It would help to know mor about your experiment. I can get quite big size improvements here by recompressing my camera's (Canon EOS) Jpeg files to... Jpeg! And with no visible quality difference either. They go from 6.7MB for the Canon file, to 3.1MB for quality 90 in imagemagick, 1.7MB for 75 and 1.4MB for 65. And ni your experiment the WebP quality scale may not exactly match the Jpeg one which makes comparisons even harder.

According to another poster who claims to work for a large ISP these modems/routers are remotely accessible so the ISP/law enforcement don't not need to walk to your home to retrieve any information they need from it. However these devices don't have the memory required to store the DHCP logs you talk about. Any relevant information would be sent by the router to the ISP during the signon process and be kept there.

Your scenario only makes sense if that criminal specifically wants to implicate you. Otherwise the whole "stealing Xfinity credentials and driving to be in range of your home Wifi" exercise would be pointless as for simple anonimity it would be much easier for him to pick any Internet cafe or even his home (no credentials to steal) and just use something like Tor. Now if someone wanted to implicate you by spoofing one of your MAC addresses, then using Xfinity credentials that don't belong to you would be stupid. So your scenario calls for a smart stupid criminal enemy of yours. Who are you to rate this scenario as 'low probability' rather than 'totally implausible'? Some kind of fantasy world super hero with an arch enemy?

You should qualify that with 'in the US'. In France Free has always let customers choose between bridge and router mode. Actually if you have fiber, bridge mode is the only way to get 1Gbps as otherwise the NATting, saturates the CPU around 400Mbps.

That's total nonsense. The cable modem's MAC address does not come into it as it does not leave the local cable network.

Law enforcement will give an IP address and timestamp to the ISP and the ISP will give back the name and address of the corresponding user. Law enforcement will then go to that user for answers. Since you were not the one using that IP address at that time they have no reason to come and see you. If you think the ISP will bungle things up then you should be more worried about the millions of other customers of the non-hotspot type whose IP address they could confuse with yours.

So for once Comcast actually brings a new useful feature. What is the reaction? Legitimate criticisms like (it seems) the lack of share and share alike rule (1) or the lack of a partnership with Fon which would extend the community abroad.

No, instead we get everyone trotting their paranoïa about this newfangled functionality that they don't know anything about. It does not matter that this new functionality has been in use in many countries without trouble for years. They worry about hotspot users accessing their private Wifi (non issue as the separate Wifi channel and routing keeps things separate), complain about spectrum pollution caused by the extra SSIDs (moot as the extra SSID is on the same channel), worry about the FBI breaking their door for copyright violations caused by other customers (hotspot access is tracked so the ISP will give the right name and address to the FBI), worry about data caps (again hotspot access is tracked separately), bandwidth usage (it's easy to limit the hotspot bandwidth usage and lower its priority).

Has the USA really become the land of the backward and tehnophobic people?

(1) The rule would be: if you disable this feature, that is if you don't share your bandwidth with other customers; then you cannot use the other customers' access points/bandwidth when you're away from home.

It makes no change to the spectrum usage. Instead of advertising one SSID the access point now advertises two, both on the same channel.

You blame the tech support for not knowing about this feature but it seems you've decided it was evil just based on preconceptions. I don't see how that's any better.

Wrong. Just because an access point now handles two SSIDs does not mean it grew the extra hardware to handle two separate WiFi channels overnight. All access points have been able to handle 4 independent SSIDs for the past 10 years at least, but all four are always on the same frequency.

As the parent said, the IP address that will come up is not the cable modem's owner so there's no reason why searching for it would turn up the name and address of the cable modem's owner. So your point is just moot. Or else explain why we have not seen thousands of such cases in Spain, France, Germany, Japan where such setups have been in place for years.

Which additional 'used frequencies'? Do you really think that your neighbours would turn off WiFi if this feature was not there? Given how prevalent laptops, tablets and smartphones are that's just wishful thinking. Or maybe you think that because you see two SSIDs it means two WiFi frequencies are used? (hint: it does not)

I take it you've never heard of VPNs. You should look it up some time. Remove the encryption part which is useless in this case, and you've got everything you need. It's really not rocket science. Furthermore Fon has been doing that for years using the open-source OpenWRT as a base. So it's not even like it's some new unproven technology.

Maybe because he knows what he's talking about and you don't?

As mentioned in the article the Xfinity users connect to the Xfinity SSID which is an open Wifi network while your Wifi network has a different SSID and is encrypted. So at the WiFi level the networks are completely separate. People seem to think this multiple Wifi network capability is new. It's not. Every access point of the past 10 years I've known about has supported 4 separate networks all along.

Then at the IP level, the way these community Wifi hotspots normally work is that when a guest connects to it he gets an address from a separate network range. Think of it as a VPN if that helps you. This ensures the guest's access is restricted to the official login server until he has registered. It also ensures the guest's IP traffic is separate from the user's local WiFi network. It also makes it possible to keep track of the guest's traffic for billing (if there's billing involved), and solves the copyright police issues.

How is that different from every other Wifi hotspot service that requires a subscription? What prevents you from setting up a fake AT&T, Boingo or T-Mobile hotspot and start collecting passwords? This sounds like an overblown fear.

Why would someone logging into this separate network get your IP address? This makes no sense and is absolutely not how it works with Free's FreeWifi community network for instance. So unless you have proof that Comcast does it the stupid way you're just reacting like someone who's just afraid of anything new. Down worry, I'm getting off your lawn now.

Wow. I never cease to be amazed by the land of free competition.

My ISP, Free, billed me 30 € ($39) in 2003 for 1mbps and no data cap. Over ten years later they still bill me 30 € ! Of course a lot has changed, there's still no data cap but the bandwidth cap has been removed too, I get unlimited phone calls to France but also about a 100 other countries including the US and Canada, and they provide me with a box which is an Adsl modem, network bridge/router (my choice), 4 port 100Mbps switch, CPL access point, WiFi access point, access to 4 milion WiFi hotspots, and a lot more.

They did increase prices once though: for a while I had TV over ADSL access for the same price but the government increased the VAT on all such offers so they turned the TV part into an extra 2 € option so that the VAT increase only applies to those 2 €.

Actually it's QEmu that does the emulation part to get x86 applications running on arm. See the schema at 30:00 in the Wine on Android video (with sound as soon as the FOSDEM guys get to it).