random neuron misfires

Ok, I’m beyond frustrated now. I’ve sent my last two emails to my ISP. There will be no more. (message one and message two)

They have finally managed to close off every single open port outbound and inbound on their routers, and now I can no longer log into them at all.

Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: rcvd [PAP AuthNak id=0x2 "Other Failure"]
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: Remote message: Other Failure
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: PAP authentication failed
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: sent [LCP TermReq id=0x2 "Failed to authenticate ourselves to peer"]

Both of their support numbers are busy 24×7, even though they’re not a 24-hour shop. They do not respond to my emails, even though they guarantee a 48-hour response time. I am being billed for this “wonderful” service, and can’t even log in to use it.

Basically, I’m calling my bank, and filing a claim against them to have the charges they’ve made on my account removed, and let them respond to *THAT* instead.

Palm Open Directory Syndicate: PODS

Well, PODS is going well, I now have 470 links (cleaned up some dupes) in the database. All of these links point to Palm-formatted websites, which can be used sans modification on the Palm. I’m trying to clean up the links and create a good schema to represent and edit them, and then wrap that in a dmoz-like interface for managing them.

You can see an image of what it looks like here

And now the legal mess. What sort of sticky goop am I getting in by publishing these links? Clearly this content is not linked directly from anywhere on the web, or if it is, it’s quite hard to find. It took a lot of URI massaging, google searching, and some other means to get this many links in there. It was so far, only a week’s worth of work. No “illegal” means were used to get these links, it was all publicly available.

I keep falling into more pandora’s boxes of links and jump sites to more links. I’m interested in providing a broad range of content for the Palm users to use (with Plucker, Sitescooper, and similar client applications). I don’t want to defraud the content providers in any way, and in fact, I’d like to help them. I’ve already received two replies from people I’ve emailed to ask for the location of their “hidden” URI so I could point Plucker and Sitescooper at them.

[…] The person I am speaking of was graceful enough to allow me to use his writings but we have an agreement that the material not be distributed and he be kept anonymous. With this in mind, I must decline your request. The AvantGo platform does not allow copy/paste and is for this reason an excellent tool to slow down illegal distribution. I am not saying you would distribute this but we need to keep a policy which can be kept consistent.
[…]

…and another

[…] As a content provider, the nice thing about AvantGo is that I can insure that the only people who access the “lean” content are those using AvantGo. This insures that regular web surfers will always use the full version of the site, and therefore my advertising revenues continue. […]

It’s interesting that they both mention AvantGo in here with regard to providing access to this “lean” content. I don’t think making these links (all 470 and growing) public is in any way “distibuting illegal content”, nor would it defraud content providers of advertising revenue.

Contrary to what AvantGo may believe, AvantGo doesn’t own this content, nor have they cornered the market on distribution of “lean” content. There are better alternatives out there, guys.

Any comments? I’m interested to hear any and all sides of this.

Enough for now. Diary moresome later.