PoS - noun phrase - Term for the DSL or cable modem your ISP requires you to run.  The quality of the equipment is exactly what you think it is.

You may or may not have noticed amongst the blizzard of other stuff that's happened in the last two weeks that Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai to the chairmanship of the Federal Communications Commission.  Pai has a history of being something of a contrarian; during his time as one of the five commissioners of the FCC, he repeatedly spoke against regulations that protected the consumer and was against diverse media ownership (since the 1980's, we went from 50 media companies to just six).  Time and again Pai's said that he was going to tear down regulation after regulation that the …

Telerama, one of the first Internet Service Providers in the world has finally jacked the big black, but somehow managed to pull off a miracle as it flatlined. Telerama (referred to as Teletrauma by ex-employees) has dropped offline a couple of times in the past because they couldn't pay their bills, management vanishing, and suchlike. In the net.community they're notorious for some of their business practices (such as outsourcing IT to the country of Brasil and running their tech support entirely off of IRC), which has probably contributed to the ISP's decline in the past nine years or so …

While browsing one of my e-mail accounts today I came across a rather worrisome notice: Home electronics superchain Best Buy bought out Speakeasy.net. Speakeasy is known for being a geek-friendly DSL provider - their tier-one tech support is extremely knowledgable, and if you know your stuff they'll listen to you and help you figure things out. Best Buy purchased them because Speakeasy has one of the better developed VoIP networks of any ISP in the US today, and they're always angling for another chunk of the market. The announced purchase price was $97mus. They claim that they're not going to …