Interesting almost-free ISP: Access-4-Free.com

[Gerald Combs]

Leo J Mauler wrote:

>
> Seriously, with NAT masquerading and a router, all TWC can see is that
> you are a heavy bandwidth user.

...unless they look at things like User-Agent: and X-Mailer: strings, 
cookie handling, TCP sequence numbers, packet padding content, and other 
clues that different OSes and applications provide.  For instance, this 
mail message probably has

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5)
     Gecko/20031007

somewhere in its headers.

There are products geared toward service providers that use passive 
fingerprinting to detect multiple users on the same connection.  Dunno 
if TWC uses them.

IMO service providers should be happy when people put their stuff behind 
a NAT device, even if they do use a little more bandwidth.  A couple of 
computers protected behind a SOHO firewall will cause far fewer 
bandwidth headaches than a single virus/spam vector sitting directly on 
an exposed connection.