Mediacom Sucks a fat one.

Sometimes it can really suck living in a small town. One reason I face is the lack of options for real high speed Internet at an affordable price.
When I moved back to my hometown and got an apartment we decided to go with Mediacom because they offered what seamed like the most for the price. Well we are finding out that lower price comes with a big problem.

1.Within a week our DVR had to be replaced because it would not stop rebooting, they replaced it with the exact same model, but so far so good.
2.The cable modem we got stuck with is HUGE, its big enough to house a full router with wifi capabilities, however its nothing more then a basic cable modem. This thing is literally 4 times the size of our last modem from comcast.
3. Internet goes out nightly, almost like they are running their own little parental control feature that no one asked for. I work all day, I do my Internet based stuff at night and I pay for an always on connection for a reason.

Their support always wants us to plug the wire directly into a single computer to test. And of course it works because at that time the Internet is working, but do the same thing when we are having problems and what do ya know. Broken still.

Some people say its probably my router, or other devices the modem connects to. Nope not buying it. I currently run smoothwall 3.0 which was an ipcop, that connects to a linksys router running dd-wrt. Both of these devices where up for almost a year solid at our last apartment with another provider.

The "point the finger at equipment that isn't ours" seams to be a mediacom (and several other ISP) moto. Take the blame away from your service and try to push it back onto the customer.

Another thing that pisses me off is when I did talk to tech support I was very specific in asking if they do MAC address filtering. I was told no of course. Then the installer had to register one of the computers and said it would work on any of the other computers. Ummmm, nope. Had to clone the mac of the desktop that was originally registered in order to get Internet to work.

All well, I'll either cancel and go with someone else, or call them and give them a very short window to fix it then cancel.

Google Offers Free Holiday Wi-Fi at Airports..OH NO!!!!

Thanks to Google this holiday will be a bit more connected for travelers. Especially in airports where the big-G is offering FREE wifi. The idea sounds great, but lets stop for a minute and ask ourselves some basic questions.

1. What security is in place to ensure users data is not stolen, via MITM attacks such as arp poisoning, sniffing, or the uncountable possibilities that have plagued the wifi realm.
2. Why? Is free wifi in an airport really that important? why not just use your 3g enabled device (Where possible) to keep up with emails, and other web-based junkness.

Those are pretty much THE only questions to ask. Wifi is great, when installed and setup correctly (*Cough). But left open for anyone to use it becomes a script kiddies dream world of easy to grab information. I guess we will have to wait till after the holidays to see how many of santas, I mean satans little helpers got more then presents this year.

Perhaps those who would otherwise jump on the first bus to the airport to exploit this new found data mine will stay home. Or maybe security will be informed what to look for. For example, a laptop with a giant "BACKTRACK" logo as its wallpaper is a pretty good give away.

In any instance, I have done my part the best I can to inform you all. We'll leave the rest to the "experts" to handle.

Conspiracy warning:
Or is this just one big plot to gather information about what kind of data business travelers actually access during their airport breaks in order for Google to develop new applications.
Lol I doubt it.......or do I.