Posted 10/28/09 at 03:32:23 PM by Bart Salisbury

There’s a definite object lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is. It could be that competition is a good thing. It also could be that monopolies don’t take kindly to threats to their turf. What is obvious, however, is if you need your local cable provider to do something you got to be prepared to poke them in the eye (preferably with a sharp stick).

The suburban hamlet of Monticello, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis, had a hankering for fiber optic cable for all its residents. The town approached it’s regional telco, TDS Telecommunications, with the request and was rebuffed. TDS didn’t see the need to make such an investment in Monticello now or any time in the foreseeable future. In response, the citizens of Monticello passed a referendum to build their own fiber optic system, which would compete with TDS’s cable service to the town.

That didn’t sit well with TDS, which promptly sued Monticello. Minnesota law sides with the city in this case, and as the lawsuit progressed through the courts the city kept winning. TDS’s intent wasn’t to block Monticello’s efforts, only to delay them. While the lawsuit was underway the city was prevented from starting construction. TDS, however, wasn’t, and began to install its own fiber optic system. When completed, TDS crowed about the technological improvements it rendered in Monticello, saying “TDS is working incredibly hard to deliver the faster speeds customers want.”

And it didn’t end there.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 08:55:36 AM by Paul Lilly

Yikes - it was discovered that a vulnerability in a Time Warner cable modem and WiFi router being used by 65,000 customers makes it possible for a hacker to remotely access the device's administrative menu and wreak havoc, To deal with the problem, Time Warner said it hopes to have updated firmware from the router manufacture to push out to customers soon.

"We were aware of the problem last week and have been working on it since," said Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley.

The security snafu affects Time Warner's SMC014 series combo modem/WiFi router and was discovered by blogger David Chen, who writes for chenosaurus.com. Chen said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable model when he discovered Time Warner had hidden some admin functions using JavaScript code. All he had to do was disable JavaScript in his browser and he could see those functions, including a tool to dump the router's config file displaying the admin login and password.

"From within your own network, an intruder can eavesdrop on sensitive data being sent over the Internet and even worse, they can manipulate the DNS address to point trusted sites to malicious servers to perform man-in-the-middle attacks," Chen wrote on his blog. "Someone skilled enough can possibly even modify and install a new firmware onto the router, which can then automatically scan and infect other routers automatically."

Time Warner said it is working to find out if the same or a similar vulnerability also affects other models.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 08:01:20 AM by Paul Lilly

Forget about all the negative attention Comcast has received this past year, the Cable operator insists it's not "a dead duck," as Web 2.0 Summit conference organizer John Battelle described cable companies in general. Not only is the company not a dead duck, but Comcast seems to think it's the reason the Web is where it's at today.

"We're going to keep investing, because we believe there are great ideas in this room and in this country and in the world," said Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO. "In the same way, it's unthinkable that a Google or a Yahoo or a Facebook or a Twitter would be happening it we hadn't made those investments (in broadband infrastructure) 15 years ago."

When pinged on what he reckons is the reason the U.S. trails some other countries in broadband technology advancements, Roberts said he didn't think that was true at all.

"We have the same equipment (as other countries), the same wires, the same infrastructure, why is the adoption different is a different question," Roberts explained.

Roberts also talked about Comcast's role in the Net neutrality debate, particularly the scrutiny his company has received over imposing bandwidth caps, saying he welcomes the criticism because "we're going to be an active participant."

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Posted 10/19/09 at 12:00:00 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

Don’t be fooled by the Vantec ezShare’s unassuming looks. This simple six-foot white cable with its Type A USB plugs on either end is actually one of the easiest ways to quickly moves files between two computers. Just plug one end into an available USB port on a box running Windows (XP and up), and plug the other end into the second box.

A Windows Explorer–like app will auto-launch on each machine, letting you drag and drop folders and files between the two PCs. If this sounds an awful lot like Data Drive Thru’s Tornado (reviewed November 2007), that’s because the two products are pretty similar. The file-explorer UI and software functionality of both products are virtually the same. It’s close enough that we have a pretty strong suspicion that the underlying chipsets and software come from the same factory in China. There are a few key differences, though.

Continue reading this review after the jump!

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Posted 04/01/09 at 09:20:34 AM by Paul Lilly

Any geek worth his mettle has, among other things, a bundle or three of Ethernet cables sitting in some box in a dingy corner of the basement. If you've considered tossing the cables in the garbage, don't do it. Instead, why not make a fashion statement?

That's exactly what took place in Medellin, Colombia, and could catch on if...who are we kidding, this will never catch on. Looking more like data disasters than data divas, one outfit, which was designed by students of the Pontificia Bolivariana University in Medellin, consisted of several bundles of different color cables used as a makeshift wig (see pic below). Another model appears to have covered herself in thousands of zip ties.

Take a peak here.

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Posted 09/26/08 at 11:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

Second Opinion is where readers respond to the Doctor, share their wisdom, correct him if he's wrong, and generally show the world what smart, beautiful people you are.

I can’t agree more with the Doctor regarding his advice to Michael Collins (June 2008) on a TiVo as the best option to extend your DVRing capabilities, especially for transferring recorded programs to a computer. The TiVoToGo feature is great. However, the Doctor’s advice regarding the FireWire ports of most cable DVRs is, as Dwight Schrute would say, “False!”

More after the jump.

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Posted 08/27/08 at 10:24:20 AM by Chris Moody

It seems that in the rapidly approaching future I may have to pay extra to my ISP to download my collection of Steam based games when I upgrade my PC or wipe a hard drive. Forget about streaming movies over the net. In fact, best keep your quality internet time to surfing text pages, email without pictures, and IMing. Okay, not quite that bad, but close, if some ISPs have their say about it.
The Associated Press covered a story in which a man in New York changed from his cable company to his phone company based on the offer of a year of free service on a two-year contract, an attractive deal. Soon afterr Frontier Communications quietly updated its policies saying it would limit internet activity each month to 5GB. That’s the same figure that several other companies are trying out.

This story is particularly interesting because it’s a phone company trying the cap, not a cable company. Since in this man’s particular area the cable company is Time Warner, which is trying a pilot program in Beaumont Texas with a 5GB cap on its cable service for new users, it might not help to switch even if he can get out of his phone company contract. That is a scenario that we could see repeated in many areas if this catches on.

These scenarios are tough sells to customer that aren’t interested in having additional fees tacked on to their bills, especially after the fact. If consumers are left without a choice because all of their area ISPs are capping their downloads, it’s customers that lose out and it becomes pretty easy for ISPs to charge more money for less service. 5GB of data isn’t much at all.

Do you think this will backfire on ISPs? Sound off below.

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Posted 08/21/08 at 10:47:03 AM by Chris Moody

Comcast is not about to stop in its attempts to manage heavy users on its network after the hand slap from the Federal Communications Commission that found that Comcast had improperly blocked peer-to-peer programs.

Bloomburg reports that Comcast now has plans to slow Internet service to the heaviest users during periods of congestion. The internet speeds for targeted customers will be reduced for periods lasting from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, to keep the service running smoothly for other users.

How much of a slow down? Mitch Bowling, Comcast's senior vice president and general manager of online services said it would back down to “a really good DSL experience''.

Internet Service Providers need a way to control bandwidth hogs during peak times in order to keep things profitable. The only other way is to add additional bandwidth that they would never even touch the rest of the time, which comes off their bottom line. Comcast’s first mistake was being sneaky about it and not disclosing the practice to consumers.

I actually like their latest idea, but from the sounds of this, they are about to repeat their second mistake; not defining what constitutes a heavy user and what exactly is this penalty phase with the bandwidth cap? The generalities just make users uneasy. Those same uneasy users will backlash if they unknowingly get caught up in Comcast’s heavy user slowdown, with what they see as reasonable usage. That reasonable usage is completely subjective, unless Comcast chooses to define it.

What do you think? Is Comcast’s latest plan an improvement?

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