5G will put century link out of business.
So we'll have a different shitty ISP? My shitty carrier (T-Mobile) does DNS hijacking of all NXDOMAINs, and pretends like it's perfectly reasonable.
CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
121–130 of 294 posts
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#122CenturyLink is totally shady. My wife just yesterday spent a significant amount of time fixing our phone bill. She decided a couple months ago to upgrade to a "fixed" bill plan (apparently they've been raising our prices $10/mo every year for the last few years). This plan price won't change until we change the plan. It's bundled with their internet though, but my wife told them to not send the modem because we weren…
An important bit of law to always keep in mind, as companies bank on consumers being ignorant of it: If a company mails something to your home that you did not expressly order - it's yours. End of story. They cannot request that you send it back, they can not charge you for it. It's yours. This includes if you ordered product A and they sent you product B by mistake. Legally speaking, in that situation you were sent a gift and the company has done nothing to satisfy their legal obligation to send you the product you purchased.
If companies could just send you things and bill you without you ordering anything, we'd all be buried in mountains of garbage and steep debt. Keep the modem as a gift courtesy of CenturyLink. Watch your bill and if they charge for anything you haven't received, if you've got the time, file fraud claims in small claims court to recover the money.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#123Why is this so surprising? You pay for your internet from this service provider and this is the trust you're putting in this private company. All your communication that goes down this channel is subject to their rules, and unless you encyrpt it they can do what they like. I think these kind of crappy implementations just surface a bigger problem underneath. If you don't choose your own DNS servers, if you don't have…
Your reasoning would be fine, were it not for the fact that an ISP's mere existence in an area, no matter how crappy, generally satisfies FCC's mandate to promote/fund broadband penetration. So, Crappy-ISP, LLC existing and being able to pencil-whip FCC filings about minimum speed expectations across its coverage area means the FCC will make no effort to provide funds for Less-Crappy-ISP, LLC or Moderately-Crappy-ISP, LLC to come in and fill gaps.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks to me like the use of the word "may" in the actual law lends a degree of flexibility to the implementation. A service provider *may* provide the notice [...] That does not seem like a hard requirement. Or is this a case where legalese differs from commonly-understood grammar?
That "may" there appears to refer to selecting among the choices (A), (B), or (C) within the statute. The portion before the selection list (which I did not quote, as it can be read in full in the actual article) begins: A service provider shall, before December 30, 2018, notify ... This clause says they "shall" notify. So it is mandatory they notify. It is not mandatory that they perform the notification via the mea…
This feels particularly delusional.
Even if the law said that this notification must be delivered via certified mail, that would obviously not prevent Centurylink from also doing this.
Why is it that you so badly want to blame lawmakers for this?
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
They purchased Level(3) who already previously owned Global Crossing, Savvis Video and Genuity, among other acquisitions. The Level(3) name was much more memorable in the carrier/enterprise/ISP field and it feels like they are starting from scratch on brand recognition, because as you said, lots of people haven't heard of Centurylink before. Edit: And as noted by the thread "CenturyLink is totally shady.", Centurylin…
What? Level3 was huge as a fiber ISP at the enterprise level, but Qwest/CenturyLink has been a huge phone service/ISP in the west since the breakup of Ma Bell. They own the naming rights to the Seahawks's stadium. They have huge brand recognition in the West, though you're right, little of it's positive. I remember a cover article in my sleepy mountain town's alt/leftist newspaper titled 'Qworst' when I was growing u…
True, I did forget about the Qwest acquisition from Centurylink because that was so long ago (to my memory). I do remember the days when routing problems and outages with Qwest in public forums always led to the 'Qworst' name popping up.
I also work for a shop that I recommended Level(3) DIA fiber/Layer 3 services on about 1.5 years ago. Now that it's CL, not much has changed on service or reliability.
The sales people however are still trying to expand their grasp into our organization so it's always a battle there.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#126Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#127And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice. And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i): (A) by electronic com…
The issue I see is also that they didn't notify the customer of what the law requires. The law requires they notify the customer that the customer can request content guessed to potentially be somehow harmful to minors be blocked. It doesn't say anything about the customer having to pay to buy software that they then have to operate themselves in order to block such content. The law, at least as far as I read it, puts the entire responsibility for blocking the content on the ISP - not the customer. So what the ISP is doing seems in direct contravention of the law.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#128The original article title is more accurate. Replacing "CenturyLink" with "Utah ISP" as if they're some podunk lil' no-name ISP is misleading. CenturyLink is a Tier 1 ISP, and 5th largest in the country by customer count. Maybe city folk haven't heard of CenturyLink but they have monopolies over vast swathes of rural copper networks.
Thanks, we've reverted to the original from “Utah ISP blocking internet and using DNS to show ads; says it's required by law”.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everything has to be encrypted and authenticated end-to-end. This isn't really enough. Even with QUIC / TLS your ISP can still know what endpoint you're connecting to, which may in itself be too bad. This is the problem VPNs are solving (or at least moving the trust). There's also the touted alternative of conglomerate everything onto Cloudflare and have encrypted SNI.
If your ISP is doing netflow analysis and DPI on your connection (like the Chinese GFW), with malicious intent specifically aimed at you, you're pretty much screwed anyhow. If they decide to start blocking traffic to VPN endpoints and such. This can be seen if you try running a non-obfuscated openvpn link into and out of China.
Excluding steganography, an eavesdropper will know if they're unable to understand your communications. What's important is that what they can glean isn't enough for them to be specifically motivated or able to harm you.
Being seen to be using a VPN only labels you as a VPN user. In China, the authorities dislike individual VPN use, and attempt to curb it with technical measures, but for the most part, they don't go around imprisoning people only for VPN use, because there isn't much expected gain to be had from the average VPN user.
Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to
#130Hmmm, so if I were on CenturyLink and in the "SOL" category the following could have happened. Attempting to email my state senators to express a political opinion? Freedom of speech: Blocked. Buying from a company online, located in another state? Interstate commerce: Blocked. Trying to run an online business? Blocked. Trying to contact my kids? Blocked. My elderly grandmother is dying and family was trying to Skype…
In the USA, Internet access is a luxury entertainment product. It is not a public utility, as you seem to be thinking of it. I'd argue it absolutely shouldn't be a luxury entertainment product, but our law is carefully constructed to ensure that it remains as such. This actively prevents government considering too deeply the idea that citizens need or should have access.