Comcast continue to prove that they are evil, scum-sucking bastards

[jducoeur]

This morning, with no warning or notice, they starting blocking inbound port 80 to my house. Given that I am trying to get some work done here, that's more than a little rude, especially since the inbound traffic is essentially trivial -- it's just for test purposes, not a real public website, so we're talking something on the order of tens of K. No idea whether it was an across-the-board change, or specifically targeted at me.

Fortunately, it's easy enough to work around (the nice thing about developing a Facebook app is that the layer of indirection means that I can redirect the port at the FB layer without any change at the user level), but it continues to increase my desire to quit this annoying company. Do I understand correctly from recent conversations that RCN (for a small surcharge) allows inbound port 80? That alone might get me to sign up for them for Internet, given how incompetent Comcast has been lately. (Have I mentioned that outbound email through Comcast has been consistently failing for us for the past two days?)

For now, I seem to be back up and running. I'm tentatively assuming that they simply noticed my inbound port 80 traffic and chose to shut it down. (Although, in that case, I have no idea why they were allowing it previously.) If I find that my new port gets blocked as well, it means that they're sniffing my traffic and looking for HTTP, in which case I'm simply out of here -- we're paying them a small fortune per month, and if they want our money to go elsewhere that much, we can probably oblige them...

Comments

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

That's why I left Comcast when we moved out of Burlington. Not that they were blocking inbound traffic, but that the Terms of Service said that I wouldn't have inbound traffic. I didn't do that in Burlington, because the TOS had allowed it when I originally signed up (for the late-lamented MediaOne), but I wasn't going to sign a new contract agreeing from the start not to do something I was planning to do. So I went with Speakeasy, for less bandwidth at a few extra bucks.

[jducoeur]

Ah, yes -- MediaOne. The one company in cable/internet that had a clue. I really, really miss them...