If you recall, back in May of 2008 we told you how the Comcast web portal was hacked by a group calling itself "Kryogenics," posting the usually gramatically incoherent shout out to their own supposed awesomeness and fellow nerd homies. The hack disrupted user access to the portal and the official Comcast forums for several hours, before Comcast tracked down the problem and the fix was propagated across DNS servers. According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, the three young men responsible for the hack have been indicted for "conspiring to disrupt service." The indictment claims the hack cost Comcast "a little less than $129,000," though each defendant could receive a maximum sentence of five years in jail, three years of supervised release, a $250,000 fine and a $100 special assessment, on top of potential forced restitution to Comcast -- who certainly could use the money.

Yesterday we issued a report exploring how Verizon was again hinting at how they believed metered billing is inevitable. We also discussed how yet again, you had an ISP suggesting that a shift to metered billing was financially necessary (not true) and that the ISP desire to shift to metered billing was dictated by some kind of altruism (also not true). Apparently, this position upset Todd Spangler over at Multichannel News, who somewhere in between taking pot shots at "edgy bloggers" and "clueless" flat-rate pricing proponents arrives at his central thesis: that consumption-based billing is inevitable:Again, the inference that the flat-rate pricing model mysteriously doesn't offer the money needed to fund investment is simply not true, should you care to look at any major ISP balance sheet or 10-K. Internet usage data (at least the data not coming from DC lobbyists pushing the "Exaflood") indicates that future capacity demand can be met with only modest capacity upgrades.

After his company won approval of its bankruptcy plan this week, Charter Communications CEO Neil Smit tells Bloomberg that upon exiting from bankruptcy, the company will raise prices and consider consumption-based billing. Charter Communications hasn't been profitable since the company went public in 1999, posted a $2.45 billion loss last year, constantly ranks at the bottom of most customer satisfaction surveys, is swimming in debt, and was just forced into bankruptcy and reorganization. Of course these problems were caused by poor management, not flat-rate broadband pricing -- a model that's been perfectly profitable for most ISPs. Despite Charter's constant failings, Smit himself was paid $7.4 million in cash compensation for 2008, and remains one of the highest paid executives in St. Louis. Perhaps he'll volunteer a fresh pay cut in addition to socking his customers with higher prices? For the team?

You might remember Ohio-based Buckeye Cablesystems for when they came down hard on the heads of cable modem upcappers back in 2002, going so far as to bring in the FBI to investigate users who were trying to squeeze extra bandwidth out of the cable system. It's now 2009, and Buckeye has found a much better solution for bandwidth-hungry customers -- they've started a fiber to the home trial in Toledo, but they're installing it without having to dig up any existing infrastructure thanks to a new technology by Kabel-X. From the Kabel-X description of the technology:Delicious, just like the white filling of an Oreo. Those interested can watch this video for more detail.

With the cable company he founded currently struggling through bankruptcy, Charter Communications founder and Chairman now finds himself facing a much more serious and difficult task: beating back cancer a second time. Allen, who already fought and beat cancer some twenty five years ago, is now facing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, according to The Seattle Times. "For those who know Paul's story, you know he beat Hodgkin's a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too," says Allen's sister Jody Allen. Allen spent much of the summer battling with creditors, who didn't like Allen's efforts to retain control of the company after restructuring. The restructuring is supposed to eliminate about $8 billion of the company's $21.7 billion in debt.