I’ve been on vacation for the last couple of days in San Diego, attending the Comic-Con for the first time in years, and staying with family in the area.

For the last couple of days, I’ve also been struggling to get my laptop online here at the ancestral family estate, which uses Cox as its (cable) broadband service. Since there’s only a single G5 iMac here, there hasn’t been a need to set up a router, or, for that matter, even a WAP.

Quaint.

Even so, I figured it would be a slam-dunk to simply take the Ethernet cable out of the iMac and plug it into my laptop, thusly going online using my own machine. No dice. After a little bit of digging, it turns out that Cox cable actually locks down access by the MAC addresses of the single-line cable modem and the computer connected to it. Want another machine to connect? Cox forces its users to purchase a Cox-installed router and cabling for the usual bullshit reasons like supposedly improved reliability and what-not, but it’s basically to mask a money grab.

Their users are already paying for their bandwidth; the addition of another machine on a home network doesn’t alter the size of the pipe they’re supposed to be providing. There are hacks to get around this, most of which involve cloning MAC addresses, but after a hard day of relaxation I just don’t feel up to compugeekery. Cox must figure the bulk of their users don’t realize what a ripoff it is.

Lame.