[pheleven]

It was many years ago now but I was living in an apartment complex that sold a shared connection on a wireless backhaul to a regional ISP - the ISP handled everything from building wiring to billing.

My friends and I were in college and taking lots of IS/CS classes. I had a personal apache server running to test a variety of things. I never once gave anyone a link to it - it was 100% for personal amusement and learning.

I had a 500k SWF video on it (which was creative commons) a few splash pages and whatnot, and that was it. The ISP was actively scanning their network for "servers" and came across mine. They played the SWF video from their office over the wireless backhaul. The video had ONE play (I kept the logs and attempted to give them to the ISP). I served ~505k, total. They turned off our internet connection and sent us a letter and bill of "overuse and abuse". They claimed we had uploaded 50mbps and were hosting illegal content and not abiding by our contract which said "no servers".

While the main moral of the story is that ISP has complete morons running it (I uploaded 500k for a few miliseconds topping out at 50mbps in their eyes; funny thing was it was a 5mbps wireless backhaul), but this isn't a small ISP (Surewest) and they were actively scanning my connection for open ports, and then manually looking through content that they found on open ports (they admitted that!).