[wellylug] Slightly OT: Cable alternatives

[David Antliff]

On Thu, 23 Dec 2004, Mark Signal wrote:
> want to swap for 2 who last Christmas used 7.5 gigs on a 5 gig account (cost 
> me $500 extra @ 20c/meg)

This reminds me of my time at Canterbury University, where we had nice 
fast Internet access via the University network in the Halls of Residence. 
Certain people (...) discovered that using an anonymous proxy (of which 
there are practically none left, Xtra's being the last we could find, 
perhaps due to us) allowed us to bypass the international traffic charging 
system and practically 'steal' bandwidth. When the NZ ISPs finally wised 
up to this, it was discovered that the University wasn't charging properly 
for some traffic anyway, and only HTTP traffic was being accounted and 
billed. Then commenced an almost 18 month long period of all I can call 
'bliss' until one weekend, without notice, they fixed the problem. One 
poor individual happened to download a heck of a lot of mp3s that weekend, 
and got slapped with a $5,000 bill the following Monday... ouch!

I'm not really sure about the ethics of the entire thing, but if it was a 
problem I would imagine they ought to have fixed it sooner. If one person 
was able to clock up a bill for 5G in a single weekend, then several 
hundred people over the last year or so would have to have been in the 
multi-millions - I find it hard to believe such a gross oversight would 
have gone unnoticed for so long, so perhaps it wasn't really costing them 
anything?

-- 
David.