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AltaVista: the farce continues

Unconfirmed sightings leads to unbridled joy

Three people have come forward to say that they have been using AltaVista's British-based unmetered Net access service in the UK.

The revelation was made by Mark E Jackson, editor-in-chief of the ISP Review.

He said: "We've heard from three people on the AltaVista service (normally we'd expect a lot more to reply).

"They say the service is fairly average and not exceedingly fast either, we haven't been able to get anymore details at this time.

"Apparently there isn't much to get anyway, AV is rather bland or something along those lines."

Whether the service is up to scratch or not is neither here nor there. What's important is that after an intensive search some people have been found. This must be of great comfort to AltaVista, which has yet to provide the details of a single user.

However, these are still only reported cases and no one actually using the AltaVista unmetered service in Britain has yet to contact The Register, or any of the other people out there who've joined the manhunt.

Two of Britain's national newspapers - The Guardian and the Mirror - have failed to locate any users despite extensive searches and repeated requests for the ISP to identify a "user".

.net magazine has also drawn a blank from readers on its ISP bulletin board.

And now Net users in the US have joined the search for Britain's elusive Alta Vista users with Webmasterworld.com letting their sniffer dogs loose on the trail.

An alleged sighting yesterday of an Alta Vista user has yet to be confirmed.

A spokeswoman for CMGI, the parent of AltaVista, said someone from AltaVista would be available for comment next week. ®

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