Comcast throws down gauntlet to residential accounts

[Martin Fick]

--- On Mon, 8/10/09, Scott Bennett <bennett at cs.niu.edu> wrote:

>    Next, the conversation took a turn
> I was told that having *any* ports "open facing the
> Internet" was a violation of Comcast's Acceptable Use
> Policy (AUP) for residential accounts.  

Seems like another good argument in favor of 
implementing a mechanism for relays to work behind 
firewalls, you would not need to have any open ports.

This might be another way that they attack bittorent 
users since to get better bandwidth, they need to 
open ports.

While it does suck, ultimately you can't blame them for
this policy (the other BS notwithstanding) since it is 
in their AUP.  There's a reason I don't use such an 
account despite having to regularly justify the extra 
monthly expense to my wife when she asks: "why can't 
we use one of those cheap DSL/cable internet services 
I see advertised everywhere?"  

If they couldn't do this, to stay competitive, they 
would charge more money for everyone and you would 
suffer more. Cheap internet access and "serving" is 
not some inherent human right, so let's not complain 
about the price of gas here. ;)  (unless it is to 
propose ways to make tor use less gas...)

-Martin