January 2, 1997

Dear Diary:

Weather today -- raining
Mood today -- good
Fly count for yesterday -- 0
HF Today -- 453.7%

Well, well, well. The Fishnet saga continues. After nearly two years of no responses to polite emails, phone calls, etc., I found out the secret of getting a response! And from the SysAdmin himself, no less! Woo hoo! All you have to do, Fishnet customers, is call them "jerks" in your email. Here's the response I got back and my reply to it:

>At 03:46 PM 1/1/97 -0800, you wrote:

>Excuse me miss, I have no idea who your gripe is with, but I have
>always gone out of my way to help you.  We recently got hacked, and
>had to restore from backup.  If you no longer have an account with us, i'm
>very sorry, especially considering how much time we've spent with you trying
>to satisfy your needs, but you certainly do not have the right to go
>attacking us personally, simply because you chose to get your internet
>access elsewhere.
>
>Keith Kelley
>FishNet System Administrator
>
1.  It's Ms.
2.  This is the fourth or fifth time y'all have been hacked in the last year
or so.  Ever heard of a firewall?
3.  NONE of this ugliness would have happened if someone would have answered
any of my numerous emails.  Adam, bless his heart, was the only person who
bothered to respond, and all he said was, 'everything's cool.'  From whose
perspective?  Mine?  I think not, Scooter Pie.  
4.  My site is in a *SHAMBLES* because you can't adequately protect your
clients from hacking.  I have had to withdraw from an extremely prestigious
competition because of your ineffectiveness when it comes to security measures.
5.  I had made the decision to pursue getting my own domain name and 100
megs of server space.  Fishnet was going to get that business.  Now Jetlink
is getting it.  My domain name approval should be here in four to five days.
6.  I have *often* been the first person to call you people up and tell YOU,
the ISP, that YOUR server is down; either the mail server, the web server,
whatever.  Seems like at least once or twice I month, I've been your early
warning system.  Great job, folks.
NONE of this is unusual.  In the nearly two years I was a client at
Fishnet, this was S.O.P. (that stands for Standard Operating Procedure, by
the way).  The ONLY person there who seems to know squat or CARE about
clients is Adam Charron.  Ron Prague certainly doesn't give a rat's ass.  He
told me he gets 200 emails a day. So what?  Has he never heard of setting up
an automated response to at LEAST let clients know he got the damn mail?
Almost two years, he never ONCE returned an email or phone call of mine.
When I finally got hold of him after all this, he hung up on me.  VERY
professional.  VERY good for business.  VERY good for your reputation. Well,
excuse me, but I got tired of it.  And there will be as permanent a record
as can be made on the internet available for all to see regarding all of
this, including a copy of your letter to me and my response.

Happy New Year.
Elaine M. Jordaan

And check it out: now the party line is not "we lost some files." Now it's "we got hacked." Of course, if you've been following this whole mess, you know that that is precisely what I said from day one.. Rudy and Cia essentially *watched* the hacking in progress! These ISP folks (this ISP specifically; I'm not labeling all ISPs as such) seem to think that we "users" are completely without resources of our own to keep track of what is going on. Cia tracked the hacker; Rudy tracked logins and logouts to the system. I sent *all* that information to Ron Prague, the owner. No response.

And as best as I've been able to find out, my directory was the only one that got nuked. Some of Fishnet's homepage went wonky for a bit, as well, but it was very minor damage. Why couldn't they just say, "Yo Elly, we got hacked and you were the target"? I could deal with that and work WITH them rather than against them. Do the terms "honesty" and "business" really have to be mutually exclusive? Poor JetLink. I think they're just beginning to realize what a fireball they've taken on (I cc:'d the above email and reply to them). Much to my brawling instincts' chagrin, Mr. Principal Main SysAdmin Keith Kelley has had the good sense NOT to respond any further.

Now the good news. I got all the webrings I own moved to Geocities yesterday, where they will reside permanently. Some recoding will have to be done once the domain name is approved and the account set up, but it's minor. That was a pretty big project and I feel like I accomplished a lot getting it done. The rest of the day was spent looking for stuff for a new page I'm working on. I found loads of *great* graphics, info and links, but the one image I'm looking for has escaped me thus far. I saw the picture in Time Magazine back in 1993 (December 27, 1993 issue) so I guess I'll have to order a back issue and either get that puppy scanned or find out who the artist is and track it down on the web that way.

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Copyright © 1997 Elaine M. Jordaan

This page last updated June 21, 1997