No, it’s not a virus. I think calling it such was tongue-in-cheek and more of a clickbait kind of thing. That, or they really are as clueless as they seem which is alarming for a tech support podcast.
Well, I’ve had issues with an MP3 crashing my Bluray player. But there are multiple possible reasons: The audio could have become corrupted. The metatags might have been broken. The DVD disk itself could have had a scratch or experienced some error during burning.
Whoa that is nice!
First close all of the windows.
So what was the culprit?
Related to the car stereo thing: https://samcurry.net/cracking-my-windshield-and-earning-10000-on-the-tesla-bug-bounty-program/
LOL. I read this thread title as “I think my homework was hacked”.
I mean, man! Students are getting aggressive in their cheating these days…
That’s awesome. Great to hear they’ve got a bounty program going, are supportive of people trying to hack their car security, and good for the white hat that managed to get a $10,000 from them.
“My dog hacked my homework!”
My sister and her kids have been staying at our parents’ house while her husband does a big renovation of their house. They’ve been there since the beginning of the month. On Saturday, they got a message from Comcast that they had exhausted their terabyte plan and were facing $10 charges every 50GB for the rest of the month.
They were basically eating 50GB of data a day. All the kids do is watch YouTube and stuff on their tablets. When they want to listen to music? They listen to the music video on YouTube. They’ll leave YouTube running while they’re doing something else.
My mom had to ugprade her plan to unlimited, which is $50 more.
So, yeah, kids gobble up data like crazy.
Yeah, we think it’s the Xbox which is set to auto update. I typically approve of always getting the latest update, but man that’s a lot of data.
If YouTube were all music instead of video it would have gotten shut down by legal action years ago.
I’ll just add this piece of related info for future reference to anyone wondering where their bandwidth went as another potential culprit to check for: Amazon fire stick likes to cache stuff it thinks you’re going to watch. I had this thing eat nearly an entire TB in one month before I figure it out.
Good post, easy. I don’t have a fire stick, but this is exactly the kind of thing I was wondering when I posted. How did you figure out the fire stick was the culprit, I wonder?
I went over last month by a few GB, but they give you two free overs before they start to charge. My son and I pretty much know it’s him, because the use skyrockets when he’s home, but I have no idea what to tell him to do, specifically, beyond be careful. If there were automated things to turn off, I could start there. Or if there was some tool I could use to measure which boxes or apps were using the most, I could narrow it down.
What model is your router? If you want to watch every packet coming and going, that is the best place to do the monitoring, but unless you have a fancy AP or network backbone like this guy, you may not have the tools to see every packet for every device.
Do you have a switch (or hub?) you can set to mirror all WAN packets to one port? You can setup a PC directly on that port and use Windows tools like Wireshark or Glasswire to capture and categorize all the traffic.
I have a mesh network by Plume that has an iphone app that shows data usage of everything connected to the network by device.
Just FYI, even screensavers ( for example my kid turned one on for roku) or music off say google chromcast or anything else eats data as well. So there are a number of possible less obvious candidates for leakage when you start cataloging them. Not unlike sticking all the expenditures you make in a month in an excel spreadsheet, haha.
WNDR3400 - N600 Wireless Dual Band Router.
Yes, i do. It’s attached to the router. Oh, I would love to do something like that. I would like to say something like, “Oh, it’s your Xbox that’s using most of the data”, or “Most of this is being used by our phones!.*”
I have heard of wireshark and I wonder how I can go about setting that up. I have looked through the router options but I don’t see how to do the mirroring you speak of. I worked for a company that created a hardware product that did network monitoring (ExtraHop) and wrote an article about doing that kind of mirroring so I sort of know what you’re talking about and think it would be exactly what I would want.
*I know it’s probably just going to tell me it’s my son gaming on his PC, but even if that’s what I learn it would be a comfort to know it’s not, like, some hacker mining bitcoin. My son mostly plays an online game that had Minecraft-like graphics and a lot of stats. It’s hard to imagine that’s sucking down 100 Gb of data
That sounds nice. What did that cost? I might have to upgrade my stuff this year. My kid is in his last year of school and will probably come back home next year. I hate to think I’m going to have to plunk down another $50 a month to the cable company to get the next level of bandwidth. We already pay a ton for cable and phone internet, so I feel a technology to allow us to spread our use over the bandwidth we already pay for would be helpful and worth it.
Plume is the same product as Xfi. Since you are an Xfinity customer, you might be better off going that way.
I went with Plume because you could use a wired backhaul, while Orbi could not. Be aware that you don’t have a lot of control over Plume. You set it up and it does what it does. If you want to tinker with settings and such, look elsewhere. Unlike Orbi, you need more units, usually one per room.
Generally speaking, I’ve been happy with Plume. We had issues the last few weeks in our old house, but I think that might have had more to do with the cable modem. Internet went in today at the new house, and I pulled some of the Plume units out of the box and everything is working great so far.
It all just works. If I had a complaint, it would be that units are sometimes slow to switch to a new node as you move about. Or sometimes a device will connect to a more distant node with weaker signal for no apparent reason.
This sort of whole-network monitoring seems like such a needed and powerful feature I don’t know why every home router is not rushing to produce this as a key feature. I’m not even sure what a good code model would be, I have used PRTG network monitor, and Glasswire, but something which can provide a simple usage summary and dashboard for a whole home network should own the market.