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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?"
Cox@home is staying up, they're just going to be dropping the "@home" part.
SERIOUSLY: I have Comcast@Home and do NOT want to lose my service. This is the best ISP that I've had (partly because of the speed). I waited for months to be able to get off of my 56k modem (which could only get ~21 due to the terrible phone lines), only to have it canceled in a few months? Just my luck. I am about 12x too far out for DSL and my only other option would be to go back to ISDN which is about 15x slower and costs easily 3x as much per month. I hope @home knows that there are many people like me who would be willing to pay an extra $5 or $10 per month if only I could keep my service. I have no other options. Let's review why:
I'm off to try to find the Judge's e-mail so that I can tell him of the situation he may put me and many others in. Of course hopefully the talks will work and none of this will happen, but with my luck...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I use Yahoo and find their junk-mail folder to be far superior to Hotmail's (I use both actually). Also, Yahoo provides you with 6 MB of email messages in your online mailbox, while Hotmail only allows 2 or 3. I admit that's still not much, but if you save that much email, why is it still online? As for reliability, I've never seen Yahoo to be down ever. Maybe that one time from the DDoS attack, but I didn't check my email that day.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
It's not all "trolls and Nimda spreaders" who happen to be on @home, and could be screwed.
You're absolutely right! It's spammers too. They're in the top ten sources of spam on spam reported through SpamCop. This is even more impressive considering that they send anything from spamcop, whether it's an automated report or a manual email with an @spamcop.net address, to Dave Null, prompting many SpamCop users to send a manual report
While I feel bad about the legitimate customers, seeing a provider who is utterly unresponsive to spam complaints disappear down the drain after circling a while isn't exactly breaking my heart.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 22:52:21 -0800
To: Chip Rosenthal <chip@unicom.com>
Subject: Fwd: Newsletter Provided by The Black World Today [Evaluation - see full header]
From: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Reply-To: AUP Enforcement Team <abuse@home.net>
Dear Chip Rosenthal,
Your message, including your pasted-in email message body, firewall log,
or newsgroup header, exceeded the maximum message size allowed by our
mail service. Please reduce the size of your email message and exclude
any excessive message body or MIME/UNICODE text.
For firewall users, usually one line detailing a system probe attempt
from an @Home user is sufficient for us to take action on the event.
Multiple lines detailing more than one event from the same user are not
necessary.
Thank you,
The @Home Network Policy Management Team
The message they refused was a whopping 50K.
Oh, and of course they fail to return the original report so that you can revise and resubmit it. That's a favorite trick of spam-friendly ISPs.
Pity @Home flushed all that money on the Excite portal. Otherwise, maybe they could afford another disk shelf for their mail server.
but it is pissing awfully a lot of people
It sure is!
Frankly, I'm very disappointed with what Rogers is doing to its subscribers. I've been a customer for over two years, and I haven't left despite the frequent occurrences of down-time (initially, at least). It's gotten better since... Until now.
The single most horrible change that was implemented was the requirement for the 'From' field to be set to an @rogers.com address. That is completely unacceptable for many people, like me. I use a forwarding address for specifically this reason: I don't ever want to go through the hassle of informing people of an address change. I refuse to change the 'From' field, and rightly so. Problem is, I can't send email outside of the @rogers.com domain. Oh joy.
Another great disappointment is the loss of static IP. When I signed up, I was promised a static IP address. A year and a half later (not bad!) the service changed to dynamic, with the option of static (eg. gather settings, set the router, go on with life). Once the transition is complete, static addressing won't even be possible, much to my dismay. I don't care that I need it or not, it's a matter of a promise being a promise.
But there's more! The inbound email servers changed their user name requirements to "userid"@rogers.com (from "userid" plain and simple). This is a pain to get working under Netscape 4.x. For those of you who have yet to make the transition, please go see this Netscape article for information on how to make the change work. I didn't have time to look that up beforehand, so I got my family to make the transition to Netscape 6.2.
The list goes on... Tens of thousands of the 500 000 Rogers@home subscribers use Netscape. It was supported for a long time. Slowly, however, support for Netscape was dropped. Now the techies, whether they want to or not, are not allowed to assist with Netscape matters (save for giving out server info... I'll get to that).
When it comes to server info, Rogers did not, sadly, tell the techies or even their supervisors what the "real" servers are. Instead, they insist everyone use 'pop' and 'smtp', which is find and dandy if you don't have a router, but useless if you do. It took a lot of searching through newsgroups to find what the real servers are. I don't blame the techies for this; I blame Rogers.
I have much to gripe about over this transition and the service in general, but I think this is enough ;-) It's a shame customers are being neglected and lied to as much as they are. If Rogers weren't the monopoly around here, I'd consider (NOT necessarily follow through on) switching to another service. Sympatico, though, is not an option (for me. I dislike PPPoE).
Thanks for hearing me through. Cheers!
Yeah, water's a lot harder to manage, and the stakes are higher when it fails. When's the last time people died because their internet connection wasn't properly maintained?
Internet would be a breeze compared to water and power.
I agree that providing Internet access is something the U.S. government should be involved in, let alone being a monopoly provider. However, I feel that some regulation to ensure (almost) universal Internet access is warranted, in the same way as current telecommunications regulations ensure that every U.S. citizen can have telephone service installed in his or her home.
Right now, ISP's are only providing broadband access (either cable or DSL) wherever they feel like it, since profit is their only concern in the current marketplace. Sure this works fine for those who live in densely populated metro areas since they can get broadband for a somewhat lower price than in a regulated market, but why should someone who lives in a rural area be completely denied broadband access simply because he lives more than 3 miles from a Baby Bell's switching station and the monopoly cable company considers his area too bass-ackwards to deserve an investment in providing cable modem access? I think in this instance the marketplace is discriminating against these particular parts of the country. And no, this situation isn't limited to the most remote parts of North Dakota and West Virginia either. The town I live in is less than 15 miles from Boston. Verizon doesn't have any switching offices in Westwood, DSL so isn't available. And AT&T Broadband hasn't moved an inch towards getting cable modem access available here either. So that means if I wanted reasonably priced (up to $60/month) broadband access here, I'm SOL because Verizon and AT&T don't consider my town profitable enough to provide such service. And I'm sure this situation occurs in many other suburban areas as well across the country.
I believe that the market should initially be given a chance to work itself out, but when the final solution provided by the market's providers basically states that some people don't deserve a chance to buy broadband service just because they choose to live in a rural area, something needs to be done by the government to ensure equal access to this technology.
What if back in the first half of the 20th century the government decided to let Ma Bell and the electric utilities deny service to whoever they deemed unprofitable to have as customers? A lot of places that are booming now in the Sun Belt and other parts of the country would still be as dirt poor as they were 100 years ago since the required tools for economic development would not have existed. In the long run, increasing the price of these services on urban customers to ensure universal access benefited the entire country including those affected by the government-imposed surchages by promoting economic growth throught the nation as opposed to certain scattered areas. It is highly probable that broadband Internet access will be as crucial to a successful business 25 years from now as electricity and phone service are to a successful business today, so it is incumbent on the federal government to ensure that businesses in unserved areas have a chance to compete in the future by giving them equal access to this technology. Though it should be a last resort, there are times when the marketplace fails to provide an equitable solution and the federal government has to step into the market for the sake of the common good.
That's what I told my fiance as well. Her superiors told all CSRs to stop doing account conversions because of this issue. My response was to leave @Home in the dust and continue converting everyone. When @Home goes dark, pull @Home's UBR and simply issue a reset on all nodes. One-by-one every customer will come back online, this time guaranteed to be on the proper network. They'll get about 100 calls during the 15 minutes of downtime, but tech support could use the work. They've all been getting lazy ever since I stopped working there.
I'd like to see how many reports they recieved compared to how large their network is. It doesn't mean much without that.
I believe one of the articles I saw said some 3.5 million customers. They've received 4,252 reports in the past week, and that's just ones that were sent through spamcop. One spamcop-generated report for every 823 customers. Every one of them summarily ignored. EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake