one true path and therefore needs help.

There's a ton of things that cost Comcast money. They're all called the cost of doing business. Also note that Comcast already has to do this logging for any of their customer who does not have a fixed IP address and I have not heard that they're not doing that part of their job.

You do that. Of course since Comcast does not have to log failed connection attempts you'll have to use your own credentials. This will most likely break some Comcast's terms of service and ensure you get their attention. They can then simply suspend your account, probably including your cable Internet access, and even sue you if you really irked them. Sounds like a great plan you have there!

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).

Yes, it's called Carrier Grade NAT and is what Free has been doing in France for years for its community WiFi.

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!

Which totally protects the home owner where the cable box actually is.

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!

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.

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.

The change in electricity consumption is going to be so low I don't think you'd even be able to mesure it.

They do require Comcast credentials. It is indeed not a public / open / free WiFi hotspot.

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.

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.

To use the Comcast hotspot you have to provide your Comcast credentials on the gateway web page. So no, that won't work.

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.