As Americans start staying and working from home in droves due to the Coronavirus, some Internet providers are removing data caps and boosting speed.

AT T has started tagging telemarketer calls, so that if you have AT T and receive a telemarketing call, you will instantly know that is what it is. Concurrently, AT T and Comcast have announced a new Caller ID technology partnership which they are calling an “anti-robocalling milestone”, and in which calls that are authenticated and verified will show that the caller is verified.

On Friday people across the United States started experiencing a massive Comcast outage. Over the weekend, instead of getting better, it spread, and now, going on 4 days later, the Comcast outage is global.

A massive Comcast telephone outage is affecting businesses and homes alike across the United States for the second day in a row. States coast to coast are affected, including California, Washington state, New York, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, along with inland states like Colorado and Illinois. Major cities that are effected include Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Houston, Atlanta, Manhattan, and Philadelphia, along with many outlying cities in those areas.

When John and Carol Lehman of Philadelphia returned their cable box to Comcast, they assumed they would no longer be charged for it. Wrong. Over five years, the charges kept piling up, amounting to $600. Comcast finally agreed to return the $600, but only if the Lehmans signed an NDA (NonDisclosure Agreement) with Comcast!

Employees of more than a dozen high tech giants were subject to a secret agreement (see the smoking gun documents) between the companies to not poach each other’s employees. The deal, labelled “Techtopus” by journalist Mark Ames, included Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Dell, IBM, eBay, Microsoft, Comcast, Clearchannel, Dreamworks and Pixar, and British public relations company WPP (which stands for Wire and Plastics Products – they started out as a manufacturer of shopping baskets).

It’s time again for March Madness. For those of you who don’t follow sports, March Madness refers to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Men’s Division One basketball tournament, which occurs during three weeks in March. During which sixty-five universities duke it out in 64 games. So popular is March Madness that The NCAA now streams it live on the Internet with a service called March Madness on Demand (MODD); and so ardent are March Madness fans that Comcast has sponsored a button on the viewer called “The Boss Button” which, when pressed, throws up a fakespread sheet, so that fans can watch while at work without getting busted.

Just two weeks ago, Comcast announced their updated terms of service, limiting bandwidth usage to 250G per customer per month. This week, Comcast cut off their users from Usenet newsgroups, that granddaddy of all Internet forums. (Usenet newsgroups are the foundation of Google’s Google Groups.)

Internet provider Comcast has issued a statement in which they limit and define “excessive use” as, essentially, anything over 250GB (i.e. 250 gigabytes). Starting on October 1, users will be bound by the Comcast AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) and TOS (Terms of Service) to keep their Internet traffic below the 250 gig threshhold.