[talk] Optimum provided home router madness

[Nick Danger]

On 02/02/2015 09:25 AM, George Rosamond wrote:
> Nick Danger:
>> One of the WiFi's is layer 2 back to "HQ" so they can let everyone on
>> the same company/brand surf the modem at your house without knowing your
>> wifi username and password.
>>
> 
> (top-posting is bad http://www.nycbug.org/index.cgi?action=lists)

I read that link and thought "Who the hell still uses PINE, or Mutt" and
then remembered I just had to install Mutt on a new server I built for
someone that has been at the school for almost 30 years now. *sigh*

I'll try to keep my 10-second-coffee-in-one-hand reply inline instead of
top post.

> I was under the impression that Comcast and TWC got rid of residential
> users providing free wifi to their customers.  Wasn't that some /. story
> a while back?

No, its still there. I think they made it "opt in" now. The claim is
that by offering a small bit of your bandwidth to other customers, that
wont impact your overall speed promises from the ISP.

There is some lawsuit going on about it, but I suspect it won't get
anywhere. Comcast and TWC aren't the only ones. ATT does it, Verizon
does it, I wouldn't be surprised if someday your cell phone ends up
boosting signal for people standing around you with crappy phone
signals. Mesh is the future. "My old StarTac didn't work very well so I
stand next to this guy with a iPhone 7 and POOF, 3 bars of signal!"  ;-)

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2014/06/comcast-is-turning-your-xfinity-router-into-a-public-wi-fi-hotspot/#24139101=0

I have the new Comcast modem sitting on my floor. I don't want to
replace the one I have now with it because I don't want the built in
WiFi. One of these days I'll scrape together some hardware and build a
pfSense box and replace the whole current messy setup I have.

> It's sort of a funny issue.  On the one hand, residential users are
> powering the cable company's wifi for their other customers with no
> compensation.  On the other hand, a lot of their customers using others
> wifi are likely to come under the sights of the RIAA/MPAA and their
> racketeering cohorts.  No?

On the second point, since its layer 2, whoever uses the "open" wireless
at your house isn't really on your house network. MPAA and RIAA would
get the ISP in their information about who is downloading Spiderman3 and
the ISP could track it back to your username/password pair. The
homeowner in the middle wouldn't figure into the whole play.

Although oddly I have seen MUCH less RIAA/MPAA letters of late. Sure
they shit down PirateBay and other sites, but I don't see so much "sue
the end down loader" going on anymore. Then again, my current job
doesn't expose me as much to that side so maybe I am just missing it.

Nick