Your profile reveals you're a former Comcast employee. That's a disclaimer worth posting here.

But yeah, if you have service with Comcast they have your home phone, email addresses, and physical address. They can get in touch with you every way that every company that CAN'T read all of your internet traffic already gets in touch with you.

The method they've chosen is terrible for at least the following reasons: - The alert will not work on many platforms & devices. - The alert may not reach the account owner. - The alert will not work on SSL traffic. - There is no record that the customer saw the alert (contrast with phone call) - There are serious privacy issues involved in parsing user's web traffic.

The alert will significantly increase your data usage...

It's extremely bad. The fact that ISP monopolies are not regulated in favor of consumers is slowly going to destroy the openness that has made the web so successful. Instead of giving us raw pipes these monopolies are injecting themselves as proxies where they can monitor, cap bandwidths, shape traffic, censor content, insert messages and even add ads, which Comcast already does when a DNS request is not resolved in a HTTP session.

If you look at what Comcast does on the TV side, things like adding ads to the guide so it's barely usable, you can see where this is going. But the federal regulators of the monopolies are asleep at the switch, we can't even get network neutrality passed. The monopolies know how to play the lobbying game as well as how to slowly turn up the heat so the users aren't all outraged at once. But we can expect more abuses, more ads, more monitoring, more restrictions, more unwanted 'value adds' as time goes on.

  | It's extremely bad. The fact that ISP monopolies
  | are not regulated in favor of consumers is slowly
  | going to destroy the openness that has made the
  | web so successful.

This is a little over the top. Whether or not to use this to notify users of time-sensitive information could be a question posed at even a small ISP without such 'evil ambitions.'

It's probably more useful to discuss the pros/cons of this approach to notifying users than it is to decry over-arching problems with the entire industry. These (over-arching industry issuse) have been discussed ad nauseum, and action is more useful than discussion at this point (at least on technical forums such as this).

  | But the federal regulators of the monopolies
  | are asleep at the switch

Look up regulatory capture.

Here are some other ways.

1. They could email you. 2. They could send you a SMS. 3. They could let you view your bandwidth usage by logging into their site. 4. They could provide an application (desktop or mobile) to keep track of your bandwidth and alert you at certain points.

My provider (T-Mobile in the UK, using a mobile 3g dongle) send me an SMS, and the connection software has lots of graphs and numbers.

They still send interstitial content warning me that I've exceeded my fair-use limit. It's a bit annoying because I very carefully checked what the limits were before I signed up.

What's worse is that they use weird, broken, IP addresses and horrible proxies for image mangling.

EDIT: Here's a pastebin.

(http://pastebin.com/k6ddD0sJ)

EDIT: Here's a Security \\\stack Exchange question about it: (http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/9368/mobile-carr...)

I use T-Mobile as my mobile carrier and as far as I know they do numbers 2, 3, and 4 that you listed here. I know this because I have received an SMS when I neared my 2GB of unlimited 4G data transfer. I also have logged into their site and used the app on my phone (HTC One S) to monitor my data usage. The phone app even tells you how much data was used by each app and when. It is fantastic. Could that be so hard for Comcast?

My ISP gives emails at 50%, 80% and of course 100%. They also do options 3 and 4 (no idea about 2) but the emails are so very easy, and knowing you've hit 50% gives you time to mitigate before you get capped.

They should redirect to a notification page. Injecting js is unacceptable.

This is a still intrusion in others communications.

I wonder isn't there any law in US that forbids carriers from fiddling with messages?

Cable companies, IIRC, aren't common carriers the same way a phone company is. They aren't regulated by the FCC the same way phone companies/tv broadcasters are.

They can do pretty much whatever they want to.

I can't think of a worse way to message it. You don't inject your data into my private communications. No matter what.

The right way would be to ask the customer when they sign up for service what method they would like to receive service notices through. Phone, email, SMS, lettermail, twitter, Facebook, there's a million better ways than to modify my data.

Oh boy.

Since you're a comcast employee, maybe go ask the guys running your SMTP/POP3/IMAP servers. I have faith that you guys can come up with some way to communicate with the people using them.

Email? Text?

All the more reason to notify the bill payer, and not the current surfer/downloader.

Doesn't matter; it's the account owner who is responsible for it.

Injecting into a webpage is unacceptable.

Maybe the power company should blink account warnings in morse code through your lightbulbs. After all, it may not be the person paying the bill that is using all of the power....

Thanks, now everyone is looking at me because I am laughing with myself!

All the more reason not to have hard caps on bandwidth.

I suppose calling on the phone is out of the question.

And what happens when your 6 year old kid gets all the notifications? Or your neighbor who is using your Wi-Fi?