Xfinity/Comcast customers lost internet, phone, and TV service Monday morning around 10 am. And an initial promise of service restoration by 1 pm has now been updated to 8 pm.

It appears that thousands of Xfinity customers across the middle of San Francisco, including Polk Gulch, Pacific Heights, Japantown, the Upper Haight, Castro, and Glen Park neighborhoods, are without internet service today, due to reported "network damage" that Comcast says it is working to fix.

The incomplete map below indicates where outages are occurring, with the full purple ovals indicated more than 2,000 customers in that area without service.

KRON4 picked up on the problem, and while Xfinity internet outages are not exactly rare, they typically do not go on for entire days.

Xfinity, per usual, "apologize[s] for the inconvenience," and the exact reason for the outage has not been given.

This is a developing story.

A San Francisco man was arrested on July 4th for allegedly trying to break into a home in San Rafael well posing as a Comcast technician, with the help of a uniform and a stolen Xfinity van.

You've heard about burglars who target the homes of people on vacation. Well, a homeowner in the Bret Harte subdivision of San Rafael called the Marin County Sheriff's Office on Monday to report on a suspicious character in a Comcast uniform trying to get into their front door — as seen on their Ring doorbell camera.

"As Deputies arrived in the area, they found the garage door propped open with a ladder and a subject flee[ing] from inside the garage into a Comcast vehicle," the sheriff's office writes in a Facebook post. "The vehicle quickly fled the area with the Deputy giving chase."

The Xfinity van led the deputy on a chase into Contra Costa County, where the suspect tried to take an offroading "shortcut," tearing across a densely planted median from an off-ramp in Richmond.

"The vehicle became lodged in thick brush and the driver fled on foot," the sheriff's office writes.

With the help of a CHP helicopter, and a CHP unit located nearby, deputies were able to locate and arrest the suspect. He's been identified as 30-year-old Tyler Christopher Ramirez.

Ramirez has been booked in the Marin County Jail on charges of burglary, possession of stolen property, evading arrest, and vehicle theft. Deputies believe Ramirez stole the Xfinity van and was posing as a Comcast employee — though it's not clear if any other burglaries were committed.

Photo: Michael Dziedzic

Some have worried that consumer rights would lose out to corporate America during the Trump administration. Well, Tuesday's congressional vote allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to sell your personal web browsing history is expected to be signed into law by President Trump, awarding a free new jackpot revenue stream to ISPs who want to sell your porn-viewing habits, medical searches, and personal web-browsing and financial details to any marketer or private investigator they please, without notifying you of any of this.

Why would Congress approve such obviously anti-consumer legislation that rewards the companies with some of the worst customer service in America? The legislation’s author, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) offers some vagaries that the law will “inform customers about innovative and cost-saving product offerings”. For a more accurate explanation, The Verge has a handy list of which congresspeople voted to allow ISPs to sell customer data and how much money each took in telecom industry donations.

The consumer clearly has no say in any of these decisions. So what can you do to protect your online privacy now that Comcast and AT&T can snoop on you and sell your data in new ways?

Pay Attention to Whether the Website is Secure
The URL of a secure website begins with the letters “https” instead of just “http”. Secure sites with “https” in their URL offer a great deal more privacy from your snooping ISP. ISPs can tell you visited the site, but they won’t see all your activity while there. SFist, for instance, is not a secure site — so your ISP would know whether you’ve browsed content about sex, drugs, or rock’n’roll.

Even if the site is not secure, you can make it secure by adding the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s HTTPS Everywhere extension to your web browser. This won’t hide what sites you’ve visited, but it will hide your activity on these sites.

Use The Tor Web Browser or Tools
The Tor Project has a free web browser and various other tools to anonymize your web behavior. Tor is fairly highly regarded in hacker community, and PC World has a nice Cliff Notes explainer on how to set up and use Tor.

Tor does, however, have a tendency to slow down your internet speed and occasionally produces a less-than-ideal browsing experience.

You can also just install the Internet Noise browser extension that a clever programmer created this week, which passively loads random websites in browser tabs, filling ISP databases with useless noise.

Buy and Install a VPN
There is some debate over whether a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which encrypts your web browsing and puts it on a more private channel, is really an improvement over normal, unencrypted Internet use. After all, you’re just switching the ability to snoop on your data from one for-profit company (your ISP) to another (whoever sold you the VPN). But there is consensus opinion that free VPNs are a pretty shady racket, and their revenue model is the exact same data-selling scheme in which the big telecoms now hope to engage,

Via Lifehacker, something called That One Privacy Site has a list of the 179 best known VPNs and gives each a color-coded ranking based on your areas of need.

Complain About It To Your Congressperson
They say all those phone calls and town hall tirades made a difference in helping to keep Obamacare from being repealed. While this internet legislation has already passed, it can’t hurt to let your representatives know that you’re not happy about it. In the case of Nancy Pelosi, though, she probably already knows.

Related: Uber Staff Allegedly Enabled Stalking And Accessed Beyonce's Trip Data

Cheekily choosing a very common enemy, one Oakland startup is gaining tons of press and good will — and fast.

How fast? 5 minutes flat — or, rather, that's how long AirPaper says it can make the usually onerous task of unsubscribing from Comcast.

So many of us are caught in the clutches of cable, an industry many a technology company considers a legacy and whose customer service most agree is ripe for disruption. So, for just $5, AirPaper claims it can save you the grief of dealing with one of Comcast's dreaded "retention specialists" and hours of their wheedling.

"Billions of hours of beautiful human life are lost each year to terrible but required processes." writes AirPaper of the unsubscription process. The startup duo of Earl St Sauver and Eli Pollak met while working at Climate.com and have now received coverage everywhere from TechCrunch to CBS.

"We're dedicated to helping people spend as much time as possible doing the things they love," the company continues, "We love turning bureaucratic processes into surprisingly pleasant processes we call 'AirPapers.'"

You get the hint. Things don't stop with Comcast. Up next is a streamlined, outsourced process for getting a San Francisco parking permit, or for registering for SF Business tax. AirPaper says it won't sell your information, and that it only requires details necessary for the bureaucratic processes in which it engages on your behalf. Let's hope they really do subscribe to those ideals of privacy.

Someone inside the evil empire that is Comcast at least a sense of humor. A story's emerged via Wired that a Spokane, Washington man's Comcast bill arrived with his first name changed to "Asshole." This all happened after the man's wife got into a dispute with a Comcast rep after trying to cancel her service — you know, like on that infamous recorded call from last summer.

Blogger Christopher Elliott first reported the story after he was forwarded the bill from the woman herself, Lisa Brown, showing the name on the account as "Asshole Brown." Her husband's real name, and the former name on account, is Ricardo.

The best part about this story is that it actually took the woman multiple tries to get the account name fixed! She went, in person, to a local Comcast office and made some calls, and no luck. It wasn't until this blogger started poking around and calling them himself that a regional PR person intervened and called the name change "completely unacceptable and inappropriate."

The reason for a rep deciding to rebrand the account "asshole" seems to be that the woman refused to keep her cable service after being offered a two-year contract. She claims she was perfectly polite about it, but she was trying to cancel the cable and keep just the internet service.

Comcast has apologized to the couple and given them a two-year credit/refund. But once again they've got to deal with a viral story about a rogue employee that casts the whole company in the negative light it deserves.

When San Francisco man Ryan Block called Comcast to cancel his internet service, he likely expected to get transferred to "customer retention," aka the purgatory level in which an employee tries to make you an offer you can't refuse. What he didn't expect was a nearly 20 minute call in which the Comcast staffer demanded again and again, with increasing aggression, to know why on earth Block and his wife, Veronica Belmont, would want to leave the company.

Block, a former editor at tech site Engadget, said on twitter that "I am seriously prepared for people to tell me I’m being overly sensitive…" when he posted the below audio recording of his interaction with the Comcast rep, who repeatedly refused to disconnect Block and Belmont's service until he explained why they were leaving the telecom giant for Astound, a Bay Area-based TV/internet/phone company.

According to Block, the recording of the call with Comcast "picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby [Belmont] and I have already played along and given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling."

"The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone," Block writes.

"Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun."

How not fun was it? Here's an example:

Comcast: I’m just trying to figure out here what it is about Comcast service that you’re not liking.

Block: This phone call is an amazing representative example of why I don’t want to stay with Comcast. So, can you please cancel our service?

Comcast: I’m trying to help you. You’re not letting me help you by declining answers, by doing all this.

Block: You can help me by disconnecting our service.

Comcast: How is that helping you?

Block: Because that’s what I want.

Here's the whole conversation:

According to Block, Comcast did eventually manage to disconnect the service.

While Comcast failed to respond to SFist's request for comment at publication time, Vice reporter Sam Gustin says that Comcast tells him that "This isn't how our customer service representatives are trained to operate," an assertion at which many Comcast customers might have a pretty loud laugh.

This just in: An estimated 1,000 Comcast employees in Livermore, Morgan Hill and Sacramento 'have been told their positions will be moved out-of-state," according to ABC 7 News. Does this mean said 1,000 or so employees are out of a job? Most likely, yes.

We'll have more details as they surface.

Just when you thought corporate America couldn't find one more way to drain your bank account, news arrives this week that at least one, if not several, U.S. cable companies are considering charging usage fees to customers with the heaviest internet usage. More and more people are consuming video via Hulu and Netflix — some have even ditched their cable subscriptions altogether — and just as Netflix tried earlier this year to separate out their streaming service to profit from the growing demand, cable companies that provide internet service like Time-Warner and Cox are said to likely be instituting new fees for excessive bandwidth usage (i.e. video watching) as soon as next year.

A previous attempt to institute similar fees by Time Warner in 2009 was met with backlash from customers, and that's to be expected — we've all gotten pretty used to the idea that we get as much internet as we want! But a Canadian cable company called Rogers Communications has gotten away with usage fees since 2008. Time Warner CEO Glenn Britt said earlier this year that usage-based fees were "inevitable," and the company is testing meters that will allow for tiered pricing. Meanwhile, Cox won't say what their plans are, and Comcast is being similarly shy — though you can bet if Time Warner's customers don't go apeshit the way Netflix customers did over their price hike, the other guys will get in on the action too. The moral of the story here is if millions of customers balk and cancel their accounts, the companies will listen.

[Bloomberg]
[PC World]