If I understand Comcast terms of service correctly, they prohibit many common applications and products. Perhaps they wrote the rules that way on purpose, so that they would always have an excuse to get rid of any troublesome customer - because they're all breaking some rule. I think that the most pertinent paragraph for the tor project is under technical restrictions:
"use or run programs from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN, except for personal and non-commercial residential use"
Unfortunately, this rule is too broad. I'm not a gamer myself, but doesn't World of Warcraft use torrents to
spread their updates? I think that would be providing a service to someone outside my premises.Technically, my weather station violates that rule by sending the temperature to the Citizen's Weather Observation Program (not for personal use). If I run a program to post an auction to eBay, or my blog, that could be a violation (commercial because I'm making money from the auction or blog advertisements). If a customer calls my voip phone, it would be a commercial use of the internet connection.
I can think of several network services that might technically violate that rule. If I run a speedtest, when my stats are posted on their site it isn't for my 'personal' use. If I visit any web page, and the _javascript_ program gathers information from my PC for the benefit of the advertisers - isn't that providing content to someone outside my
premises?
In an earlier paragraph, it looks like they tried to specifically prohibit any proxy services - but they limited their rule to "dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers" - and that's not a problem for the tor project.
From: Jon <torance.ca@xxxxxxxxx>
To: tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: [tor-talk] Comcast Residential - terms of service
My question would be this... does comcast allow their customers on
residential accounts to run servers? I know with some of the cable
accounts on some of the other cable networks, servers are not allowed.
Yes, they will disconnect your service if it is against their TOS.
IMO: For a lot of people, $12.00 is a lot of money, especially
students. But if you look at this way, you are donating bandwidth and
your server to TOR and I believe if $12.00 is all you need to pay
above the residential price, it is worth it. I just wished that was
the case for me. It just makes me wonder if there is something else
gong on here. But i degress....