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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

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Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#281

Post by patrickg_zill »

anticensor wrote: post #265
patrickg_zill wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend who is in telecom told me that when talking to a prepaid calling card software company, one of the features was the ability to change by how much the prepaid calling card would overbill. For instance, you make a 12 minute, 5 second call (12.1 minutes with 6-second billing which means 60 seconds is billed in tenths of a minute) - the software records it as say, 12.6 minutes.

Do they not have call termination logs? I am saying that because service logs have to be accurate by law.

I am talking about the sort of prepaid calling cards that you might buy at a gas station or convenience store. I don't know what would happen if you called their customer service line and asked for the logs of your card...

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#282

Post by metildaa »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #268
gmjosack wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some states require carriers to maintain service for 911 on inactive lines. You could check if this works in your area. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2009/05/update-abou...

One word of caution: I worked for a large phone company (GTE then Verizon) back in 99-01. I was in the call center for disconnections. Inactive lines are not equal to lines with no telephone service. IF there is no telephone service, 911 probably won't work. If your phone is temporarily disconnected (say for non-payment of a phone bill or the disconnect they do for folks that live in FLorida for the winter and up nor…

Putting power down each linw costs money, ditto for maintaining cabling to each home.

Setting an expectation of free 911 service is fine in the cellular world where its a minor nusiance to support, but in the context of a rapidly shrinking customer base (for incumbent telcos) its a very expensive burden.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#283

Post by beatgammit »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #244
beatgammit wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a municipal fiber connection, but the bandwidth is atrocious and Comcast seems to be much better priced for faster speeds. What router do you have? Is it just something running OpenWRT, or something fancier? Also, how much do you pay beyond the listed service price (fees, taxes, etc), and can you waive the installation fee?

My router is a PC Engines APU2 running pfSense. When I signed up there was no installtion fee, and no problem doing a self-install. But this was years so, so I have no idea if things have changed or not.

Thanks! That machine looks pretty awesome, and it even supports ECC and core boot.

I might have to pick one up and see if I can get more SATA through the mini PCIe and have to be a storage server that also routes traffic. I've been hoping for an ARM chip, but with ECC, this might just win out.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#284

Post by beatgammit »

hathawsh wrote: post #208

I'm not going to defend CenturyLink, but in the interest of attributing this mistake to incompetence rather than malice, I'd like to suggest how this might have happened. CenturyLink is a multi-state ISP and their generic system has limited ability to support state-specific policies. They have a well-developed system for creating state-specific packet processing rules, but they don't have a well-developed way to noti…

I think it was that this was cheaper and easier to implement, so they didn't bother doing the better option.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#285

Post by hannasanarion »

vertex-four wrote: post #57
kawfey wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why in the world was this the decision they came up with?

Some lawyer-management meeting resulted in the argument that they didn’t want customers to be able to claim they had never seen the notice, most likely.

But the law literally says that email is sufficient notice.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#286

Post by Broken_Hippo »

metildaa wrote: post #282
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One word of caution: I worked for a large phone company (GTE then Verizon) back in 99-01. I was in the call center for disconnections. Inactive lines are not equal to lines with no telephone service. IF there is no telephone service, 911 probably won't work. If your phone is temporarily disconnected (say for non-payment of a phone bill or the disconnect they do for folks that live in FLorida for the winter and up nor…

Putting power down each linw costs money, ditto for maintaining cabling to each home. Setting an expectation of free 911 service is fine in the cellular world where its a minor nusiance to support, but in the context of a rapidly shrinking customer base (for incumbent telcos) its a very expensive burden.

I'm not convinced it is an expensive burden comparatively. I'm fine using tax money to fund this. I'm fine with a 911 fee for mobile phones, and Im fine including it on prepayments for prepaid, though it would be more upfront if it were included in the price of the prepayment. I wish the world would put a bit more effort into the system so it is better than it is.

These are things that let folks call 911 for a dangerous, possibly drunk driver. House fire, abusive husband, neglected kids next door. I've personally used it for car accidents, violent customers (one decided to huff canned air in a pharmacy), hurt co-workers, and random folks off the street needing an ambulance.

911 provides a public safety service. If it means that phone companies have to provide access from their equipment or their lines, I'm OK with that. Im OK with all or part of that being reimbursed, with the main exception of requiring a new mobile to be compatable with emergency services (no worse than requiring autos to have seat belts).

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#288

Post by ninju »

Applejinx wrote: post #242
rdtsc wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BBB complaints also work sometimes. Was playing back and forth ball with Verizon FIOS's billing department for a few months. Got tired of it. Filed a BBB complaint. Then soon after got a call and magically the issue was solved.

BBB is also a kind of scam: they are not in any sense a government agency, more of a Yelp-like entity. In the age of the internet, they go after small businesses, and are eagerly sought out by scammers because you can just purchase their approval, and it can help allay people's suspicions. For that reason I'm less trusting of anything that is touting BBB support. It might be an old person who's not up to speed with w…

You mean Yelp is sort of like a hipster version of the BBB since the BBB predates Yelp by a couple of decades

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#289

Post by WorldMaker »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #230
WorldMaker wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pain for the users has never stopped enterprises from doing it, sadly.

That is often handled by group policy. I'm not entirely aure how pinni is handled, maybe it's disabled in ie or chrome via group policy too?

Just because it is handled automatically by "group policy" doesn't mean that users don't feel day-to-day pains from it. It just means it is more likely that don't understand where their pain is coming from. ("If I pull up google.com in Chrome or IE it works, but why can't I use Firefox?" "Because we don't support it here." [Because group policy deploying CA certificates to it is harder and it has stricter CA requirements, such as no self-signed certs.]) Enterprise IT can sweep some of that under the rug by controlling which software is allowable to be installed at all, but there's always going to be edge cases in a TLS Interception environment to cause users papercuts, at the very least.

To answer your direct question: So far pinning in browsers is still just TOFU [Trust on First Use], I think? So pinning alone still works with TLS Interception so long as it is intercepted on Day One.

The Chrome security team has been threatening for a couple versions now that certain pinned lists, including (but not limited to) Google's own sites, would be baked into the browser in such a way that no one should be able to disable them.

I wish they have the gumption to pull that off. With Chrome being the current darling browser of a lot of the same IT groups using TLS Interception, that might actually send a clear message that TLS Interception is a bad idea. Unfortunately, it might just be received as "Here's Google's list of sites that have to be whitelisted or outright blocked from our Interception Proxies so as not to confuse our users", but that would still be a step in the right direction in so far as end-to-end internet security.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#290

Post by dylz »

walrus01 wrote: post #26
gnode wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

Without malicious intent, ISPs are already doing this, both to sell aggregated traffic data and to shit all over their network.

On Sprint and ATT Mobility I cannot maintain many TCP connections for long durations - websockets will be killed after a while and require reconnection, long-connected TCP games will drop after a few minutes, quite a handful of HTTPS/TLS sites do not load and immediately hardfail with a TLS protocol error or connection reset, traffic appears modified and periodically injected, DNS is hijacked, images' hash values do not match the server side on plaintext connections, NXDOMAIN DNS values are hijacked, traffic crossing any port will be tampered with as long as it looks like HTTP/1.x, etc.

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