[ale] DirecTV & BellSouth

[attriel]

>><rant>
>>Getting back to shopping around, I'm disheartended somewhat by many of
>> the acceptable use policies that have been presented in this thread.
>> Everything from "you can't do this" to "we're watching everthing you
>> do". Quite frankly, I'd rather assume the duty of adequately
>> protecting my
>>network rather than rely on a bunch of script kiddies to do it for me.
>> (Those who think they know what they are doing are very annoying to
>> those of us who do.) I'm looking for an ISP that will give me a pipe to
>> the internet and forget all the other crap.  I don't need web space.  I
>> don't need email addresses or POP3 or IMAP or SMTP.  I don't need a
>> firewall.  I don't need spam filters.  I don't need a "MyAnything".
>> And most of all I don't need someone telling me how people are not
>> allowed to communicate with me (a.k.a port blocking).  What I *do* need
>> is a link to the internet with a static IP address.  So sell me the
>> service, sit back, and shut up! </rant>
>
> Here here!
>
> That's been my philosophy for years.  Maybe someday the service
> providers will catch up....

Well, in their defense, they're still selling to home users for the most
part not power users.  People who have trouble setting up a web page and
would be running IIS on their windows 98 machine if they ran their own
server, etc.  The majority of their customers like having those features
at the ISP.  I used my ISP mail for years, even though I was running my
own mail server.

OTOH, Speakeasy's "SysAdmin Package" comes with like 100M webspace, and 4
email addresses.  I can understand the emails (backups in case something
goes wrong on your server, people can still contact support), but the
webspace is a little strange considering we've JUST established that I'm
RUNNING servers an' all.  But I have no complaints about speakeasy,
they've been very helpful to me (I got DSL about 2 weeks after moving, and
part of that was the phone company had to come and upgrade the hardware on
my house :o).  Of course, I move to DC/Baltimore, so I'm outside of
BellSouth's iron fist :)  But speak was good to me in dunwoody, too.  The
extra features are there for "the mundanes," as it were :)

--attriel


_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale