This is abusive. Imagine if anyone else had access to pus you notifications by intercepting your communications. Imagine Uncle Sam interrupting your calls announcing you haven't submitted your tax returns yet. Because that's basically what's happening here.
That said, in my experience datacenter and enterprise ISPs tend to be far more "pure", so if you want a truly unmolested connection a possible solution could be to use a VPN to a server that terminates in one of those.
This is very, very true. Anyone who has worked at a telco should've heard the "we don't want to be a dumb pipe" argument. The thing is: they can't be more than that! I don't want their applications, they are not very good at doing applications. I don't want their content, they don't seem to get content production at all. Even their research, it has become less and less relevant.
As a customer, I'd rather see all that money spent on efficient ways of transporting bytes, or even directly subsidizing the customer bill (so that they can support smaller ARPUs). But no; I have to pay extra to support the entertainment of their engineers, in order to get sub-optimal apps and content.
Same with vendor crapware on phones and PCs. I call this stuff "value subtracted software".
Frankly at one point or other every large company in every mature market has to contend with having reached their growth limit. There are only so many customers in this world for the products and services offered.
The only place that could grow forever is Wall Street, by piling derivatives upon derivatives and passing them round like hot potatoes. Everywhere else has to contend with us being on a physically finite planet.
I had to deal with one of them using transparent DNS proxies without disclosing the fact. Only found out when something broken on their end. The only way to have functional DNS is to tunnel it over another protocol because their equipment will intercept DNS queries to any server and reply with a bogus IP.
* It will incur a lot of wrath because it gives them power over your bank account
* Only gullible / ignorant users will actually install the certificate
* If your internet access is working, why would you go through extra steps?
If their ISP posts a message telling them they have to install something to continue getting "the best internet possible" or, better yet, when the tech comes to install the modem they just do it as part of the installation service, so few people are going to even think about it, let alone know why they shouldn't want it.
Remember... we here aren't an accurate facsimile of the general population.
Don't worry though, you just need to install the Comcast Connect app and all will be well.
Let's take something like using the (now removed) + operator in Google search.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your...
> However, we found that users typed the “+” operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.
1 in 600 searches used it correctly, another 2 in 600 used it incorrectly.
Stuff like that.
Or have a look through /r/tipofmytongue for people looking for help to identify songs, tv shows, and films. You'd think they'd include details of roughly when they saw the film, or who any of the actors were (or even what other film they'd been in), and then the plot (with some details), or the name of some of the characters, any music, the genre of movie. But you frequently see people who give very vague information. I won't give examples, but it's really easy to find them.
But I do need to remember not to be a judgemental dick about it, and if I was I apologise.
It works like this: When you want to pay for something you give them your login credentials to your bank account and a TAN and they send the money to the merchant for you.
The selling point of this service is that SEPA wire transfers usually take one day. But with their service the merchant gets an instant notification of money received and you can get your stuff one day earlier.
It's crazy but people use this and have no problem handling over the keys to their bank account.
Part of the problem may be that people don't really understand where those keys are going. They put the information into their computer perhaps via keyboard. Beyond that they often don't know where it goes or where it gets stored. Perhaps they think it's stored locally in an app. For a while people didn't get the distinction between an app and a web site, but I think that's changing. People think Siri does voice recognition on their phone and freak out when you tell them all the recordings are sent to Apple and stored there.
I wonder whether there's more to that story. It seems like a potentially useful payment service, but it also seems like something the banks would surely be aware of. Customers giving up their credentials like that is probably a blatant violation of the bank's normal terms of business, and asking for those credentials or failing to keep them secure seems legally risky for the payment processor as well, particularly if anything ever goes wrong. Are you sure there's no separate agreement or commercial arrangement to cover this, probably between the payment processor and the banks?
The banks don't like that payment processor and therefore just started a competitor where you only give your credentials to your bank. Hopefully it gains traction.
But lacking wide spread of credit cards and the aversion of many merchants to PayPal here in Germany it's still pretty popular.
I applaud your bravery and self-confidence though.
But the argument that if they mess with the content and the traffic, they carry responsibility for it that they don't if they're just a dumb pipe, is a good one.
At least I pray so.