Tag Archive for: Cable

Another reason people hate cable companies, particularly Comcast

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Residents of St. Paul, MN, are entitled to a 10% discount from Comcast if they are elderly, disabled or low-income.

From a story in the Pioneer Press:

When Ruby Fabian called Comcast cable for a St. Paul resident senior discount, customer service reps informed her of a few restrictions. They said the 10 percent savings applied to low-income seniors and low-income disabled residents, but not to seniors in general. Fabian is almost 66, and she is neither disabled nor low-income.

The company’s 10-year cable franchise agreement with the city, though, does not apparently require seniors or the disabled to prove they are low-income. The deal was approved by the city council in March.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Not shocked by Lenovo power cable recall

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So I’m sitting at my kitchen table this morning scanning news items on my Lenovo ThinkPad, which is plugged into my kitchen wall via a Lenovo power cable, when I read this headline: “Lenovo recalls power cables over fire risk.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission website was a bit more graphic: “Lenovo Recalls Computer Power Cords Due to Fire and Burn Hazards.”

Oh, swell.

All that was left to do was to see if my machine and its cable were on the recall list … I mean all that was left after gingerly unplugging. My luck on the recall front has been running cold of late, thanks to Toyota, so I was prepared for the bad news.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Hordes of cable modems, Web cams, printers can become DDoS launch platforms

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Attackers are mounting distributed Denial-of-service attacks from home routers, wireless access points, cable modems, Web cams and printers by taking advantage of weaknesses in the protocol they use to announce themselves on networks, according to PLXsert.

The attacks, observed in the wild since July, have generated peak traffic of 54.35Gbps and 17.85 million packets per second, according to a threat advisory from Prolexic, which is a part of Akamai.

+ Also on Network World: Bot-herders can launch DDoS attacks from dryers, refrigerators, other Internet of Things devices; Security vendors claim progress against Chinese group that hacked Google +

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Network World Tim Greene

Time Warner Cable TV goes blurry in presence of Verizon LTE phones

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In Raleigh, North Carolina, customers of Time Warner Cable are seeing blurry, pixelated TV channels when Verizon LTE phones are used in the same room.

A report by WRAL in Raleigh says that “Time Warner Cable in the Triangle recently placed some channels, including WRAL, on the same spot in the broadband spectrum that serves Verizon’s 4G LTE data service.”

Those channels are transmitting on the same 700MHz spectrum also used by Verizon, and the cable system is seemingly unable to block out the signals. The WRAL story points the finger at cable boxes being incapable of dealing with interference, although it’s also possible that a bad coaxial cable could be causing the problem. Cable systems are allowed to use the same spectrum as wireless carriers, as long as they keep the transmissions on the wire and don’t interfere with cellular service.

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