51–60 of 149 posts
I looked him up recently. He's a big player in SV now.
[0] little demonstration that their Windows domain shouldn't be on the same subnet as their users.
I worked for a dial up ISP as a network engineer around the same time frame mentioned in the article. A standing instruction was to, as time allowed, manually look at usage across members and force resets on any long standing connections! Mainly this was because it was a small company and this freed up the number of possible incoming connections to avoid busy signals. I was very junior and cringe at how naively unawa…
It's not necessarily unethical - it's a problem of resource allocation under constraints. You can either let the person who stays connected for weeks stick around, or free up space for less frequent users who are also paying customers.
Seems like if you're advertising unlimited service the least you could do is deliver it as much as possible for extreme users and only bump them when they might be denying other customers access to the service.
If it's something that happens routinely you need to expand your capacity to make good on your advertised offering.
Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each t…
In the UK in the early 90s we had to pay 1) The ISP a monthly charge 2) The ISP a per-minute charge (these were things like cix, compuserve, aol, etc) 3) the phone company a per-minute charge Later we had ISPs that didn't have a per-minute charge (Demon and the like), so it was just the monthly charge and the per minute charge to the phone company. Even later than that ISPs which were just a per-minute charge to the…
Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up), my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta cracks and servers on the ISP webspace…
Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer to yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some good reasons for data caps on mobile carriers. The last mile is a shared access medium, and the carriers only have so much spectrum licensed to them. All mobile carriers are offering plans with soft caps, meaning you may be derated to a lower speed after a known amount of data and (usually) there are bandwidth limitations in your area.
I disagree. The last mile is very local, limited to a single cell, whose size depends on the planned capacity (cells are smaller in cities). Congestion is therefore limited to specific cells. Furthermore, congestion is often very temporary, limited to peak hours or special events. A congestion event could last just minutes. A global monthly data cap doesn't actually address congestion very well. You can still have a…
To play devil's advocate,
- With data plans based on minimum speed, there would still be a possibility of service being degraded below the paid-for minimum speed during times of high usage at a cell site. There would have to be an asterisk in the contract to the effect that minimum speeds would only be supplied while possible. And, ideally, some regulatory oversight to ensure sufficient cell site capacity is installed based on the cumulative speed of the plans sold, if that makes sense.
- I wonder, to what degree is the structure of cell phone data plans constrained by regulation and private agreements? IOW, are carriers allowed, under current regulation, to sell minimum-speed plans? How complicated and time-consuming would it be to unwind inter-carrier cell-site-sharing agreements?
Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each t…
In the late 90s I moved to an area that did not yet have broadband, so my choices were either 56k modem or pay out the nose for ISDN or similar. I got a 2nd phone line, and went the modem route but left it connected 24/7. I kept getting banned from the local ISPs for this exact reason. Luckily I moved out of the area before I ran out of ISPs available without paying long distance charges!
I was a little bastard in the late 90s, a script kiddie who executed anything I could find. Ran very obnoxious port scans against everything online. Eventually I got a letter from my ISP and it was a thick binder with "netiquette". How to behave online. And a letter saying basically "we see everything you're doing, cut it out". They probably had complaints on the abuse address of my home IP, since I was a total moron…
Not the same, but in the early 2000s (Germany, so ISDN dial up), my dad got a call at work from my ISP, because they got a call from blizzard, because my dad's son was hosting WC3 closed beta cracks and servers on the ISP webspace…
> because my dad's son Is this referring to you, or to your brother? That wording is highly confusing in English. If it were you, it would be "my dad got a call at work because his son was...", and if it was your brother it would be "my dad got a call at work because his other son was..." . You would never say "my dad's son" to refer to yourself.
Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996. We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs. Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each t…
Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.
I was a little bastard in the late 90s, a script kiddie who executed anything I could find. Ran very obnoxious port scans against everything online. Eventually I got a letter from my ISP and it was a thick binder with "netiquette". How to behave online. And a letter saying basically "we see everything you're doing, cut it out". They probably had complaints on the abuse address of my home IP, since I was a total moron…
Simpler times of experimentation…