Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 4/13/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:4/13/2000; 5:23:28 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 4/13/2000
Msg #:16176
Prev/Next:16175 / 16177

The outages have started again. Seven in the last hour. The last outage was 17 minutes long and cleared at 7:50PM.

BBC: Gagging the net in 3 easy steps. "Firstly we would look at the site. If we thought it was defamatory, then we would ask the sender to remove it, and if they didn't remove it, we would. Each case depends on its merits, but wherever possible we would wish to avoid any legal proceedings."

Watch This Space: Beautiful pictures from Seattle's Pike Market.

New Manila feature: Restore Template to Default.

Survey: Are you a geek or a suit or..?

An ususual big spring thunderstorm last night. It's warm and wet and smelly. My garden loves the moisture. Weather like this makes me miss the east coast, where I grew up.

See the icons in the upper right corner of the Scripting News home page? What's that all about? Behind each icon is a weblog that changed recently. See the question mark? Click on it to learn more. (That's called a "user interface standard.")

Hey to brighten my day I just got a call from a real estate agent with an offer on my house. It was a very large offer. I didn't say I wasn't interested. Surprising. Anyone know of an excellent rental in SF with a garden and a hot tub? Might be time for a move.

Conxion rocks our world today

 Well, this is the ultimate outage. We worked with Conxion for years, when their service was great I praised them to the hilt. When they interfered with our ability to do our work, we quantified it. When I criticized them (mildly, compared to how I felt) for stepping over the line challenging our First Amendment rights, they shut us down. Unbelievable.

Here's the best part, instead of an apology and a credit for all the outages: "Our records show that you have currently paid for Services through April 30, 2000. You have also been billed for the month of May 2000 (invoice No.2356 dated April 3, 2000). If you pay the May invoice promptly (by April 21, 2000), we will provide Services through May 31, 2000."

Hey Conxion, we have a business here. We're still making up for lost time due to all the outages. This adds insult to injury.This will interfere with our shipment of new "Manila" features, and Frontier 6.2, due at the end of the month. It's going to cost us a lot of time and money.

Now there's no doubt that this termination is due to criticism of Conxion here on Scripting News. In the print world, it's not uncommon for a columnist in a newspaper to criticize the newspaper he or she works for, or to criticize companies that advertise with the newspaper. In the e-commerce world this is going to be even more important. Sweeping the truth under the rug is not a good way to gain trust. Our readers knew that we were having technical problems. When the problems are our own, we say that. When the problem is with an ISP, we say that too.

BTW, everything I said about Conxion is archived and in the search engine. I did use a lot of restraint. An ISP has a lot of power, esp when the outages persist. How do they use the power? Do they interfere with their customers' relationships with their customers? We're finding out now that this ISP uses their power to shut down critics. This is a Cluetrain thing. If I were them, I'd welcome criticism. This is how you get the bugs out. Microsoft, a large customer of Conxion's, understands this. Interestingly, a few Microsoft people read this site. I bet they would pay attention if you sent them an email. (However I will not post email addresses publicly.)

I called Steve Martin, left a voicemail. I said we would move off Conxion, but probably not the way they specified in their letter. We need more than 17 days to do the transition. I want 180 days, at no cost to UserLand. Since this was Conxion's decision, and since we're still reeling from the outages of March and early April, this is the only fair way to deal with it.

Letter to Conxion CEO. "While we no longer wish to be a customer of yours, we still want to work with you to get this straightened out. You can do good for your company and industry, and the Internet publishing industry, by participating in the discussion, and helping us all understand what kind of Internet you want to be part of."

A reader named Bryce says "Scripting News is powerful public platform. In my opinion, you abused that platform by taking a private business matter public and making it personal."

I have to deal with these kinds of reckless unfounded accusations all the time. It's why we need a clear integrity statement. We're getting closer.

Conxion CEO Antonio Salerno's April 4 letter to me, while we were still down, experiencing outages and completely and utterly frustrated at the lack of progress in getting the problem solved. It's true that Steve and Diane did pull out all the stops to help us. We did thank them for their help, publicly. It's really awful to have this used against us. Further, our deal with Conxion, from the start, was for a full T1, not for 128K. So Antonio is actually spinning a negative against his company against us. Further, the really hard part to swallow is the lecture on what the First Amendment does and does not allow. He is not a lawyer, and his opinion on this subject is misinformed and irrelevant. You will see my response to him on the April 5 Scripting News, which on review, is quite measured.

We are not and never have been a "partner" of Conxion's.

Finally, Salerno is the problem. The company is good, their service excellent, but this guy gets personal and makes assumptions that are not cool. We are not his special project, we are a serious business with customers and real partnerships, and reliable transparent Internet connectivity is essential to our work. This clearly is not his focus. I should have spent today doing my real work, not dealing with this company. Shame on them. It's understandable when bad PacBell technology stands in the way, but today's outage is 100 perecent Salerno's doing. Yuck.

Another persistent outage..

 xmlhack: XML-DEV withering. "Long used as an excellent technical resource for XML developers, XML-DEV's ongoing difficulties are proving an impediment to the kinds of discussion and collaborative development that have made its reputation."

I started a temporary mail list at eGroups for the xml-dev community, until the problems at OASIS are worked out. It's an unmoderated list, open to the public. All xml developers are welcome. As soon as the problems at OASIS clear, we should use that list to do our work.

"gandhi"



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