Re: AT&T Usenet Netnews Service Shutting Down

On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:18:42 -0700, Joerg <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

krw wrote:
On Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:25:04 -0700, Joerg <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

krw wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:15:26 -0700, Joerg <invalid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


Now I am confused. What exactly is happeing with your payment and who
initiates it?
I don't really know, Individual I expect. Oh, I think I see the
confusion. When I said "both parties", I meant Individual and whoever
does their clearing on this side of the big pond. Both notify me well
before the transfer takes place and I have the option to cancel.

From Europe I only know "pull", not "push".
Now I'm confused. We have a "pull" system here. They convert a check
to an EFT (Check-21) and *pull* the money out of your account. ...

Ahm, that means they do withdraw money from your account. Above you said
you'd never do that.

Not my account, my credit card. Credit cards have legal protections
that bank accounts don't have. Also, if someone goes after my credit
accounts the bank is out the money while it's being contested, not me.
I don't use debit cards online either.


Problem is, news.individual.de doesn't take credit cards. At least not
according to their web site.

Individual may not, but whomever does their clearing in the US does.
That's how they convert $US to Euros. I'll have to dig through my
email to find the references.
... From
everything I've read about the European banking system, they give you
the account information and you *push* the money into their account.
Therefor, they cannot double-dip (or worse) like they can here.

That's for one-time transactions. The banking system over there is more
modern, no checks, you just wire all the time. But for frequent
transactions such as phone, water, electricity and such it's customary
to give them the power to pull per month. You can instantly dispute
unjustified charges and they get credited back. This avoids overdue
bills when your flight home gets delayed big time, or you decide to tack
on another couple weeks at grampa's because he suffered a stroke.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. ;-) That can be done here too,
but it's still a "pull". Too dangerous, IMO.

<snip>

Maybe, but the fact of the matter is that many alt-groups have become
less useful to nearly useless.
Yes, though that isn't too much of a change for the alt hierarchy.

I don't know how badly a.b.s.e. tanked but alt.home.automation went from
quite active to total anemia, and fast.

I'm still getting daily spam from X10. :-(


The company that sells X10 stuff? That may never stop, you've got to
filter and ditch it.

They are some sleazy group. I opened their email at work once. It
was basically porn.


To be fair, I do a reasonable amount of business via the Internet and
have found a bunch of excellent companies to deal with. They know
that service is what they're selling.
So far I can't complain about AT&T lately. Rocky in the first years and
customer support required a large dose of persistence on my side but I
never had a problem in that area. The last few years was smooth sailing.
No major outages except when a kid slammed his car into a big green
metal box (but the good thing is he lived).
I've used AT&T's business Internet service (attglobal) for fifteen
years (it used to be IBM.net) and have been very pleased with the
service. I now also use AT&T.net for DSL access, but the technical
level of the service isn't the same. AT&T.net treats their customers
like idiots, for one. It takes forever to troubleshoot a problem
because every call has to go through the same troubleshooting script.
After nine months, I still can't access the email servers. It's
simply not worth going through another call to them. BTW, AT&T.net
and AT&T global don't talk to each other. In fact, I'm convinced that
they don't know each other exists.

My server is sbcglobal in S.F., whatever that means. Never had trouble
with email, just Usenet once in a while. Last time I asked to be
"escalated" and a very friendly woman with a Philippines accent
(probably outsource to Manila) answered. Judging from our chat she must
have either had a degree in CS or was close to that level. Within less
than 10mins she said "Oh, I think I see where the problem is, call me
back if not fixed within the hour, my extension is ...". Less than
15mins later tons of fresh headers roared into my newsreader as if she
had pulled a gigantic plug somewhere.

I'm sure the server is fine. My account was apparently never set up
properly. My password gets rejected. I gave up trying, so am paying
for SMTP service through another company ($2/mo or some such). I
don't like hunting for SMTP servers when I travel anyhow, so it's not
that big of a deal, except that my outbound email volume is rather
restricted.


For $5/mo I get complete web hosting via a third party, including domain
name and a gazillion freely configurable email account.

Do you get an SMTP server with that? I have no use for web hosting or
a domain name. I have a bunch of email accounts, but I can't get to
them from AT&T DSL. ...not even AT&T's sibling (ATT dot global).

The last few years was smooth sailing.
No major outages except when a kid slammed his car into a big green
metal box (but the good thing is he lived).
Yeah, a few hours of Internet outage is better than if the "big green
box" were potted in concrete. ...

The boy would be dead if they'd done that. I'd rather he live, we all
made similar mistakes when we were young.

Yep. Nothing is as bad as the two doctors, when I lived in NY. They
bought their 16YO son a Corvette ZR1. He wrapped it around a tree,
40ft up.

... I see people brag about armoring mail
boxes, too.

Ours _is_ armored :-)

Hope no kid plays mailbox polo.


The bat would fly right back into their face. This is your standard
flimsy aluminum box.

Exactly. More than one kid hasn't reached the age of intelligence
pulling such nonsense. Mail boxes are cheap. Make 'em easy to knock
down; no challenge.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Re-Post - "the trust relationship between this workstation and the
    ... "the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain ... only problem is adding a new user account on the station. ... Client computer must use STRICTLY the INTERNAL DNS server which can ... Attr: subschemaSubentry ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)
  • Re: Same question, still no answer!!!
    ... Sounds then like we are all paying for a feature set only large companies ... The "proxy server" pc is actually an older box stuffed ... Expectation #1) keep the ethernet more or less as is. ... The kids account would be ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Re-Post - "the trust relationship between this workstation and the
    ... "the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain ... only problem is adding a new user account on the station. ... This would be on the DNS server 172.20.100.2 ... Attr: subschemaSubentry ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory)
  • Sending email to mydomain.com
    ... server will appear as undeliverable. ... This happens because you are using the POP3 connector... ... an NDR when an account doesn't exist). ... >different from the user account names for the exchange ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: Basic Authentication + IIS 5 + Windows 2000 + Frontpage 2002 = failure?
    ... Everytime I attempt to login under Basic Authentication, ... IUSR_blah account. ... the anonymous user impersonated by the IIS Server is the ... > Event Viewer Security log. ...
    (microsoft.public.inetserver.iis.security)