usenet via fairpoint?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

David Rysdam <david at rysdam.org> writes:
>
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:36:56 -0400, "Michael ODonnell" <michael.odonnell at comcast.net> wrote:

> > ...maybe you could fiddle with your browser's User Agent string.
> > The User Agent Switcher plugin is fairly painless to install and
[...]
> 
> Oh yeah, I think when the switch first happened a few years ago I
> determined that I could do that. But I'm really more inclined to just
> decline to do business with a tech company so incompetent. And if they
> are actually *mal*competent (i.e. deliberately excluding anyone not
> using IE), I'm even less inclined to trick them into letting me send
> them money.
> 
> Of course, I still *am* doing business with them. And not even getting
> my money's worth, if they do have nntp that I just can't use for some
> reason. Which is why I raised the possibility of alternative ISPs.

Well, G4 was mentioned here as a local ISP when MV Communications
announced that they were shutting down and GNHLUG needed to find a new host;

    http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/21007

I've been using Earthlink <http://www.earthlink.net/> for a number of years;
for DSL or Cable, they're middlemen (reselling Fairpoint DSL, in my case),
but they actually provide NNTP as part of the package (I'd switched to
Comcast for a while, and then switched back to Earthlink when Comcast
stopped providing NNTP service [but kept charging the same price]). FYI,
Earthlink's NNTP service is actually provided by GigaNews (I'm pretty sure
I actually saw this documented somewhere, at some point...; empirically,
connecting to news.east.earthlink.net gets me a greeting of
"200 News.GigaNews.Com").

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."