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Cablevision, the company that holds the local cable monopoly on Long Island in New York, calls their internet service Optimum Online. Optimum is run by a bunch of assholes.

Here's how you can tell:
Optimum's mail servers have about a 90% downtime and when they are running, they are open relays for spammers. As a result of their stupidity and incompetence, e-mail that originates from Optimum's servers is often banned by such services as AOL, MSN and Earthlink.

When challenged to do something about it, rather than hire competent technicians to secure their servers or putting an intelligent system in place to block excessive and abusive use of their network, Optimum hamstrung their customers by blocking all outgoing traffic from port 25 (SMTP e-mail). This means that with the exception of AOL and web-mail, anyone who relies on any e-mail server from a company other than Optimum is fucked.

People who pay for Yahoo! POP mail service, for example, can no longer send mail using their Yahoo! account. People with MSN or .Mac accounts are similarly screwed. Anyone who depends on their mail server from work is fucked royally, as am I with my own mail server associated with this web site and hosted remotely.

At first glance, Optimum's move seems the height of stupidity. It doesn't do a thing to stop spam. It just punishes legitimate customers. Spammers are still at liberty to use Optimum's open mail server and to create their own mail servers on Optimum's network to blast anyone they want with Viagra ads.

But really, it's not so much stupid as it is blindly arrogant and larcenous. It points out how much this monopoly is populated by a bunch of fascist assholes. You see, I spoke to a couple of managers at their Woodbury offices for a long time about this issue and they made it clear that they didn't give a shit about who was affected by their toying with the network. They offer one and only one way for customers to get the ordinary use and enjoyment of the service that they already paid for and reasonably expected from Optimum and that's to shell out an additional $30 dollars a month for an account free of arbitrary port-blocking.

That's right, this local monopoly is extorting cash from its customers by forcing them to pay extra for services that they already pay for. They do this not because they must, but because they can. There is no rational tie between their obscene actions and the public interest. The managers that I spoke to pointed out that their terms of service "agreement" which resides on their web site and is subject to change without notice by them and only them with no negotiation permitted by their customers says that they can change the service any time they want without notice.

Assholes. Plain and simple. I can't wait for the class action lawsuit.