Red Hot Pants - Dial up days.
Someone elses story reminds me of this.

Years ago there was an ISP called Red Hot Ant, who offered an 0800 dial up internet access for £65 a year.
I paid my £65 and then hardly ever got a connection, beeing plauged by engaged tones. Once on, gave it an hour, it'd cut off again, and then bam more engaged tones.

Enough was enough, I complained. They did nothing about it. So complained again on a newsgroup for connection problems.
Next minute, i was getting authentication errors whenever I didnt get an engaged tone. They sent a letter through the post saying they had terminated my account due to "Malicious use, and slanderous comments in newsgroups". They refused to give me any refund or part refund. A month of shoddy internet cost me £65!

It was quite obvious this ISP was so over subscribed that they were needing to ditch their users as they couldnt keep up and they were losing money badly.

A week later, I was handed a text file from a friend of a friend of a friend. Which contained a list of every single red hot ant username and password. They had been hacked. Tried a couple of accounts and viola! I was back in.

It appeared that if I was on someones account, it did not actually stop the owner of that account getting on also. As a few of us were using the same account simultaneously with no problem. So I felt it was a victimless crime. I had paid to be on the service, so didnt feel like I was stealing either. (im sure a load of goody two shoes will probably flame me and report me for to the cyber pohlice but I dont care).

Red Hot Ant appeared to become aware of their leak. But instead of forcing a password change to all the users, or restricting the service to 1 simultaneous logon. They put a feature on their site where you could see how many hours you had spent online. I checked one of the accounts I was using, and it said:

"In the last 24 hours you have been online for 8,349 hours". It seemed this file had obviously spread around the internet like wildfire and half the UK was abusing the crap out of the ISP.

Unsurprisingly, Red Hot Ant shut itself down.


For me it was a victory, because I had managed to get what I had paid for by sticking it to the man. But I did feel bad for them, because they had obviously been hacked, exploited and they didn't seem to be capable of taking the appropriate action to protect themselves, and their users.
(Boom- Clicks on NSFW links at work., Thu 10 Feb 2011, 16:18, 3 replies)

Can't imagine
why anybody would criticise you for that. They had an unviable business, and sloppy infrastructure. You were only getting what you paid for. Doesn't matter what you did, they were goin' DOWN.

And slander is not a breach of contract, they were not entitled to terminate for that. They could have taken civil action against you, but they'd have fuck all chance of winning, sounds like what you said was true anyway.

You were probably in breach for using someone elses login, but who would blame you. I certainly wouldn't.
( Not Pineapple anymore, Thu 10 Feb 2011, 16:56, closed)

I'm a goody two shoes...
But I can't see anything wrong with your actions -- you paid your money and you got your service. The ISP tried to steal from you by selling you something it had no intention of providing you with and it went bust. All's well that ends well -- I just hope the thieving scumbag who thought of the ISP scam lost their house.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Thu 10 Feb 2011, 17:44, closed)

My friend Barry had a red-hot-ant account
We soon also worked out that we could use it at the same time - however it was described to us as a free service and not one we were nicking lol
( SiX and his hat, Thu 10 Feb 2011, 18:32, closed)