A friend of my girlfriend’s who lives in the DC area had Comcast cable internet installed yesterday. The Comcast technician came to the house and did whatever those guys do in order to get the high-speed connection up and running.
And then, just to make sure that everything was working fine, he sat down in front of the computer and began calling up pornographic websites! While the customer was standing right next to him!
Now, i’m a bit of a free speech junkie, and i have no problem with people surfing for as much porn as they can handle in the privacy of their own homes. If my girlfriend’s friend is going to use his high-speed connection for porn (and i very much doubt that he is), then that’s his right.
But in what universe is it acceptable practice for the cable guy to test out your connection by surfing for porn on your computer? You’d thing that simple pragmatics–i.e., a desire not to lose his job–might dictate a more conservative choice of websites.
I said that my first reaction would have been to call Comcast and say something. My girlfriend said that her friend thought of this, but worried that getting the guy fired might result in a return visit that would make the porn surfing look tame by comparison.
That’s appalling. I had an ISP guy refuse to show me how to get to chatrooms when I was a newbie because his wife had run off with a person she met in a chatroom. I was kinda pissed off in the extreme that he would see that as good service.
Well, hey. What better way to test a high-speed connection than by viewing MPGs or MOVs or whatever? And where do you find the highest concentration of said files, huh? That’s right!
Wally: My proposal for the year is for me to stress test the network under severe conditions. I will accomplish this by downloading large image files from the busiest servers on the net.
Later…
Wally: I was this close to making it my job to download naughty pictures.
Dilbert: It’s just as well. I would have had to kill you.
This could be silly but - are you sure that he meant to pull up those sites?
Porn sites are notorious for owning the names of spelled-alike sites.
The first time I lit up my browser on a new computer I typed in the address box what I thought was the name of a favorite website for wav file snippets, Daily Wav Link, I accidently typed an E at the end of dailywav and launched a storm of pornographic pop-ups.
At that point I was extremely relieved that my kids didn’t happen to be within eyesight of the screen.
Holy crap!! My parents had a very similar experience, mhendo. (And I figured it was just because of the area they lived in at the time)
My parents had gotten cable modem service from Charter about a year or so ago, and the “technician” started setting everything up for them. My parents proceeded to watch TV while the cable guy did his thing. At one point, my mom tells me, she looks over her shoulder to see how things are coming along and she sees a porn site opened up on the computer, and the guy is proceeding to click on links on the page, or whatnot. My mom let it go, and chalked it up to bad vision at first, and told me about it about a week later.
So I go into their “History” folder, and sure enough there are like 15 porno websites (all quite apparent from their URL) in there. So I took a screenshot (can never be too careful) of the History folder, and printed it out for my parents (I showed when these sites were accessed-- that is, the date the cable modem was installed). My parents complain to Charter about it, and Charter handles it pretty well. Charter ended up giving my parent some kind of refund or something, but I don’t know whatever happened to the cable guy.
Geez… I thought people like this would have been weeded out of the gene-pool by now.
LilShieste
I would be willing to bet serious money that these guys are using that new customer account to launch pay-per-click ad links off of a personal web page. Many sites still happily pay for “unique traffic” which a new ISP account will most definitely be.
It would be childs play to build a simple site with 20-30 links that pay 5-10-15 cents per unique clickthrough and when they install a new customer hit the links real quick and then close the browser. Do that to 5-10 customers a day and you have a nice little bonus income.
Don’t a lot of pr0n sites have a reputation for downloading nasty cookies, spyware and the like to unsuspecting computers? If this is true, the OP should definitely call Comcast. The heck with the images one might accidently see; we’re talking about computer performance and privacy here!
I like your generous attitude, your willingness to give the cable guy the benefit of the doubt.
But come on, this guy installs internet connections for a living. Surely he knows at least a few sites that that don’t contain porn. I mean, even if he has no imagination whatsoever, surely he could just try comcast.com–it’s his own company, ferchrissakes.
And, as manhattan and drachillix have suggested, there could be even more nefarious motives behind his actions than simply getting to see some free smut.
15 cents a hit, 30 hits, 10 customers comes out to $30.00. That’s maximum for one day. If he did this every workday (255 days) he’d get $7650. IRL, the total would be less, maybe half.
Even at $3000 it’s a nice yearly bonus, but I doubt if it’s worth his job. Great thought drachillix, I never would have guessed that there was some monetary reason. Until LilShieste talked about her parents, I was considering the possibility that the technician was making some sort of creepy pass at mhendo’s girlfriends friend, or whether she thought that something like fark or si was porno.
Yeah, I’m sure Comcast would do something about it. In fact, we just had to migrate out AT&T Broadband account to Comcast. To do so, we installed “transition software” which converted our settings to use the new service. It also installed some spyware, some annoying pop-up generators I still haven’t figured out how to get rid of, and some other stuff. So, I’m sure Comcast will be REALLY helpful.
Crap. Somehow I left off a nickel at the beginning. It’s $45 a day, and $11,475 a year.
Still not worth losing a job, but we’re getting there. If he can earn a quarter each click, and do 50 clicks to 15 customers, then it’s probably worth it.
You’re forgetting something; someone who’d do something like this probably works on the assumption that they won’t lose their job, and that the money they earn will always be a supplement to their regular paycheck.
I know that kind of pay scheme exists, but I don’t understand why it exists. A lot of those clicks are probably just annoyed people trying to get rid of popups and crap like that.
