171–180 of 216 posts
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I think one of the things I'm most excited for is canceling my absurd Comcast agreement.
I'm not sure that speed would be enough to want me to go with Google, but I'm paranoid that way. I'd welcome the competition and the presumed price drop at Comcast. It's fast enough for me.
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Yep. I pay 60 bucks a month for 40 Mbps, and Google offers 1 Gbps for 70 bucks a month. I pay almost the same price for 4% the speed (not to mention horrible customer service).
and I pay around 80 in TN for 25 mbps
What part do you live in? I think they're upgrading everyone? Or maybe it was just the middle Tennessee area. Either way, the $70 I'm paying is 10 times slower than the internet Google Fiber users get for the same price so even $70 is still grossly overprices for what I'm getting.
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TL;DR: trash-talking Google's record doesn't seem fair to me. Here are some things that are public knowledge: 1) Google considers some kind of network traffic to be attacks (obviously). Google claims (and no one doubts) that in some cases Google reports these attacks to law enforcement authorities, and to other companies believed to be affected. The main example of this that I'm aware of is Operation Aurora (see http…
I'm the one who claimed they seem to have "allyed themselves with the surveillance state," so I guess I'm really the one you're responding to. I wouldn't consider that to be trash talking, exactly, but I don't mind you saying that. I actually don't know many of the facts on the ground, as you do. I mean, you can cite evidence and provide links, and I can't. What I do know is that Google is a humongous red target pain…
Partially, yup.
> facts on the ground
Again, I emphasize that I learned most of what I know by following privacy-oriented links on HN, and reading public sources. And I know these things because I, like you, think it's very much worth thinking about. I want to know whether or not Google is evil.
> Google is a humongous red target
Absolutely. No doubt.
> we should all be encrypting everything
I think I agree with your reasoning, but I disagree with your conclusion; I think this is simply evidence that I value my privacy much less than you value yours.
> trend of slow erosion
This one flows back and forth. The battle is not lost, even in the US. See e.g. that last link my my previous post, re Judge Susan Illston
possibly already have ways of doing this
You know what an NSL is, right? As far as I can tell, the FBI can ask for anything of anyone at any time. If surveillance scares you, get scared. Though, again, c.f. Susan Illston.
In any case, I once again think it is important to distinguish between the good points you make in this comment, and the shitty summary you made in the previous comment, which in my opinion is vastly under-supported and also probably wrong.
> not sure if they'd still have me, though, since I make the above point not infrequently
They hired me.
Good god I hope these announcements light a fire under the butts of the other US providers.
I think one of the things I'm most excited for is canceling my absurd Comcast agreement.
Then again, Comcast tries to get me to "upgrade" to packages costing half as much as my current one on a regular basis, so who knows what they were going for.
I imagine that Google will be working its way north, up through Orem and Bluffdale where the NSA, Adobe, and a number of other large tech companies are. There are some SLC suburbs up north that are running failed fiber networks, too, so I imagine they'll eventually fill in the Salt Lake area. I'm surprised about Utah, even with the existing fiber. The population density in most of the valley is really low, and the in…
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My last apartment had <1mbps with AT&T. I was working remotely for a company that required VPN+VNC into a linux server on their intranet to get anything done. Any time my roommates tried to watch something on hulu/netflix (frequently), our router had to be rebooted.
Your router was shit, then, and probably bad enough that you weren't able to measure the true connection speed. Did you let the ISP provide the router? That's always a mistake.
Upon moving out, I got a 18 Mbps cable subscription & a Motorola Surfboard Extreme. Now the only shitty piece of networking equipment in my setup is a Belkin wifi router that I haven't been bothered to upgrade.
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You've got it good. Here in Santa Cruz California at the southern end of Silicon Valley, I pay $70/month for a whopping 6mbit (ADSL). This is via a reseller of everyone's darling Sonic. They helpfully include "free" phone service I have no use for, which is then responsible for a not free $10 of that bill, $7 of which goes to Sonic for providing the "free" phone service.
Who is the reseller?
(I'm on it too)
This is definitely one of those situations where when the big telcos heard about Kansas - they were prolly thinking..."meh...who cares about Kansas". But it feels like every few weeks, Google makes a new announcement. This is definitely going to shake-up the entire ISP market in the US. I am happy for you guys - I no longer live there, but when I did RoadRunner wasn't TOOO bad. I guess Comcast is the biggest offender…
http://kansascityisinmissouri.com/
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I'm not LDS, and generally dislike religion, but I wonder how bad an LDS-controlled area really would be. I assume it means good disaster/etc. preparation, a relatively strong social safety net for participants (and thus less abject poverty, random crazy people, etc.) The non-LDS or ex-LDS people I know who live in Utah (from Defcon or whatever) seem pretty cohesive as well. Maybe because it's a smaller tech scene th…
As a member of the Church that attended BYU (in Provo), I'm always a bit surprised to hear people outside the church express these kinds of questions. In Utah due to the large percentage of the population belonging to the Church, there is a somewhat unique culture (it's a Utah Mormon culture, not a Mormon culture in general, if than makes sense). Us Mormons believe in respect and love towards all, regardless of belie…
