Second, I am a Comcast customer who will never see these messages precisely because you do things like MITM unprotected traffic. Because I can't trust you to leave my traffic alone, all my traffic is tunneled.

So at the very least, if you feel this is a critical service you are offering (as implied by the RFC), you need an alternative communications channel for people like me who don't permit this one. Snailmail is fine; you try to upsell me constantly through that channel already.

The same thing happened on Netflix ...

This is exactly why Comcast is still the most hated company in America [1], and the only reason you have any customers is due to the monopoly deals of dubious legality you or your acquisitions bribed local officials to create back during the infancy of cable. We hate you, but we don’t have any choice.

It’s worth noting that government regulation created Comcast by allowing long-term monopoly contracts with municipalities. Remove the regulations which prevent competition in local internet and TV services; don’t add more regulations.

  [1]: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/america-most-hated-companies-110032495.html

Also, most games I have played seem to use HTTPS. The only time it is used is when the game does not need an instant result, in which case they use HTTP or HTTPs. Most of the times, this is in the main menu or similar. Doing this makes it even harder (assuming they use certificate pinning) for users to change the values returns to gain any advantage on their client.

Any part of the game that needs speed should be using a UDP based protocol.

I recommend you add your primary email address. You can do this via the self-service portal.

Go to https://customer.xfinity.com/#/settings/account under Account / Settings / Contact Information. IIRC you are sent a confirmation email you have to act on before it takes effect.

Edit: typo.

Implying you’d probably miss it and, if not you, the customers they’re trying to reach.

I don't think there's any fault in logic in presuming that the best way to make sure a customer receives a notification is to insert as near to their known-active stream as possible. I don't condone altering that stream, but I think it would be nice if they could send a page, potentially at the browser or OS level, exclusive for system control and status messages (no sales, marketing, billing, or collection messages allowed).

I had tried calling customer service to see if they'd give me a new bundle but they told me they were only for new customers, so I switched ISPs.

Anyways, when I went in store to return the equipment, the guy I spoke to told me to not bother with phone support but to instead come in store or call him directly (he gave me a business card) since he can get existing customers bundled rates that the phone reps can't.

While I had the choice of ISP many don't, I'd definitely recommend going to a store location where you can talk face to face with someone in your area and see if you can't get a contract at a better rate than you pay month to month.

Why would they not maintain a clean marketing list!?

I don't mind the anon downvotes though, it's par for the course anywhere.

However, the supported device list [2] shows that it's still an allowed modem to use for a e.g. 200mbit connection. A user that's looking to purchase a modem isn't discouraged from getting one from Amazon.

Since Comcast considers it EOL, any interaction with Comcast support includes the stipulation that it's likely the modem that's causing the problem, and the customer will be liable for a surcharge if a technician decides it's the modem causing a problem.

For a brand new modem, purchased from Amazon right now.

There seems to be a disconnect between EOL for the purpose of leasing a modem and EOL from the vendor.

[1] https://www.arris.com/surfboard/products/cable-modems/sb6141... [2] https://mydeviceinfo.xfinity.com/device/arris-sb6141-336

As another comment points out though, I'd also like to understand why it was decided to comminate by injecting JS into pages people are visiting rather than following a more traditional communication channel like snail mail. I assume that this solution scales better and has get immediate $ attached. However, it also seems obvious to me that it reenforces brand image and political issues people have with your company.

I get that's problematic for your modernization efforts, but in that case: eliminate modem rental fees. Bake the fees in to the standard cost of the service and don't let customers use their own equipment. I understand that non-cable competitors don't have this cost to shuffle around, and that this will mean you are forced to either A) raise prices publicly or B) have lower margins. That's your problem because of your technology legacy; don't pass the misery on to the customer.

While you're at it, offer two hardware choices: one with, and one without routing/wireless. I refuse to run a wifi network in my household for your other customers and expect complete control over my LAN configuration.

On the topic of injection: I get that you don't think it's immoral, but hey, 1) most people who understand it think it is totally unacceptable. And 2) the window for this approach is rapidly closing for you as the web moves to SSL everywhere. Give up on this approach now and save face.

I love how it's in the interests of public companies to brag about how successful they are. When I see a comment like this, I like to checkout the most recent 10K. According to Comcast's stated figures, they made $8.7 BILLION last year. So, they're doing pretty well. Now, obviously, they can't just give the modems away, but if they would at least STOP BILLING THE CUSTOMER for a leased modem after their costs have been recouped, that would be a HUGE public-relations win.

If we all could buy the modem of our choice, over time, say, amortized over the length of your contract, and then RELIABLY stop getting billed for it, I'd LOVE to just buy it through them. I'd argue that the reduced support costs for NOT BEING RENT-A-CENTER JERKS about the modems would save them a lot of money in the long run.

As a website owner you should have the right to verify all code that will run on your website to be sure that it won’t cause issues since only you have the context needed to make that call. What if there’s a global DIV selector that hides the close button, the website visitor is screwed! And they’ll just think it’s a problem with your website.

One more note, there are way better ways to do what they’re trying to do. Even with how terrible IFrames are, they prevent CSS and JavaScript conflicts. A simple position fixed div at the bottom of the screen containing an iframe seems more appropriate. If you are going to run code on my site, make sure it’s as small as possible. This could have been accomplished in 2 lines of code (excluding iframe host).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

3.0 spec does up to 1.2Gbit/sec, just like Comcast. You know up to 200Mbit/sec, which is more like 20 because of all the "extreme complexities of the internet service".

At the very least, you have customer addresses. You should also have phone numbers and email addresses. If you have a way to bill customers, you have a way to contact them.

Injecting JS into HTTP sites is disgusting. It violates both the user's and the site's expectations and is entirely unnecessary.

There is no ethical excuse to ever inject code into a webpage.

Your own argument about it being critical is false or sophistry. If there were wildfires coming to burn someone's house down..that might qualify as critical. Not this, and deep down you know it.

You should be embarrassed to attach your name to such an obviously poor decision.

If a fellow community member has a first-hand involvement with a situation under discussion, such as working for a company that some people are mad at or does some wrong thing, we're all responsible for reacting responsibly. Otherwise bad things happen, such as first-hand observers being scared to post because they'll get lashed out at, and the already-weak community bonds we have here getting weaker. We all know what the culture of online shaming has led to and it's all our job not to do it on HN.

This is, in and of itself, a blaming statement. Blaming statements, such as the one contained in the comment you replied to, are a result of a) dissonance and b) inability to resolve the dissonance.

It is, in fact, unknown what the culture of online shaming has led to in our society. In fact, I'd hazard "shaming" online is actually just raw blame provided by some rationalized thought process driven by Internet interactions themselves, not the people reacting. See This Video Will Make You Angry on YouTube for context. Screwing with people's Internet in contextually what could be considered "wrong" behavior becomes highly polarizing. In as much as someone coughs because they smoke, people blaming is a result of a larger problem, perhaps related to the fitness of memes and some people's weakness in being hacked emotionally by memes with higher sophistication. Again, that problem is noted by the dissonance and inability to resolve it, but the behaviors emerging from those who are "infected" by the thoughts are not exactly theirs to bear alone. We blamed the tobacco industry for smoking. Why can we not blame the employees who are providing the rationalizations for bad behavior? One might argue that they shouldn't be blamed because they have no choice in the matter. It may be their job to argue otherwise for the company.

The irony here is that vast majority of the denizens of HN are likely responsible for creating most of the "mess" we're in today by writing software without considering the long term effects on consciousness and perception of reality. That "mess" would be defined as means, by algorithms or neural networks, to attempt to exploit weaknesses in human nature to spread other's beliefs in a unnatural way. Growth hacking. In some cases, like Comcast, those beliefs are rooted in sophisticated rationalizations which sound good when limited in scope. But! I don't care what anyone says about it, changing the content of a page which, when requested from one place returns one thing and when requested from another (which ones pay for I might add) returns another thing entirely is a violation of TRUST. At least it is to me. I like consistency in my data.

If one of the "members" of this group we call HN wants to make a blaming statement against someone who is defending this irrational logic, then I say let them blame! How else are we to uncover the dissonance and solve it? Or, perhaps, that dissonance is desired to be left in place by our complicit behaviors trying to be "nice" to each other.

I've suggested before social media sites could benefit from a "this is a blaming statement" flag on articles or comments. I stand by that assertion today. Logging back out again. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into running this place.

...unless it's for adblocking...

Although I do that with a MITM proxy locally (and thus filters everything on my LAN), it would certainly lead to a very interesting situation if an ISP decided to do it...

Way too much non-spam disappears down overeager spam filters, which most people only check if they are specifically expecting some particular mail and it does not show up as expected--and even then many won't check their filters.

An ISP could white list their own mail in their spam filters but that would only help with the customers who use their ISP provided email. A lot of people use third party email providers instead and never use their ISP email.

I will at least _glance_ at my email.

For critical service info I'd want SMS personally, from a verified number with a link on the company main domain to verify the info.

Is that the idea here?

Or does this efficacy come at some cost (namely, the sentiment behind this thread)?

You know it's actually an important piece of mail when the envelope isn't imploring you to open it.

More work, but way less scummy.

In either case, the argument does not address the fact that customers recognize unsolicited packet injection as unacceptable ISP behavior. Without support metrics, we can argue all day about the efficacy of one method of delivery over another, but the fact remains that no sensible user would perceive e-mail and/or post of official notice from their ISP as overtly intrusive. With as much internal advertising as Comcast distributes amongst its existing customers, it blows my mind that official notice generated from boilerplate and delivered via snail mail would fail to achieve the intended goal.

To be sure, your pre-edited comment: > Surely showing up in-person at their door must be an even more effective "reminder" than the browser injection! Is that next?