Tuesday, April 1, 2003

FBI used to enforce AUP

Here's an article from the Toledo Babble in which the local police AND the FBI were employed to seize PC's and cable modems from individuals who had modified the cap on their cable modems.

Doing the math, the estamated "loss" was a cool 1/4 mil., generated by 13 cable connections. That comes to approximately $20K per household. Given the maximum speed of an uncapped modem, I doubt the local cable company let things go so long that each generated an upstream bill for the cable company amounting to $20K.

Somehow I think the cable company futzed the numbers so that they were high enough to get the FBI involved (you've got to convince the judge). Wanna bet the majority of the Toledo 13 are teenagers? Is this a case of the "victim" wasting the FBI's time and resources?

Would someone who agrees with the cable company's loss please explain it to me? (But keep in mind that I have a ready rant about bandwidth not being a conservable resource.) Yes, I can see the cable companies side of the argument. I just can't figure out the numbers or why the FBI got involved. This probably should have been just an issue for local law enforcement.

There's got to be more to the story.

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