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Actually, they're charging £2.25/GB for overage ( http://www.timico.co.uk/soho/ip_connectivity/adsl ), although Timico have the most insane pricing I've seen in an ISP. Two lines on their 50GB/month service (£22 each) are a cheaper option than their 100GB/month server (£50).

A much saner (business) pricing example can be found from Demon: http://www.demon.net/broadband/business-broadband - if you're in an exchange with LLU, £19/month gets you a 200GB allowance during peak hours and unlimited off-peak. If you're not on an LLU exchange (and this also says volumes about BT's pricing), £30/month gets you a 100GB allowance during peak hours (and did I mention the line speed is a quarter of the LLU package?)

The point is that some people just don't care about ping rates and bandwidth. For the life of me I can't get my father in the USA to upgrade his internet connection from a 1MB connection to a 10MB connection for an extra $10 per month. I just do not get it.

However if I'm gaming and my ping rate goes above 200ms I get very concerned. I would pay to have my network traffic prioritised, but I am doing something for which I perceive a greater need for a better response time. I know Demon are trialling a new gaming broadband service, however I don't think what they are doing is degrading the service for others.

They have their normal good network, but also have direct hooks into gaming events and servers. If AT&T offered a direct network connection to a game network (say Battle.Net) that got my ping rate down to 40ms on a game I played 24/7, then I would be seriously considering buying this 'premium' service. Even the idea of offering better connection to NetFlix would appeal to some people.

Anyway there has to be a recognition that some people don't give a shit how fast their connection is and there are those that really really really do and some of us might even pay for that.

Argh -- follow up! It seems Demon (a UK ISP) do exactly what I suggested, and provide a "430 Forbidden" page with a reason for the block: http://www.demon.net/error/403-blocked.html

My ISP isn't on the list of ISPs implementing the blocking, so my experiments with DNS requests might just show that the sites aren't reliable, though it's strange that the MIT nameserver resolves where mine won't. Perhaps they are using a different system based on similar information?

(Back to the point -- this is much different from internet censorship in many other countries! E.g. China. But back to the other point, what happens if you try and visit a 'bad' site in Germany?)

Demon Home 8000
8Mbit download, £17.99 a month inc VAT, no limits

Demon HomeOffice 8000
8Mbit download, fixed IP address, £22.99 a month inc VAT, no limits

Demon Home 8000
8Mbit download, £17.99 a month inc VAT, no limits

Demon HomeOffice 8000
8Mbit download, fixed IP address, £22.99 a month inc VAT, no limits

My UK ISP Demon has had a clause like this for ages

http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/aup/thusaup/
Demon cannot tolerate any behaviour by customers which negatively impacts upon its own equipment or network, or upon the use by other customers of the Internet, or which damages Demon's standing in the wider Internet community.

It's a bit broad, like most consumer contracts - essentially they can stop you being a customer if you piss them off. But as far as I know they use it to get read of spammers, scammers and so on, not to get rid of people who criticize them.

I'm very happy wirh Demon. But I think Laurence Godfrey is a nutter

They won't cut you off as such, but here in the UK, Demon Internet sell an "uncapped" service which has a "limit" of 50G per month before you are throttled back to 128kbps during daytime hours (Mon-Fri, 09:00-22:00). Annoying since the package is sold as having "no download limits" (technically correct, but weaselly). It's not the end of the world, since the throttle is removed overnight and at weekends, but it's a pain during business hours. And normal service is not restored until your rolling monthly average returns to within limits, and only then on an arbitrary date set for review, so it's possible to wait over a month for full speed to return. I'm able to monitor usage now (using IPcop), but it's very easy to hit the 50G limit (OK, I download the odd TV show), so am on the lookout for a better deal.

Demon seem good. Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them in any way. They aren't even my ISP, but I'm looking into changing to them.
Static IP, Usenet service, and decent, unmetered down/upstream makes them seem like they know what they're doing. Hell, you can even get network status reports by doing "finger report@gate.demon.co.uk".

Strong ties with Bits for Freedom (our version of the EFF), best Dutch ISP year after year, support for *nix systems, frequent new experimental services. Only pain is that they're also one of the more expensive ISP's. You get what you pay for, and with XS4ALL they give you the works.

(for the record, I'm a long-time customer so I am rather biased. But these guys aren't your average ISP)

...So, I had to leave Tiscali and they wanted one months notice, which they got and after a month, my broadband stopped working. It then took many calls to Tiscali chasing them up to get BT to cease the line...

Sadly, that's my experience too (though with fairadsl, not Tiscali). I'll never go with an ISP who (a) is cheap-as-chips, and (b) isn't part of the MAC system. The whole MAC thing annoyed me; basically OFCOM (OFTEL?) don't really seem to regulate the non-MAC ISPs, which mean that the ISPs have you over a barrel. Some advice I was given at the time was: call BT and claim you want to switch broadband provider to BT, but you can't do it online "because there's a problem". Let BT sort out the problem (ie. put a rocket up the backside of your old ISP), then walk away - and to your chosen ISP. Worked for me ;-)

I'm now with http://www.demon.net/ who I'm very happy with...

Equally happy! Though if that ever changes I'll give Demon a try.

I used to be with http://www.tiscali.co.uk/, who are one of the worst ISP's in the UK. I decided to move to another ISP and rang Tiscali to get a MAC code. With a MAC code the old ISP talks to the new ISP and they arrange a changeover, usually takes 2 weeks and you are down for a day at most. Turns out Tiscali don't do MAC codes, probably because they are one of the worst ISP's in the UK and every bugger would leave if it was that easy ;)

So, I had to leave Tiscali and they wanted one months notice, which they got and after a month, my broadband stopped working. It then took many calls to Tiscali chasing them up to get BT to cease the line, what should have taken a week took three weeks. Then it took a another 2 weeks for BT to cease the line after Tiscali finally got off their butts and told BT to cease the line, that again should have taken 3 or 4 days. In that time Tiscali and BT constantly blamed each other for the delay.

I'm now with http://www.demon.net/ who I'm very happy with, but if they ever go downhill at least they support MAC codes so I never have to go through anything like that again.

Jonathan

Seriously, though, if Linux can have a penguin, Sun's Java a steaming cup of coffee (coffee, java, geddit?), and anysystem.com a rubber duck, why not a little daemon? Lighten up, world.

BT are lying theiving scum that have exploited the British public with their monopoly for years. This is an obvious gimmick (that will fail) to attempt to steal customers from other broadband providers.

Their ADSL service is fine up until layer 3, at which point it becomes crap. Their web service will only let you download two simultaneous files, and given half a chance they will cap your downloads. Service is unreliable. I have several remote sites using VPN's - one uses BT at the moment, and VPN is up and down like a yoyo.

If you want broadband in the UK and you live in an area where you can get cable, use Telewest (I have a 3Mb line which is 1Mb faster than the fastest BT offering) or if you can't get cable and can only have ADSL, use Demon.

Oh and don't use BT for regular telephone lines - they are overpriced.

In fact, don't use them for anything.

Yup, Clive Feather was IIRC a founding member & still works for Demon

"windowsupdate.com" is a real Microsoft site? The HTML looks like something some dumb spammer would write. There's a NOFRAMES tag, but the page doesn't have frames. There's no BODY tag (which is why the page won't display in Mozilla). There's no CSS. There are no Microsoft Front Page indicators. The domain is in REGISTRAR-LOCK. Yes, the registrant info shows Microsoft's address, but you can put anything in there.

(fires up Demon.net's net tools page)

windowsupdate.com - WHOIS shows Microsoft being in control. No lock. DNS record looks like last updated on July 6th 2004.
windowsupdate.net - WHOIS also shows Microsoft in control. No lock. DNS looks like last update March 2004.
windowsupdate.org - WHOIS does show someone other then Microsoft. Registered Feb 2002, expires Feb 2005 by Jacco Tunnissen in Rotterdam, NL.

Looking at the page body of www.windowsupdate.com, it's simply a text-only HTML page, but with a missing set of BODY tags. Probably due to the massive DDoS that one of the past worms inflicted. So they removed all graphics and tried to make the page as light as possible. (I am surprised it's not simply a META REFRESH pointing at windowsupdate.microsoft.com.)

WHOIS for me.com:

Brainstorm Ventures International LLC

The patent is in the server automatically setting up subdomains for users as they sign up. News.yahoo.com is not a good example. However, if Slashdot was setup so that typing in NanoGator.Slashdot.Org brought up my stats list, well that'd be more like what the patent covers.

Well, in 1996 I had an account with Demon Internet I had the domain maidast.demon.co.uk where my account name was maidast. In 1998 they started giving free webspace for www.maidast.demon.co.uk as well.

Surely this is prior art?

I have 1024/512 ADSL without data limit for 39 excl. my phone subscription, which is about 25 per month. I could cancel that subscription but that would raise the DSL fee with about 10.

They recently doubled my ADSL speed unannounced and without extra costs. That was kinda cool :D

Demon Internet - been with them for years. No real issues with them. No restrictions on what you do with your ADSL connection. I've served over 30GB of data from my webserver in my house in one month (used to have a MAME site on it)!

I've only come across one truly unlimited ISP and that is Demon in the UK. Using their Premier Plus for a signtificant monthly fee you do get 24x7x365 access on ISDN only.

Its not cheap but you do get your moneys worth for those who can't get broadband

Rus

I've only come across one truly unlimited ISP and that is Demon in the UK. Using their Premier Plus for a signtificant monthly fee you do get 24x7x365 access on ISDN only.

Its not cheap but you do get your moneys worth for those who can't get broadband

Rus

It seems the UK's largest ISP, Demon Internet, is also affected by a sudden recent surge in e-mails.

Thankfully they are keeping their customers informed through their status pages but it has resulted in us moving our mailboxes from Demon for the time being. We have seen delays as much as twenty-four hours or more.

Demon Internet released the following statement, also available in its original form here.

Demon Mail Service

Some customers will have noted that the delivery of some email has been delayed.

As a result of maintenance carried out on our mail platform, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of part of the mail server application.

This resulted in some email being back-logged. Whilst we have cleared a significant volume of the back-logged email, we have taken the decision to manage this email separately to avoid similar delays to any email sent or received today. The remaining backlog will be managed and delivered over the coming 24 hours.

A further announcement will be made in due course.

We regret any inconvenience caused.

Malcolm Muir
Demon Internet

It seems the UK's largest ISP, Demon Internet, is also affected by a sudden recent surge in e-mails.

Thankfully they are keeping their customers informed through their status pages but it has resulted in us moving our mailboxes from Demon for the time being. We have seen delays as much as twenty-four hours or more.

Demon Internet released the following statement, also available in its original form here.

Demon Mail Service

Some customers will have noted that the delivery of some email has been delayed.

As a result of maintenance carried out on our mail platform, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of part of the mail server application.

This resulted in some email being back-logged. Whilst we have cleared a significant volume of the back-logged email, we have taken the decision to manage this email separately to avoid similar delays to any email sent or received today. The remaining backlog will be managed and delivered over the coming 24 hours.

A further announcement will be made in due course.

We regret any inconvenience caused.

Malcolm Muir
Demon Internet

The big corporate ones, targetted mostly at home users, although some do have business customers as well. They're the ones likely to introduce those weird clauses in their TOS, or to provide poor service because they're big and they don't care anyway, if some customers leave, they'll get new ones who have seen the TV ads or picked up a CD at Walmart. A lot of those ISPs originate from their country's phone company too.

The latter ought to be evil, after all it was founded by a Hubbardist, but it does at least make an effort to provide a basic service with as few catches as possible. I'm using their DSL service at the moment and was surprised and rather happy to see nothing about servers, use of non-Windows machines, NAT, etc, in their contracts, beyond a basic "We will not provide customer support if you're using anything other than [list configurations here]".

Demon, if anything, are even better though from conversations with friends back in Britain, they're suffering a little because of British Telecom's desire to try and make DSL as unattractive as possible to anyone who wants to do more than look at web pages. Demon themselves continue to provide an "anything goes, you're responsible" approach, despite being purchased by Thus a few years ago, a telecoms company whose reputation is considerably poorer than Britain's original ISP.

It's genuinely worth looking around for the "original" ISPs and seeing what they offer. Quite often, they're still trying to do what they were originally.

I don't know why more ISPs don't offer twin email feeds for each customer - one could be totally unfiltered for the paranoid, and the other filtered using whatever the ISP decides upon.

I know I'd use the filtered feed at my ISP if they offered one. I now get over 100 pieces of spam evey day - most for random character usernames and usernames I've not used in 6-7 years!

ADSL where available either direct from BT or several resellers (there are loads more). 512 down / 128 up costs about GBP 30.00 / month give or take.

There are two major cable operators in the uk, ntl: and Telewest. Both offer cable modem in almost all areas of their networks for about GBP 25.00 / month for 512 and 40.00 / month for 1M.

ntl couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Bah, Demon are rubbish tonight.

The site is here for a few hours.

Despite the BBC having a story on this (the first place I learned of it: I had a looong lie-in this morning, er, afternoon) that incidents.org which collates scanning activity worldwide has "status: green" showing with a small note that "some scanning by new SQL Server worm causing some slowdowns" - not exactly apocalyptic, huh? And here in the UK (My ISP) everything looks fine. Slashdot's faster than usual if anything... sounds like a storm in a teacup to me.

Umm, Quake 2 would never run of a 486...

Seems a bit stingy - after you've downloaded the latest RedHat ISOs, and read your spam, you're left twiddling your fingers each month.

Actually, this will at least help in the fight against spam, as it eats away at a subscribers monthly allowance it would probably help make the scumbags pay through the courts.

Glad my ISP basically allow you to do anything - I've served >30GB from the web server on my DSL line in a month before now! I'm pretty sure I've downloaded close to that figure too, leaving ftp sessions to run overnight for ISO's...

Although the idea made it into reality in the Turnpike email client, which is probably the best email client for Windows that you haven't used, but which is so terribly marketed by Demon Internet that you might as well forget I said this right now.

Or turnpike (use this myself & find it superior to the bat, though possibly because I grew up on it) http://www.demon.net/products/turnpike/

The Linux version will run under FreeBSD but both the Linux and FreeBSD versions require hardware graphics acceleration. The only supported graphics acceleration is 3dfx though others may work.

I tried BT's service, but switched to demon (no I don't work for them) as they have a pretty open policy, plus you get a fixed IP (which is a double edged sword I guess).

Before I signed up I asked about their policy for customers running services on their machines and bandwith limits. I was told I could do anything I liked so long as I didn't cause problems for anyone else.

Service has been great for me, I could never go back to a modem now ;-)

True enough, the spammers probably don't give a damn about what pathetic legislation can be brought against them at the moment, especially the hardcore responsible for the bulk of it. More serious legislation to let you go after the spammers, the ISP hosting them and maybe even the luser whose open relays were used would still be a further deterrent though.

That aside, I don't think you can win the fight against spam by going after the spammers directly either, but what is required is to remove their support infrastructure and watch them wither on the vine. If spammer friendly ISPs are more liable for the actions of their customers then we might stand a better chance of reducing spam. My dial up ISP in the UK, Demon Internet, has recently institued a policy of pulling the plug on it's customers before notification of the customer if they are, or are being used to, spam. Like any legislation this is a start, and every little helps... the more ISPs that implement similar procedures the better.

One of the common things that people complain about on my ISP (Demon Internet) is that of the 'smart hosts' (servers that relay the mail to avoid you having to send the messages direct to the recipients) being marked as being open relays due to people having badly configured mail servers that use the smart hosts - or even open proxies that can be used to relay through these smart hosts. Whenever these smart hosts get listed on the blacklists it affects all customers of the ISP, not just the offending customers who have these open relays. Admittedly Demon should take a harder line on these people who have the badly configured mail servers/proxies - and indeed there was a recent announcement by Demon that access to the smart hosts would be cut off if abuse was detected - but even then its usually too late - the hosts have been already marked as open relays. Perhaps there should be some way of preventing these smart hosts from being added to the blacklists.

Angelina Jolie herself doesn't work with me, but at least most of the male geeks are drooling over one cute geek girl in this place. I don't believe it's part of the job description that hackers have to be fat and ugly.

and never seen a Macintosh PowerBook Duo with an Intel CPU.

Well, yeah, but at least one of the laptops appeared to be running Unix - there was a "ls -l" output, and a packet trace (from a Demon Internet dialup account at that). Blink and you miss it though, because it boots into MovieOS a second later.

My upstream ISP (Demon Internet) is a participant in the 6bone network; so I e-mailed their 6bone contact and requested a small allocation of IPv6 addresses with which I could use on my internal network (all Linux; therefore all capable of IPv4).

I received no response from them whatsoever after three seperate e-mails. I *want* to switch away from IPv4, but my upstream ISP won't let me, while they are making out to the outside world that they are 'spearheading' the IPv6 revolution by announcing that they are a member of the 6bone.

Yes, I have considered applying to other 6bone networks, such as JANET and other UK ISPs, but my upstream ISP would have been ideal for my IPv4IPv6 tunnel (zero routing overheads). Besides, it is a matter of principle.

Anybody running a 6bone site reading this care to comment ? - before you say it, yes, I fulfil the criteria for joining the 6bone (according to http://www.6bone.net/ anyway).

This is exactly what I do right now.

My ISP (Demon Internet) gives you unlimited email addresses at your own domain (albeit a sub-domain of demon.co.uk). This way I can sign up to anything with a unique name, e.g.: unique@myhost.demon.co.uk, and then I can tell where the spammer got my email address from.

Using this technique I have been able to tell that BT sell their customer's email address to sports.com, and Virgin Radio will sell their user's addresses to almost anyone selling junk!

Sure is interesting to find out where the spammers harvest the email addresses from.

I pay around $2000 a year, including taxes, for a 2M/256k line, 20:1 contention, fully routed with 15 IPs...

Are you sure you mean bucks and not quid? The offering from Demon -- one of the UK's largest ISPs -- is priced at £175 per month, i.e. £2,100 pa or around $3,000 for 2M/256k 20:1 access.

The BT offering is slightly cheaper but (1) you need to have windoze and (2) you MUST use their NAT -- there is no static IP with all ports open option. Did we already mention that BT suxs?

When I change jobs (no, I'm not planning it at the moment) I move countries, unless the UK fixes its infrastructure. Internet access and railways seems to be the most urgent priorities...

We've had similar rulings in the UK in particular the Dr Godfrey vs Demon Internet libel case.

(For Demon commentary see : Demon Response)

Fundamentally it was ruled that Demon were not a common carrier and thus liable for the content of their news-groups.

For a litigous country like the US this is very bad news. Think of all those fundamentalist states which will be suing ISPs for corrupting their children's minds with disgusting pornography, violence etc.

I'd lobby your congressmen to get this sort of decision reversed, it can only lead to heavier censorship, and the winning of the ISP game by bland behemoths like AOL.

We've had similar rulings in the UK in particular the Dr Godfrey vs Demon Internet libel case.

(For Demon commentary see : Demon Response)

Fundamentally it was ruled that Demon were not a common carrier and thus liable for the content of their news-groups.

For a litigous country like the US this is very bad news. Think of all those fundamentalist states which will be suing ISPs for corrupting their children's minds with disgusting pornography, violence etc.

I'd lobby your congressmen to get this sort of decision reversed, it can only lead to heavier censorship, and the winning of the ISP game by bland behemoths like AOL.

No longer will I be able to get a shell with it's own IP for £54 a year ($80 US) - bummer.. how will i ever irc from i.graha.ms now :(

Also this will probably come down hard on ISPs like Demon Internet who give static ips to dialup users. This was a bugger originally since they used to use smtp for mail delivery which wasn't easy on Macs and Windows, but still a very nice feature.

Similar situation, I use Freeserve purely for my connectivity over ISDN. The throughput at times can be, shall we say, less than optimal, but for the price I don't think that it can be beaten (10GBP for what is effectively a 64Kbs leased line!). Especially as it allows my Linux boxen access throught my router - as you say, no special software is a blessing.

I still use my (paid for) Demon Internet account for email and web hosting, but as their service has been in decline for a while now this may change.

• AltaVista admits service a sham
• Alta Vista's world crumbles
• AltaVista mystery ends today
• AltaVista: the silence continues and the farce continues
• CMGI to buy ISP for Altavista

The opt-out option from DoubleClick is reasonable for what is does:

It does not stop tracking of visited web pages, it simply stops associating that tracking information with you.

So DoubleClick will still know that somebody visited the lesbian p0rn site (or whatever the original example was) and it will know the IP address that the request came from (I always go through a web cache that my provider supplies: this provides some degree of anonymity) but it will not know it is "you" and will not be able to associate this visit with the one you made yesterday (and the day before and the day before that, ...)

It's fairly easy to check that the opt-out is working by simply checking the cookies for DoubleClick. If you are using Netscape 4.x and are unfortunate enough to use it on Windows NT, then look for the file:

drive:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\Your User Account\cookies.txt

Search in here for .doubleclick.net. (Other systems will find a similar file somewhere.)

A guy in the UK who successfully sued demon internet for a libelous post about him on usenet.
--

Using the Pairgain kit you can drive a single pair up to about 1.1meg, or if you use 4-wire circuits you can get about 2meg. The greater the distance though, the lower the signal, you have to remember that.

As I recall, Demon used to give it away to their staff as a perk - Mailbox seem to be doing that as well now.

FWIW, we put a link into the local pub, The Southern Cross.

But wasn't it the case that the 'defamatory' post was actually on a deja server and the demon server posts in question contained only URL's to deja? From reading the post on demon's site I'm led to beleive that the problem is deeper than just cancelling news posts on your (the ISP's) own server.