Comcast (and virtually all ISPs) have truly stupid TOSes. I believe that Comcast's states that you are not permitted to run any servers of any kind. Of course, they don't block port 80, and turn a blind eye to anyone hosting their own webserver in-house, so long as they don't see gigs and gigs of data going out. I run VNC on my home machines and have DynDNS setup for my Comcast account. Technically, I run "vnc server" on each machine, so that would be prohibited... but then again, Windows Remote Desktop is a stripped version of Terminal Server, so that too would be prohibited. Heck... if you can remote into your router, THAT is even prohibited via the TOS!
I've been told by Comcast reps that they virtually NEVER even look at any of this stuff unless the end user gives them reason to, like massive amounts of data going out or broad port probing or the like. Think about this... all IP phone services (including Comcast's) use something that acts as a server to respond to incoming calls... it sits and waits for data, and when data is received, it runs a series of processes and converts the call from digital to analog... but you don't see Comcast kicking people off of its network for using non-Comcast VOIP solutions! Personally, and this is very much just an IMHO sort of thing... I never consider Comcast's TOS in things I do, because they themselves don't abide by it. Joe ----- Original Message ----- From: brian raszap To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, June 09, 2008 11:19 AM Subject: Re: [UM-LINUX] [OT] Comcast users in the area you're saying it's illegal to run an SSH server? that makes no sense. On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:07 AM, Randolph Baden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
