Eideard

The end of the internet comes not with a bang or a procession of four lolcats of the apocalypse, but just with two blinking lights on a modem. At least that’s how it came for Andre Vrignaud, a 39-year-old gaming consultant in Seattle, when Comcast shut him off from the internet for using too much data.

Vrignaud, it seems, committed the foul of using more than 250 GB of data on Comcast two months in a row, triggering the company’s overage policy that results in a year-long ban from using its services.

“It’s one of those things I never thought would hit me,” Vrignaud said. “They didn’t even call. I just got double blinking lights on my modem…”

It was the second month in a row that Vrignaud got those blinking lights. The first time he called in and tried to figure out what the problem was.

So he turned off the router he had that was open to the public, and asked his roommate to go a bit lighter on data usage, since his household is heavy on streaming media, including YouTube, NetFlix and Pandora.

What he didn’t count on, Vrignaud said, was that Comcast, who he was paying $60 a month for a 15Mbps download speed, was counting uploads against the quota as well.

Just recently he’d switched his online backup system from Mozy to Carbonite, after Mozy put an end to its unlimited back-up service. Carbonite has no such limit, but does throttle users’ uploads once it hits a high level…

He’s got his music ripped into lossless FLAC format, in addition to lower rates, amounting to about a gig a disc — which he stores in a basement RAID server that can handle 12 TB of data. (He says it has plenty of empty space.)

As an amateur photographer, he saves his photos in RAW format, which can run to about 10MB per image. And when Amazon last week opened up its cloud music service to unlimited storage of music files in AAC, Vrignaud batch-converted his collection and began uploading it.

The music is what he assumes caused the problem, but he’s not sure. He admits to doing a little bittorrenting in the last month, but says it was limited to getting a few episodes of a famous British sci-fi show that’s not totally available in the U.S.

And all Comcast is saying is that he’s kicked off — and under the terms of the ban, he can’t even switch to a uncapped, higher-priced, lower-speed business connection.

Life in the Land of Liberty – where establishing standards based on the needs of ordinary citizens is extremist and offering information services as a public utility is socialist.

Both of those concepts may be correct in their identification. Which is why my feelings aren’t hurt when some dimwit populist hurls such accusations in my direction. That doesn’t alter the needs of modern-day Americans however. If industrial-level capitalism doesn’t meet our needs then it really is time for a change at some level or other.

A German bank robber led his pursuers straight to him after taunting police in an email over their efforts to catch him. Authorities in the southern city of Wuerzburg said on Wednesday the 19-year-old sent emails to police and two newspapers to point out factual errors in the report of his bank raid in the town of Roettingen a week ago.

According to daily Bild, he mocked the police for getting his age, height and accent wrong then pointed out he escaped in a car, not on foot.

“His game of cat and mouse went all wrong,” a Wuerzburg police spokesman said.

Police traced his email and arrested him in a gambling hall in Hamburg just a few hours later.

“He was completely shocked,” the spokesman said.

Har!

Just days after a sensationalist report by the LA Times suggested that Apple was spying on users’ location based on an incorrect understanding of the company’s revised privacy policy, two Congressmen, one a chair of the House Privacy Caucus, have demanded that the company answer a series of basic privacy questions.

The original report by David Sarno of the LA Times set off a firestorm of privacy panic three days ago after it suggested Apple was tracking iPhone users’ locations in some radical new way that other devices weren’t, and assumed that users were powerless to do anything about it…

The report has since been amended twice, once to note that users can turn off Location Services entirely or on a per-app basis, while also stating “there’s nothing to indicate that these settings prevent Apple itself from gathering and storing location data from Apple devices,” and again two days later to acknowledge that the privacy policy change is not really new at all, but rather simply a restatement of the privacy policy contained in the company’s product EULAs, which contained precise language instructing how users can withdraw their consent for system wide and per-app data collection.

What the LA Times failed to report is why the change in presenting the privacy policy was made, and how users can opt out of geographic location data used by Apple’s iAd program. Formerly, Apple and third parties used Location Services solely to power features such as locating the device in Maps, Find My Phone, GPS driving directions, and similar applications. With the company’s purchase of Quattro Wireless, it’s now in the business of display advertising, and can potentially allow third parties to collect geographic and other user information to enable ads to provide more relevant and targeted results.

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Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams — least of all Mr. Bradford — could have imagined. They became his alibi.

His defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the status update had actually been typed from a computer located at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, as Mr. Bradford said. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become…”

Mr. Bradford, who has stayed in Harlem with his father since that case was dismissed, said he is thinking about hanging around with a different crowd and going back to school to become an electrician. Meanwhile, his friends have taken to calling him the “Facebook Kid.”

As for those pancakes: “I used to really like them,” Mr. Bradford said. “Now I love ‘em.”

Of course, some semi-geek-literate gangbanger will now try to game the system and build an alibi in advance.

After federal border agents detained several Mexican immigrants in western New York in June, an article about the incident in a local newspaper drew an onslaught of vitriolic postings on its Web site. Some were racist. Others attacked farmers in the region, an apple-growing area east of Rochester, accusing them of harboring illegal workers. Still others made personal attacks about the reporter who wrote the article.

Most of the posts were made anonymously. But in reviewing the logs of its Internet server, the paper, The Wayne County Star in Wolcott, traced three of them to Internet protocol addresses at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection.

Homeland Security started an investigation into the posts this month, according to the reporter, Louise Hoffman-Broach, and Richard M. Healy, the Wayne County district attorney. A spokeswoman for the federal agency’s inspector general said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation; department rules prohibit the use of office equipment for the personal transmission of material that could offend fellow employees or the public…

Local officials and residents say that beginning about 2006, federal officials stepped up their enforcement of immigration laws in western New York. Farmers and other residents said the push created a climate of fear in communities whose economies depend on migrant laborers, many of them illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has moved to a less confrontational policy at work sites, focusing on employers. But Customs and Border Protection, which does not conduct work-site inspections, had not changed its strategy in New York, Mr. Price said.

The newspaper removed the posts. When they checked further, they found more racist and bigoted comments tied to previous articles coming from IP addressed belonging to DHS.

Nice to see the Department of Homeland Security living up to the standards of its founders.

Dangerous criminal gamers?

Games firms are accusing innocent people of file-sharing as they crack down on pirates, a Which? Computing investigation has claimed.

The lawyers in the Atari case turned to anti-piracy firm Logistep, which finds those people illegally sharing files via their IP address – the unique numbers which identify a particular computer.

In the case of the Murdochs, a letter was sent giving them the chance to pay £500 compensation or face a court case.

Gill Murdoch and her husband, aged 54 and 66 respectively, told Which: “We do not have, and have never had, any computer game or sharing software. We did not even know what ‘peer to peer’ was until we received the letter.”

Pirate Bay makes no secret of the fact that it inserts the random IP addresses of users, some of who may not even know what file sharing is, to the list of people downloading files, leading investigators up a virtual garden path.

Do you think that may have had something to do with this? And shouldn’t corporations have to come up with more proof than the unproved record of an IP address?