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Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
Comcast pulled the plug on me!
Remember what I said back in May about just being interested in providing a useful site to the small number of people I know. Well, it looks like this site has gotten a little more popular than I expected. Friday morning my broadband connection was down, but I didn't think too much of it. Then I get a call from a guy over at Comcast Security, and he says there's "malicious" activity going on with my computer so they had to suspend my service. He wouldn't give me any details about what exactly that activity was, other than I'm running some servers. I never knew this, but it's against Comcast's Fair Use Policy to have servers of any kind running on their network. I've been running this way for years! Anyway, now I'm in lymbo with no broadband and I'm not sure when or if I'll get it back. In the meantime, I'm limping along with a 48K dial-up connection, yikes.
This seems to be a bit of a grey area to me. Why pay people to search out users with servers, call them up, and then suspend their service? All they have to do is put up a big firewall like what you would find at your job. No more servers for anybody, job done. I think they don't do it because it would break lots of applications that people really like to use. What does it matter what I do with my connection as long as it's legal? I feel bad for the ISPs these days, they are really finding themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place.