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Microsoft Hotmail/Passport Service Interrupted:UPDATED
Oryx Gazella writes "Unable to access Hotmail this Christmas morning? This would be why!
You may have received an error like "unable to locate host", or "no such domain" after your browser was directed from www.hotmail.com to lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com. There are no NS records for the domain passport.com in any of the root name servers. Hotmail (www.hotmail.com) uses the Passport Service (www.passport.com) which allows users of the Microsoft Messenger Service to login using their "Passport" and to add other Passport members to their contact list. The new MSN Messenger Service 2.0 is integrated with MSN Hotmail and Microsoft Outlook Express for real-time email notification, and retrieval.
" Not being a Hotmail or regular Windows user for that matter, I cannot verify this - but I've gotten several e-mails from people this morning wondering about it.Update: 12/26 01:39 by H :Click below to read the quite humourous conclusion to this story.
Effugas writes "Oh, this is just beautiful. Linux user Michael D. Chaney of Doublewide.Net, upon reading of Microsoft's Christmas loss of the passport.com domain, took it upon himself to donate $35.00 for the world's largest software company to restore service for its customers. I've heard about Linux empowering its users to truly prevent downtime, but this is ridiculous ;-) I'm still laughing--Merry Christmas, Microsoft, from the Linux community to you! "
Hey, I spoke with the reporter about two hours ago- at 6:30PM CST. My guess is that we'll be hearing more about this, and I'll keep the /. crowd updated.
Do you have ESP?
Hotmail really isn't down, it's only that the domain name returns a bad address. If you really need to log in, save the following as an HTML file on your computer and open it with a browser. Should work with any javascript-enabled browser. Tested with Netscape, IE, and Opera. Needless to say, that this is very insecure, and you shouldn't leave this file lying around.
---cut here---
<html>
<head>
<noscript>
<meta http-equiv=Refresh content="0; url=http://www.hotmail.com">
</noscript>
</head>
<body onload="document.pform.submit(); ">
<form name="pform" action="http://www.hotmail.com/cgi-bin/dologin" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="login" value="[yourlogin]">
<input type="hidden" name="passwd" value="[yourpass]">
<input type="hidden" name="rru" value="/cgi-bin/folders">
<input type="hidden" name="js" value="yes">
</form>
</body>
</html>
---cut here---
--
I just wanted to let you folks know, that www.hotmail.com (Microsoft) is down, because Microsoft didn't pay a $35 bill to Network Solutions. Hotmail uses "passport" services that reside within microsoft's "passport.com", which is no longer resolving from the Internet Root Servers, because of non-bill pay. Proof of this glitch can be found by going to https://payments.networksolutions.com/ and typing in "passport.com". It seems Amount Due is Amount Due, and even the big guys can't get away without paying their bills.
IT'S ALL Y2K. JUST WAIT ANOTHER WEEK.
*EVERYTHING WILL BE DOWN*
THE APOCALYPSE IS NEAR.
If you've indeed payed the bill, I beg you, please get a hold of someone in the media. This could be such a fantastic headline. and be sure to refer to yourself as a linux user. please please. If you really payed it. use the publicity.
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