Re: lynx-dev Lynx Access in Japan

[David Woolley]

> is it indeed the case that "many" ISPs impose such restrictions
> in these days when hardware in general & memory in particular are very cheap,
> esp in a country like Japan, renowned for its high standard of living
> (it was Japan the user inquired about by name)?

My impression is that shell accounts from ISPs are a legacy service that
many would want to terminate because they are high security risks
(my ISP always rejected setting up such accounts because of the high
security risk).  They would probably argue that the low cost of hardware
means that legitimate users have no problems running TCP/IP stacks
on their own machines and the real benefit of a shell account to
such users is that it gives them a high bandwidth connection to the
backbone - useful for spamming etc.

I think there is another class of shell account providers, who are
doing it almost as a public service, on very limited budgets and
for people who cannot afford even vaguely modern hardware.

With regard to the legacy providers, all the ISPs who used to provide UUCP
(probably the best way of doing dial up mail and news with metered phone
calls) in the UK seem to be withdrawing that service and discouraging
current users.  ISPs like to operate only the most popular services,
to keep support costs and internal training costs down.