Talking point
How on earth could Jack Schofield write hundreds of words on chat programs yet not mention the original - Internet Relay Chat?
It was developed in Finland in 1991 and has been used by millions the world over. IRC allows you to swap files, chat privately, and runs on virtually any operating system (including Epoc, PalmOS, Amiga and VMS). And instead of taking up 5.5MB and gobbling resources, an IRC client will take up 300KB and run happily on a very old machine.
ICQ? No thanks; I want to chat, not watch superfluous animated widgets.
Gideon Hallett.
ghallet@pilot.net
Jack Schofield replies: the article (Everybody go surfing, October 5) was actually about group surfing, not chat. ICQ was included for ICQ Surf.
Poor line
At what stage does failure to provide a service become intentional and the selling of a "non-existent product" come under the trades description act. Maybe the Guardian should consider offering a forum for a "class action" against Freeserve?
Having paid £10 a month for unlimited access to the internet with Freeserve via the telco Energis, I initially found that evening connection was at best problematic. I felt sorry for people who had paid for an off-peak service but was not personally inconvenienced.
Now the daytime service is rapidly deteriorating. Lunch times and after school hours are becoming impossible. I cannot even get past the BT "network busy" which suggests that Freeserve has not purchased the capacity to even get to its modems!
Richard Page
richardpage@veg-edible.clara.co.uk
Along with many others, my account has been terminated due to "heavy" use. Freeserve claims that I have been using its service for almost 17 hours per day. My own logs contradict this.
It appears to be in direct contradiction of 1.11 of their terms and conditions which state: "All internet calls will be subject to network management controls. We reserve the right to disconnect you after two hours continuous use and/or 10 minutes of inactivity during connection. There is however, no limit on the number of connections made every day."
Also, the service is described online as giving "unlimited internet calls day and night, 365 days a year".
How can Freeserve justify termination on grounds of causing "abnormal" load on their system when I - and others - are using the service as described by them?
Furthermore, Freeserve has recently changed the terms and conditions because some users were storing too much email. Why did they not change them to account for high usage?
Companies should not be allowed to offer a service and then blatantly and arbitrarily withdraw it on a whim.
No one will take either the internet seriously or companies like Freeserve until they act with responsibility.
David Lee
dlee@ansible.freeserve.co.uk
Is it write?
A couple of weeks ago, you published a letter stating that CD-RW discs were only readable on the machine that wrote them.
I was astonished that anyone should produce such a daft standard that I expected this assertion to be contradicted inFeedback, but there was no letter then, nor was it mentioned in Ask Jack on backups on September 17.
Is it really true? I think we should be told!
Colin Cohen
c.cohen@europe.com
Jack Schofield replies: No, it is not true. The CD-RW (ReWritable) system uses reflectances much lower than those in the original CD spec and may be unreadable in older drives, but any drive that meets the MultiRead spec should be able to read them.
