Modem and Me: The Loose Ends

by Emily Saunders

This is an update to the article "Nightmare on E Street (Modem and Me Against the World)" which appeared in the Winter 2017-2018 issue.

I called a private tech company and managed to snag a free in-home consult.  The guy who came was friendly.  We sat on my couch and I showed him a few of my screenshots and provided a summed-up overview of my issues.  Unfortunately, he didn't seem to take me seriously.  The gist of what he said was: "What you're seeing is normal Internet traffic.  Everything you've been told up until now has been inaccurate.  Stop worrying about it."

It would have been so easy to believe him if I had talked to him first.  But even so, there were some things that just didn't add up, no matter how you looked at it.  Yes (sigh), I had come to the realization that some of the site history that I hadn't recognized, like art-0.nflximg.net, was actually innocent stuff such as "Netflix images."  Some of it was adware.  But some of it, like aia.entrust.net, was genuinely malicious.  So my stress levels improved somewhat, knowing both that a good chunk of it was just annoying but harmless crap, and also knowing that I wasn't just paranoid.

I still couldn't explain the email on my CenturyLink account being changed to a combination of my two email addresses.  That wasn't the kind of mistake I would make.  I was still unable to explain some of the unfamiliar site history, like the police officer forum or the Super User computer forum that the Geek Squad said appeared to be indicative of a hacker using my network to research more hacking strategies.  I hadn't forgotten this stuff, but I was out of steam.  Being a freaked-out basket case takes energy.  I was beginning to accept that, in the absence of taking computer science courses, there were some things that just might never make sense to me.

As I began to get used to Xfinity, I gradually thought about it less and less.  One thing that helped was that the people in the apartment next to mine moved out.  I had suspected it might be them messing with my Wi-Fi when I saw a brand name of another modem on my network and they were closer than anyone else.  A little voice inside my head suggested that they moved because they couldn't get away with jacking my Wi-Fi anymore.  Ha!

My Xfinity modem was a lease and, after thoroughly familiarizing myself with it, I decided it irritated the hell out of me and I should shell out for my own.  The advantages of a decent modem far outweighed the only possible mitigating factor for me: modem tech support from the ISP.  Owning my modem meant I had full control of it, whereas leasing came with the support, but then obviously Xfinity could tinker with it if they wanted to.  So in my view, the advantage wasn't much more than getting to bitch at someone else when whatever modem issue you were having used up all your patience - as opposed to taking care of it yourself.

I went to Micro Center and ended up getting a Netgear Nighthawk AC1900 Wi-Fi cable modem router.  On sale.  I got it in October of 2016 and am still using it.  It's a big improvement over the Xfinity lease.  It's not perfect - nothing is - and I poke around in the modem settings every once in a while.  I don't see much but the few things I do see, like right now the logs are full of stuff like DoS attack, Ping-of-Death, Teardrop or derivative, illegal fragments etc., but I just don't care.  As long as they don't get through, I'm fine.

Probably what bugs me most is when a male buddy of mine was hanging out and tried to watch porn on his phone while using my Wi-Fi.  This bugged me because not only does porn repulse me, but porn sites can be full of malicious crap that will f*** up your network.  I block several things with my parental controls, including porn.  Who knows, maybe that's a legitimate deterrent to hackers trying to steal your Wi-Fi.

I'm more confident in my technical knowledge now.  I'm familiar enough with this stuff by now that anything left that I'm not familiar with I figure must not be too important.  I know more than any of my friends do.  It's endearing when they come to me for techie stuff because if I'm an expert, then the bar is set too low.  I'm aware that I'm still a dunce compared to the likes of Hacker Quarterly readers.  That's still plenty good enough for me.