Comcast Launching $9.95 'Internet Essentials' Broadband for Low-Income Families

by Michael Santo
from http://hothardware.com/

Comcast is launching Internet Essentials, a new initiative offering discounted Internet access and home computers to families that meet low income requirements. The program was mandated as a requirement of Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal, earlier this year.

In that way, it's very similar to AT&T's Naked DSL program, which AT&T was required to offer as a condition of its merger with BellSouth. Internet Essentials will be available wherever Comcast offers broadband, which means 39 states. To promote the program, Comcast has launched websites in both English and Spanish.

To qualify for Internet Essentials, a family must meet the following requirements:

• Has at least one child eligible to receive a free school lunch under the NSLP (as an example, according to the Department of Agriculture, a household of three would have to make less than $25,000 a year in income);
• Has not subscribed to Comcast Internet service within the last 90 days;
• Has children in grades K-12
• Does not have an overdue Comcast bill or unreturned equipment.

As part of the program, families will receive literacy training and Internet service for $9.95 a month (plus tax). Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, "When we look around the country, we see the disparities that exist. Quite frankly, people in lower-income communities, mostly people of color, have such limited access to broadband than people in wealthier communities."

Families will also receive a voucher which will allow them to purchase a new computer for $149.99 (plus tax).

As an example, according to the Department of Agriculture, a household of three would have to make less than $25,000 a year in income to qualify. Qualifying students will receive an application at the start of the upcoming school year.

'Wonder Woman' project finds a home at NBC

by Lynette Rice

from http://insidetv.ew.com/

 
Image Credit: DC Comics

The ol’ girl may fly this fall after all: NBC has picked up the Wonder Woman pilot from David E. Kelley. Ironically, NBC was the final network to pass on bringing back the superhero over a week ago, but that was before the new regime was officially in place in light of the impending Comcast takeover. Robert Greenblatt is now spearheading primetime as chairman. (On Thursday, head of programming Angela Bromstad announced she was leaving).

The pilot’s cost may not be a concern to Greenblatt, the wunderkind who revitalized Showtime with critical faves like Dexter and Weeds. One factor that seemed to have sunk the Wonder Woman project the first time around was the price of rebooting the series, with the studio requiring a rich license fee to bring the iconic character back to life. But then, NBC has been down this road before: It rebooted Bionic Woman. Kelley’s take incorporated the superhero’s signature lasso, cuffs, and plane in the script, and insiders said it was a serious, non-campy take on the DC Comics character. For years, various writers and producers (including Joss Whedon) have tried to bring back Wonder Woman, but the character has proved difficult to resurrect.
Kelley is already executive producing Harry’s Law for NBC, the new drama starring Kathy Bates. The pilot, like all the others ordered by NBC during the current development season, will have to pass the final smell test this spring before its ordered to series in May.

In other business Friday, NBC also ordered a drama pilot from Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City), dubbed Mann’s World. It chronicles a celebrity hair stylist in Los Angeles.

Time Warner Cable iPad app brings interactive program guide

From: http://www.electronista.com/

Time Warner Cable is the latest cable, satellite or IPTV company to soon bring out an iPad app that will make watching TV easier. Thus far, it involves an interactive program guide that can be used to schedule recordings and act as a remote control, but eventually the company plans to let viewers stream programs to their iPad wherever they are. Users would also be able to watch part of a program on their portable devices while returning from work, for example, and continue to view the program in their living rooms once they get home.

Browsing the program guide and searching for specific programs would also be made easier through the use of metadata and the ability to group programs by category. There is the possibility that users will be capable of creating personalized content or recommendations based on what they view regularly.

The app was built by Time Warner Cable and web service APIs were built around it. Time Warner can share these with third-party developers to make their own applications for devices other than the iPad. This may include Internet-connected TVs, smartphones, other tablets and gaming consoles. [via NewTeeVee]

By Electronista Staff

Comcast's Latest iPhone App Manages Your DVR From Anywhere

From: http://gizmodo.com/

Comcast is fairly evil, to be sure. But if they're doing one thing right, it's the latest version of their free iPhone app, Comcast Mobile App 2.0.

In this walkthrough, you'll see that not only can you set recordings from your iPhone, but you can do so over the multiple DVRs that you may have in your house. (Note: so far, this function is only available in select areas.) Meanwhile, everyone receives new push notifications reminding you to watch or record your favorite shows...which admittedly sounds a bit useless in the DVR era.

If you're watching the clip, skip about 20 seconds in to get to the meat of it. (Not that Scott the Comcast guy doesn't seem very nice.) [iTunes via Comcast Blog Thanks Simon!]

Send an email to Mark Wilson, the author of this post, at mark@gizmodo.com.

Comcast TV Everywhere launch details: December, free for existing subs, really goes anywhere

by Richard Lawler

Comcast's Amy Banse just hit the stage at NewTeeVee Live and announced key details about the company's new On Demand Online launch. If you can't check out the video (embedded after the break) here's the important stuff: It will be available at no additional cost to existing subscribers and allow the authorization of up to 3 devices per household. Log in once from home to Comcast.net or Fancast.com, download the Move Networks powered player to authorize your PC and proceed to stream from the very healthy library of VOD, whether at home or anywhere else, despite previous rumors to the contrary. The bad news? Yes, this does still count against the 250GB monthly cap if used at home and still no word on HD streaming, but within the concept of making content available to subscribers wherever they want to view it, this seems like a good first step.

[Via Media Experiences 2 Go]

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Comcast in deal talks with NBC Universal

Cable giant Comcast Corp. is kicking the tires of NBC Universal, according to people familiar with the situation.

Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator with almost 25 million subscribers, has been looking to increase its content holdings for several years. In NBC Universal it would get its hands on not only a big broadcast network and movie studio, but also several powerful cable channels, including USA, Syfy, CNBC, MSNBC and Bravo.

NBC parent General Electric has often denied that it is interested in selling its entertainment holdings. Of course, if history is any guide, Comcast doesn't necessarily wait for an invitation before making a play. Five years ago it made an unsuccessful run to buy Walt Disney Co. for $54 billion.

The price tag for NBC Universal would be substantially less than that. A recent analyst report from J.P. Morgan analyst Stephen Tusa valued NBC Universal at $30 billion to $35 billion. However, such a deal would likely be very complex because there would be huge tax implications for NBC Universal parent General Electric, which first bought NBC in 1986 for $6.5 billion.

That is still a pretty steep price tag for Comcast to swallow. The cable giant has a market cap of $48 billion and about $4 billion in cash so if it were to buy all of NBC Universal, it would be a highly leveraged transaction.

Speculation that GE may be looking to unload NBC Universal has heated up as of late in part because the French conglomerate Vivendi, which holds a 20% stake in the entertainment unit, may look to unload its interest before the end of the year. There have been questions raised as to whether GE -- which has first dibs on the Vivendi interest -- could muster the $4 billion - $5 billion needed to buy back the stake or whether another company such as cash-rich Time Warner or Comcast would step in and buy it.

Whether Comcast is making a serious run at all of NBC Universal outright or just in acquiring a stake in the company or forming a joint-venture remains to be seen.

In a statement, Comcast denied a report from industry website The Wrap that it had a deal to buy NBC Universal, but it declined to elaborate on any other talks it may be having with NBC Universal. A spokeswoman for NBC Universal declined to comment.

For Comcast, getting all or some of NBC Universal would give it programming assets to match its distribution clout. It currently only owns a handful cable networks including E! Entertainment Television, Versus, the Golf Channel, G4 and 10 regional sports networks. None of its cable networks have the commercial success of NBC's assets.

While NBC has lots of assets, many of its entertainment holdings are struggling. Its Universal Studios is in a slump at the box office and its management the NBC network is mired in fourth place in both viewers and demographics. It's big gamble this fall, putting Jay Leno on in prime time, has not delivered big ratings yet although it may prove to be a smart financial gamble. In the first half of 2009, NBC Universal made $1.6 billion on revenues of $7.5 billion. Its revenue accounts for less than 10% of General Electric Co.'s total revenue.

-- Joe Flint

Passwords of Comcast Customers Exposed

By Brad Stone

A list of user names and passwords for customers of Comcast, one of the nation’s largest Internet service providers, sat unprotected on the Web for the last two months.

The list was 8,000 lines long, but Comcast said late Monday that just 700 of those lines contained information for active customer accounts.

Kevin Andreyo, an educational technology specialist in Reading, Pa., and a professor at Wilkes University, came across the list Monday on Scribd, a document-sharing Web site.

Mr. Andreyo was reading a recent article in PC World entitled “People Search Engines: They Know Your Dark Secrets… And Tell Anyone,” when he was inspired to find out what information about him was online. He searched for his own e-mail address on the search engine Pipl.

The list on Scribd was one of four results, and it also included his password, which was a riff on his love for a local sports team. Statistics on Scribd indicated that the list, which was uploaded by someone with the user name vuthanhan2004, had been viewed over 345 times and had been downloaded 27 times.

Mr. Andreyo informed Comcast, the F.B.I. and several technology journalists about the file on Monday morning, but the document disappeared only at 1:45 p.m. when I contacted Scribd about it.

“That isn’t just my password for Comcast, it’s my password for everything that is not tied to my credit card,” Mr. Andreyo said in an interview. “It’s one thing to publish a credit card number, but to hand over user IDs and passwords for accounts is another. Someone could just go in and pull up all your archived messages, and then they have everything about you.”

I have asked Comcast how the information got online. It is possible that the people on the list divulged their passwords in response to some kind of phishing message, and that Comcast itself is not to blame.

Update: Comcast said it did not believe the information came from inside the company, pointing to duplicated data on the list and the lack of structured information like account numbers.

“We have no reason to believe this came from Comcast. It looks like a phishing or related type of scheme,” said Jennifer Khoury, a Comcast spokeswoman. (Asked about this possibility earlier today, Mr. Andreyo said that he doubted he was ever the victim of a phishing scheme.)

Ms. Khoury said that Comcast was freezing the e-mail accounts of the customers on the list and contacting them to educate them about using safe passwords. She said the company would also urge them to download McAfee Security Suite, software that is made available free to all Comcast users.

Update: Ms. Khoury said in an e-mail message late Monday: “We have scrubbed the list that was on ScribD and have found that about 700 names are user ID’s that are for Comcast customers not 8,000. The other names on the list are either not customers, duplicates or older inactive accounts (no e-mail address currently).

Comcast suspects 'foul play' in Tucson Super Bowl porn feed

Brian Pedersen

Arizona Daily Star

Tucson, Arizona

Comcast believes the pornography that interrupted its feed of the Super Bowl Sunday night was the result of foul play, a company spokeswoman said Monday morning.

“Our initial investigation suggests this was an isolated malicious act,” spokeswoman Kelle Maslyn said in a statement emailed to the Star. “We are mortified by last evening’s Super Bowl interruption and we apologize to our customers. We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine how this happened.”

It is still unclear how many viewers were affected by the clip, which lasted about 30 seconds, and featured full male nudity, Maslyn said.

Comcast is Southern Arizona’s second-largest cable subscriber, with more than 80,000 customers in unincorporated Pima County, Marana and Oro Valley.

The interruption was only seen by Comcast subscribers who received a standard definition signal, Maslyn said, while those who watched the game on high-definition televisions were not affected.

Comcast is working on a plan to compensate customers, but nothing has been set in stone, Maslyn said.

The pornography clip was from Club Jenna, an adult cable television channel.

The Arizona Daily Star newsroom was flooded with calls from irate viewers who said that the porn cut into the game with less than three minutes left to play, just after Arizona Cardinals player Larry Fitzgerald scored on a touchdown pass from Kurt Warner to put the team in the lead.

Callers said that the clip showed a woman unzipping a man’s pants, followed by a graphic act between the two.

The Super Bowl was being shown locally on KVOA. The station sends its signals — both standard definition and high definition — to Cox Communcations, which then sends the signals to Comcast, station president Gary Nielsen said.

KVOA’s signal didn’t have porn on it when the station sent it over to Comcast, Nielsen said. He said his station has received no complaints from viewers who watched the game on Cox, on satellite providers such as DirecTV or Dish Network or from people who saw it through an over-the-air signal.

“This did not emanate from us,” Nielsen said. “We are dismayed that this had to happen.”

Comcast has set up an e-mail account to take feedback from concerned customers. The address is comcasttucsonfeedback@gmail.com.

Customers can also call 744-1900, though the Star newsroom received several calls Monday morning reporting they could not get through to Comcast by phone.

A DIY Test For Your Broadband Provider’s Net Neutrality

By Christopher Rhoads

Worried that your broadband provider is slowing down your Web traffic?

If so, you might want to download the aptly named “Switzerland” — a tool that tests whether your Internet provider is violating the principles of so-called “network neutrality.”

Network neutrality, which prevents carriers from blocking traffic or manipulating the speeds of traffic from certain Web sites, became a hot-button issue several years ago when carriers suggested they should be allowed to charge content providers more for using faster lanes on their networks.

The issue resurfaced last summer when the FCC determined that Comcast had interfered with its subscribers’ use of a file-sharing technology, called BitTorrent, a free application used to distribute sometimes large software and media files. Comcast is contesting the ruling.

Net neutrality is likely to re-emerge in the coming months, as the incoming Congress considers expected legislation on the issue. At the moment, the FCC advocates only broad guidelines to “preserve and promote the open and interconneted nature of the public Internet.”

Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit in San Francisco that helped discover Comcast’s actions, decided it needed to help users detect similar violations.

“Congress may or may not decide to pass legislation on this,” said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the EFF who designed Switzerland. “But we are going to need tools to know what’s going on and spot causes for concern on the network.”

EFF released Switzerland in August. The tool can be downloaded by users for free, and has been downloaded several thousands of times, according to Mr. Eckersley. It’s designed to detect when packets of Internet traffic have been modified or inserted into the network by service providers.

Still, in a hint of the debate to come, some contend such tools don’t detect anti-competitive practices that should also be included in any net neutrality legislation.

“It’s important to note that this tool tests for only ONE set of behaviors that are claimed by SOME people to be a violation of network neutrality,” wrote Brett Glass, a technology consultant, in a Web site comment on the EFF tool.

Comcast's New Network Throttling Now In Place

by Daniel A. Begun

For the last few months, Comcast has been transitioning how it monitors and throttles broadband traffic. DSLreports.com claims that this transition is now complete for all of Comcast's markets, meaning that Comcast users might see their connection speeds drop if they use too much sustained downstream throughput and they can even potentially lose their service if they exceed Comcast's monthly broadband cap.

Comcast previously received quite a bit of flack for throttling the throughput of users who were downloading certain types of data, such as torrent packets. While torrent traffic can often mean someone is downloading illegal content, that it not always the case--there is a growing amount of legitimate torrent content. Comcast decided to transition from this packet-inspection type of network monitoring to one that is content-agnostic.

Screenshot of a beta version of Comcast's bandwidth usage meter tool (Credit: DSLreports.com)

The new system, which is now in place, monitors the amount of downstream traffic a user consumes and not what that traffic is actually composed of. The system first monitors the traffic on the cable modem termination system (CMTS) ports. If a particular CMTS port is deemed as "congested," any users on that port who are "identified as a primary reason why" that port is congested will have their traffic priority downgraded, which can potentially impact their throughput. By default, most users have a quality-of-service (QoS) traffic priority of "Priority Best-Effort" (PBE). However, if a user is flagged as causing congestion on a CMTS port, that user's priority changes to "Best-Effort" traffic (BE) for a period of time. DSLreports.com states:

Comcast says that sustained use of 70% of your up or downstream throughput triggers the BE state, at which point you'll find your traffic priority lowered until your usage drops to 50% of your provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for "a period of approximately 15 minutes." A throttled Comcast user being placed in a BE state "may or may not result in the user's traffic being delayed or, in extreme cases, dropped before PBE traffic is dropped."

The downside is that if you are downloading a lot of data at a time when many of your neighbors are online, you might see your connection speeds slow down--or even drop out entirely--at least temporarily. The upside is that you can be as much of a bandwidth hog as you want at any given moment as long as the network can handle your traffic and your neighbors. This might act as an incentive for users to perform more of their large downloads during off hours.

But even if you never find your throughput temporarily throttled, you are still not out of the woods if you download and/or upload lots of large files. Don't forget that Comcast also has a monthly cap of 250GB of data--and that 250GB per month is an aggregate of both your downstream and upstream traffic. Users who go over the limit will receive a warning as well as a suggestion to upgrade their service from a residential to a commercial plan. Users who go over the 250GB per month twice in a six month period can have their service terminated. Comcast has promised a bandwidth usage meter tool so that Comcast users can keep track of their usage, but as of yet, the tool has not been released to Comcast customers.

Comcastic P4P trial shows 80% speed boost for P2P downloads

By Nate Anderson |

Comcast engineers have just released the first-ever real-world data on P4P technology—and it appears to be a massive success. While only a trial, the results do show that P4P's iTracker technology can increase P2P download speeds by 80 percent on ISP networks without materially increasing the network load.

P4P, which is being designed under the aegis of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, is meant to "localize" peer-to-peer transfers. P2P users generally grab data from all around the world, putting tremendous cost and bandwidth pressure on ISP peering and transit links with other networks. P4P uses an iTracker server to keep those transfers within an ISP's own network when possible, with the goal of boosting speeds for users and lowering peering-point loads for ISPs.

(Note that P4P has little to do with network neutrality, though companies sometimes suggest that it does. While it can decrease the financial hit ISPs take from sending traffic over transit links, P4P isn't designed to lower the total bandwidth on an ISP's network. In fact, by directing P2P users to "local" network sources, it might actually be expected to increase an ISP's local network traffic. More on that below.)

Comcast engineers have just filed the results of the first major P4P trial as an "Internet draft" with the IETF. The trial involved Pando, Yale, three (unnamed) ISPs, and Comcast, and it took place over the summer. It used a special, Pando-provided P2P client that is set up to check in with "iTracker" servers when searching for download locations in a BitTorrent swarm. The test used a 21MB video file (which was "licensed," in case you were worried), and measured the results of using the P2P client in order to see how the use of iTrackers affected uploads and downloads.

Data source: Comcast

Results were hugely positive. Compared to a random swarm, the use of any iTracker provided substantial speed boosts to Comcast network users, ranging from 57 to 85 percent above default behavior. For consumers, this would obviously be welcome news, but how does it affect Comcast?

Not too much, it turns out. "We did notice that download activity in our access network increased somewhat, from 56,030MB for Random to 59,765MB for P4P Generic Weight and 60,781MB for P4P Coarse Grained," wrote the Comcast engineers. That's a small increase, especially given that it reduced Comcast's "incoming Internet traffic by an average of 80 percent at peering points."

But uploads proved even more surprising. "It did not appear that P4P significantly increased upstream utilization in our access network," note the engineers. "In essence, uploading was already occurring no matter what and P4P in and of itself did not appear to materially increase uploading for this specific, licensed content."

Further good news came from a close examination of the various iTrackers. The fine-grained tracker provided detailed topology information about Comcast's network, and it took significant time to set up. "It was a detailed mapping of Comcast backbone-connected network Autonomous System Numbers (ASN) to IP Aggregates which were weighted based on priority and distance from each other," says the report. "Included in this design was a prioritization of all Peer and Internet transit connected ASNs to our backbone to ensure that P4P traffic would prefer settlement free and lower cost networks first, and then more expensive transit links."

Sounds like a lot of work. But Comcast found that it wasn't even necessary; simpler iTrackers provided even better results. The best results came from the coarse-grained iTracker, which featured 22 iTracker node identifiers and "resulted in a 1,461 line configuration file."

iTrackers can run on lightweight servers; for good results, every ISP should run one. While every network that deploys an iTracker will see good results, the system gets "dramatically" more impressive as more ISPs deploy it.

Comcast wants the iTracker mechanism made an IETF standard; more impressively, it recognizes that iTrackers should be "opt-in" mechanisms that each user can control. "The use of ISP-provided iTrackers should probably be an opt-in feature for P2P users, or at least a feature of which they are explicitly aware of and which has been enabled by default in a particular P2P client," say the engineers. "In this way, P2P users could choose to opt-in either explicitly or by their choice of P2P client in order to choose to use the iTracker to improve performance, which benefits both the user and the ISP at the same time."

Win/win scenarios haven't been common in the P2P wars, and it's important to note that this was only a preliminary test. But if P4P shows the same promise in larger trials and if P2P clients start to embed the technology into their software, faster downloads and lower-traffic peering points could be had simply by running some inexpensive servers.