Comcast, dynamic DNS service

[John Chambers]

Oops! I just noticed that I missed a fat-finger typo, referring to msn.com as
man.com.   Oh,  well;  'a'  is  just  one key off from 's'.  Actually, out of
curiosity, I checked and found that there is a man.com site. It seems to be a
gay  men's site that advertises it self as a "search site".  Somehow, I doubt
they did what I said they did.  OTOH,  msn.com  has  developed  a  bit  of  a
reputation for sleazy business practices.  No surprise, I guess.  ;-)

Sometimes you find fun things when you mistype a host name. F'r instance, why
would  what's  obviously a site targeting gay men have "Men Seeking Women" as
one of the items in their nav list? To show that they don't discriminate?  Oh
well, it's off topic here.

| Matthew Gillen wrote:
| | It's beyond me why anyone would use their ISP-provided email for anything but
| | interacting with the ISP anyway.  It's as much a vendor-lock-in mechanism as a
| | "service" provided to the customer...
|
| In some cases, it's because they want to be  able  to  look  at  your  email.
| Remember a few years ago, when man.com was caught picking photos out of their
| customers' email and web sites, and using them in advertising?  It really hit
| the  fan  when people found out, and they agreed to stop doing it.  But first
| they tried justifying it by saying it was legal because they stated in  their
| Terms  of  Service  (ToS)  document  that  any files stored on their machines
| became msn.com's property.
|
| Fact is that the management, especially  the  marketers,  at  many  companies
| consider  anything  they can trick you into "giving" to them is theirs to use
| in any way they feel. If they can make a profit selling information from your
| files, they feel that it's their right to do so. Some of them even argue that
| they have an obligation to their shareholders to do so.  This should be  good
| enough ground to avoid any "service" that puts your files on their machines.

--
There are three kinds of people in this world,
those who count and those who don't.