Excite Could Go Dark On Friday

robvasquez writes: "According to this CNET article, excite @home could be pulling the plug on cable modem subscribers. What's your providers back up plan? Could milions of trolls and Nimda spreaders be taken off line?"

Comments

what about us...

[djsable]

Some of us slashdot readers are going to be caught in that too you know.

It's not all "trolls and Nimda spreaders" who happen to be on @home, and could be screwed.

blah.

Re:what about us...

[camusflage]

Spamcop, at its core, is an automated spam processing system. It comes in a free and a pay flavor. Basically, you either cut and paste your spam into a form on their website, headers included, or you forward it as an attachment to your submission address. It slices and dices, looks for links, parses headers, records statistics, and sends notices to appropriate parties, be they ARIN contacts for IPs or abuse.net contacts for domains. There's all sorts of nifty stuff for making sure that your real email address doesn't end up in spammers' hands, instead creating a ReportID@spamcop.net address for each report (my most recent one is in the 4.75 million range). Still though, it's not perfect. Sometimes it's fooled by the mta chain, sometimes it does let an identifying bit of information slip through, and it DOES NOT parse reply-to addresses (grumble). Still though, it does do a pretty good job overall, and lets me send out reports about spam in a fraction of the time it would take to manually parse them.

For spamcop vs. @home, @home bounces anything with an @spamcop.net address, whether it's an automated report or whether it is someone using their @spamcop.net address (each paying member gets an email account that is spam-filtered, which can be used for everyday usage). Myself, I prefer Sneakemail for my mail management. Anyway, not only do they block spamcop reports, but they generally ignore even manual reports from non spamcop.net addresses. Just today, they started sending an auto-acknowledgement with a case ID of something like 1001 for every case (non-incrementing), indicating that they simply don't care anymore.

All in all, SpamCop, despite its problems, is an incredible service. It's open source too, with the code being available on SourceForge. You can use it for free, or pay $36/yr or $1/mb of mail for a lot of advanced features, such as the filtered email address, IMAP/POP3 access, black/whitelists, et al.

@Home trying to keep subs until last packet....

[Arethan]

I'm hearing rumors that @Home is delibrately causing issues with customer account conversions at various cable offices. My fiance is a CSR, and she's been talking about how @Home's sytems are no longer removing modem records from the headends, and the regional General Manager is contantly on the phone bitching at them to fix it (and fast). Apparently every time they try to convert a customer, they issue the account close operation, and it returns successfully, but the customer's modem stays online. When they add the local record for the subscriber, their UBR is given the appropriate information and will accept the modems, but the customer has a 50/50 chance of the @Home UBR responding before theirs. Effectively keeping most customers on @Home's network.

You'd think that they were just having issues with their UBR, or maybe with their access to @Home's subscriber management system, but they are able to successfully add new customers to their own service just fine, and everything was going smoothly with conversions until just a week ago.

Could be @Home being a prick until the very last minute, could be a coincedence. I'm not apt to support one theory or the other, I'm just relaying what I hear.

Moderation: -1 Heresay! (lmao)

Re:@Home trying to keep subs until last packet....

[hyrdra]

I'm a network engineer for a cable provider in Columbus, Ohio. What we do is contract backbone service out to bandwidth companies in the area. When we switch networks what we do is issue a DHCP update to all of our nodes, and turn the DHCP server off before it has time to respond with a new IP address on the old network. We then send a TFTP configuration to the modem to turn the network control access object off, switch the HFC IP address, turn it back on, and by this time the DHCP server on the new network responds with the new IP address.

The process is completly transparent and the only hit is to programs which keep a constant port open (e.g. file sharing programs), will suddenly loose a connection for receiving (sinc they have a new IP). However, they usually time out and reconnect.

It also has the added advantage of flushing out priate modems on the network, since customers who use a modem with it's TFTP disabled or it's control locked to on don't receive the new info for the new network and are stuck on an old, dead network.

We have switched networks over four times with only a few support calls. It could have been a big deal, requiring customer talk-throughs but we do it transparently.

Already switched here

[RollingThunder]

We've been barraged for a couple months on Shaw @Home to set up new shaw.ca addresses.

For those with Adelphia PowerLink@Home...

[antdude]

Please read this thread on DSL Reports. It includes important information, schedule, etc. :)

Re:It may not be so bad.

[Robotech_Master]

I just talked to an AT&T@Home support rep via their Java web chat app.

You say: Will my service through AT&T be affected if Excite discontinues its service Friday?

After a bit of prevaricating...

In-Max Marcus says: While we cannot be certain of the court's final decision, AT&T Broadband has always encouraged its customers to periodically save their browser bookmarks, personal Web page files, address book, and e-mail files to their desktop, disk or CD. These steps are commonly practiced for increased safety against unforeseen events such as computer crashes, network outages and virus infections.

I was able to get the guy to come through with an answer:

You say: I need the answer to this question: If Excite can't reach an agreement, and discontinues its service Friday, will my Internet access also be discontinued. I'd like a solid answer, please.

In-Max Marcus says: No.your services will not be affected at all and we wil reprovisoin all the settings needed.

So there you have it. My own cable service seems to be well in hand.

excite mobile email was discontinued today.

[BrookHarty]

I had customers calling into today saying they couldnt reach excite mobile mail on the phones. After some checking, mobile.excite.com says they discontinued thier service. They didnt even let me know so I could remove the connection.

Some past articles...

[interiot]

Step 1: Buy a majority stake in the top 2 broadband companies (Excite@Home and RoadRunner)

Step 2: Merge with MediaOne and control 30% of cable.

Step 3: Get the FCC to withdraw the cable ownership caps set during MediaOne merger

Step 4: Buy out the number one broadband company, despite protests from stockholders that AT&T (being the majority stockholder) had set itself up to pay very little for Excite@Home.

Re:don't let the screen door ...

[CaseyB]

50K? What were you sending them, a raw TCP dump of your entire day's POP/SMTP sessions? Anything more than the headers of the email you received is just extra garbage for them to wade through.

Comcast Users: You shouldn't have a problem.

[thesolo]

I talked to a few people at Comcast back when Excite was having trouble earlier this year, and they hinted at the fact that there wouldn't be a problem if Excite went under.

Later, when I called to complain about the newly-imposed bandwidth caps, they hinted at the fact that they would be offering different service plans in the near future, and mentioned Excite's financial troubles numerous times.

Also, if you notice they have had their own portal (www.icomcast.net) up and running for some time now.

Lastly, they just upped their cable modem service rates--from what I'm told by people at Comcast again, its to cover new operating expenses (read: no more Excite).

So, with any luck, Comcast users shouldn't experience many, if any, problems with service. All signs are pointing to them keeping service afloat.

Canadians don't have a problem...

[Hadean]

It's not that the loss of Excite isn't causing any confusion, but for both Rogers@Home and Cogeco@Home, customers have been contacted weeks ago about the change (snail mail, television commercials, e-mails, and even phone calls). Rogers and Cogeco will simply be changing over to @rogers.com and @cogeco.com respectively, and, as long as no one has their system set up as a static IP (which it shouldn't), the user only needs to change their e-mail program of the change (and maybe reupload their website to the new domain).

The sad part is, Excite is definitely being a big dink about all of this. I had several usernames from Cogeco, and then
I moved to a Rogers-controlled area. Everything was fine until now - unfortunately, since Rogers wasn't the original creator of the usernames, they can't transfer it to @rogers.com - and since Cogeco can't get Excite to transfer them to Rogers, I'm rather stuck. Fine, I can just get Rogers to create some accounts for me when everything's settled, but Excite could have simply deleted the accounts and then Rogers could have had free access to them - but no, they froze the accounts, not allowing anyone to touch it. Ugh. Ah well, things will be MUCH better now that Excite is over with... at least from my end of things.

Re:Backup plan

[ncc74656]

I'd have to characterize that as a Nutscrape problem [..] Ditto for Eudora.

It's a Rogers problem: it breaks RFC 822.

RFC 822 governs the formatting of email messages (besides, it's been superseded by RFC 2822). In what way does RFC 822 (or 2822) have any bearing on authentication with a POP3 server? RFC 1939 describes POP3; the argument passed with the USER command is described as "a string identifying a mailbox (required), which is of significance ONLY to the server." No limit is set as to what goes there; as long as the server accepts it, it's valid. I could associate "euidfje@uitsjl.dslj.tep" with my mailbox and it would be perfectly valid under RFC 1939. Are you suggesting that all of the POP3 servers that take this form of authentication are broken?

(Gratuitous slams at Microsoft don't constitute an argument. Besides, ESR would be surprised to find that MS owns fetchmail. :-) )