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Free maket? In my area there is only one cable provider (Bright House Networks (formerly Time Warner),) and they are c*cky as hell. A few months ago, I switched to satellite for lower monthly costs, and a low cost TiVO. Right before I canceled my cable TV service, I received a letter stating that the rates were again going up. The justification? They were going to add some channels aboutr which I couldn't have cared less. I wonder if they will lower rates when they remove channels (e.g. when the TechTV/G4 merger is complete. I'm willing to bet that they won't. For the most part my cable modem service worked fine, but when it did, and I was a direct customer, they had no tech support outside of business hours. Near the end, I switched to Earthlink cable modem through the same cable company, $5 cheaper per month ($25 cheaper for the first 3 months,) and tech support was available 24/7 via Earthlink. When I made the switch, all of my hardware stayed the same but the cable company charged me $9 to switch the billing record. What a bunch of crap. The cable companies know they have people by the balls, and they take advantage of it.

Free maket? In my area there is only one cable provider (Bright House Networks (formerly Time Warner),) and they are c*cky as hell. A few months ago, I switched to satellite for lower monthly costs, and a low cost TiVO. Right before I canceled my cable TV service, I received a letter stating that the rates were again going up. The justification? They were going to add some channels aboutr which I couldn't have cared less. I wonder if they will lower rates when they remove channels (e.g. when the TechTV/G4 merger is complete. I'm willing to bet that they won't. For the most part my cable modem service worked fine, but when it did, and I was a direct customer, they had no tech support outside of business hours. Near the end, I switched to Earthlink cable modem through the same cable company, $5 cheaper per month ($25 cheaper for the first 3 months,) and tech support was available 24/7 via Earthlink. When I made the switch, all of my hardware stayed the same but the cable company charged me $9 to switch the billing record. What a bunch of crap. The cable companies know they have people by the balls, and they take advantage of it.

Are companies still paying for that shit? I can't imagine them getting anything approaching a good return on investment for popup ads these days.

It's all about the marketing. Earthlink and AOL (or several other unnamed ISPs) advertise their mad pop up blocking features in their newest products on TV. Typical computer user sees the commericals and thinks "damn, I hate pop ups, I can never stop them. They are annoying. I'll get Earthlink/AOL and beat those nasty pop up advertisers once and for all! Where's my credit card?"

The fact that you can download a free browser like Mozilla or Opera that will install and run on your Windows system doesn't matter to typical computer user. If it's free, who supports it? If I'm paying for it, it's probably good software. They wouldn't make those clever ads with the "Six Million Dollar Man" music if it wasn't good software, would they?

You don't actually have to make a better product, you just have to convince enough people that your product is better. Then call it "Optimized" or something like that. Sounds good, but what does it do for you?

My dad's Dell PC arrived on August 11th... by late afternoon I assembled it and had him hooked up to a new ISP. And one day later (if you recall) the PC was hit by the Blaster worm.

My dad was not happy... The thing was fresh out of the box, and here I was explaining to him that the patches had been available at microsoft.com since mid-July, and Dell was shipping unpatched software.

Some Spammers=Some Hackers

Today's court ruling in favor of the ISP Earthlink vs Spam Ring Leader Howard Carmack got me to thinking.

Are ALL Spammers doing it for a profit? I find that many to most SPAM emails I receive in my inbox have unresolved links. Meaning; you can't "take advantage of the DEALS you are getting". (not that you'd necessarily want to) What would be the purpose of sending out emails such as this in great quantity, and using the man hours, hardware, etc to do it?

I think it may have to do partially with "the hacker mentality" Not all hackers do things for the common mythical reasons we like to think they do. (Revenge on the corporate world, profit, fame) - they do it because they can and a lot do it because they are mentally obsessed with it.

This was the attitude of a former colleague of mine that was hacker. He came from a rich family, was very well known in the community, and had a 1000 easier ways to get what he was wanting accomplished. He was obsessed first of all with hacking, second doing it with a Macintosh, and 3rd just because he could.

I'm not alluding to hackers having a mental problem, nor really comparing hackers to spammers.

This ruling, just made me think of motivation. Maybe if we can tap the motivation for Spammers, then maybe we can come up with the solution.

So are they all moving to the butterfly, or to popup blocker land, or have they wised up and are (doubtful) speaking easy? At the very least we know they aren't finishing the internet...

The Earthlink has a whole bunch of advantages of the RR account.

• It's cheaper
• It provides free, nationwide unlimited dialup
• It allows me to run servers
• It has no installation cost
• and it will soon have reasonably priced static IP addresses (additional $15/mo for Earthlink vs additional $150/mo for RR!)

This is what competition does. I find it short sited that the government grants a monopoly to the cable company by not letting anyone else lay cable, but then doesn't turn around and enforce shared access! It's just luck that AOL/TW is being forced to open up their access.

I live in a brand new subdivision that basically has no hope of getting any kind of dsl/cable broadband any time soon (God bless Qwaste and the Deathstar).

Then a neighbor told me about a small isp (Mesa Networks) that was offering fixed 802.11b connections for residential service in my area with 1-mbps up/down for $58/month. I called them up, arranged an installation time for a week later and have been up and running with no problems for a few weeks now.

Since then, it occurred to me that small shops like these offering fixed wireless access are a perfect compromise between the bloated-beauracracy-from-hell providers (ie here, here and here) and the unreliable, unmanaged, unavailable you-get-what-you-pay-for communal neighborhood nets that have been spawned as a backlash. It's become obvious that turning a profit offering broadband where last mile wiring is involved is extremely difficult if not impossible. But, the infrastructure to manage fized wireless seems a lot more manageable from a small business perspective to me

Anyway, I don't have the time, inclination or expertise to professionally manage an isp network and I really hope that the model these guys are pursuing pays off - I think small local providers have a much better chance of tailoring solutions that can cost effectively meet the broadband needs of neighborhoods and communities.

I especially like this part:

"The company also agreed to change its practices so further violations would not take place."

Seeing as how they have stopped offering the i-opener service, and sold the existing customers off to Earthlink, that shouldn't be too difficult for them.

I still get very mad at them whenever I think about it. I purchased two i-openers, one for each of my parents. My mother went through 4 of them before we gave up (the modem kept going bad). My dad faired slightly better until the change-over to Earthlink.

First, one of the big things Netpliance talked about when notifying their customers they had been sold out was that their monthly service would drop from $21.95 to $19.95! Great. What happens? Earthlink just hikes their rates.

"No one knows anything about those things, and anyway, they aren't high-powered enough to handle our service. It is just going to get worse. I would suggest you get a real computer instead."

Fantastic customer service there. Not to mention the fact that I waited for one hour and fifteen minutes during the middle of the day to speak with an Earthlink representative just to cancel my two accounts with them!

I guess more traditional practices include customer ripoffs.

I note, for example, this 23 May 2001 Press Release, where Earthlink announced

"EARTHLINK NAMES COCA-COLA EXECUTIVE TO HEAD ITS MARKETING EFFORTS
New executive vice president of marketing brings a wealth of experience to EarthLink"

The LA Times had this story about the ouster of one of the founders, under controversial circumstances.

I figure it is bloody in there.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

This really sucks for Northpoint subscribers. First their service gets cut off, then earthlink signs them up, now they find script kiddies playing on their boxen. What's next?

I'm afraid I don't see much hope for the good old days when there were two dozen ISPs available here in the Portland, Oregon area. Instead, the ISP market will be mostly the impersonal national companies.

It's already blindingly obvious that the cable modem market in the US will never allow a local ISP a share of the market, which is one reason I prefer DSL: I can get my service from a local ISP. Sure, the line still comes from Verizon, but it's better than nothing.

But the DSL market is going the way of the cable modem market. Companies like Earthlink, the ISP-eating monster, are rapidly buying up the small town ISP as they find themselves unable to compete with the budget of national companies, regardless of the quality of service.

So, that's my bleak outlook on things. Last year, there were no less than 7 ISPs in my area offering DSL service. Since then, two have gone out of business, two have been purchased by national companies, and a couple others are fledging. One remains in high standing, and that's the one I'm with. :) Hopefully they can hold off the soulless acquisition advance for a few years.

This story prompted me to read through Earthlink's TOS since that is my ISP. On http://www.earthlink.com/about/policies/aupolicy.h tml it says "Pinging is expressly prohibited." Well I guess I've violated that one a few million times.

This post is also violating their Internet Access Agreement (http://www.earthlink.com/about/policies/accessagr mnt.htmlbecause it says "You may provide a hypertext link to our Web site on another Web site, provided that: the link must "point" to the URL 'http://www.earthlink.com' or 'www.earthlink.net' and not to any other pages within the Web site."

Oh well!

This story prompted me to read through Earthlink's TOS since that is my ISP. On http://www.earthlink.com/about/policies/aupolicy.h tml it says "Pinging is expressly prohibited." Well I guess I've violated that one a few million times.

This post is also violating their Internet Access Agreement (http://www.earthlink.com/about/policies/accessagr mnt.htmlbecause it says "You may provide a hypertext link to our Web site on another Web site, provided that: the link must "point" to the URL 'http://www.earthlink.com' or 'www.earthlink.net' and not to any other pages within the Web site."

Oh well!

How many ISP's can you name who Earthlink has bought up?

A couple years ago, the dominant (and first) ISP in the Portland, Oregon area was purchased by OneMain, which was recently purchased by Earthlink.

Earthlink makes such a business out of acquiring other ISP's that they have a contact page for ISP's interested in being purchased.

I found this while going through the sendmail newsgroup on http://www.deja.com It's about the mail system that earthlink uses. It discusses how they use open source to build a scalable mail system.

A Highly Scalable Electronic Mail Service Using Open Systems

"...In September of 1997, EarthLink provided email service for over 350,000 subscribers with a 99.9+% service uptime record. In fact, we expect the current system to scale to well over 1,000,000 users without significant alteration of the architecture as presented....."

Rule number 1 in Linux -- If it's worth doing, someone probably already has. Earthlink has published a really great paper on this subject. Definately worth the read http://www.earthlink.com/about/ papers/mailarch.html

EarthLink uses Unix systems and NetApp filers for mail service. They have a lot of customers.

They've written up a a paper on their mail system architechture: http://www.earthlink.com/about/ papers/mailarch.html. It's definitely worth a read.