comcast

Report: FCC expected to rule against Comcast

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to announce this week that Comcast wrongly interfered with file-sharing traffic, according to a report Sunday night on The Wall Street Journal's Web site.

The commission is due to issue a ruling Friday that the cable giant violated federal law when it prevented some customers from swapping videos on file-swapping service BitTorrent, according to the report. Comcast has admitted "delaying" traffic to file-sharing sites. At a public hearing in February, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, "Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic when that … Read more

FCC set to punish Comcast on P2P blocking

The Federal Communications Commission appears poised to take steps to punish Comcast for allegedly blocking access to file-sharing traffic.

Three of the five FCC commissioners have voted in favor of an item saying Comcast violated federal policy by dialing down peer-to-peer traffic over its network, according to FCC officials cited in The Wall Street Journal.

The news isn't much of a surprise, given that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has publicly criticized Comcast for the practice and recommended to the rest of the commissioners that they vote in favor of the decision.

"The commission has adopted a set of … Read more

AT&T threatens WiMax joint venture

AT&T is looking to put a kibosh on the proposed merger of Sprint Nextel's nationwide WiMax assets with those of Clearwire.

On Thursday, the nation's largest phone company filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission, asking it to deny approval of the merger.

Sprint Nextel announced in May that it was teaming up with Clearwire to form a new joint venture that would combine both companies' WiMax assets to create a nationwide broadband wireless network. The deal, which has been valued at about $14.5 billion, is being backed by cable operators Comcast and Time … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 772: Tom's 3D house of terror

We debunk yesterday's story about how the studios are going to develop new 3D standards. That is, we like the standards idea, but we know there are glasses in there somewhere. Also, the San Francisco mayor makes a secret, underground visit to imprisoned IT martyr Terry Childs and get's the city's network passwords out of him. It's so very Jack Bauer. Oh, and Google might buy Digg. Call us when it happens. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 772

Episode 772

SF mayor gets codes to hijacked city network http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9997177-83.html… Read more

Cuomo strong-arms Comcast over Usenet

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has found a novel way to shake down law-abiding broadband companies: accuse them of harboring child pornography and threaten to prosecute them unless they do what he wants. That might just happen to involve writing Cuomo a hefty check.

The latest company to be honored by Cuomo's personal attention is Comcast, which received a two-page letter on Monday threatening "legal action" on child pornography grounds within five days, if its executives failed to agree to a certain set of rules devised by the attorney general.

In the letter (PDF), the Democratic … Read more

Cable giants bullied into new child porn censorship deal

The major national cable providers are all to sign a troubling yet major censorship deal with a private anti-child porn organization. The deal would give the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) carte blanche power to issue a takedown of any customer's content hosted on a cable provider's servers.

The group will provide each cable company with a list of Web site addresses that they believe contain child porn. The cable companies will then, per the agreement, scrub the content from their servers.

A press release describing the agreement states that:

The cable operators that have … Read more

Comcast customers: Sent e-mails blocked?

I have Comcast cable modem service here at home. It's been very reliable. Service interruptions have been rare and brief. The cable modem I was given years ago is still working fine. Network performance has been reasonably good.

So all in all, I'm happy with the service.

But I just found out about something that really bugs me--and may explain why I've received occasional reports over the years that an e-mail I sent didn't get through at all--or was marked as spam when it did arrive.

This came up about a week ago, when I noticed that some (but not all) outbound e-mails sent through Apple's .Mac service (now known as MobileMe) were not going out. After waiting about an hour for the messages to go through, I reported the problem to the service's support desk.

It turned out that… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 764: iPhail?

On the first day of the iPhone 3G massive amounts of fanatics went home frustrated. Activation problems meant a lot of folks couldn't go home with a working iPhone. Some didn't even have a working phone at all, as the old phone got deactivated but the new one was not brought into working order. Meanwhile FCC goes Medieval on Comcast and announces the four freedoms of the Internet will be enforced. Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 764

iPhone 3G goes on sale http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-iphone-3g-goes-on-sale-plagued-by-activation-problems/ http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080711-launch-woes-turn-iphone-parousia-into-activation-apocalypse.html … Read more

FCC chief plans to recommend sanctions against Comcast

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin will recommend sanctions against cable company Comcast for allegedly blocking access to file-sharing traffic, the Associated Press has reported.

"The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet," the AP quoted Martin saying. "We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

The AP said Martin would circulate the order to his fellow commissioners on Friday, who will vote on the measure at an open meeting on August 1.

Comcast has been sharply criticized in recent months for slowing down peer-to-peer … Read more