MSN Messenger goes dark (or 1 Degree of seperation, .Net leaves 75 Million without service)

CNET ^ | Stefanie Olsen

[Bush2000]

shouldn't matter anyway, since a court has AOL on their way to being the only instant message provider anyway, right?

And what court would that be?

[KneelBeforeZod]

typo, not a court, but a patent...

[Bush2000]

Unlikely. If AOL tries to enforce that patent, they're going to get their heads handed to them. There's plenty of prior art. IRC, for one thing. Novell had an application more than a decade ago which allowed you to see which users were online. And Gawd knows how many mainframe time-sharing and Unix systems allow you to see who's online.

[zeugma]

That's yet another brin-dead patent brought to you courtesy of the idiots running Fedgov. According to my manpage for 'talk', "The talk command appeared in 4.2BSD." That would put it sometime around 1982 or so.

[Flashman_at_the_charge]

Probably the cleaning lady unplugged the server.

[js1138]

Back to my firewall. I am suspicious that theonly sites I noticed being blocked were eBay, hotmail, and Windows Update. This smells a bit like I got a product intended for export to some country that would like these sites blocked. I don't know about eBay, but Windows Update offeres 128 bit encryption modules.

[Bush2000]

Maybe you just needed a firmware update. Did you try?

[js1138]

Yup. I went through several levels of support. The thing isn't that complicated. It's supposed to work right out of the box, pretty much.

[Frapster]

I still can't log in.

[Redcloak]

We have experts on that subject around here!

[Frapster]

It says (Bad Redcloak, no biscuit) beside your name. Why is that?

[Redcloak]

Cuz I'm teasing the hapless Focault's Pendulum.

[Constitution Day]

*

[Focault's Pendulum]

Cuz I'm teasing the hapless Focault's Pendulum.

Hapless indeed!

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