Hacker News Reader

Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Xfinity won't give folks in certain locales (maybe everywhere in the US?) unlimited bandwidth unless they use their modem/router. This seems like a good reason that practice should be illegal.

View on HN

If you want to remove the 1.2TB data cap, you can either pay $25/mo and get Xfinity's gateway router "included" OR pay $30/mo to use your own modem/router.

I have to pay more when I do not use their device? Crazy...

Right, it makes you wonder what they're getting out of using the first-party device. Companies usually aren't in the business of burning money.

I use my own and there's a data cap.

I did too last time I had my own internet service, but I wasn't paying the $30/month fee to have unlimited bandwidth. Are you? (And if so, why, if they're not giving you the unlimited bandwidth?)

Put their WiFi router inside a faraday’s cage and wire a modem behind it. That should shave off the $25/mo.

I use my own modem/router with them, but I have to pay an extra $30/mo for unlimited download. Complete garbage. I wish there was competition; Comcast is my only realistic option in San Francisco.

As far as I’m aware, Xfinity fiber customers have to use the provided “Xfinity Wi-Fi Gateway” and cannot enable bridge mode.

If anyone knows a way around this, please share! I want to connect my Xfinity ONT directly to my UniFi router.

In that situation, I would put the vendor modem in a microwave or other impromptu faraday cage to prevent the leakage. Remove/isolate the antennas as best as possible.

Can also open it up and disconnect the wifi antennas, or cut the traces if they're on the PCB.

Those vendor modems are rentals and expected to be returned in working order. Would you likely get away with it? Sure, nobody is paying techs to diagnose why the WiFi is failing for unit #367326, but cutting traces is definitely crossing some lines.

I mean if they're going to track me then it's fair game IMO.

I wonder what they do with them when they’re returned. Ship em off in pallets to e waste buyers in China I would guess.

I think they get refurbished and sent back to other customers.

> cutting traces is definitely crossing some lines.

Pun intended I'm sure!

They have changed this policy with their new plans released last week. You no longer have to use their equipment to get unlimited data

I was thinking about this with respect to the new uncomplicated no-contract service with no caps they started offering:

https://www.slashdot.org/story/25/06/26/2124252/comcasts-new...

Apparently you can get 1/2gbit ethernet only modems without wifi. You don't save any money over using their equipment.

This practice, and fear of the exact sort of nonsense in this article, plus wanting to keep my wifi bandwidth free for the network I actually connect to, is why I'm still on AT&T DSL in my area, at 50 mbps. Comcast is available at up to gigabit, and they can keep it.

AT&T is pretty bad in its own way. They snoop DNS and to sell your info (including physical address) to advertisers - even if you switch your DNS providers. They used to had a paid opt out (~$20/mo IIRC) but I don’t see that option anymore.

This is quite easy to avoid by using DNS over TLS. It's like 15 minutes of effort in some OpenWRT documentation [1]. If you want any hope of having some semblance of control and privacy, you would already be using your own router, with their CPE being relegated to modem-only duties. It only makes sense that in this situation you choose a router that can run highly-configurable and privacy-preserving software.

I did it several months ago, including the optional adding an outbound firewall rule dropping forwarded UDP/TCP 53 traffic (I tried the redirect rule suggested there first, but it didn't work and the firewall ruleset failed to load, so a drop will have to do. I didn't bother investigating why, because everything on my LANs is configured to use the router as their only nameserver anyway).

I also added a rule dropping it from the router itself in case something breaks, for example if it suddenly decides to start honouring the DHCP-received nameserver addresses (my ISP) despite being configured not to.

EDIT: The article doesn't make this clear, but the bootstrap section is only necessary if you specify upstream nameservers by name (e.g. "https://dns.cloudflare.com/dns-query"). This is not required. For example, you can configure a manual upstream of "tls://1.1.1.1" like I did, and then it doesn't need to do any DNS lookups at all, so does not need to be configured with bootstrap servers, so will not break if you add the 2 firewall rules I mentioned.

[1] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/dns/dot_dnsmasq...

I wasn't really meaning to defend AT&T as a good option, just a slightly less evil one. I'm surprised I have a choice at all out here in the sticks. A lot of places just have one provider.

I had AT&T DSL many years ago. They forced me to use their modem/router combo from 2Wire. It was truly awful. I eventually got so fed up with trying to connect things to the WiFi that I bought a separate router to plug into it, and connected to that network, which it did let me do. That solved most of my problems, other than the overall poor service.

Interesting. My family had one of the pointy 2Wire ones (the HomePortal 1000 looks like the one), and I don't remember it having issues with WiFi. Then again, all I had to connect at the time was an HP Pavilion running Windows Vista/7 (later Linux) and an iPod Touch. I think we eventually had a Wii and an Epson printer connected wirelessly as well.

Now I do remember some issues getting it to maintain a stable connection to the DSL network at some points, which even daisy-chaining another router wouldn't have fixed. No way to tell if that was the gateway or just the DSL network that was flaky.

So use their router, but connect your own to it. Then turn off the WiFi in their equipment

I'm doing the first bit, but I can't turn off the wifi -- only stop broadcasting my "personal" network. And actually, as I went in to make sure that was the case, I saw that broadcasting of my personal network had been forcibly turned back on. Lovely!

If you don't broadcast your SSID, then how can device manufactures have hyper accurate location services available when GPS is not? You're not participating in the system! Hell, as much money as theGoogs gives to be the default search to various companies, would they not be willing to pay ISPs to keep that option on? I'm just throwing ideas out that I know nothing about, but I don't see why they would be opposed to the concept.

This is an old article, but still accurate. By default every Xfinity router also advertises Xfinity's public wifi offering: https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/16/technology/security/comcast.... Now if you turn that off then what? Not sure, but I trust Xfinity and their lawyers to find a way :)

Doesn’t turning off SSID broadcast result in devices that have the wifi network saved repeatedly broadcast a request for the AP to identify itself in an effort to establish a connection?

I'm not sure I follow. Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network? If you never connected your device to their wifi and only connected to your wifi connected via ethernet, why would it even know to make a request? If you're not actively connecting to the WiFi in your house, why not just "forget network"? Seems like a strange hypothetical, but aren't they all?

> Why would a network known to the device not be connected to the network?

I think they're referring to when you leave your home. Your device(s) will be constantly broadcasting probe requests for the hidden network.

The away-from-home probe requests wouldn't be that useful for mapping, but your AP/router is equally useful for mapping with or without broadcasting the SSID. Hiding your SSID just means it sets the SSID to null in the beacon frames but it's still sending out beacon frames with its far-more-unique MAC address (BSSID). If you're on linux you can see this pretty easily by running `sudo iw dev wlan0 scan`. The "hidden" wifi networks will have their SSID as "SSID: \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00" but all the other information including MAC address is still there. Personally it seems there are two "hidden" wifi networks within range of my bedroom.

They do that already... sum of all privacy losses.

Any time you go out in public your devices are crying out looking for your home AP. If someone can figure out which are you, e.g. by seeing you multiple times in different places they can then go look up where you live based on your home's SSID broadcasts.

Correcting myself: It appears that many modern client devices (at least current Networkmanager in linux, iphones, and grapheneos) have a "hidden" flag on saved SSIDs and only probe for hidden ones, so the ancestor post is correct for a least these devices.

Older and less sophicated clients, -- that don't explicitly have a 'hidden flag' for saved SSIDs will probe continually for all SSIDs they know.

I admittedly know little about this, but isn't GPS accurate enough on most modern devices to render the SSID refinement moot?

Put the thing in a faraday box.

If you cannot disable it and you don't trust the wifi but need the service, wrap the isp provided box it in aluminum foil and ground that foil ( no need to try to solder on the foil, an alligator clip is more practical), the wifi will still be on but it will be completely blind. Just make sure it doesn't overheat.

These are the comments I come to HN for.

I thought you weren’t supposed to ground faraday cages, is that not the case?

it a safety mesure, the ground coud potentially act as a really crappy antenna but if the foil is touching something conducting on the modem and there is a malfunction, you want that current to go somewhere and the ground is that place.

That is what should be illegal, for electronic devices (even if rented) to be unable to disable wireless communications, or for a contract to affect the operation of stuff other than wireless communications when the wireless is disabled. It should also be illegal to be unable to disable all power to electric devices (for devices with battery power, that would include that it must be possible to remove the battery, and the method to be documented).

I use a cellular connection for my internet, but my apartment building is wired with Xfinity, and probably 90% of people use it.

Naturally, there is no way for me to opt out of this.

Time to make your apartment a faraday cage!

RF-blocking paint exists.

And contrary to popular belief, neither it nor a faraday cage blocks RF. They attenuate it, to varying degrees.

There is still the question of how much the attenuation is and if it can prevent the detection. There is also the issue if you want to receive other radio signals such as AM radio, FM radio, amateur radio, etc.

Does your apartment lease require that you use Comcast's hardware? When I signed up for Xfinity years ago I wanted to use my own hardware (NetGear cable modem, Buffalo Airstation with DD-WRT). I forget now whether I had to walk through the activation over the phone with a tech - I vaguely recall having to provide some information about the modem, which was one of the models listed as supported on their use-your-own-hardware web page - but the whole thing was easy.

Other people have mentioned that not using Comcast's stuff means that certain features won't be available, but I don't care. I don't have huge bandwidth needs, for instance.

I believe the person you are replying to does not use comcast, but is saying they cant' opt out of this spying due to their neighbors using comcast.

Are you in California? I'd contend there's a CCPA issue there. "I live at X address, and demand that you not collect my movement information from any of your equipment at this address or others."

Exactly why I rent the modem but it sits unplugged in the closet lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com