What would you think if your internet service provider...say Comcast or AT&T Uverse...was using your home modem/router/WiFi device to traffic WiFi to your neighbors?

"XFINITY WiFi Home Hotspot" also called "Cable WiFi" or "WiFi Everywhere" (advertized as now over 500,000 hotspots). So Comcast is now using our home Comcast cable routers to broadcast WiFi to anyone within range.. your neighbors..people in the street (as long as they are Comcast subscribers). What if a neighbor is using his WiFi laptop to download porn over your home router?

And I suspect it will eat into the bandwidth and slow down your internet activity as well..bottle-necking your bandwidth.

Right now, you can call Comcast and ask them to disable the hot spot use on your Comcast router but this may not always be possible in the future. They put these sneaky things in the fine print when you sign up.

And there is a probability that AT&T Uverse may be doing the same thing. In fact, I even wonder if plain old AT&T DSL (not Uverse) is using people's home routers WiFi connections for this as well. I have noticed some difficulty, sometimes, in doing a normal search on my home PC when I have my router WiFi turned on and have no WiFi device being actively used on the internet...just connected but not surfing. And the WiFi LED on my router is rapidly flashing like someone is heavily accessing something over WiFi. I rarely use my WiFi device and usually keep the WiFi inactive on my DSL modem/router. I had suspected a neighbor had hacked into my router and was using it...but now that I found out about Comcast and AT&T WiFi Everywhere scams I wonder. I thought I had hardened my router against access by anyone but my WiFi device using the best encryption methods and strong passwords.

https://www.grc.com/sn/sn-442.pdf pages 7, 8, 9, & 10 talks about this.

By the way, last year (I think it was September)...I got a letter from AT&T Uverse with an urgent message that "At&T Uverse was updating it's equipment to fiber optics" and that in order to prevent an interuption in phone or internet service I should, within 30 days, sign up with AT&T Uverse so that I can get the needed AT&T Uverse modem/router. Well, it's been all this time and I have not had an interruption in service. I thought then that it was just marketing hype to push people into signing up with AT&T Uverse. So far, it looks like I was right!

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NBC's nightly news, with Richard Engel (the international correspondent), coverage of the Olympics sent a team of so-called security experts from an anti-virus company to test how "hackable" someone would be in that country. The idea was to warn (scare) people from bringing in their electronic devices. The news piece made it look like they were in Sochi but in fact they were in Moscow..1000 miles from Sochi. They did everything imaginable to be vulnerable to being hacked. No security updates...they surfed to malicious hacker sites....had Java and Flash installed...and were probably not updated. They did everything they could to attract malware and then portrayed it as scare tactics...yellow journalism...to make anyone traveling to Sochi think that they would be hacked. With everything they did, if they did it in the US, they would have gotten nearly the same results.

By the way...NBC is owned by Comcast...and has just bought out Time Warner....as Leo says..."Comcast, The worst company in the world"!
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The State Department issued this warning to tourists traveling to Sochi for the Olympic Games:

“Travelers should be aware that Russian Federal law permits the monitoring, retention and analysis of all data that traverses Russian communication networks, including Internet browsing, email messages, telephone calls, and fax transmissions.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/winter-olympics-2014-privacy-hacking-sochi-o...

---Duh!!! You mean like exactly what the US does to all of it's citizens? What hippocrites!!! I wonder if Russia gives the same warning to it's citizens traveling to the US?

chuckle8 - Thanks for the info. How did you find out he did not show up for work? I usually do not watch his show on RT, so I am out of the loop concerning his show on RT. I still do not like the ruskies and I am not so sure what is expressed on RT is not tainted by their influence. I realize they have American producers, but they can be influenced by the people who pay the bills. I guess that is my capitalist side showing. K.W.

I assumed Ou was a her because of the avatar, but who knows? -- c8

Am I missing something, isn't this the same blog that was posted yesterday? I enjoy reading Thom's blog even if I do not respond with a comment everyday. Hopefully it is a technical problem and not something serious.

This is why most of us think the Keystone pipeline is a bad idea for America, even if Kend thinks it is a good deal, we can do without the possibility of an accidental oil spill, especially when it is dirty oil, such as the shale oil from Canada. Let the Canadians risk their environment for profits. I think running the whole pipeline across Canada and ending up on the Canadian Pacific Coastline (as Kend has stated will happen) is a better idea for America, especially since most, if not all the gasoline is going to be sent to Asia. A few jobs for the American public is not a wise trade-off for the risk involved. It is the Koch brothers and others who own the refineries who will benefit from Keystone, and they could care less about our environment, if there is a profit to be made for them. K.W.

As for the protests in Ukraine. I spent a month in Kiev and saw a parade put on by the opposition. They were protesting the demotion of a Nazi war hero they worship in western Ukraine. The protesters were Neo-Nazi Types as many of the opposition are. During WW2 they fought on the Nazi side. They slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as well as tens of thousands of Jews and were noted to be the most brutal of murderers of the entire war.

They are supported by the USA Fascists and the IMF who can't wait to plunder and rob Ukraine of all its' resources and make it a Colony.

It will be a disaster of incredible proportions if Ukraine joins the EU. Manufacturing plants will close, massive unemployment and debt that can never be repaid. Ukraine will be destroyed by the Capitalist war mongers.

I think she's stumbled into the wrong blog.

Joe F -- Fusing boron? Are you sure? I don't think even the sun does that. On a related note, today's LA Times (feb 13, 2014) has an article about the fusion experiment at Livermore labs with 182 lasers enclosed in an area the size of 3 football fields. For 1 nanosecond they were able to have a fusion process that generated net plus energy.

On your program "The Big Picture” yesterday, you had two pundits that simply sidestepped your questions to get their dogma on the air. The answer to one of your questions drew the response from one of your guest was: “Just repatriate it.” You said you did not understand what he meant. What he meant was what is better known as a “tax holiday”. Meaning corporations could bring their trillions of dollars into the US without paying any taxes on the funds. This was done once, but the corporations did not use the money in a manner promised, so it has not been done again.

I sent in a voicemail with a question, but I was too late. My question was, “Is it legal in any European nation to hold profits in offshore accounts to avoid taxation?” The answer to the question is that no other nation but ours. has made such behavior legal. President Reagan through executive order changed the law established in 1905 that limited the amount of profits that a corporation could hold without being taxed.

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Just change the incorporation laws to prohibit such actions by corporations.

Woops, wrong book. Still Tom Robbins, but the quote is from "Even cowgirls get the blues".

Thom, you need to know this, Look what I found, I did not wright this.

Volkswagen isn't opposed to a union, but Republicans are threatening jobs.

By Laura Clawson Follow for Daily Kos Labor

Workers at a Tennessee Volkswagen plant are facing threats of retaliation as they vote this week on whether to unionize, but the threats aren't coming from their employer. Instead, it's Republican politicians trying to combat union support even though Volkswagen is neutral in the vote.

In fact, Steven Greenhouse reports, "Volkswagen is eager to have a German-style works council at the Chattanooga plant." A works council is a form of workplace governance bringing together managers and workers and which would, in the United States, require a union. With the company taking a neutral-to-positive stance, though, Republican politicians are stepping in to intimidate and threaten as bosses often do in union representation votes:

Here is a You Tube Video.

State Senator Bo Watson, who represents a suburb of Chattanooga, warned on Monday that if VW’s workers voted to embrace the U.A.W., the Republican-controlled Legislature might vote against approving future incentives to help the plant expand.

“The members of the Tennessee Senate will not view unionization as in the best interest of Tennessee,” Mr. Watson said at a news conference. He added that a pro-U.A.W. vote would make it “exponentially more challenging” for the legislature to approve future subsidies.

Gov. Bill Haslam and Sen. Bob Corker have also implied dire consequences for jobs in the area if workers unionize. As one VW worker puts it, "It’s essentially saying, 'If you unionize, it’s going to hurt your economy. Why? Because I’m going to make sure it does.' ... I hope people see it for the underhanded threat that it is."

This is what is wrong with The Republicans legislators in the state of Tennessee. Tennessee Republicans legislators wants to return their state back to a southern plantation style of workforce, were the people do not have a voice in the workplace. Volkswagen knows the benefit of a German style work council environment. A works council is a form of workplace governance bringing together managers and workers and which would, in the United States, require a union. Unions can eliminate inequality with the ability of the American workforce to achieve a higher standard of living, of healthcare, retirement at a decent age, and the ability to buy the product they make, a Volkswagen vehicle. However, The Republicans always wants to repress what they consider big government, to a government that is controlled by corporations, American-style corporate power, in other words, fascism. We must Vote the Republicans OUT OF OFFICE!!!

Ron Ramsey (Vegasman56)

We've got a real mess going on in the Denver-Boulder area. There's a deal, negotiated secretly, to build a privatized expansion of a U.S. highway, with toll lanes, and give control of it to the constructing company for 50 years.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25126064/50-year-u-s-36-management-contract-gets?source=most_viewed

One way the traffic congestion that necessitated this construction could be lessened is if people lived closer to work. The highway involved has high volume because there are so many people that drive between Boulder and Denver every day. Some of that a choice and some of it isn't, but living further from work raises the average distance traveled per car, the average time that cars spend on the road, and therefore the total capacity that the roads need to be able to handle. Reducing daily drive distances would reduce car exhaust and the amount of petroleum used in the materials and labor to make and maintain roads.