Slashdot Mirror

http://www.communitycolo.net/

Just send an application and a computer. There are multiple location sites around the US. You maintain the server software yourself if you're up to the task. Considering you claim to be writing an operating system I would hope you are capable.

Community Colocation Project is part of the Online Policy Group which provides Free (as in speech AND beer) hosting to any individual or non profit entity. They're the peoeple who fought Diebold, refuse to work with unacceptable takedown notices, and in general, are here to host these kinds of sites.

Hi, everyone! I'm David, the author of IM Smarter. I'm glad that people are interested enough in the service to post about it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post this earlier, as I was in a (very long) meeting with some folks from the Chicago Beck Foundation to discuss different ways to promote literacy in the third world.

Anyhow, I'm here now, and I'd like to respond to some of the higher-order points that people have made. I think that it's correct that trust is a big issue here. This is part of the reason why we tried to create a privacy policy that would clearly hold your private data as sacred to us. This is also why we took the unusual step of making a privacy promise. The comments in this forum make it clear that we didn't do a good enough job in making it clear that your private data is yours alone. We would be delighted to work, with your constructive feedback, on a privacy policy that does a better job making it clear that your chats are for your eyes only. I actually did ask the EFF to edit and review my privacy policy, but they haven't set up a program for doing that. If any of you know of a consumer-rights organization that would be interested in working with a company on drafting a consumer-focused privacy policy, please do let me know about them.

Let me be very clear here: we will not scrape the content of your IM chats to deliver advertising to you. This is not GMail. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties. We are here to use your information for you, not against you. If that makes it harder for me to rake in the big bucks as quickly, so be it. I am here to protect your privacy and improve your IM. (The last time I was on Slashdot, it was because my non-profit had successfully sued Diebold in federal court for infringing free speech rights. We won - thank you EFF!)

There was some concern that our intended deployment of Premium features would suddenly disable currently-available features. This is not true. There are a suite of kickass *new* features planned for Premium - the services that are currently offered as Free will continue to be offered without cost throughout the service's lifetime.

If you have any other questions or concerns about the service, I'd be happy to hear about them. Having launched less than two weeks age we frankly weren't ready for Slashdot with regards to our privacy messaging or site design (which, yes, totally blows but should be fixed in the next week or two). We've got a lot of great features yet to deploy - as I said on the Engadget interview, logging is really only the tip of the iceberg. Logging isn't the *point*. The point is having an agent who can work on your behalf to keep you in the loop about things you want to know about and who can keep away messages you don't want brought to you (at the moment because you're busy, or ever).

This is my baby, the fruit of my labors of a year. I realize my baby's pretty ugly and infantile right now, but my metric for going out of private beta was to launch at the point when I could imagine that at least one random person out there on the Internet could plausibly find the service interesting enough to use on a regular basis. I think we're at that point now, albeit not at the point where we're the service "everyone obviously should use". The service continues to make progress on a regular basis. I can only hope and pray that people will be patient with me as it creaks onwards towards becoming a great, genuinely useful service for people.

Have a great Saturday night, everyone.

Peace,
David E. Weekly

So you can't pull off the non-profit thing, big deal, maybe its not your thing but it does not follow that its not possible to do such a thing. They are doing it now very sucessfully.

I recommend talking to CCCP.
I've had a few e-mail exchanges with the guys that run it, they really do answer
all inquiries and are very friendly. It's not $20k but maybe they can help out somehow.

I'd like to take this moment to publically thank, congratulate, and otherwise embarass my illustrious former roommate, David Weekly. Alot of people talk about problems, like how alot of people talk about "Gee, how tragic is Zero Tolerance for all these kids, oh look, another one just got expelled for learning the word 'Knife'!"

Most people don't do anything. David Weekly did.

He stepped up, fought back against Diebold, and brought justice -- not just for himself (he's the founder of the California Community Colocation Project, so the ISP takedown notices directly affected him), not just for the four college kids attacked by Diebold, but for all of us here and for everybody with a stake in the perceived integrity of the American vote.

That's some damn fine work, David. Thanks! And thanks to everyone at EFF and OPG who fought this battle with him too!

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

You host at the California Community Colocation Project

We host quite a few open source projects which require their own dedicated hardware/resources/etc. (groups include penguinppc, musicbrainz, kaffe, and many others)

-davidu

Some large projects that are too complex to host on SourceForce move to California Community Colo Project. The MusicBrainz project actually raised enough money for two servers.

Assuming you are non-profit, you might try:

Community Colo in the bay area. They host non-profit servers for free, or by reasonable donation. I think there was a /. story about them in the past.

-Sean

I've been considering something similar, just for the experience. Specifically: On the baylisa mailing list, David Weekly noted that he'd "founded the California Community Colocation Project, a 501c3 non-profit whose mission it is to provide virtual and colocated Internet access for individuals and non-profits. ... If you'd like to help, we'd love your help! You can find out more about us at http://CommunityColo.net/"

They call themselves CCCP ... a pun intended or an early April fools joke?

And their web site: Red background with Yellow letters. If not a visual pun, it shows poor color choice in terms of readability. If their web site is poorly designed, what else is in questionable shape?