xfinity [comcast] just blew my mind...

And what were they looking for?
Maybe ingress?
Yes they will go into any room that may have a cable outlet or cable in it. And they may go into rooms that don't have cable, but may have something causing the ingress.

Ingress is noise (unwanted signal) in the system. A lose fitting on your modem could take down a node causing problems for 100's of customers. Then there is leakage and that is the flip side of ingress. Leakage is the RF getting out of the cable from a damaged cable or un-terminated port.

If the ingress is bad they will "pad" it until you let them fix it. A pad is a frequency blocker that will block the frequencies that have the noise from back feeding into the system.

In most cases it is ingress on the transmit frequencies that cause slow internet and/or on-demand to not work.

As for the op, they transcript the voice mail as an option for people. They do not transcript the actual calls the op must be mistaken on what they saw, but this is all only to the best of my knowledge.

I am a Comcast tech and it is funny when people that don't understand the way it works demand it is the modem, or the cable box. And the people who try to tell us to get out of there yard because "they don't have Comcast" are the best. When you tell them you have easement rights and they give you a blank look LOL.

Anyway, please understand the system more before jumping to conclusions. Comcast really does not care who you call or what you download.
a reply to: Daughter2

Another thing to watch for is how they bill and when. I signed up and told them I need my due date to be on a certain day of the month so I can pay on time and not have a late fee. They agreed, and asked me my pay day calendar, then began billing me a week earlier so that on my pay day I am late exactly on that date and they then add a 9 dollar late fee to my bill.

To me, this is predatory and a possible class action lawsuit.

i previously worked at another large cable company that starts with a C, in a local networking group. they had diagnostic tools for their voip that recorded every button press on every call. the tool had the ability to record calls, presumably for troubleshooting, but it had the potential to be enacted on a mass scale. it wasnt active at the time, but it would have been trivial to enable it. potentially anyone at the company with network access and a healthy curiosity could have discovered a way to access it and enable recording.

im rather curious what they are all doing with their sandvines deep packet inspection servers. back then, comcast got in trouble for modifying bittorrent packets to drop connection, so the industry was a little squeemish about using them. i doubt that to still be the case. sandvines boxes are like dedicated MitM gear, i could spend hours imagining all the havok and nastiness they could be put to, or covert/nefarious purposes, either by industry or gov.

law enforcement and fbi monitoring is done through CALEA vpn gear (with help routing traffic to them) so recorded outside the MSOs. i suspect nsa monitoring would be through optical taps on higher teir fiber, or directly in peering points.

security and proper coding practices can be pretty lackluster in the industry, its possible you saw something that they meant to be internal only. though i would be suprised if they had someone competent enough who noticed and fixed it so rapidly, it was rare for me to encounter a group or individual so on top of things where i worked.

ive heard the phrase "if you arnt paying for it, You are the product" it seems like more and more we are all products, even with services we pay for.

comcast does care about ANYTHING that can be monitized.

Oh look, i found the saying on the second page of /.

yro.slashdot.org...
(Bruce Schneier: "Personalized advertising is how these companies make money, and is why so much of the internet is free to users. We're the product, not the customer.")

a reply to: Vroomfondel

they are reading your posts here

I poked around my account, I can't find this. Where exactly did you come across it?

originally posted by: underwerks
a reply to: Vroomfondel

I'd think it would depend on where xfinity is located. If they're located in a different state than you, they may not have to follow the rules in your state.

Surely they would ave to follow the laws of the locality were service is installed, no?