The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Gardenman]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have two free email addresses. GMail and Outlook and they work well. AOL, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo are lousy. I did this so if I ever change ISP, I would not have to change my email which is a right pain in the ass. I've changed ISP a number of times. SO it's just easier not to use the ISP email address.

I have had a Yahoo address all my life and have found it great. What is supposed to be bad about it? Also I did not know Yahoo was tied to an ISP.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Gardenman

I have had a Yahoo address all my life and have found it great. What is supposed to be bad about it? Also I did not know Yahoo was tied to an ISP.

We've been in our business since '08, give or take a month or two. We do a fair amount of email at my shop--a typical customer, even just an ebook customer, with a very small order, will consume/use ~40 emails, in about two weeks, over the course of the project/book. We do not send newsletters, announcements, anything at all like that, ever. There's no chance on God's Green Earth that any ISP could possibly view us as some email scammer or whatever, right?

What we've found is that Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, etc. give exceedingly limited access to their customers, in terms of controlling what they can and can't see or send or email. AOL and Yahoo, both, have literally denied our customers the right to email US. In other words, the customer of course, tries to email us and AOL has decided that "whoops, your email is suspicious," so we don't ever receive. They send us more email, getting angrier and angrier that we haven't replied to them and finally, maybe, they try something else--social media, whatever and we finally realize that they've been blocked out.

But they can't see that. They can't see that they've been blocked or anything else. They think everything is peachy. We never showed up in spam, junk, nuthin'. Just AOL, etc. deciding..."hey, you guys suck! You're blocked and we're protecting our customer--who hasn't asked for this protection, mind you--from YOU!"

Oh and the icing on that cake is I've had both AOL and Hotmail 'report us" as email spammers. Nice, that. Just wait until you try to get with Rackspace and plead your case, for having done nothing. It can cut you off from endless emails and you can sometimes take weeks and even, once, months, to reinstate your whitelist status, which I work on religiously.

Comcast is another. None of my Comcast customers can ever FEEFO us, no matter what we do. They can't receive the invite email to critique or review us.

The other problem that we see--and I'm not sure of the why--is that for some reason, maybe how those were set up and all that--is that the Hotmail, AOL, etc. users seem to be less au fait with how to really use their email. They don't know where their Downloads folder is, or they aren't familiar with the difference between Downloading versus opening/launching, and all that. I don't know to what to attribute that.

Yahoo, in fact, was one of the very first ISPs--Internet Service Providers, which really just means a company that provides access to the Internet, for their customers. Yahoo, AOL, etc. Today, even those companies that "only" provide email (like Google, if you think about it) are considered ISPs, but yes, Yahoo has been an ISP since the very jump.

Hitch

[Gardenman]

Thanks I did not that

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Gardenman

I have had a Yahoo address all my life and have found it great. What is supposed to be bad about it? Also I did not know Yahoo was tied to an ISP.

The major problem with yahoo that I've heard of is that they have been cracked multiple times and customer contact lists were stolen. By customer contact lists, I mean yahoo knows who all your contacts are and that is what was stolen.

[j.p.s]

Hitch, the internet predates the existance of yahoo, hotmail, and google, so there is no way they are among the first ISPs. They also do not provide fundamental services such as ssh so from my POV they are not ISPs at all.

[Aleron Ives]

ISPs do not "provide" SSH. SSH is a protocol that the ISP customer uses over the Internet access provided by the ISP. Yahoo is a search engine, not an ISP. Yahoo and AT&T have been intertwined when it comes to e-mail for some time, but AT&T is the ISP, not Yahoo.

[j.p.s]

Well, back in dialup days, it was possible to connect to an ISP via a terminal connected to a modem and ssh from there to elsewhere on the internet.

[crane3]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Well, back in dialup days, it was possible to connect to an ISP via a terminal connected to a modem and ssh from there to elsewhere on the internet.

GENIE...thaught me how to use unix & was able to get software from various sites for my Atari or PC clone. Looks to me that Genie is long been forgotten. I found that it was much better than Compuserve for info on computers.

[Quoth]

ssh didn't exist at the beginning of the Internet.
The ssh protocol 1995
Internet was Arpanet (1969-1990), then bitnet (from 1982), then Internet all before 1989 when HTML published. Actual websites date from about 1992. Before that there was email, gopher, newsgroups, FTP.

I used dialup in 1987 approx in Ireland to access X25. then used that to access a mainframe with X.400 in London and gateways to people with email on bitnet.

The SSH came out about the same time as Win95. I was using Windows 3.x and a dialup ISP from about 1993. Browser was Mosaic

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

ISPs do not "provide" SSH. SSH is a protocol that the ISP customer uses over the Internet access provided by the ISP. Yahoo is a search engine, not an ISP. Yahoo and AT&T have been intertwined when it comes to e-mail for some time, but AT&T is the ISP, not Yahoo.

OMG, come on, Yahoo absolutely, along with AOL, etc. were ISPs, back in the day. I was using "the internet" when you had to be able to use Archie, Gopher, NG's, etc. so thank you, yes, I'm aware that "the internet" predates GUI web crap.

Spoiler:

As it happens--for whatever it's worth--I had the 18th Internet Connection in Phoenix, AZ. The first provider, Primenet--I think that they actually had an earlier moniker than that, but were thence acquired by US West, etc.--was my then-provider, and we were customer 0000018. That doesn't make me some Net Pioneer, but I do have some passing familiarity.

Hitch

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by crane3

GENIE...thaught me how to use unix & was able to get software from various sites for my Atari or PC clone. Looks to me that Genie is long been forgotten. I found that it was much better than Compuserve for info on computers.

I had GENIE for a while. I didn't like that they claimed "compilation copyright" on public domain and other open material that users uploaded. They explicitly claimed that if you downloaded it from GENIE it was forbidden to upload it elsewhere or otherwise distribute.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Quoth

ssh didn't exist at the beginning of the Internet.

Telnet was the protocol everyone used to login remotely over the Internet.

Encryption? Why would you ever need that?

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Actual websites date from about 1992. Before that there was email, gopher, newsgroups, FTP.

There was also telnet, a predecessor to ssh.

telnet is actually still very useful as a debugging tool. In a pinch you can even read a textual web page or send an email with it.

There used to be a very easy to find web page titled something like "I am stuck in Siberia and have only telnet".

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

OMG, come on, Yahoo absolutely, along with AOL, etc. were ISPs, back in the day. I was using "the internet" when you had to be able to use Archie, Gopher, NG's, etc. so thank you, yes, I'm aware that "the internet" predates GUI web crap.

Spoiler:

As it happens--for whatever it's worth--I had the 18th Internet Connection in Phoenix, AZ. The first provider, Primenet--I think that they actually had an earlier moniker than that, but were thence acquired by US West, etc.--was my then-provider, and we were customer 0000018. That doesn't make me some Net Pioneer, but I do have some passing familiarity.

Hitch

The first ISP was Software Tool and Die located in Massachusetts. I did sign up with them back then. You got shell access, email, Usenet, and WWW using Lynx.

I forget the service I signed up for as well. It was similar to CompuServe but better. It was located in California. You could dial in direct or if you had telnet access get in that way. I had telnet access via MIT.

[theducks]

My company added 'Defender' (a dial back system) to thwart the 'war games' style hacker.
My Modem line was registered in the system. I called in with my password on the phone (no caller ID back then). The system responded (voice) 'I will call you back'. You had YOUR modem ready for incoming (auto answer or manual).
Lots of fun if you were not at your normal (registered) place.