Free Republic

Linda Naples, FL Verified purchase Customer Service Reviewed Jan. 13, 2025 I have been a comcast/Xfinity customer for 35 years. The customer service was not good before, but now it is outrageous. I have spent hours the last two days trying to get answers. 3 Hours yesterday. I was told it was fixed. Today I get a warning my service is going to be canceled for the same reason. Late payment. Today another 2 hours with me yelling at AI. Then another 30 minutes on the chat. Nothing. AI says the same thing over and over again with no selection...

A federal judge in Massachusetts is going to make Twitter explain whether or not it is a “state actor” or a truly private company, and the effects could be significant in reigning in Big Tech’s oppression of conservative views. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who invented email, ran for US Senate in Massachusetts as a Republican and made allegations of voter fraud on Twitter. These tweets were then deleted by the far-left tech giant. Later it was discovered that they were deleted at the direction of government employees of the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office. Discovering this, Dr. Ayyadurai filed...

Hi everyone. My home internet went down a week ago Friday (the 1st) late at night. My ISP promised ("committed") to having it up by 6:30 the next morning. It finally came on this past Thursday around midday, only to go off again around 10:15 AM yesterday (Saturday) when I tried to log into a Zoom meeting. They're claiming there's an "outage" and they keep sending me updated times when it will be fixed. In the meantime, I have to use the library's internet. Who's your ISP? Are they reliable? Inexpensive? Can you get a bundle?

An internet service provider (ISP) in the North Idaho and the Spokane, Washington, area has decided to block Facebook and Twitter for its customers after some called in to complain about censorship on the platforms.The ISP, Your T1 WIFI, confirmed that it will block Facebook and Twitter from its WIFI service for some customers starting this Wednesday, according to a report by KREM 2.The move comes after Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump from its platform, and Facebook locked the president out of his account “indefinitely.”“It has come to our attention that Twitter and Facebook are engaged in censorship of...

Idaho-based internet provider T1 WIFI will no longer provide service to Facebook and Twitter following this week’s purge of conservatives. “Our company does not believe a website or social networking site has the authority to censor what you see and post and hide information from you, stop you from seeing what your friends and family are posting. This is why with the amount of concerns, we have made this decision to block these two websites from being accessed from our network.”

Cloudflare, a web infrastructure provider and content delivery network, is reportedly suffering outages resulting in major websites crashing across the internet. Multiple websites crashed worldwide today as one of the web’s most important infrastructure providers and content delivery networks, Cloudflare, suffered an outage. Cloudflare provides DNS and CDN services and powers approximately “40% of the internet.” The Cloudflare system status page stated that “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” The issue is reportedly related to the Cloudflare Resolver in the company’s edge network in certain locations. The outage struck at quite a few Cloudflare data...

SAN DIEGO — Raymond Liddy, a former California state prosecutor and son of Watergate break-in organizer Gordon Liddy, was convicted Wednesday of possessing child pornography. Liddy was convicted after a non-jury trial in San Diego federal court and could face up to 10 years in federal prison when he is sentenced on May 1, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Liddy had been free on bond since his 2017 arrest. FBI agents searched his home in the San Diego Bay resort city of Coronado after an Internet service provider contacted a national tip line to report a user had uploaded child...

The Federal Trade Commission, in what could be considered a prelude to new regulatory action, has issued an order to several major internet service providers requiring them to share every detail of their data collection practices. The information could expose patterns of abuse or otherwise troubling data use against which the FTC — or states — may want to take action. The letters requesting info (detailed below) went to Comcast, Google, T-Mobile and both the fixed and wireless sub-companies of Verizon and AT&T. These “represent a range of large and small ISPs, as well as fixed and mobile Internet providers,”...

The telecommunications industry is working together in an attempt to ensure any website housing footage of the Christchurch terrorist attack is inaccessible to New Zealanders. Spark, Vodafone, Vocus and 2degrees - the country’s largest internet service providers (ISP) - are blocking any website which has footage of the shootings. According to Geoff Thorn - CEO of New Zealand Telecommunications Forum (TCF) - this is an “unprecedented move” by the telecommunications industry, but one that they all agree is necessary. “The industry is working together to ensure this harmful content can’t be viewed by New Zealanders,” said Thorn.

We have Exede satellite providing Internet service. For the last 2 months they say we have used up our 10GB data allowance in 3 days or less. This month we used it all up in less than 24 hours. We streamed a one hour serial show on low resolution on our LG smart tv, and used the Internet for email. I also spent an hour or two on FR. Exede claimed we had used the entire 10GB. We've had this service for 1.5 years and our online behavior has not changed. This location is a getaway home and we visit...

Internet users are fighting back after Congress voted to block Obama-era internet privacy protections. Two fundraising campaigns have so far raised more than $215,000 to purchase and reveal lawmakers' browsing histories. Actor Misha Collins, the star of television show “Supernatural,” has raised more than $63,000 on his GoFundMe page. More than 3,000 people have donated to the page, which has a goal of $500 million. “Great news! The House just voted to pass SJR34. We will finally be able to buy the browser history of all the Congresspeople who voted to sell our data and privacy without our consent!” he...

The Senate voted to kill Obama-era online privacy regulations, a first step toward allowing internet providers such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon to sell your browsing habits and other personal information as they expand their own online ad businesses. Those rules, not yet in effect, would have required internet providers to ask your permission before sharing your personal information.

If passed by the House and signed by President Trump, the bill would use an obscure law called the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to eliminate the rules before they go into effect. The CRA would also prevent the FCC from passing “substantially similar” regulations in the future, though no court has ruled on what agencies can pass under those standards. Critics of the privacy regulations say they are too onerous, and subject service providers to stricter regulations than websites such as Facebook and Google, which also collect consumer data.

ISPs, who once fed us lines about excessive bandwidth usage and network congestion in order to upsell people on higher-tier “business class” Internet packages, are now essentially using the same tactics to punish cord-cutters, many of which were likely former cable subscribers.

I have noticed a significantly slower Internet bandwidth speed lately. I'm decently savvy with computer. I have cleared the cache, checked for browset helper objects, viruses, trojans, reset the modem and router and have connected directly from the modem to the computer; still have a slow connection. Even disconnected other computers and access points on the network. I called my ISP and they say they haven't had any outages. So my question - is anyone experiencing this?

Two weeks after passage, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally released its landmark “net neutrality” regulations Thursday morning. Among its many determinations, the FCC stated that broadband providers do not enjoy First Amendment protections because they do not have a right to free speech. “The rules we adopt today do not curtail broadband providers’ free speech rights,” the commission said on page 268 of its decision, noting that because they merely serve as a means for others to express themselves, broadband providers are not entitled to free speech rights themselves. “When engaged in broadband Internet access services, broadband providers are...

Consider that activists promoting this rule had previously targeted neither AT&T nor Verizon with their first net-neutrality complaint but MetroPCS — an upstart competitor with a single-digit market share and not an ounce of market power. Its crime? Unlimited YouTube. MetroPCS offered a $40-per-month plan with unlimited talk, text, Web browsing and YouTube streaming. The company's strategy was to entice customers to switch from the four national carriers or to upgrade to its newly built 4G Long Term Evolution network. Or take T-Mobile's Music Freedom program, which the Internet conduct rule puts on the chopping block. The "Un-carrier" allows consumers...

Do you ever feel like you're being watched? In the past, you could chalk it up to paranoia, close the curtains and get on with your life. Thanks to technology, it's not just your imagination. You really are being watched in your home, at work and everywhere in between. From online advertisers and hackers to the NSA and other government agencies, everyone is trying to keep tabs on you. And things keep getting worse. If you think you know every gadget and organization that's a danger, think again. Here are three things spying on you that you probably didn't know...

Specialized servers used by many ISPs to manage routers and other gateway devices provisioned to their customers are accessible from the Internet and can easily be taken over by attackers, researchers warn. By gaining access to such servers, hackers or intelligence agencies could potentially compromise millions of routers and implicitly the home networks they serve, said Shahar Tal, a security researcher at Check Point Software Technologies. Tal gave a presentation Saturday at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas. At the core of the problem is an increasingly used protocol known as TR-069 or CWMP (customer-premises equipment wide area network...

If you noticed more buffering and sputtering when streaming video from Netflix a few months ago, you weren't alone. But who was really to blame? Your broadband provider or Netflix? Netflix, which earlier this year reluctantly agreed to pay interconnection fees to broadband providers, has suggested that Comcast is to blame because it's violating principles of Net neutrality, which are all about keeping the Internet free and open. Comcast has vigorously denied these assertions. Still, questions remain and confusion abounds over how the two ideas are linked or whether they should be linked at all. The confusion deepened with statements...