The Passport Payment
Background
On December 24, 1999, I tried to check my
Hotmail email and found that
there was a problem. Basically,
passport.com addresses were, according to
my browser, nonexistent, which made Hotmail unavailable (Hotmail uses
passport.com for authentication). Thinking Microsoft was just experiencing
some nameserver problems, I moved on without giving it much thought.
The next day, Christmas, I was reading the news on
Slashdot and noticed a story about Hotmail being down. I read through
the discussion area
for that story and found that the problem had been
tracked down to an outstanding invoice for passport.com at
Network Solutions, the domain name
registrar.
I own a number of domains myself, including doublewide.net, so I’m no stranger
to the payment system at Network Solutions. I went to the payment page at
https://payments.networksolutions.com
and typed in “passport.com”, after which I was greeted with a page showing
the outstanding invoice for $35. One of the buttons near the bottom of the
page was “Make payment”, so I pressed it.
I was presented with a payment form, and I filled it out, including my
credit card number. Then I did something else for a few minutes, leaving
that completed form on my desktop. Finally, I brought it back to the
foreground and contemplated the whole situation. I really couldn’t think
of any negative consequences, and I knew that I was probably restoring
email service to a lot of Hotmail users (I thought there were a few million
at the time, turns out there are more than 20 million users with around
55 million email addresses). And I knew that if I didn’t press that button,
for whatever reason, I’d regret it.
So I pressed it. When the receipt page came up, I
posted it
on Slashdot, along with the statement “Merry Christmas, Microsoft”. This
was around 11AM.
At 5:00PM that day, I received a call from a reporter at the San Jose Mercury
News, but Hotmail still wasn’t working, and I didn’t think that passport.com
addresses would be available until the next morning at 5:00AM. At midnight,
I checked before going to bed and passport.com was unavailable. My son had
us up at 6:00AM the next morning, so I looked and passport.com- and hotmail.com-
was again available.
Although I was certain the payment was the fix, I couldn’t know for certain
until I’d heard from Microsoft or Network Solutions. On Tuesday, December 28
I heard from Microsoft. I was happy to hear that the payment did fix
Passport, and of course they wanted to reimburse me, and thank me.
On January 15, 2000, I received the check from Microsoft
for $500, in addition to a new copy of Visual Studio 6.0 (which I need to
compile and run the decss program to decode my DVD’s so that I can play them
under Linux). I put the check
up on ebay
to raise money for charity.
Latest news is: as of January 27, 2000, at 11:37 CST, the auction is finished,
and the check goes to John at
Northern Development Group. He plans
on giving the money to the Sisters
of the Road Cafe, a Portland, Oregon charity which provides meals to
poor and homeless people. Pretty cool!
I’d like to also add one more comment about this situation. The Slashdot
story was posted originally at 9:07AM on Sunday morning, and by 10:58AM (1 hour
51 minutes) it was fixed. According to Microsoft, they had known about the
problem the day before, and working with Network Solutions, their technicians
were unable to determine the cause before we did. There’s no better way to
say it, folks, this is a better way to write and debug software.
More Information
Frequently Asked QuestionsHow Much Did This Really Cost Microsoft?Who Is Michael Chaney?
About Passport
Information supplied by Microsoft
Check out http://www.passport.com/directory/ for a complete list of sites
which allow the Passport wallet to be used for purchases. These sites do
not use the Passport authentication (Single sign-in) service and were not
seriously affected by the temporary outage (purchases could still buy using
that sites proprietary purchase mechanism). Note that only the Microsoft
sites listed on www.passport.com/directory use the Passport single sign-in
service today. Microsoft plans to make the single sign-in service available
to third parties this spring.
About Doublewide.Net
I host web sites. See http://www.michaelchaney.com/ for details.
Contact Michael Chaney for more
information.
doublewide.net is owned by:Michael Chaney Consulting CorporationMichael Chaney, President/Owner2624 Oak Forest DriveAntioch, TN 37013615-361-1244http://www.michaelchaney.com/mdchaney@michaelchaney.com