On Fri, 6 Jan 1995, Mike Duvos wrote: [ big monolithic service providers like Nyetcom are the best and will crush all you piddly little upstart ISPs ]
Big service providers like Netcom don't interfere with customer use of the resources they sell, except when network functionality is impacted. Even in such cases, they try to reach an understanding with the user, and terminate accounts only as a last resort. Accounts don't vanish when "the guy who owns the machine" decides to throw a tantrum.
Yeah. They only kill accounts when people criticize NetCruiser. :-P Nyetcom is hardly an example of a quality service provider. They suffer periodic long term news and email delays; their service personnel are rude, slow, and unprofessional (read: Bruce Woodcock & the above incident); their security has been compromised countless times; their FTP server is constantly overloaded; their toy software NetCruiser generates nonconformant Usenet articles; their 18 (!) machines are constantly overloaded that it takes a good five minutes to respond to a finger request; they have no http:// support. They are home to some of the most infamous net.kooks and net.cretins (like Tom Servo, currently), and their net.reputation sucks. Frankly, I'd rather have a Winternet account than a Netcom account. ObCypherpunks: sameer's system, the Community Connexion, suffers *none* of these problems. http://www.c2.org or <info@c2.org> for more information. sameer supports PGP and the running of anonymous remailers on his system. Check it out, send him money.