From the “One More Reason To Hate Microsoft” dept.: For my other site, I use a Hotmail account so I can get my email from work as well as at home. Hotmail is now an MSN service, so it runs Microsoft’s user authentication and profile scheme, Passport. Well, guess what. Passport seems to be down right now, so I can’t get my mail.

Passport has recently been upgraded to .NET, and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with it. I know that when Microsoft upgraded their support knowledgebase, the results were, ahem, memorable. It’s really frustrating when you’re trying to diagnose a big problem and you keep getting “Content Not Available” messages for every document you try to open. But Microsoft will probably get away with it. After all, they don’t have to convince users to switch to .NET, they only have to convince content providers. And hell, if they don’t convince them, they’ll just buy ‘em.