Extra extra, read all about it! ISP b0rks subscriber's opml file!

Yes, you read the post title right. Link.net ruined my opml file. This goes on the record as one of the weirder software malfunctions of all time. The story goes like this.

My ISP, being the clever people they are, thought it would be clever to redirect all my traffic to their site to present a clever reminder to me that my bill would become due in a week or so.

Unfortunately, they botched this completely. Their DNS servers were resolving any and all requests to this page.

Liferea, my RSS aggregator, couldn't find the xml feeds and therefore decided to ask Link's DNS servers, who kindly responded that all my feeds could be found at one convenient location, namely here. Liferea being a very cooperative RSS client promptly modified the feedlist.opml file which contained the links to my RSS feeds to all point there.

The result? Connection back up after barking at tech support, and liferea is totally b0rked. All my feeds? Redone manually (though I was later to learn that I could have used autodiscover in a small bash script, which wouldn't have worked anyhow with a lot of the URLs).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you put Microsoft monkeys in charge of a large ISP. Out of consideration for the few brain cells which have not suffered untimely death from the sheer frustration of living in Egypt, I have refrained from discussing this issue with the Link.net people.

One pays, and one shuts up.

Much unlike the clever people at the ISP, the liferea developers were extremely prompt to respond to my email on this matter. A fix of sorts is forthcoming in the next release.

Large ISP, completely botched. Small open source software project, near-instantaneous response.

Let no one wonder why open source is such a threat to the traditional software "industry".