OT- Comcast Subscriber Agreement

[Tilly, Lawrence]

As an aside to this, it's interesting how some cable ISPs are configured
differently than others. I was on attbi for a little over a year, and with
them I had to actually "register" each of my PCs that I wanted to be on the
system, and they only allowed me to keep two on record at a time. This was
a PIA because at the time I did not use a router and was simply swapping 
the cat5 between boxes. I had my home desktop, my work laptop and my wife's 
work laptop that we wanted to have easy access.  Additionally, when my
sister-in-law visited she would like to hook her laptop up sometimes. I
got them to allow a third MAC to be listed on a permanent basis without a
charge (they normally wanted extra $ for this!), but I think I was just very
lucky at couldn't get any others.

For the last year or so I've been w/ metrocast and until just last month I
was still without a router. However, their system doesn't give a darn what
machine I hook up to the modem. I have swapped the cat5 between five different
machines without any issues more than the occasional need to cycle power on
the cable modem. Usually I've been able to just swap the network cable and
give it a couple minutes to "sync up" with the new computer. When I did finally
hook up a router box there were no issues at all.

It reminds me of how the cable service I had about 10 years ago in Nebraska
made you rent their converter boxes ( $5/month ). I didn't have any premium
channels, and never use PPV, but it was "required for service". When I hooked
directly up to my VCR I was still able to get all the basic channels I had 
contracted for, but I could not remove the converter box from my account since
they had determined it was mandatory for them to be able to ensure service.
It just torques me off when a company (phone, ISP, cable, whatever) charges
or limits access for no real technical reason, simply because they want to 
get a few extra $ / month out of us. 

</rant>
-Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Buskey [mailto:tom at buskey.name] 
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 12:40 PM
To: gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
Subject: Re: OT- Comcast Subscriber Agreement


Greg Kettmann wrote:

> I kind of liked the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" method, which someone
> mentioned so kind of wish I'd just kept quiet, but I'm sure they're very 
> aware of all the routers out there.  I would assume that their all a 
> dead givaway based on their MAC addresses.  
> 

Most cable firewall routers let you set the external mac.  Set it to be 
the same as the PC you signed up with and you never have to tell che 
cable company what you did.

With most Linux (& BSD) systems you can set the MAC address that's used.

I signed up with my wife's PC with a 3com card.  My firewall is a Sun 
with the same MAC address.

There are ways to detect a NAT'd subnet (discussed on Slashdot awhile 
ago).  OpenBSD has already been patched to defeat it for the paranoid 
amongst us.