Not sure, I'd analyze the benefits of both options.
I'd think that this service would eliminate the constraint of not having enough room for new clothes in the dresser at least.
I converted my home office to a standing desk about a year ago and now I won't turn back. @ work, I still have a sit down desk at my office, but I'm in and out of meetings more of late, so I'm not fixed to by desk for more than a couple of hours at a time. it ends giving me a good 60 / 40 (sit / stand) solution
The Desk
I'm using is a slightly older Ikea office desk that allows me to set it to any particular height. Sadly, it looks like they don't carry it anymore and the closest option that I see currently is the Frederick.
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60111123
It really shows up in British vs American versions of "The Office" television show. The American boss is more likeable than Ricky Gervais, and the show's tone is cheerier.
I think that's also because the American show was intended to last longer. Ricky Gervais' character was truly repellent, and probably wouldn't have been tolerable for 7 seasons.
I'm curious to find out what you guys / gals think about this. Is this just a fear tactic? Or, does ATT have a legit way to check if you're doing unauthorized tethering. Any of you get hit with this text on accident (false positive)?
EDIT
Removed the '(Ars)' from the title. N00b mistake :)
Supposedly all packets from the iPhone have a TTL of 64; packets from your laptop routed through the iPhone would not necessarily have the same TTL and are thus detectable.
"AT&T may, but is not required to, monitor your compliance, or the compliance of other subscribers, with AT&T's terms, conditions, or policies"
And, of course, it's now well-known that the government WAS using deep packet inspection on AT&T internet traffic.
I would assume they're just looking at how much you download in a month, though. I don't think AT&T is worried about offending outliers using large amounts of mobile data by inaccurately accusing them of tethering.
They probably just see that you are using more bandwidth than a normal user and infer that way. If they were packet sniffing your non phone traffic they might be able to infer from a plethora of non phone headers that the system will invariably send out. (system update check in the background. Etc. )
It is possible for them to detect this if they are doing Layer 7 inspection. All it would take is parsing the user agent to see that you're not on Mobile Safari. On the iPhone side, it just does a NAT and theoretically passes all information as the public IP of the phone itself.
Honestly, any respectable nerd is going to have either a) a box to SSH to or b) a VPN endpoint... if you encrypt/encapsulate all traffic originating from your tethered machine there's very little chance they'd be able to catch you.
Assuming the IPv4 TTL issue can be worked around (see elsewhere in thread), a phone that does GBs/month of encrypted traffic over SSH would still be a signal that something suspicious is going on.
