The Wrath of the ISP

A big fear of mine is having my cable/dsl/dialup/whatever isp of choice at the moment start blocking ports and inhibiting my HOBBY activities. There is no business based on my Seamonkey page, my blog, or my wedding site. They're all just toys, so an expensive business account is quite inappropriate.

Well my suscom friends, like my Matthew and Fizz (whose webpages are at...oh wait, their traffic has been blocked!) have felt the wrath of their isp recently. As Fizz pointed out, one agreement says run your servers at your own risk and the other says its strictly forbidden. I guess the biggest risk is them pulling the shit right out from under them. Fizz seems to think he has alternatives, so I'm happy for him. I encourage everyone I know to call up Suscom and bitch about this denial of service, then switch to a friendlier service. We're just geeks here. We just want to stake our little plots on the internet and learn shit along the way. No, some crap web host on "properly sanctioned" connections does not afford us that opportunity.

And now I'd like to reiterate the commandments of broadband:

• Though shalt not produce -- Do not publish your thoughts or learn technology for yourself. We provide bandwidth for you to access the approved news and information. Do not run your servers and disseminate your own opinion, even though it couldn't possibly tax our system at the blazing 128 (or 256) kilobit to which we've throttled your outgoing data.
• Though shalt only consume -- Use your broadband only in the approved ways. Get your news from CNN.com, get your music from Amazon, and email your friends at AOL.

Rants like these are part of the reason I wanted a nice theraputic blog like this. Now let's hope port 80 stays open. I hate my dependency on others.