The saga continues.

[elfs]

Apparently, one of the geeks at Drizzle decided that I was "hacking" or something, and in the course of about five minutes I slowly found all of my services cut off. First my password was cut out, then my ssh access was denied, and now I can't even get my email. And now their ssh server is denying all contact from my IP address.

All I was trying to do was determine the parameters of their NNTP service, which apparently is a low-speed corporate offering from newsfeeds.com. I don't mind them changing news servers, but the level of service I was getting from them changed in mid-stream, and I do object to them touting this as some amazing improvement when, in fact, it's a drop in performance of 80% and you're not allowed multiple streams, as they have a six-stream limit with newsfeeds.com. Anyone who uses mozilla knows that mozilla always establishes two streams anyway, one for maintenence and one for actual contact, so the maximum number of users they could have reading Usenet at any given time was three if they were using a modern newsreader. Since I was almost always at least one of those users (I'm pretty much connected to Usenet 24/7), I bet they thought my running multiple streamers was excessive and cut me off.

I don't see anything in their terms of service or any of their conditions about the permissions by which I access Usenet, and I'm annoyed that this has all happened Saturday morning, they don't have support staff working on weekends, and nobody has called me. The sweet irony is that in an hour or less the script on my website, to which I now have no access, will update and this complaint will be publicly visible on drizzle itself. Snerk.

So now I'm looking for an alternative. Anyone got one?

In the meantime, you can email me at elf.sternberg@speakeasy.net if you need to get in touch with me.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

jeez. And I thought they were one of the good ones.

As far as ISP's in general, you know about Speakeasy, and Eskimo; there is also 2Alpha.net, with whom I will be speaking probably tomorrow evening, being tired of Verizon's brand of bullshit... dunno about Usenet feeds from any of them, since I abandoned Usenet in about 1995.... but they've probably all got them.... and I imagine Ed and Spencer (2alpha) would probably feed you anything you wanted as long as you were willing to pay the bandwidth... Robert (Eskimo) might not be quite as accomodating, but he's been around a *long* time, so I imagine Usenet is a big part of his world....

Other providers

[(Anonymous)]

Heh... be glad you don't have my ISP. These BOFH-wannabe sadists have decided that Usenet gets cut off after something like 150 MB of transfer. Then you have to wait 24 hours until their news server will even talk to you again. Oh, and good luck getting them to even admit they have a news server in the first place.

They seem to be devolving into an AOL-style "the internet is only what you see in a web browser" type of provider, the bastards.

Correspondingly, I haven't really used Usenet in about two years. I miss it, but I don't miss the signal-to-noise ratio -- which I can only fear has grown worse. I've occasionally thought about buying a Giganews (http://www.giganews.com) account, but that involves bleeding more money for something I've weaned myself from, so I've never followed through.

When I first moved to this state, I used Blarg (http://www.blarg.net/). They rocked. They got me DSL when Verizon said my address wasn't serviceable. They explicitly stated "unlimited transfer" on my 768 kilobit line. (That included Usenet, if I remember correctly.) They included dial-up access in the account, no extra charge. They ran and supported Linux. I could get a live, friendly geek on the phone without having to go through an operator.

God, I hated to give them up. But when I moved, a cable modem was the only faster-than-dialup option available.

I miss Blarg. They were friendly. And that is such a rare trait in a company these days.

Bryan.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Well, for a variety of reasons I'd rather not deal with Robert. And Drizzle usually is one of the good ones. I'm not sure what happened here, but I'm annoyed by it. It's either a great misunderstanding, or an unacceptable unpublished change in the terms of service for which I'm paying. If it's the latter, well, I'll be looking for more service somewhere else soon.

I'm pretty much a power Usenet user, I admit that. I'm trying to do it on the cheap. I may not have that option for much longer. I may, finally, have to start living for real out of my laptop.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

My ISP is pretty good, but since I'm in the UK it isn't any good to you. They've just announced they're dropping four binaries newsgroups, which total 25% of their entire NNTP traffic.

I have news.individual.net access as a safety-net, which is free but no-binaries, erratic coverage outside the big-8, and no guarantees anyway.

The new TOS are probably written in Babylonian cuneiform on a clay tablet in the flooded cellar under the cage where they keep the leopard.

And announced to customers via the news server.

Couple of options

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

Lightning Bolt DSL (lbdsl.com) looks pretty good -- I plan to switch as soon as I can come up wiht the $175 fee. I don't know if they offer service where you are, but it might be worth looking into.

Also, if it's text-only newsgroups, drop me an email and I can probably set you up (but at the moment my upstream is only 384K -- be advised).

Data points to ponder

[dion.livejournal.com]

Hey Elf,

Sorry they yanked your access.

Some points to consider:

1) Doesn't sound as though they have a very well thought out escalation path. We would if at all possible notify the customer voice before doing an action like this. They should have at least left you a voice mail explaining what was being done and their reasoning why.

2) Sounds as though they might have disconnected you as a way to get your attention. Are your contact address and phone number up to date? If they thought a live-hax0ring event was taking place, they might have changed your password as a way to protect you from what they thought was a mid-cracking event in progress.

3) If you have not done this already, email the contact you have in a sane normal voice and ask whats up, say you're a long term customer, and you wondered why access has been changed. Maybe this still is "misunderstanding" not "punitive enforcement of just-now-changed policies."

4) Regarding the usenet feed / bandwidth issue. If they just changed upstream providers this might be their way of saying usenet "abuse" will no longer be tolerated. Usenet costs a lot of money because running a feed or a full-leech of some binary groups is probably the most expensive thing in terms of last-mile bandwidth a customer can do. According to the usage breakdowns I see at work .. where I manage the abuse-enforcement function at Speakeasy.

5) Changing policies mid-stream without notifying the customer sucks. We definitely don't do that. On the other hand, if we thought a guy was breaking into our server, we *would* disconnect him on sight, then try and contact him. So I would still approach this as a "they did this to protect your own interest" more than "they did this to attack your connection" sort of thing.

Good luck! And as you are, at least momentarily now, a Speakeasy customer, Welcome!

Re: Data points to ponder

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been a speakeasy customer for about a year. But Speakeasy is what I would use for text, not binary, Usenet accounts.

It really does look like I'm going to go a'la carte with my services. I'll use speakeasy as my primary mailbox for now on, buy a domain (I haven't thought of one I like yet, but I have a couple of candidates), and host on someplace cheap. I only do about 2GB of traffic a month, so anyplace that'll put up with that is good for me. Someone suggested Entiki, and they look good, and inexpensive enough that I could afford them and a good Usenet feed.