by Ron Newman.
Last Revised: Saturday, November 8th, 1997 at 11:00 pm EDT. Skip forward for latest news
On Thursday, June 12, 1997, the Boston Globe published a column about the problems that I (and other customers) have had with Cybercom. Read it here. The Boston Business Journal also published a short article about Cybercom and me the following day.
As many of you know, I used to have an account at a Boston-area Internet service provider known as Cybercom.net, whose formal name is "Cyber Access Internet Communications, Inc.".
I don't have that account any more, and this page will explain why. After I complained publicly about a weekend-long service outage, Cybercom deleted my account, my e-mail, my web pages and all of my private files, without notice or explanation. I had to hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit, which cost me several thousand dollars, in order to get my e-mail forwarded and my files returned.
Cybercom and I signed a formal agreement on June 3 specifying that Cybercom would install forwarding for all URLs that begin with "http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/".
Our agreement called for Cybercom to forward the URLs for three months. Cybercom did not fully comply with the agreement until some time the week of June 23rd; however, once they finally complied, they kept the forwarding in place until around October 20, nearly a month longer than required. Since this forwarding is no longer in place, the following links to various old web pages of mine at Cybercom will now give "Not Found" errors:
link 1 , link 2 , link 3 , link 4 .
Do you have a Cybercom story you'd like to tell the world? If so, e-mail it to me, rnewman@thecia.net, and let me know if I can add it to this web site. Here are two stories I've received so far that are definitely worth reading:
I have also offered Cybercom a "right of reply". If Cybercom wishes to make a public statement contesting any of what I say here, I will be glad to include that statement on my site. If Cybercom posts a reply on its own web site, I'll hyperlink to it from here.
On Friday, May 9, 1997, around 4:00 pm, Cyber Access suddenly lost its connection to the rest of the Internet, which had been provided by a T1 link to MCI.
I telephoned Cyber Access's office at 617-876-5660 to ask what had happened, and was assured that the problem would be fixed within the next half hour. It was not, and Cyber Access remained disconnected for the entire weekend to follow. No explanation was given to users who attempted to log in, neither in e-mail, nor in the login "message of the day", nor on the company's web site. Further telephone calls to the office were useless, as I continually reached a voice mail system that informed me that "The person's mailbox is full. It cannot accept any more messages. Goodbye."
On Sunday, May 11, I attempted to visit Cyber Access's office at 2000 Massachusetts Avenue #4 in Cambridge, but found nobody there.
In frustration, I then visited a public-access Internet terminal at Harvard University's Science Center and posted the following message to the public Usenet newsgroup ne.internet.services :
From: Name.Withheld@cybercom.net
Newsgroups: ne.internet.services
Subject: What happened to cybercom.net?
Date: 11 May 1997 16:09:19 -0700
Organization: ISP Watch - Boston
Message-ID: <5l5jiv$d26@drn.zippo.com>
Does anyone know why cybercom.net has disappeared from the Internet?
It hasn't been connected to MCI since some time Friday afternoon.
If anyone lives in the Porter Square area, could you try visiting
them tomorrow at 2000 Mass. Ave. #4 in Cambridge, and see what's
going on? Please post a report to this newsgroup.
By Monday morning, May 12, the Cyber Access voice mail message finally said that they apologized for the outage and expected service to return to normal on Tuesday afternoon. But most of the time, callers still got the "Voice mailbox is full" instead of this status message.
Service was not back to normal on Tuesday night, so the following morning, I dropped by the Cyber Access office again and met S____, an employee of the company. (I know her first name and e-mail address, but I am omitting them here in fairness to her, since she's really another innocent victim of Cyber Access's incompetent management.)
S____ was just then arriving for work, so we chatted outside on the street for about a half hour. S____ told me of the problems Cyber Access was having trying to re-connect to the Net, her efforts to solve them, and her increasing frustration with the company's management.
The Cyber Access system remained totally disconnected from the Internet until some time on Wednesday afternoon, May 14. At that time, a very slow and intermittent connection was restored, which was often still inaccessible to many other machines on the rest of the Internet. Telephone calls to Cyber Access continued to be answered by a voice-mail system, which usually was full and did not allow the caller to leave a message. And there was still no status report given to users, neither by e-mail nor on the Cyber Access web site.
I later found out that this new connection was a single ISDN link via Harvard.net -- hardly an adequate way to link 1600 users and 270 businesses to the rest of the world. A new T1 was on order to replace this, but it takes 3 or more weeks to get a T1 installed around here. The head of Harvard.net got so many phone calls from disgruntled Cybercom customers that he finally posted these two messages to ne.internet.services on May 22, explaining that he knew even less about Cybercom than the people who were calling him.
On Thursday morning, May 15, I attempted to log in, only to find that my user name and password no longer worked. Telephone calls to the office remained useless (I still got the "full voicemail box" message when I called), so I visited the office in person again at around 10:30 am. Nobody was there, so I handwrote a letter asking what had happened to my account, including information on how to reach me, and left it under the office door.
Nobody responded to my letter within the next 24 hours, so on Friday morning, May 16, 1997, at approximately 10:45 am, I visited the office again. This time I found two people there, S____ and Augustine. (I do not know their last names.)
I asked S____ what had happened to my account and my files, and she was surprised to find they were missing. She began to re-create my account, but then Augustine interrupted us and said that Cyber Access had deliberately deleted my account and my files, because I had acted in a way harmful to the company (referring to my ne.internet.services posting above). He said that my files were not my property, and that under no circumstances would Cyber Access restore them to me. I told Augustine that I would not leave the office until my account and files were restored, and he threatened to call the police, a threat which I ignored.
S____ continued to restore my account, and got on the phone to the owner of Cyber Access, Peregrin (Pippin) Petty-Schroeppel, telling him that I was in the office. She more or less demanded that Pippin restore my files from a backup tape. After she got off the phone with Pippin, S____ told me that my files should be back online by the end of the day. I told her that if they were not, I would return to the office on Monday, and she agreed that this was reasonable.
When I logged in around 4 pm Thursday afternoon, I found at least eight e-mail messages and a .tar.gz file that had been restored from a backup system, which contained the entire contents of my directory at the time of backup. One of the messages was from S____, asking me to copy the .tar.gz file elsewhere as soon as possible. I agreed to do this when I returned home Thursday night.
However, by 5:30 pm that day, my account had once again been deleted, along with all of the files in it, including the just-restored .tar.gz file. My telephone calls to the office that night were not answered. I e-mailed S____ to ask what had happened, and she replied on Saturday afternoon with a message informing me that someone (not her) had deleted not only my account and my restored .tar.gz file, but also a second copy of that file "in its original location". S____ also told me, in her e-mail, that she had been ordered not to restore the file a second time for me.
On Saturday night, May 17, I wrote a letter to Pippin Petty-Schroeppel demanding the return of my files, and threatening to sue him and Cyber Access if they were not restored by Monday evening, May 19. I hand-delivered this letter to his home at 54 Dartmouth Street in Medford, Massachusetts at about 9 pm Saturday night. Nobody answered the doorbell, so I dropped the letter into the mail slot.
On Monday morning, May 19 at 10:15 am, I visited Cyber Access one last time. Nobody was in the office yet, so I taped another copy of my letter to Pippin Petty-Schroeppel to the office door. I returned to the office around 11 am and found S____ in a parked car outside, about to go to work. She told me that she had tried her best to help me, but that there was nothing further she could do. As a result of her last attempt to restore my files, one of her co-workers had actually taken away her "root privileges" for a short period of time, probably to prevent her from trying again.
I told S____ that I planned to take legal action to recover my property, and I wished her good luck in finding another job. S____ and I agreed that I would not visit the Cyber Access office again unless it was to serve formal legal process, and we parted as amicably as possible given the difficult circumstances we were both working under.
By this time, I decided that my files are in imminent danger of being permanently destroyed, so I hired a lawyer, John Maconga of the law firm Perkins, Smith & Cohen in downtown Boston. This firm has extensive experience with Internet and intellectual property law, something that became immediately evident in my conversation with Mr. Maconga. I didn't have to explain anything to him twice, and he even told me that he was already familiar with my two well-known web files, The Good Net-Keeping Seal and The Church of Scientology vs. the Net.
Mr. Maconga quickly understood the harm that Cyber Access had caused to my reputation in deleting my web pages and bouncing my e-mail, and he fired off another letter to Pippin Petty-Schroeppel demanding that Cyber Access return my files, forward my e-mail, and replace my deleted web pages with new ones that contain pointers to my current home pages. The letter asked that Mr. Petty-Schroeppel reply by the close of business on Thursday, May 22, or else we would file suit the next morning. The letter was delivered by certified snail mail, fax, and e-mail, so there could be no possible excuse for him not reading it in time.
The May 22 deadline passed without any response whatsoever from Pippin Petty-Schroeppel, so the next day, John Maconga and I went to Middlesex County Superior Court in Cambridge and filed a formal complaint. We asked that the judge grant an immediate temporary restraining order forcing Cyber Access to return my files and establish e-mail and web forwarding. The judge denied this request because Cyber Access had not yet been served with a copy of the complaint, but he scheduled a hearing for the very next business day, Tuesday, May 27. (Monday, May 26th was Memorial Day, a major holiday in the U.S.)
About an hour before Tuesday's hearing is scheduled to start, John Maconga finally got a phone call from a lawyer representing Cyber Access. This was the first response either of us had gotten from Cyber Access since I first hired Mr. Maconga a week earlier.
It seemed that Cyber Access now claimed that I owed them $60 for being over my 20MB disk quota for the past three months. Since I had never received a bill or any other kind of notice about this, I told them that no, I wouldn't pay them anything. (When I got home that evening, I found in my snail-mail box a bill for $59.85, dated May 18 but not postmarked until May 23.) Nor would I agree to a "gag" that would prohibit me from talking publicly about Cyber Access.
After a few more phone calls back and forth, Pippin agreed to return my files to me, to begin forwarding e-mail from my old address (rnewman@cybercom.net) to my new one (rnewman@thecia.net), and to establish "web forwarding" pages, so that anyone who tries to access any of my old URLs gets directed to a page telling them that they have moved.
We also agreed that no money would change hands either way. This is a bit painful to me, since I've now spent a couple thousand dollars in legal fees, but the alternative was that I might not get my files back, or my mail forwarded, for many weeks to come while we fought this out in court.
I composed two "forwarding" Web pages whose text I wanted incorporated into the agreement, and then sat back and waited for the agreement to be formally drafted, delivered to Pippin, and signed by him. On Thursday morning, May 29, Pippin made my files available by FTP in .tar.gz format. On Friday night, May 30, Cybercom began automatically forwarding my e-mail.
On June 3, 1997, Pippin Petty-Schroeppel and I finally signed an out-of-court settlement letter of agreement. One of the provisions specifically reads:
2. You and Cyber Access will create pointers for Mr. Newman's web pages. One pointer will direct anybody who attempts to access any URL beginning with "http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/scientology/" to a web page that reads substantially as follows:A second pointer will direct anybody who attempts to access any other URL beginning with "http://www.cybercom.net/~rnewman/" to a web page that reads substantially as follows:
On June 4, Cybercom installed forwarding pages, but only for these two specific URLs, and no others:
Later that day, I sent Pippin Petty-Schroeppel this e-mail, cc'd to my lawyer. The letter pointed out that Cybercom had not followed the letter of the agreement, and gave these three URLs as examples of links which still had no forwarding installed:
Late in the evening of Thursday, June 5, someone at Cybercom installed forwarding pages for the above three URLs, apparently in response to my message. But until at least June 23, they still did not comply with the actual agreement. For nearly three weeks after they signed the agreement, the following links still resulted in "Not Found" errors:
When I complained about this, Cybercom told my lawyer that it was technically difficult to do what they agreed to. This claim was easily rebutted by the online documentation of the Apache web server, which Cybercom uses. See the Apache HOWTO document entitled How to redirect an entire server or directory to a single URL.
On Thursday, June 19, I sent Pippin Petty-Schroeppel another e-mail, cc'd to my lawyer, demanding that Cybercom fully comply with our June 3 agreement. I got no reply to this e-mail, but....
On June 25, I received e-mail from a reader of this page, informing me that all of the links to my old web pages now forwarded properly to my new site. After I confirmed that this was true, I called my lawyer and asked him to dismiss the lawsuit, now that Cybercom was finally complying with the spirit (though not the exact letter) of the agreement we signed on June 3rd.
However, I intend to keep this page up on the Web for as long as Cybercom remains in business. If you have a Cybercom story to tell, please email me at rnewman@thecia.net. Let me know if I can add your story to this page.
On Thursday, June 12, 1997, the Boston Globe published a column about the problems that I (and other customers) have had with Cybercom. Read it here. The Boston Business Journal also published a short article about Cybercom and me the following day.
Cybercom has been the subject of a fair amount of discussion on the newsgroup ne.internet.services.
See also:
If Cybercom issues any public statement in reply to this page, I'll hyperlink to it, both here and near the top of the page.