Hacker News Reader

Comment by bastard_op | Hacker News Reader

If someone really wanted to make a change, setup some bot farm to fuzz comcast's own address search for literally _everyone_ in a given region, and report real numbers for who can and cannot get service there. Then like the nice folks that made the online method to fight your tickets and such, mass submit them in batches to the fcc, or all individually as disputed complaints. Comcast "could" do this themselves, but reality would be horrifyingly destroying to their fake metrics, thus they'd never get any more grants, and we can't have that.

View on HN

XFinity's website for new internet service blocks VPN and automated traffic with a heavy hand. I've had trouble accessing my own account, even when logged in as a paying customer, depending on if I'm using a VPN.

This was probably originally meant to keep wide-scale pricing information secret from competitors, but it sure has the nice side effect of making it hard to verify their coverage promises.

With enough residential and mobile proxies, you can scrape almost anything.

A friend of mine had a project that would get it's rotating ip addresses by connecting to wifi of the parade of Google busses that dropped off and picked up in front of his office.

That's incredible, I love stories like this. Google busses had open wifi?

Open to employees

The first rule about scrape-club is you don't talk about scrape-club :)

Luminati is expensive

Shouldn't we push for a world that doesn't depend on independently smart and well off random people to exhaustively track which things are objectively and clearly lies? Why is there not a government group whose entire job is to seek out businesses doing shitty things and claw back unjustly earned profits?

Where are our ombudsmen

Seriously. This is something the NIST is perfectly set up to do.

I'm pretty sure their own address search tool will be wrong too.

I bet there are lots of installs where they take your money, and then later call to apologize that they can't in fact offer service and give a refund.

Part of 'lying' as a company is to make sure that your internal data sources tell the same story, but just never invest in correcting any inaccuracies that aren't in favor of the story you want to tell.

It doesn't really matter if their service tool is wrong (as in "We technically have lines to this address"). It matters that their service tool disagrees with what they're reporting to the federal government, which they use to participate in federal grant programs.

And if it doesn’t? I think the point that poster was making is that it’s likely their tool matches what they’re reporting. It’s their actually service that is different

This still isn't the most reliable. Windstream says they don't service my house. Their map says they can't give me service, they've responded to 811 calls with no wires at the house.

I have windstream gigabit fiber. There's a windstream box in the back yard.

I am confused by your comment. Can you elaborate?

Spamming the ISPs form for checking service isn't the best way to see if they provide service. Since, at least for windstream, they'll tell you (online) they don't service an area, but do.

Bonus points if the endpoint you're querying suffers a service interruption for some reason and you blamed for a DDOS attack?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com