March

Two Lovebirds

We are pleased to announce that Gadfly Petrel and Arara got married in the merry merry month of February! We wish them all the best and hope their feathers will be always soft, their nest warm, and that they make beautiful migratory patterns together.

Hey, people in the U.S.!

Listen up! There is something rotten going on in the House and Senate, a bill was filed to make it so Riseup would be required to keep logs of all your activity for the purposes of aiding law enforcement! This sucks and we need your help to make this go away because even those Democrats are supporting it and if this passes things are just going to get worse.

Call some people and get angry! We are pessimistic it will do anything too, but we must try whatever we can, so how about it, lets try calling them up and chewing them out. Calling up your Senator(s) (https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm) and Representatives (https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml) and tell them that this bill is terrible and about as practical as asking people to keep a filing cabinet full of photographs of every footprint that shows up their garden. Or just give them a piece of your mind, whatever makes you feel better. Please do something before it’s too late!

And another link for people in the USA—the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization Riseup loves and trusts, has published a (US-focused) Surveillance Self-Defense site at https://ssd.eff.org/. Check it out!

Answering a question

Last month we asked you all to send in questions and ideas for riseup and the world of technology. We got lots of lovely responses (and a few irate ones). Some of them were great ideas we also dream about, some of them were brand new shiny thoughts, and some were questions about how and why and what riseup does. We’re going to be answering some of them in this newsletter. If you sent in a question about something that is broken, please resend that as a help ticket (https://user.riseup.net/forms.) If you have come up with any new dreams, ideas, or questions for riseup, you can email pigeon@riseup.net. So, here we go…

Question: I am concerned that riseup.net emails will not carry attachments. We often have cases that have to be carried and they are always rejected. Even what we consider a small attachment can’t be carried to our network.

Response: The maximum email size is restricted to 300k, which we consider generously high. There are many reasons to limit the size of list email. Large attachments can be very costly for us. We have a lot of bandwidth, but we pay for what we use. For example, suppose you sent a 1 meg PDF flyer as an attachment to a list with 100 subscribers. All you have to upload is the 1 meg file, but our humble little server then must send out 100 megs. Also, we have to archive the attachment and keep backups of it forever. As long as message size is small, this is manageable.

The good news is that large attachments are not needed because you can create a “shared web space.” Shared web spaces allow a list subscriber to upload a file using their web browser. When you send out an email, include the URL of the file in the shared web space (an example URL might be lists.riseup.net/www/d_read/newsletter/readme.txt). Other subscribers can then download the file using their web browser.

Want to know more geeky details? Info at https://help.riseup.net/lists/admin/faq/#what_is_the_maximum_size_for_list_email

Hey, student groups!

Sunbird recently flew to a university because a student group said “Riseup, send a bird to talk with us and we’ll give you some money, because our university has money for speakers.” If you go to such a university, and would like to hang out with a riseup bird and hear us squawk about responsible technology, net surveillance, free software, how to start a radical tech collective, etc, drop us a line. We might not be able to come right away, as we are busy birds who care about the environment, but we can try to make it work (maybe there is already a riseup bird living in a tree near you!) It seems like a great way to transfer money from the academic-industrial complex to the movement. Send an email to collective AT riseup DOT net.

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The economy is crumbling. Maybe some states will be falling soon, too. Maybe the time has come to invest in some autonomous technology structures. https://riseup.net/donate