What NTL know....
 

Topic for discussion: What can/do NTL know about you?

I was talking to someone with a STB broadband set up, and he told me that in one conversation with NTL customer/technical services they were able to tell him the make of his router and the number of computers behind it.

Given what I know about routers I found this a little hard to believe. I remember people saying in discussions about the 3 computer rule that they couldn't know that.

Re: What NTL know....
 

I smell a bit of bovine excrement here m8 !!

There is no way to tell the make and model of a router unless is identifies itself via a html or telnet session...

I think you are having your leg pulled ! :)

Re: What NTL know....
 

There are researchers out there who have been developing ways of 'sniffing' behind a router by sending packets of data into a network and then analysing those packets as they come back out. Apparently you can tell with a fair degree of accuracy how many machines are there and what kind of machines they are. Somehow I doubt NTL is so cutting edge that they are employing these techniques yet, however I have no doubt they would like to, as it would be fairly easy for them to spot if someone was, for example, using Xbox Live without having paid their extra £5.

Re: What NTL know....
 

:Yikes: How would that work when the packets are re-written as they pass through the nat box :confused: And how would they send packets in ? Surely the nat would reject them !

Re: What NTL know....
 

There was a thread about this on .com about a year ago. It contained a link to research paper ... I'll have to do some fairly heavy googling and see if I can find it again.... :walk:

EDIT: OK, here it is - this link is Google's cache of an HTML version of the paper:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cac...hl=en&ie=UTF-8

PDF version downloadable from here:

http://www.research.att.com/~smb/papers/fnat.pdf

Re: What NTL know....
 

They would know it's mac address, do they have company trends?

Re: What NTL know....
 

Ahhh. Packet counters :D - Clever.... Would not work on a proxy though !! :)

I supose they could determine the make and model of the router via mac.. Though for a company that seem incapable of running mail servers correctly I doubt that they have the technology to do this !

Cheers Towny.

Re: What NTL know....
 

yes they do, for example a mac starting 00028a1 is an ntl home 200 (ambit) modem, and 00d0596 will be an ntl home 100.

So, they might be able to find out the manufacturer and model of the router, but to be honest i doubt they would bother, and dont see why ntl would need to do this!!

Re: What NTL know....
 

If it is a STB then the customer will have provisioned the router. If he called it the make and model then NTL will know.

Re: What NTL know....
 

You dont need to pay an extra £5 just to allow you to hook your xbox up. Thats only if you want the technical support for it.

I can hook as many different things as I like to my connection, and it has very little to do with ntl, provided I stay within the AUP, and dont go over the cap.

Re: What NTL know....
 

The MAC address is a strong clue, as they are assigned in groups to makers (and then the maker assigns them within that group. avoiding any risk of identical MAC's on the same ethernet), most routers will allow you to manually set the MAC address (aka. MAC address spoofing) so that the router can present the same address as the primary PC - this makes things a lot less painful if you have to move between router and direct connection, as you should be able to do a DHCP release/renew without power cycling the box.

Re: What NTL know....
 

'Fraid that's not the case. You can certainly hook up your Xbox without NTL's knowledge and without paying them, but if they knew you had done it they would insist you had breached their AUP in doing so. They don't market their Xbox service as 'pay us £5 if you want our technical support', they say 'pay us £5 if you want to use your Xbox on NTL broadband.'

Whether this is legal or moral of them is quite another matter, just be sure you understand that they think you're breaking the rules by doing what you're doing, and make sure you don't get caught. ;)

Re: What NTL know....
 

The only way to tell would be in the registration for the stb as you can register upto 5 pc's in here however I don't think it's possible to tell re the router side of things :shrug:

Re: What NTL know....
 

I thought the extra £5 was to provide an extra IP address for the xbox? Not that i've got xbox live or anything, i'm sure i read that somewhere though.

Re: What NTL know....
 

Well, I don't think the way the AUP is written is particularly clear-cut.

The way I interpret that, there is nothing wrong with my connection method (router), despite it not involving paying NTL £5pcm ;)

My router has been "designated" as XBox compatible by Microsoft (AUP doesn't say it has to be designated by NTL ;) ). Plus the AUP, in a different section, allows the use of routers.

For your £5 per month (plus a "set-up fee" too, AFAIK), you get a 2nd IP address (for the XBox or PS2), & also official tech support from NTL for using XBox Live.

£5pcm = £60 annually....whereas a cheap & simple Linksys BEFSR41 router will cost a one-off forty quid, thereabouts.

And XBL support...well, that's what the M$ XBL support line is for. Plus there's always these & other forums too.


Anyway....

Re: What NTL know....
 

From the Internet Usage Residential Terms & Conditions:

My emboldening... :D

Re: What NTL know....
 

I completely agree with you Tez, the AUP is very poorly written and I doubt it would stand up in court. I was really trying to warn Nutty that ntl don't see it that way and to be careful who he tells about his set up. :)

Re: What NTL know....
 

LOL, yeah, v badly written.

Wasn't taking issue with your warning or anything you said, Towny - just wanted to point out my take on the AUP ;) :)

Re: What NTL know....
 

They will be able to find out how many PC you've got behind...If you were on the Business 5 IP Static Service but thats about it!!! and even then u dont know if those PC's are running NAT.

Re: What NTL know....
 

I am not very sure on this... but if they were to inspect the packets that were coming from your network, would they not be able to see the mac address of the source machine, and therefore be able to see if they were picking up 4/5/6 different mac addresses?

don't know much about it myself, but i have heard this... could someone more techy confirm it for me please!!!

Re: What NTL know....
 

The MAC address that NTL sees is the MAC address of the WAN port of your router, which will be the same for all PCs connected behind the router.

However, it is usually possible to figure out which customer is using a router by the characterisitics of the DHCP requests that the router makes. Plus, if you don't clone the MAC address of the WAN port of the router, each default MAC address identifies its manufacturer, so you can see which router is a Linksys, which a Netgear, which a D-link, and so on.

But is still isn't very easy for an ISP to tell exactly how many PCs are behind a router.

Re: What NTL know....
 

I forget where I read it, but a rather forensic process was described, that could make strong assumptions about the number of systems behind a router, but it required tight monitoring. If you spoof the router's mac address, then unless they are going to router-check everyone, then they don't even know where to start looking!

What's the point of the 3 machine limit anyway? - So I can't invite 3 mates to hook their machines up, and team-frag some other guys over the net.

Since the standard consumer broadband router normally has FOUR ports, that would be a more understandable limit, since you would be hooking some extra hardware up to support more.

Re: What NTL know....
 

I think the idea was to "scare" people into not hooking up lots of machines and then consuming more (most likely if there are four average users as opposed to one average user) bandwidth.