Ask MeatChat Advanced cable modem home self defense:
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First, please feel free to welcome me back to teh intarweb after a long week of moving heavy boxes of books and blinky things. Or if so moved, boo and throw poop, whichever.

It's been a long week - the longest I've gone without regular access to broadband in 4-5 years or so. Well, I've gone longer by choice on trips and quests and whatnot, but even then I always knew that somewhere at home or near home there was at least a slightly plump pipe and a box of blinkenlights happily packeting away, just waiting to be commanded and tickled and massaged and otherwise ordered around.

Having already chosen the apartment for reasons of economics, palatial size and location, and bizarrely finding myself more than 18k feet from my new and highly disreputable switching-house of overpriced twisted copper strands and dialtone-service, I've had to bite the bullet and make with the schlub-schlub noises on the Cox, what with the coaxial wanging and the most hateful avoidance of purchasing these needless extra features like useless "teevee" channels and the shared local loop-de-looping and the extra-extreme insecurity and Trojaning.

This is the first time I've been unable to get DSL or even low speed PPPoE aDSL.

After a great deal of tracing cables around the roof and eves of the new hovel in extreme heat, lightning and unseasonally early moonsoon weather, after making the hideous mistake of calling Cox support from a payphone on a 110 degree Friday night and holding for (literally) 45 minutes just to get the entirely unrequired "master account username and password" that only is used for their useless spyware and IE browser hijacking, I finally got a solid link and connected my poor, naked, and unpatched Win2K fileserver box to the cable modem and recieved three Windows Messaging popups and a browser hijack before I could manage to download FireFox and ZoneAlarm and gouge my own brain out with a rusty backplane cover.

Normally, this box (and all others) runs behind a (yet to be unpacked and installed) consumer hardware firewall and on a DSL line, so you can imagine my panic when I finally got an IP and spoke aloud the words "D'oH! FIREWALL! CABLE MODEM! UNPATCHED WINDOWS! SWEET, SASSY JESUS ON A DOGSHIT-TRAMPOLINE IN A PETTICOAT!"

Anyway, my question: Please bless me with your cable-modem self defense tips at your leisure. Cox sucks, but not as badly as no broadband at all.

Linux is an option - but not a permanent one, as I have a buncha audio and visual creative-type wares that have no Linux counterparts. What ports do you block? What should I do that I wouldn't normally do on a DSL?

Also, how do I deal with customer "service" if and when in the future they start bandwidth capping me and blocking my perfectly legitimate ports for things like Creative Commons torrents, or soulseek transfers? SSH? (s)FTP? My Terms of Service actually forbids VPN, WTF? Are they going to start blocking SSH as well if/when I tunnel through it?

Should I just kiss any illusions of ever having any sort of real internet experience ever again goodbye?

Many, many thanks in advance.

Also, feel free to just generally whinge about cable modems and share horror stories. And I hope you had as much fun reading some of this as I had writing it. My fingers have been itchy, they like typing.