Apparently NTL have blocked out cable modem users from accessing Hotmail etc. This is certainly affecting Tony and others. A solution has been posted on the bigblueball forum here and there is a load of spiel from Robin Walker on setting up proxies at NTL here
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Instructions for Tony :-)
Goto Internet Options in Internet Explorer, click the connections tab, and then click the Lan Settings button.
Check Automatically detect Settings.
Check Use Proxy Server.
Type in one of the address's below, and the port (NTL is port 8080).
The NTL Cambridge proxies are:
inktomi1-cam.server.ntl.com
inktomi2-cam.server.ntl.com
inktomi3-cam.server.ntl.com
inktomi4-cam.server.ntl.com
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I'm sitting pretty behind my smoothwall server, so no problems so far.