Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did that, and then a few years later they no longer supported that version. I gave up and used the provided modem.... guess I could put it in a faraday cage to prevent the WiFi from being enabled...
DOCSIS protocol hasn't changed, 3.0 modems are still being supported, just like a decade ago
Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
451–460 of 517 posts
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can’t solve social problems with technical solutions. Sure, this has a fair amount of truth to it. However, security is not a social problem, it's an economic one. No one, not even the most well funded and skilled organizations like the NSA, has access to infinite resources. Whether a given attack/data harvesting effort costs $1 million, $10 thousand, $100, $1, or $0.01 makes an enormous difference in impact. C…
I am really struggling to see the technical solution here. This isn’t a security question - security has already been lost. We’re talking about a device in a home that the owner doesn’t control, being able to monitor the presence of a person using either WiFi signals or device identifiers. The obvious solution is to not use that device. But that’s not necessarily possible for a variety of reasons, not all of them con…
Are you? Comments are full of obvious solutions like using your own hardware, which you clearly understand.
>We’re talking about a device in a home that the owner doesn’t control
No, we definitely are not. As you yourself immediately acknowledge:
>The obvious solution is to not use that device. But that’s not necessarily possible for a variety of reasons, not all of them controllable.
...but then immediately try to do a fuzzy hand wave it away for reasons I don't really understand. Technical solutions don't have to be completely perfect, which is surely not a standard you're holding any social/legal solution to right? Since that would be ridiculous.
As I said, simultaneously pursuing multiple tracks in parallel is the correct approach, as hybrids can be more then the sum of their parts. A purely legal solution ("law against ISPs collecting this data"), if it's even possible to get passed at all, ends up depending heavily on the honor system with all sorts of perverse incentives, and is very challenging to verify. A purely technical solution ("use your own hardware", "route through another end point") could potentially be interfered with (though let's be clear: this isn't actually a thing basically ever). But we can easily imagine hybrid approaches, just as was done in the past with efforts like CableCARD. The law doesn't need to necessarily try to mandate and police hard to verify behavior like how non-property owner controlled hardware acts, but instead can mandate that ISPs must always allow direct dumb interfaces to their network via customer controlled hardware. That's something easy to verify, which enhances compliance, and easy to understand which enhances the politics.
But make no mistake: the technical aspect is an inseparable part of this approach. We need both.
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
DOCSIS protocol hasn't changed, 3.0 modems are still being supported, just like a decade ago
Well, I had a DOCSIS 3.0 modem I used with Spectrum ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B016PE1X5K ), and now it no longer works. You can see it isn’t on their compatible list anymore: https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/compliant-modems-c...
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes that's the point. You don't need those things. The idea that a news article or blog post or e-commerce page could "crash" is ridiculous, and the law shouldn't humor that excuse. There's been standard ways to declaratively define such pages since before scripting frameworks gained popularity. Use those standard ways. If you're really building an app and need to performance test, buy some hardware in your target ra…
You don’t need a shopping cart either. Just make the user write down the skus from your online catalog and send you a purchase order. Products exist on spectrum and the ones that win are typically easier and more convenient to use. If your business is developing the best product it can, it absolutely needs the ability to be convenient and useful. Adding a language select option on a multinational site seems pretty ta…
Pretty sure this exact example is explicitly carved out as a-okay.
I think what we're dealing with here is not websites trying to do basic things. Rather, it's every website and their mom thinking they need elaborate analytics to sell plastic garbage.
Yes, that elaborate analytics you spread to 20 third parties IS a privacy concern. We should be looking at that.
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.
I use my own and there's a data cap.
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.
I have to pay more when I do not use their device? Crazy...
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely that is not true? I thought rental fees were common with using the vendor equipment (something like $10/month). It is a frequently listed as a cost cutting measure to buy your own modem rather than rent from The ISP. A modem is $100-200, so you should be net positive after a year on the investment.
No longer true last time I went in to renegotiate my service plan, I got a better monthly rate and higher bandwidth using their gear. I had previously used my own modem and router.
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it possible to deny it?
Probably, but my care would have suffered. They are required by law to treat people in emergencies but they aren’t required by law to do anything but keep them from immediately dying. I have a condition that requires complex and ongoing care, and sometimes need to be admitted briefly for same. Refusing to sign consent forms prevents that and gets you on to the “this guy isn’t going to pay us, get him out of here asap…
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged You're repeatedly misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issue. The tl'dr is that Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement, more than a million of me even. This is one easy way to take the casual and overly general "you're civically disengaged" victim blaming off the table. Your elected representatives already know your interests, they…
> Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement Again, I worked on these issues. Bezos and friends never showed up. Nobody showed up. This wasn’t a battle between David and Goliath, it was an empty field to which some generals showed up, looked around and then left. > money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take To a limit. The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidat…
Re: Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
This practice, and fear of the exact sort of nonsense in this article, plus wanting to keep my wifi bandwidth free for the network I actually connect to, is why I'm still on AT&T DSL in my area, at 50 mbps. Comcast is available at up to gigabit, and they can keep it.
I had AT&T DSL many years ago. They forced me to use their modem/router combo from 2Wire. It was truly awful. I eventually got so fed up with trying to connect things to the WiFi that I bought a separate router to plug into it, and connected to that network, which it did let me do. That solved most of my problems, other than the overall poor service.
Now I do remember some issues getting it to maintain a stable connection to the DSL network at some points, which even daisy-chaining another router wouldn't have fixed. No way to tell if that was the gateway or just the DSL network that was flaky.