The Official Status Thread
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
@loopback0 I only hear distant voices, I’m not sure where they’re coming from.
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@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
Went through this about half a dozen times. At some point the wizard tells you to set up PPPoE but doesn't give you the credentials for it. One needful doer said I didn't have credentials. Really? Am I on a phone? Another needful doer said I didn't need to set up PPPoE. Really? Then why is the wizard telling me to? Another needful doer transferred me over to sales where they tried to sell me a second line. The next needful doer said to buy a new modem at BestBuy because they can't send me one (even though I got this modem and the last from the ISP).
This reminds me of the time I had to deal with Italian customs officers.
But the blinking red light never goes away, nor does my internet work. And, folks, I tried this on four browsers across two PCs, so it's not my old software to blame.
I know the reps keep telling you to fix your PC or some shit like that, but when the router says it's not connected, it literally doesn't matter which devices you might or might not use to go through it.
A long time ago (>10 years) at a shitty ISP far, far away, the idiots tried to make me go through the usual bullshit (rebooting my PC
), then tried to blame the router.
: It's not the router. Not only did it work before, I tried a spare router I got lying around which also worked before, and now doesn't.
But they insisted the problem is on my end and sent me another, free, router. Which of course didn't fix the problem.Makes you wonder at what point hiring cheap incompetent people that can't go off script and sending out free routers is actually, you know, more expensive than fixing the damn problem.
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@Gustav said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith the best would be your own server up there in the clouds.
Now imagining if everybody needed to set up their own email server.
But Gmail is a decent alternative. As long as you don't need to send any photos to your child's doctor, it's as reliable as it gets for free.
As someone who uses Gmail himself (like @zenith having made a wrong choice ages ago): you do realize how much your second sentence discredits your first, right?
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I ended up moving most of my email stuff to https://soverin.net/
Not too feature packed but nice and simple for my needs. Mostly when I was looking at email providers they had catch all for free.
status I’m reading a dark souls book but I’m convinced he’s never played the games. I can’t put my finger on it but it feels like he read reviews, the arguments online and sat through about 500 hours of lore videos but didn’t spend any time with the games themselves. There’s no sense of shared trauma.
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@DogsB I haven't looked into it too deeply, but for the future when I got some time to migrate I bookmarked https://mailfence.com/ as a possible alternative to look into.
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@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
a dark souls book
But of course there are
Gamers really are one of the most gullible morons.
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@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
I ended up moving most of my email stuff to https://soverin.net/
Not too feature packed but nice and simple for my needs. Mostly when I was looking at email providers they had catch all for free.
status I’m reading a dark souls book but I’m convinced he’s never played the games. I can’t put my finger on it but it feels like he read reviews, the arguments online and sat through about 500 hours of lore videos but didn’t spend any time with the games themselves. There’s no sense of shared trauma.
He talks at length about shields but doesn't mention poise. I might give up.
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@topspin Incredibly, as I browsed their site for information on what modems are available or supported, I find mine on the list. I ordered a cheap one on eBay anyway but I don't expect it to work. I had to go to eBay because Amazon sucks and Google is retarded. I happen to prefer Netgear so I put "Netgear DSL" into Google. Google, being retarded, links me to cable modems. If I put in Netgear and a specific model of DSL modem, I find more hits, but I'd have to know what models to look for. From the looks of their site, they don't sell DSL modems anymore, so the only thing that worked was searching eBay
and since I was already there...
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
a dark souls book
But of course there are
Gamers really are one of the most gullible morons.
I didn't pay for it and I gave up.
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@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
I didn't pay for it
*le gasp* How dare you!?Good man!Mike A. Tadpole or whatever the name of the novel-in-21 days guy who churned it out was has already got his money, and is probably lined up to make something coherent out of GRRM's discarded post-it notes for the Elder Rings.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Official Status Thread:
GRRM's discarded post-it notes
Tell him he should write a decent ending for
ASoIaFGoT already before he dies of cardiac arrest.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
he should write a decent ending for
ASoIaFGoT alreadyAnd be raked over the coals for the bother, because the fat man can write alright, but nothing can possibly justify the 20 year wait?
Already some years ago when he published another blag post that the draft is 3/4 done, I concluded that he's trolling and getting away with it, because he can. And if not, that just paints a more depressing picture of the reader base as a whole.
I stopped at book 4 anyway.
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@Applied-Mediocrity I haven't read a single one. But Game of Thrones really started out as a great series that completely went to shit. Season 4, for example, with Tyrion on trial and The Mountain and The Viper was simply amazing. I'm still scarred from the latter. The series had so many story arcs and deep characters, and then they just threw almost everything away and never did anything with it.
I mean, everybody who'd been paying a little bit of attention saw from a mile away that Danny wasn't going to be a great, just Queen but yet another mad Targaryen. But even besides that, there were so many things that the last seasons just completely blew.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I haven't read a single one.
I don't like multi-tome works in general (fuck Wheel Of Time with electric ratchet spanner; I guess that gets me crossed out of @DogsB's crypto-will), because either me or the author loses the plot (
). But I kept trudging on, because I wanted to see how exactly it deviates from the show.Well, the books are more depressing. The show has humorous stuff sprinkled, because TV shows must, as a rule. In books it ranges from far less and subtle enough to require vivid imagination (that I don't have) to non-existing, with all the horrible shit matter-of-factly happening. And then there's Lady Stoneheart... oh fuck, he starts another subplot with the zombie Catelyn, nope, nope, I'm out.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
@DogsB I haven't looked into it too deeply, but for the future when I got some time to migrate I bookmarked https://mailfence.com/ as a possible alternative to look into.
This is reminding me of the last time this conversation came up on this forum. Maybe I still have--
Yep
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@topspin Also, if GRRM kicks it, it could very well happen that his estate trusts Bran Sanderson to finish it, in which case, whoo-boy, if you thought the show's last seasons were bad, you ain't seen nothing.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gustav said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith the best would be your own server up there in the clouds.
Now imagining if everybody needed to set up their own email server.
Not much different from everybody setting up their own personal blog/portfolio website back in the day.
But Gmail is a decent alternative. As long as you don't need to send any photos to your child's doctor, it's as reliable as it gets for free.
As someone who uses Gmail himself (like @zenith having made a wrong choice ages ago): you do realize how much your second sentence discredits your first, right?
So what do you propose instead? Gmail isn't very good, but every other service is even worse.
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Status: If I were building my own home or remodeling, drywall (both hanging and finishing) is one thing I would contract out for.
Helped a family in our local church community make progress (until we ran out of drywall) on hanging drywall in one room. Ok, I mostly stood around and handed things, with the occasional measuring or lifting something. Because there were enough people who kinda-sorta knew what they were doing to actually do the work. It still sucked.
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@Applied-Mediocrity
Careful with badmouthing Sanderson, I'm pretty sure he's the Patron Saint of Lost Fiction.
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@izzion It's precisely why I'm badmouthing him. His meticulously plotted DnD action movie style works well enough despite the churn, and it's said he's a decent chap IRL, and has admitted to good parts of the criticism. But his fanbase seems to consist of the most annoying kind of turbonerds, where Sanderson has been placed on the highest shelf and Stan Lee created the rest of their world in 7 days before the deadline.
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@Gustav said in The Official Status Thread:
WHY DOES IT GO BACK TWICE WHEN I PRESS BACKSPACE ONCE
This bug I just found at work brings back memories.
ITYM why does it go back at all when I press backspace? Who the thought this was a good shortcut?
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@Zecc I mean, that too. But in this case it's not a browser. In fact, it's not even a keyboard. Kind of.
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@Zecc said in The Official Status Thread:
Who the thought this was a good shortcut?
I see in retrospect that I didn't think "hell" was a strong enough curse word, and that I couldn't think of an alternative before posting.
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Status: tonight's party is in a shed. It is hard to hear conversations.
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Status: I don't ask much of people. If you're stupid, don't touch me or any of my stuff. That's it.
Bank didn't follow that rule. Because of the ISP's fuckup, I needed my bank account number. Bank updated to an astoundingly awful website in the last year or so. As part of their security theatre, they hide the account number behind 2FA. After you're already in your account. Because stupid.
Anyway, some needful doer fucked that up and removed every option except "phone call" from the list that had contained "e-mail" and "text" as options. I have three phone numbers on the account. Two are desk phone lines - one at the office and one that used to be a landline but currently serves as DSL's dry loop only. The third is a 4G cell phone with 3G voice service (thanks so much Assholes Through & Through) that can only get texts.
So now I have to call from a fourth phone and hope the dingbat at the other end doesn't ask stupid questions that require me to drive to the main office an hour away.
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@Zenith You have the weirdest banking problems.
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@Parody When I was a kid, I liked my burgers with only ketchup. So often that took more brainpower than staff at McDonalds or Wendys could muster. You either ordered exactly what's on the menu or you took your chances. That's happened alot less in recent years, probably because it saves them money leaving crap off.
It's the exact opposite everywhere else. I don't ask the bank or ISP or anybody for special arrangements. I just open the account and expect a working debit card and monthly statements. That's it. Apparently, when you don't make problems for them (like asking to hold the pound of onions at McDonalds or gallon of mayo at Wendys), they have plenty of time to make problems for you.
Edit: You want to hear another weird story? When I left my employer several years ago, I had to fill out beneficiary forms for my pension. So, of course, I put my immediate family on there. All same last name as me at the time. For a couple of years, I got these annual reports that showed the correct names. Then, one day, somebody changed one letter in their last names. So instead of "Bryan Smith" and "Stacy Smith" it read "Bryan Smitg" and "Stacy Smitg." Happened to everyone except me.
But you know what's even weirder? After I got that sorted out (had to call several times of course - you know the drill, they say they fixed it, you see it's still wrong), my mail from the local ambulance club or firehouse or something else started arriving with the same misspelling.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
tonight's party
Was boring to me. It seems most everyone else had fun at least.
I guess I just don't have enough testosterone to push myself into other people's conversations.
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@Gustav said in The Official Status Thread:
But Gmail is a decent alternative. As long as you don't need to send any photos to your child's doctor, it's as reliable as it gets for free.
As someone who uses Gmail himself (like @zenith having made a wrong choice ages ago): you do realize how much your second sentence discredits your first, right?
So what do you propose instead? Gmail isn't very good, but every other service is even worse.
Probably pretty much anything else! (I assume Facebook doesn't provide an email service.)
Gmail is very nice from a technical point of view. That's why I got it in 00's. But it's from Google which makes it nearly unusable.
First off, their business model is basically to scan through your emails, to use this for tracking you, for training their ML shit, etc. That's like USPS reading all your snail mail. We had that shit in the soviet bloc and nobody liked it, but here you're signing up for it voluntarily (by virtue of it being hidden in 100 pages of legalese nobody is capabale of understanding).
And if you don't care for all of this: considering how most of the internet works, your email adress is basically your identity. Most of your accounts on other pages are linked back to your email address (or in some cases maybe directly to some Google SSO). So your email is the key to the castle. And google can randomly block your account, as you mentioned both with case of the guy sending images to his doctor, and you moving overseas. Like, that's absolutely ridiculous! They don't believe you're the account owner even though you have the credentials, and just block you. There is also no recourse to that. They have billions of users, but zero customer support. If the thing says you're blocked, you're blocked. No getting back your account.
And then you lose almost everything else, because normally to change your email adress for an account, they send a confirmation email to your original email first. Or, in the case of that doctor, it completely fucked up his phone, too.In my case, I didn't get locked out completely, but they locked me out of the account until I entered a phone number they could harvest, at gun point. Ostensibly because 2FA is safer of course, but that's obviously a lie if you read what happened.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I haven't read a single one. But Game of Thrones really started out as a great series that completely went to shit. Season 4, for example, with Tyrion on trial and The Mountain and The Viper was simply amazing. I'm still scarred from the latter. The series had so many story arcs and deep characters, and then they just threw almost everything away and never did anything with it.
They're really good books, try them. The series went to shit when they ran out of source material.
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@error reading good books that will never be finished sounds as unsatisfying as watching a great show that got flushed down the toilet.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I haven't read a single one. But Game of Thrones really started out as a great series that completely went to shit. Season 4, for example, with Tyrion on trial and The Mountain and The Viper was simply amazing. I'm still scarred from the latter. The series had so many story arcs and deep characters, and then they just threw almost everything away and never did anything with it.
They're really good books, try them. The series went to shit when they ran out of source material.
I propose a new law… no television or movies can be created without a best seller as underlying source material. And disrespecting the source material is punishable by tar and feathering, followed by a spacewalk without a suit.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
They're really good books
So you have a job that pays you shitloads of money for kneeling, you play several instruments, have couple hobby projects, have three girlfriends, play videogames on maximum difficulty and also, it terns out, read shitload-of-hundred-page books?
Status: I just took a daytime nap of 2 hours because I felt spent even though I hadn't done nothing today
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Willy’s Wonderland is a great movie.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
And if you don't care for all of this:
It's not that I don't care. It's that this happens anyway, whether I use Gmail or another email on my Android.
Yes, they have way too much control over everyone's life. Yes, they can have you cyber-disappeared at moment's notice, for any reason or no reason, usually by mistake when deploying AI - and there's no appeal process for anything. But they will never shut down. They will never fuck up network configuration and make your mailbox unreachable. They will never get bought out and retire free tier. They will never get sued into oblivion. They'll never get blocked at ISP level (outside China and thinner Korea). The chance of anything going wrong is 100x lower with them than other providers.
I said before. If you care so much, roll your own. Put it on Azure, the least evil of the three evil cloud providers. And build it on one of those cloud-agnostic frameworks so you can quickly switch to AWS if needed. Buy two different personal domains at two different registrars. Run a mirror on a NAS-connected Raspberry in your home, with push notifications so it gets mirrored instantly with minimal network traffic. And build a killswitch for when you lose access so that emails queue up at sender instead of disappearing while you're moving to AWS. Now you're virtually bulletproof, with about the same or even lower monthly cost than a paid-for email provider.
Every other provider is going to be worse at contingency than Gmail. Including your own server box in your own basement (because you now rely on ISP never having any outage or other fuckup). It's either Gmail, cloud as described above, or intentionally crippling yourself.
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
I haven't read a single one. But Game of Thrones really started out as a great series that completely went to shit. Season 4, for example, with Tyrion on trial and The Mountain and The Viper was simply amazing. I'm still scarred from the latter. The series had so many story arcs and deep characters, and then they just threw almost everything away and never did anything with it.
They're really good books, try them. The series went to shit when they ran out of source material.
I thought the tv series was better than the books. They both get poorer at about the same time and I suspect the ending what was told to them. I liked WOT books more but if GOT has a coherent ending I’d probably recommend that more. Sanderson ruined the last three books of WOT. Props on creating an evil lair though.
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@Gustav said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
And if you don't care for all of this:
It's not that I don't care. It's that this happens anyway, whether I use Gmail or another email on my Android.
Yes, the part before that quote, but not the part after.
It's an unfortunate fact that we have apparently accepted complete corporate surveillance and give it no more than a shrug of the shoulders. But not being able to escape Google's tracking doesn't mean it's good advice to be at the whims of their account policy.
Yes, they have way too much control over everyone's life. Yes, they can have you cyber-disappeared at moment's notice, for any reason or no reason, usually by mistake when deploying AI - and there's no appeal process for anything.
Which is completely unacceptable.
But they will never shut down. They will never fuck up network configuration and make your mailbox unreachable. They will never get bought out and retire free tier. They will never get sued into oblivion. They'll never get blocked at ISP level (outside China and thinner Korea). The chance of anything going wrong is 100x lower with them than other providers.
Objection!
The first few things seem like a trivial risk, and even Google doesn't have 100% uptime. The chance of "anything going wrong" isn't "100x lower" with them. It's not even low at all. It is frighteningly high.
Just here we have:
- You losing your account you apparently had full credentials to because they didn't like the location of the IP you used.
- Me temporarily getting locked out, while having full credentials, because they decided they "didn't recognize" the only device the account has ever been accessed from.
- Right in the same thread I mentioned above, @djls45 posted how he did forget his password, but had full access to the email that was stored as his recovery email adress. But they didn't let him recover the account anyway.
And I wouldn't be surprised if we have more TDWTF members, which isn't exactly a huge community, to have similar experiences. I can't think of any other mail provider that has such a high occurence of locking people out of their shit. Or, in fact, any provider that has absolutely no way to get in contact with support to get your shit back.
I said before. If you care so much, roll your own. Put it on Azure, the least evil of the three evil cloud providers. And build it on one of those cloud-agnostic frameworks so you can quickly switch to AWS if needed. Buy two different personal domains at two different registrars. Run a mirror on a NAS-connected Raspberry in your home, with push notifications so it gets mirrored instantly with minimal network traffic. And build a killswitch for when you lose access so that emails queue up at sender instead of disappearing while you're moving to AWS.
Sorry, but I can't even begin to describe how ridiculous this "alternative" sounds to me.
I don't have the expertise to configure that, nor the time to do it, or the time to learn how to do it without getting paid for it. My friends and family certainly don't, either.
(The idea of wasted resources if every single person ran their own server for one email address is just cherry on top.)Now you're virtually bulletproof, with about the same or even lower monthly cost than a paid-for email provider.
Every other provider is going to be worse at contingency than Gmail. Including your own server box in your own basement (because you now rely on ISP never having any outage or other fuckup). It's either Gmail, cloud as described above, or intentionally crippling yourself.There's a bunch of free mail providers. Do yahoo or hotmail still exists? Surely, they can't be even remotely close to being as terrible as google. And if you go for a paid provider, I doubt the $3 a month or whatever will be more than the costs of "two personal domains" and a server running on Azure.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
And I wouldn't be surprised if we have more TDWTF members, which isn't exactly a huge community, to have similar experiences. I can't think of any other mail provider that has such a high occurence of locking people out of their shit
Is there any other provider with even close to the amount of users as Gmail?
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
There's a bunch of free mail providers. Do yahoo or hotmail still exists? Surely, they can't be even remotely close to being as terrible as google
Hotmail is now Outlook.com but still exists. Its spam protection isn't anywhere near as good as Gmail.
I have no idea if Microsoft are any better at not locking people out of their accounts or not noseying through your emails.
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@loopback0 said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
And I wouldn't be surprised if we have more TDWTF members, which isn't exactly a huge community, to have similar experiences. I can't think of any other mail provider that has such a high occurence of locking people out of their shit
Is there any other provider with even close to the amount of users as Gmail?
Probably not, but the point here was that even if you assume that everyone is using Gmail, that’s still a shockingly high incidence of people affected by their arbitrary bullshit.
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I’ve had more downtime with gmail than I’ve had with outlook.
it’s been a few years though. I remember more aws outages to be fair. 
status it shockingly hard to find a dual sim phone that supports lineage os for under €150.
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@loopback0 said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
There's a bunch of free mail providers. Do yahoo or hotmail still exists? Surely, they can't be even remotely close to being as terrible as google
Hotmail is now Outlook.com but still exists. Its spam protection isn't anywhere near as good as Gmail.
I have no idea if Microsoft are any better at not locking people out of their accounts or not noseying through your emails.I don't know how they are about locking people out of their accounts, but Yahoo has (or used to have; I haven't gone near them in years) absolutely no spam filtering whatsoever. I once created an account there, because
, and within minutes of creating it, my inbox was full of spam. A very enthusiastic 
from me.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
@Zenith said in The Official Status Thread:
the local ambulance club
Where else do you think ambulances hang out in their free time?
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@HardwareGeek said in The Official Status Thread:
I don't know how they are about locking people out of their accounts, but Yahoo has (or used to have; I haven't gone near them in years) absolutely no spam filtering whatsoever. I once created an account there, because
, and within minutes of creating it, my inbox was full of spam. A very enthusiastic from me.Current Yahoo! Mail has spam filters in the same vein as GMail. It also has occasional problems with mail from some senders just never appearing and you can't figure out where the issue lies. Every service has some kind of problem.
My personal take on this: pick somebody to provide you an email address on their domain. It can be your ISP, a separate service, whatever you're comfortable with given the issues raised with various services. Only use this email address to purchase a domain and hosting with someone other than your email provider. Make email accounts on your personal domain for actual use. Even my cheap web hosting (~$100/yr) lets me make all the accounts I want.
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Which is completely unacceptable.
Absolutely. I do not agree with it, I would do everything in my power to change it if I could. But I cannot. There's literally nothing I, or you, or anyone else on this forum could possibly do to change it even the tiniest bit. Wait for the opportunity to arise, because it will arise eventually - and in the meantime, keep your head low and cut your losses by only giving them the data they already have. That's how communism was beaten in Europe.
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
yahoo
Aren't they in the process of bankruptcy?
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
hotmail
No, I'm pretty sure they don't anymore. Or at least rebranded and became Outlook 365 or whatever. Haven't checked their free offer but back in the day Hotmail was Hotgarbage feature-wise, and I'd be surprised it got any better. Unless you already pay for Office 365 anyway, then it's a different conversation.
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Surely, they can't be even remotely close to being as terrible as google.
The reason Gmail got popular in the first place was because they were much better than both Yahoo and Hotmail specifically, at the time. And except for mandatory phone number verification, Gmail didn't really get any worse than it used to.
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Sorry, but I can't even begin to describe how ridiculous this "alternative" sounds to me.
I don't have the expertise to configure that, nor the time to do it, or the time to learn how to do it without getting paid for it.Now you're just whining. You're an IT professional (I presume). You're fighting Lovecraftian horrors of technology day in, day out, for years - maybe decades. And you're saying you're scared of setting up an email server?
(The idea of wasted resources if every single person ran their own server for one email address is just cherry on top.)
I'm Polish. Over there, everybody is their own mechanic. You never fix your car at a shop unless you're super rich, super stupid, or the victim in a car crash (so insurance pays). If you won't do it yourself, nobody will do it for you to acceptable quality. Even if you pay. Same with most household appliances. You only buy things you absolutely cannot possibly do yourself, like buying the appliances themselves in the first place. My people have been living like this ever since industrial revolution arrived in our lands, and it works well enough.
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@DogsB said in The Official Status Thread:
I’ve had more downtime with gmail than I’ve had with outlook.
it’s been a few years though. I remember more aws outages to be fair. status it shockingly hard to find a dual sim phone that supports lineage os for under €150.
You can have mine. It's banned from VoLTE on AT&T though, ymmv.
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There's a fundamental issue with setting up your own email server these days (at least if you want to use it for outgoing email). You will get picked up on a spam/block list and won't be able to do a darn thing about it. And probably won't even know about it until people start complaining that they're not getting your emails. And that's very much a feature, not a bug as far as the big providers go. Email reputation management is incredibly a dark art, weighted real heavy in the big commercial providers' favor.
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@Parody said in The Official Status Thread:
My personal take on this: pick somebody to provide you an email address on their domain. It can be your ISP, a separate service, whatever you're comfortable with given the issues raised with various services. Only use this email address to purchase a domain and hosting with someone other than your email provider. Make email accounts on your personal domain for actual use. Even my cheap web hosting (~$100/yr) lets me make all the accounts I want.
I have my domain registered through and email hosted (same inbox as their own domain account) by a regional ISP in California. (They were once, when I lived in their service area, also my access provider. Alas, no longer.) They consistently get 5-star ratings for privacy and customer service. In one recent survey, they were rated the best ISP in the US.
The only problem I've ever had with email through them was when once, when I was doing maintenance, moving a lot of email between folders and deleting old junk, thousands of old emails I wanted to keep somehow got deleted accidentally. Their customer service was not able to help me recover them (but I was eventually able to recover them from Thunderbird's local cache). I blame this on Thunderbird messing up its end of IMAP, but it's possible it was PEBKAC.
As an access customer, you could for opt for static IP addresses (extra $5/month for each block of 8 IPV4) and to disable port blocking, so you could host your own servers, if you wanted to (although they reserved the right to block ports again if you misconfigured your server in a way that threatened their network). Of course, that's not useful if you're getting access from someone else, like AT&T, Comcast, Cox, or whoever, that forbids local servers and blocks the needful ports.
threads are 
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