I guess I'm a little surprised that some of these problems didn't come
up in discussions between the student and his advisor when the project
was first being contemplated. One thing that was not mentioned is
that anybody running a hardware firewall would have to open a port for
SSH to even be able to get to the "server". Are we assuming that the
"standard" configuration is one single machine connected directly to a
cable modem, with no intervening wireless/NAT box? Another question
is if ComCast was contacted to see if permission to do this research
could be obtained. Although as incompetent as ComCast has been in the
past, I question if anybody could actually be located would would
agree to even MAKE such a decision...
On Jun 9, 2008, at 11:07 AM, Randolph Baden wrote:
Sorry everyone. I'm going to have to withdraw this, thanks to
something Charles pointed out:
I might warn anybody tempted to cooperate with this request to very
carefully check their terms-of-service agreements with ComCast to
make sure this is not prohibited behavior.
I was so caught up in this that I didn't even think about that.
Running an SSH server alone is probably technically a violation of the
ComCast ToS. As much as I wish I could still do this, you're right,
I'm not going to be able to. Thanks for pointing this out.
Randolph,
I'm a member of this list, and have Comcast, but have no servers
running at
home. As you yourself stated, you are asking a lot, and even more
when one
considers that you are a total unknown to the group. Perhaps if
you were to
give more info for verification... Professors, sponsors, etc...
that people
could communicate with to verify who you are, you might get a better
response. I myself am not a UMD student (UMUC), but just a list
member.
Good luck with the research, it sounds interesting!
Joe
This is a great idea, and I feel a little foolish for not doing this
in my first e-mail. First of all, for information on me and a little
about my research, you can check out my university web page at
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~randofu. I'm working on this with Bobby
Bhattacharjee and Mark Shayman. I'd appreciate it if you didn't send
them too many e-mails (since they're busy), especially since I've
realized this won't be possible. I'm just pointing this out because
even though I'm withdrawing it, I don't want anyone to think that I
was trying to do something shady.
I'm going to go look into the Comcast ToS and see what I can do about
this... Hopefully I can get around it somehow.
