Re: OT: Newsgroups dead in France?

On 2009-07-11 19:29:23 +0100, Kate Brown <elvira@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

On Sat, 11 Jul 2009, David in Normandy wrote
Earl Evleth wrote:

I use the same serived
I have had problems since July 9th, at the end of the morning using my
normal access
to the groups. I can dodger around that using google groups.
I noticed that I can send a communication to the news group and it
appears on google
archives immediately. But nothing incoming. Any postings prior to
July 9th around
11 AM do come up.
I assume Orange is working on it. Maybe the Northern Korean hackers
have loaded the
news groups internationally?


Thanks for the reply. The symptoms you describe exactly match those I experience. It confirms the problem is at the Orange end. I've looked on their awful website but cannot find any reference to news groups full stop, so I don't know if this is just a fault or if they are no longer offering a news server service.

As you mention there has been some skull duggery with the North Koreans and a nasty worm wiping out computers that aren't fully patched. I gather Orange has problems with obsolete software in their organisation and still use IE version 6 internally! So this leaves them open to various nasties.

The eternal-september news server, as suggested by others, seems to work fine.

Orange is perhaps the most desperately useless ISP on the planet. Well, at least in France. Two or three of their local servers got infected by a Russian spambot a year or so ago, which proceeded to fake my address as a sender, and flood the email waves with spam, largely to non-existent addresses. As Orange itself is clueless when it comes to identifying the source of spam, I started getting Message Delivery Notifications - in their hundreds of thousands! As you say, it's impossible to navigate their website - if you want to make a complaint you simply go round in circles. Even official messages from the abuse department at my ISP failed to make them reply. In the end I had to change my domain address...:(

We changed to Zen from Orange because of the spam flooding. The theory/rumour/idea, was that some disgruntled ex-employee had sold or released details of hundreds, if not thousands, of Orange customers. I was getting hundreds of bits of spam every week, sometimes even per day and Orange seemed unwilling or unable to do anything about it before it hit my inbox. I'm very happy with Zen and they seem to get good user reviews.
--
Sacha
www.hillhousenursery.com
Shrubs & perennials. Tender & exotics.
South Devon

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