🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6tm8q5$k0r$1@hirame.wwa.com>, chrisw@wwa.com (Chris Williams) wrote:


> 
>    I don't want to move. I have two money orders made out to Verio that I was
> just getting ready to drop off at the WWA offices. Shit! The ISP that I 
> trusted has been bought by spammers. Any one know a good ISP?
> 
> Chris Williams of
>    Chris'n'Vickie of Chicago



Well, I recently switched to Enteract, and they're awesome. My new account
was up and running twenty minutes after I paid for it, I never have any
problems at all connecting, and It's always at 33.6.

Compared to my old ISP, which took three days to set up my account, had
frequent outages, overloaded modem banks, and a screwed-up billing system,
Enteract is damn fine.



Allen James

-- 
%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%

"To judge by the notions expounded by most theologians,
one must conclude that God created most men simply with 
a view to crowding Hell."

Marquis de Sade

chrisw@wwa.com (Chris Williams) wrote:

>Holtzman found that 32 percent of the Whois traffic - more than generated by 
>all of Europe - was initiated by a single company. He won't name names but 
>said two companies in particular badly abused the database and are now locked 
>out. The culprits initiated parallel sessions via HyperText Transfer Protocol 
>with multiple computers and slowed down by 50 percent access to Whois for the 
>rest of the Net. 

>Can identify source
>Numerous domain name holders said they regularly receive direct mail marketing 
>solicitations from such companies as American Express Co. and Verio Inc. and 
>can tell by the addressing that the source is Whois.                       

As Holtzman said, this isn't spamming as your message subject
indicates - it's denial of service.

Not to defend Verio, but...

The anecdotal evidence you cite certainly points to Verio mining the
InterNIC database, which is allowed by NSI according to the message
you quoted. However, you cite no provable connection between Verio
mining and Verio causing a DoS

Remember, just because all A is B doesn't mean that a given B must be
A.

In article <35fec817.24623679@nntp.enteract.com>, lokari@enteract.com wrote:
>chrisw@wwa.com (Chris Williams) wrote:
>
>>Holtzman found that 32 percent of the Whois traffic - more than generated by 
>>all of Europe - was initiated by a single company. He won't name names but 
>>said two companies in particular badly abused the database and are now locked 
>>out. The culprits initiated parallel sessions via HyperText Transfer Protocol 
>>with multiple computers and slowed down by 50 percent access to Whois for the 
>>rest of the Net. 
>
>>Can identify source
>>Numerous domain name holders said they regularly receive direct mail marketing
> 
>>solicitations from such companies as American Express Co. and Verio Inc. and 
>>can tell by the addressing that the source is Whois.                       
>
>As Holtzman said, this isn't spamming as your message subject
>indicates - it's denial of service.
>
>Not to defend Verio, but...
>
>The anecdotal evidence you cite certainly points to Verio mining the
>InterNIC database, which is allowed by NSI according to the message
>you quoted. However, you cite no provable connection between Verio
>mining and Verio causing a DoS

   Sure, but Holtzman was worried (rightly so) about getting sued, and 
couldn't name names. So the writer was forced to *infer* that Verio is
one of the culprits of the DOS. 

>Remember, just because all A is B doesn't mean that a given B must be
>A.

   Sure, but if the people who bought my ISP are paper-spamming every
owner of a .com domain, I want nothing to do with them. It indicates
a poor understanding of the culture of the Internet, and a disregard
of the value of WhoIs. 


Chris Williams of
   Chris'n'Vickie of Chicago
      chrisw@wwa.com
"How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" - C. Crumb

chrisw@wwa.com (Chris Williams) wrote:

>>However, you cite no provable connection between Verio
>>mining and Verio causing a DoS

>Sure, but Holtzman was worried (rightly so) about getting sued, and 
>couldn't name names. So the writer was forced to *infer* that Verio is
>one of the culprits of the DOS. 

Hell, I've had people infer and hint at and imply all kinds of things
about me - that doesn't make any of them true.

It's fun to get wound up over things like this, but I prefer to have
real evidence at hand before I go jumping ship.

Of course, if you're jumping ship because the service at WWA suddenly
sucks, that's another thing entirely!

>Sure, but if the people who bought my ISP are paper-spamming every
>owner of a .com domain, I want nothing to do with them.

Fair enough, and I can appreciate that. Heck, Enteract recently had a
little taste of that sort of thing when they sent out a snailmail
advertisement to their own customers and received heat for it.

Oh, an argumentative aside (sorry, can't help myself) - paper-based
junkmail isn't spam. It's annoying as hell, yes, but the sender bears
the burden of the cost, which is what differentiates it from
e-mail/usenet spam.

>It indicates a poor understanding of the culture of the Internet, 
>and a disregard of the value of WhoIs.

Here we're in full agreement. All I can figure is that someone
somewhere must actually buy stuff from spammers, since the practice
continues to be so commonplace. I'd love to be able to simultaneously
whack the spammers *and* their idiot customers on the head with a
stick.

Chris Williams (chrisw@wwa.com) scribed for us...
>    I don't want to move. I have two money orders made out to Verio that I was
> just getting ready to drop off at the WWA offices. Shit! The ISP that I 
> trusted has been bought by spammers. Any one know a good ISP?

Just a suggestion for anyone who's thinking they may want to change ISPs, 
given the recent spate of local ISP sales: Think about getting a 
"portable" email address somewhere.  

POBox is one option and I know that there are others, so just look around 
if you need one.  They're not expensive, and they have other advantages 
beyond the fact that your email address won't change if you switch ISPs. 

* Some of them (well, pobox, maybe others) give you several addresses so 
you can use them for different things - perhaps one for personal mail, 
one for Usenet, and one for web pages that require an address.  
* Some of them provide spam filtering.  
* Some of them provide SMTP servers that you can be set up to use in case 
you're going through a corporate firewall and your primary ISP has 
(hopefully) anti-relaying measures installed.
* All of them should allow you to change the address that mail is 
forwarded to very quickly, so if your ISP blows up and starts rejecting 
mail, you can shift to a backup quickly.

Overall, something that's worth looking into given the likely instability 
of the local ISP scene over the next few years.  Personally, I'd be 
surprised if WWA and MCS were the only ones changing hands.

ajm

-- 
Alan Miller \\ ajm at pobox.com \\ http://www.pobox.com/~ajm

In chi.internet Chris Williams <chrisw@wwa.com> wrote:
>    I don't want to move. I have two money orders made out to Verio that I was
> just getting ready to drop off at the WWA offices. Shit! The ISP that I 
> trusted has been bought by spammers. Any one know a good ISP?

Yeah, but can I say that this seems a bit of

Uh oh... Verio's hitmen got him before he could finish typing!!!!! :)


Martin J. Maney wrote in message <6tmqqt$q8d$1@Jupiter.Mcs.Net>...
>In chi.internet Chris Williams <chrisw@wwa.com> wrote:
>>    I don't want to move. I have two money orders made out to Verio that I
was
>> just getting ready to drop off at the WWA offices. Shit! The ISP that I
>> trusted has been bought by spammers. Any one know a good ISP?
>
>Yeah, but can I say that this seems a bit of

"darkain" <darkain@darkain.org> wrote:

>Uh oh... Verio's hitmen got him before he could finish typing!!!!! :)

Don't you just hate to see one of our own cut down in his prime like
that? He still had a few good years left in him, and now this.

What a waste.

: Hell, I've had people infer and hint at and imply all kinds of things
: about me - that doesn't make any of them true.

Sorry, I just have to point out that while it doesn't necessarily make
them true, they usually in fact are... :-)

-- 
Doug Bora
stigmata@abend.com

Doug Bora <stigmata@enteract.com> wrote:

>Sorry, I just have to point out that while it doesn't necessarily make
>them true, they usually in fact are... :-)

Who let you out from under your rock? Shoo, bug, shoo.

In article <6tmip0$rot$1@hirame.wwa.com> Chris Williams, chrisw@wwa.com
writes:
>   Sure, but if the people who bought my ISP are paper-spamming every
>owner of a .com domain, I want nothing to do with them. It indicates
>a poor understanding of the culture of the Internet, and a disregard
>of the value of WhoIs. 

Now since that article also said NSA^H^H^H NSI is spamming everyone with
some kind of ad for a "Verisign digital identification system" (Gee, what
else would the NSA^H^H^H NSI spam out of Reston anyway?), I suppose
you're going to have "nothing to do with them" also ... right?

That's the thing about the modern U.S.; people look suspiciously at every
company except, of course, the ones that are monopolies and they CAN'T
boycott.  Naturally, they do business with those without question... and
eventually everything becomes a monopoly.

It DOES look like my original suspicions about the Verio "central
facility" might be wrong, at least.  But I just wonder how they're going
to handle DNS without access to NSI.  Any information?

In chi.internet Tommy the Terrorist <mayday@newsguy.com> wrote:
> It DOES look like my original suspicions about the Verio "central
> facility" might be wrong, at least.  

You, wrong?  Nooooooo...

>                                      But I just wonder how they're going
> to handle DNS without access to NSI.  Any information?

DNS and whois are not the same.  They'll get along fine.

In article <6tnpna$qpp$1@eve.enteract.com>,
 <drjones@hospitals.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>In chi.internet Tommy the Terrorist <mayday@newsguy.com> wrote:
>> It DOES look like my original suspicions about the Verio "central
>> facility" might be wrong, at least.  
>
>You, wrong?  Nooooooo...
>
>>                                      But I just wonder how they're going
>> to handle DNS without access to NSI.  Any information?
>
>DNS and whois are not the same.  They'll get along fine.

You can access whois from WWA just fine.  I did it last night after
this thread got started.  

Jamie

In wwa.general Jamie E. Eimermann <jee@news.wwa.com> wrote:
: You can access whois from WWA just fine.  I did it last night after
: this thread got started.  

If the story were true, depending on how the "block" was implemented,
WWA users could probably still access the whois database just fine,
even if Verio had a machine doing mass accesses that was blocked.

-Eric
-- 
Eric A. Mathiasen | eric@mathiasen.com | www.mathiasen.com