What on earth do non-technical consumers do in a situation like this? Do they just wind up calling tech support and wasting hours talking to someone in Mumbai inexorably working their way through a script?

Anyway, I restarted my PC and, you may not be surprised by this, AT&T put up the same warning all over again. I had to restart the DSL modem twice to get rid of the warning and avoid what appears to be just an over-engineered password reset process that is thoroughly and unforgivably ridiculously ineffective.

What I don't get is why AT&T is so fussy about passwords for DSL access. The connection is point-to-point and they know which line located at what address connects to which DSLAM port so why the apparent paranoia over access passwords? Is this just an engineering driven architecture that serves to maintain legacy systems that really should be redesigned? Anyone?

(Actually, an old friend works for AT&T on the DSL side so I'll try and track him down and see if he can shed any light on this saga … I will let you know what he says.)

Weirdly, after this benighted process, my Mac seemed to get its DNS cache "stuck" so, while I could access Gmail and iGoogle, Google was unreachable until the condition mysteriously cleared itself up after a few hours (I gave up and went and had an early glass of wine … it was either that or put my fist through something digital).