Were you able to get your firmware upgraded? My understanding is that firmware upgrades can only be done over coax (there's certainly nothing on the web interface), but Time Warner Cable will not upgrade your firmware; so if you need a firmware upgrade you're pretty much out of luck.
Of course they can. The way DOCSIS is designed, your cable company has full access to your modem; your modem receives configuration data via TFTP from them and in most cases the firmware can only be updated over the coax interface. In fact, it's very rare that there's any configuration you can change on the DOCSIS modem side of things at all, even on the most expensive modems.
Lately cable companies have been pushing these hybrid modem/router combinations with things like wifi support built in. From a consumer standpoint, this seems very convenient, but the cable companies do this because it makes it easier for then. If you call up with an issue with "your Internet," they can remotely diagnose it and reset your modem/router. Make no mistake; they have more control over these than you do.
If you want to stop your ISP from having administrative access to your "private connection" (I assume you mean your wifi), then don't put the modem and the router in the same box. There's no other way around this.
The issue he is discussing with ownCloud and timezones is not a limitation that applies to their CalDAV implementation, it is just an issue with their web client. If you use a CalDAV client that supports time zones properly (most do), it will work fine.
Right, the server says its timezone is -0800. You don't know what timezone you are currently in?
I'm not sure I really see a point in this. How are you going to forget the server's time zone when it's listed in the timestamps? It doesn't really make sense.
Based on the description of the product, it sounds like it performs man in the middle attacks on BitTorrent trackers or an attack on the Peer Exchange feature of some clients. I am willing to bet that either TLS-enabled trackers or disabling PEX would be all that are needed to get around this.
This is a terrible article. The number of people moving away are people moving away from GoDaddy's DNS servers, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the number of people using them as a registrar.
I suppose this could be useful in the future, but I don't see why they would launch with just Github support; at the moment, this doesn't do anything Github doesn't do itself.