December

spamcop and new accounts

As many of you have discovered, spamcop has been blocking us from time to time. Spamcop is a very aggressive blocklist service which some ISPs use to block servers which are sending spam. Riseup uses several blocklists too, but we use ones which are more reasonable.

Recently, a few scam artists have successfully created riseup.net accounts. The amount of scam email they send is very small, and we shut down their accounts right away, but we still get blocked for at least 24 hours.

Because of this, we have become much more careful in what accounts we approve. If an account request is vague or has a short description, we typically reject the request to be safe. If you have friends who have not been able to get riseup.net mail accounts lately, tell them to try again, and be more specific under the description of their political work. We encourage users to delete this information once their account is approved.

Also, if your ISP is using spamcop, tell them to stop. In Spamcop’s own words, the Spamcop blocklist “should not be used in a production environment where legitimate email must be delivered.”

For more information on how spamcop is harmful (and a sample letter to your ISP), see

http://help.riseup.net/spamcop http://jhoward.fastmail.fm/spamcop.html

the hosting working group

For many years riseup.net has provided earnest but limited web site hosting to organizations, manually setting up hosting accounts. At long last, we now have a much more enhanced hosting setup: it is more secure, more reliable, has more capacity, and is mostly automated.

Unfortunately, now that we are hosting web sites again, we have been flooded with more requests than we have labor to handle.

If you are interesting in joining the hosting working group and would like to help us with these requests, please contact us at collective@riseup.net.

We are looking for people who:

-> have an autonomist/horizontalist political perspective (ie anarchist, autonomous marxist, etc).

-> are actively involved in local struggles.

-> are somewhat familiar with common web hosting concepts like DNS, SFTP, HTML, PHP, etc.

-> are interested in helping create a safer space for women, queer and trans folk, and people of color to work with technology.

In particular, if you have experience maintaining drupal websites, we would love to hear from you.

mail account reminders

There are several very common viruses which pretend to come from riseup.net “staff” (or the staff of whatever the mail domain happens to be). These viruses threaten to close your account unless you take immediate action by opening the attachment (and thereby infecting your computer). Don’t be fooled! We will never ever send you an email with an attachment. See http://help.riseup.net/virus

The mail in your “Sent” folder will be automatically deleted after 3 months. If you want to keep this mail, see http://help.riseup.net/special-folders for more information.

mutual aid

People often have the false impression that riseup.net is a non-profit with staff and outside funding.

The reality is that we are a very small collective running on a shoestring budget. To support our basic services, all of the money comes from small donations from users like you. Lately, however, donations have dropped off dramatically even as we continue to expand our services.

Perhaps this is because we have not written a newsletter in a long while, or perhaps it is because of all the other urgent appeals for money.

Whatever the reason for the drop off in donations, we need you to start kicking down for riseup.net. We have invested an incredible amount of volunteer time in creating a secure, alternative, and reliable infrastructure. All that we ask of our users is that you donate enough to cover the minimal expenses required to keep the services running. It’s really easy to donate and your small donation is a huge help to us.

Please see http://riseup.net/donate for information on how to donate.

Thank you, The Riseup Collective