Online Policy Group Board Meeting Minutes: July 27, 2023

Meeting Minutes

  1. WelcomeandIntroductions

    Attending: James Hankie (new), Roger Klorese (continuing Executive Director /President), Stardust Doherty (continuing Secretary /Treasurer)

    Quorum achieved
  1. ApprovedAgenda unanimously
  2. Approved Bylaws unanimously (attached)
  3. Board Representation (accepted unanimously resignation of board member David Haney effective as of this meeting, other continuing board members unanimously confirmed, new member James Hankie unanimously elected)
  4. Finances
    ° FY2022-2023 Report (attached)
    ° Fundraising ($1,000 board donation pledged, fundraising letter for planned campaign) ° Approved Credit Union Resolution (attached)
  5. Online Services
    53 email domains
    172 email lists (144 for QueerNet, 21 for OPG, 7 for OPG administration, total not including email lists hosted on client domains)
    72 websites hosted
    48 domain registrations
    New project: Faerie Reliquary and Family Photo Archive
  6. NextMeeting: 12 noon Pacific time on Saturday, July13, 2024

Minutes recorded and approved by:

Stardust Doherty Secretary

On date: July 27,2023

(PDF of Minutes) (PDF of Financial Report) (PDF of Bylaws)

GivingTuesday – Count Us In

I know we’re all exhausted already by the commercial holiday season, and there’s more ahead. But one important part of the season is GivingTuesday and the chance to help keep organizations like ours, who depend completely on donations of funds (from people like you) and labor (from people like us) to deliver services, online and active.

You can, of course, donate at any time, using the directions here. But we have a special opportunity now, to raise matching funds from Facebook. (No comments right now about politics or privacy – while that would align with aspects of our mission, we also know that many people have accounts there, and besides, separating Internet billionaires from their money for a good cause is always appropriate…)

Here’s a link to our GivingTuesday fundraiser, which is eligible for matching funds. We know that money may be tight now, especially this year, but if you can, please make your money go further by giving through this tool.

Thanks, and we hope your days ahead are brighter.

Help OPG Put Every Penny to Work for Internet Freedom

This is far from the only request for support you’re receiving at this time of year. But there are two things that make this appeal from Online Policy Group (and its QueerNet Project) special. One: no other beneficiary is as effective at putting every penny you give to work for its services, not for overhead. And two: over the years, the way people use our services has changed in a way that makes a new and special appeal necessary for us to continue.

(NOTE: This will be a long message. Cutting to the chase: scroll toward the bottom of this message and make a contribution, or even better, sign up for a monthly donation.)

OPG employs no paid staff; every penny we raise goes toward the bills we pay to provide services and the equipment we use to run them. OK, one exception: the insurance we are required to carry as a business. And our services are supported solely by donations – no one is billed for the non-profit services we provide, and no one is turned away for lack of funds.

Here’s an accounting of our expenditures so far in 2017:

EXPENSE
$/month
PURPOSE
IO Cooperative - main server
125
power, net, rack space in CA
IO Cooperative - DNS host  38
virtual server in MN (so DNS works even if main server down)
RackSpace Jungle Disk  36
online encrypted cloud backup of email, lists, websites
Bank   3
fee for check processing
Tucows/OpenSRS 103
domain registrations and renewals



TOTAL
305
ANNUAL OPERATING EXPENSES: $3,660

We also had two additional expenses: equipment, including a replacement disk driver and the new server we are planning to put online in January ($6,217), which is a one-time cost, and our annual insurance ($815).

Our total expenses for the year were $10,686, including the purchase of our new server. But our total income was $9,064, requiring us to spend the majority of our savings to cover the gap.

Even worse, if you take the server purchase and the funding campaign for it out of the picture and focus on operating expenses and donations, our income was only $1,662 – or an operating deficit of $2,813.

…which brings us to why we have a special need at this time. The numbers speak for themselves: we cannot continue to go on with this expense rate and this donation rate.

When I started QueerNet (in 1991!) and we joined OPG to provide hosting services to a broader base (in 2001), we offered primarily discussion and announcement lists to individuals. We had a direct relationship as a service provider to over a hundred thousand users. Their one-time annual donations were significant. But the most consistent funding base was those people who registered for recurring monthly donations. Some gave $5 per month, and others more. These contributions gave us a predictable base.

As many discussion and announcement forums have migrated to bigger services – first Yahoo and Google Groups, and more recently, Facebook and Google+ – more of our work has been directed to organizations and projects, not only for list hosting, but for email, websites, and domains. We still have directly-hosted lists, but nowhere near as many as in the pre-Facebook era. So our appeals go to direct users but also to organizations, some of whom pass the ask along to their users, some others of whom donate at the organization level. But they have their own funding needs too, of course.

These groups and users come to OPG for the same reasons as ever: hosting services from a provider that will stand up for your speech and access rights, and won’t cave to discriminatory or inappropriate censorship requests. We offer the same protection as we did to the Swarthmore students who went public with the vulnerabilities of Diebold electronic voting machines in 2003 – going to court and winning. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Policy_Group_v._Diebold,_Inc.)

If you look at the numbers again, it’s clear that we need somewhere in the neighborhood of $4500 to provide continued services through 2018. (The increase reflects the power cost our new, much more powerful server – which should eliminate nearly all of the downtime that plagued us this year.)

WHAT DO YOUR DONATIONS MAKE POSSIBLE?

Looking forward, with the somewhat increased costs we expect for our much more powerful hardware:

  • $15 pays for a year of domain registration for a worthy project we host.
  • $35 pays for one month of daily backups for our websites, email, lists, and databases.
  • $60, or a recurring gift of $5 per month, pays for all of the network (IP) addresses used for our services.
  • $75 pays for our master DNS server to be maintained halfway across the country – so clients with other services outside our data center won’t lose access to them if we or our upstream provider have a serious interruption.
  • $210, or a recurring gift of $17.50 per month, pays the data center costs for our servers for two months.
  • $840, or a recurring gift of $70 per month, pays our insurance for the year.
  • $1,260, or a recurring gift of $105 per month, pays the data center costs for our servers for the full year.

And, of course, any amount you can give helps us meet our costs and continue to provide services both free of charge and free of censorship.

If you want to make a ONE-TIME donation to help us reach this goal, you can either give to our new GoFundMe campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/keep-opgqueernet-running-in-2018 or follow the one-time donation directions at http://www.onlinepolicy.org/donate

But being able to predict our available funds on an ongoing basis is very valuable to us, so if you can give a MONTHLY RECURRING DONATION, please sign up at http://www.onlinepolicy.org/donate

(The posted goal for the GoFundMe campaign is set at $5,000 to assure that we can cover fees assessed by GoFundMe. No fees are charged if you make your donation directly to us by check at the address listed at the web page linked above.)

Please give what you can to keep our services running through the upcoming year, with more consistent uptime, updated services… and the knowledge that your gift is being spent entirely on delivering open and free services – especially in the age when net neutrality is threatened.

For OPG:
Roger B.A. Klorese
Stardust Doherty

ACLU and LGBT Organizations File Lawsuit to Stop School Filtering

The American Civil Liberties Union and several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) organizations have filed a lawsuit against the Camdenton R-III School District for configuring web filtering software to block hundreds of non-sexual LGBT-supportive websites while permitting access to anti-LGBT websites. For more info, see http://www.aclu.org/lgbt-rights/pflag-v-camdenton-r-iii-school-district.

Shutdown of Blogging Site Sparks Dispute

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/shutdown-of-blogging-site-sparks-dispute/?hp

By STEVE LOHR

A free blogging site, Blogetery.com, went dark less than two weeks ago, and its disappearance is stirring controversy about the obligations of Internet services and threats to free speech on the Web.

Visitors to Blogetery, which says it housed 73,000 blogs, now find a page that is blank except for a brief message saying “our server was terminated without any notification or explanation.” It directs browsers to a forum on another site, where a message posted on July 14 by “AffiliatePlex” described the abrupt termination by BurstNet Technologies, a Web hosting company in Scranton, Pa., saying it was done at the request of unnamed “law enforcement officials.”

BurstNet said in a statement on Monday that it had shut down Blogetery after the F.B.I informed it that the site included “a link to terrorist material,” including bomb-making instructions and an Al Qaeda list of Americans targeted for assassination. CNet News reported Monday that the material was connected to a new Al Qaeda recruitment magazine.

AffiliatePlex, the name on the forum posting, is also the name of an Internet marketing company in Toronto. It lists Blogetery as one of its services, along with marketing tools like a “Facebook cloaking script,” which its site describes as a way to sneak prohibited ads past Facebook’s human reviewers.

In an interview on Tuesday, Alexander Yusupov, who said he was the owner and sole employee of AffiliatePlex, said that he returned to Toronto from a weekend camping trip on July 12 and found BurstNet had pulled the plug on Blogetery.

Mr. Yusupov said the hosting company did not show him any law enforcement documentation or tell him where the terrorist material appeared on his site. “They just took it down,” he said.

BurstNet’s chief technology officer, Joe Marr, said in an interview on Tuesday that the Blogetery site had received five previous notifications in the last six months of improper material on its blogs. The previous ones were for links to copyrighted music, movies and software. Standard practice for BurstNet, he said, is to notify a site about illegal content, send a second warning after 24 hours, and disconnect the servers after 48 hours. Nearly all such issues are resolved within 24 hours, he said.

But not for Blogetery, Mr. Marr said. Last April, the blogging site was down for more than four days after it failed to address warnings.

The F.B.I., he said, did not order BurstNet to shut down the site. It did so, Mr. Marr said, because of this incident and Mr. Yusupov’s past troubles. “This isn’t the first time for him,” he said.

Mr. Yusupov said that he had responded to previous warnings from BurstNet “almost always within 24 hours.”

John Morris, general counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that while he did not know the details of the case, the shutdown does “encapsulate the fragility of free speech on the Internet” and its dependence on the behavior of private companies.

And Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said the “tragedy is that thousands of blogs will be taken offline for no good reason.”

Mr. Yusupov said he had backed up some of the blogging site’s data, but not all. And he said he was trying to negotiate with BurstNet to get the data so he could restart the blogging site with another hosting service. “This has been a big hassle for me,” he said.

Mr. Marr of BurstNet said the Blogetery server did “not get a lot of use or traffic,” suggesting the number of active users of the free blogging site was probably a tiny fraction of the 73,000 Blogetery claimed.

BurstNet, Mr. Marr said, does not screen the material on the servers it leases to customers, so it was unaware that the shutdown might put some bloggers in the dark. “We extend our sympathies and apologies to them,” he said.

iBooks Naughty Word Filter Doesn’t Let You Say “Sperm”

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/04/ibooks-censortron-do.html

iBooks naughty word filter doesn’t let you say “sperm”

Rob Beschizza at 1:16 PM April 4, 2010

iBooks Blocks Sperm

Dean spotted that bowdlerization is afoot in the iPad’s bookstore’s selection of classic literature! This includes obvious candidates such as a certain Joseph Conrad classic.

But … sperm?

US Tech Coalition Calls for New Online Privacy Law

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8595775.stm

Changes urged to US privacy law
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

US technology firms and privacy groups have called for an overhaul of privacy laws, saying the government has too much access to private online data.

Google, eBay and others have launched the Digital Due Process coalition, seeking to update the 1986 privacy act, passed before internet usage exploded.

It calls for warrants to be issued before e-mails and texts are handed over to law enforcement agencies.

It seeks more protection of data stored online and mobile tracking information.

Outdated law

The coalition is looking to re-write the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 that governs what kinds of private digital information the government has access to and how they may obtain it.

“It is not surprising that a law written in 1986 didn’t foresee the privacy protections we need some 25 years later,” Richard Salgado, Google’s senior counsel for law enforcement and information security told BBC News.

The coalition – which includes over 30 members drawn from the worlds of industry, privacy and academia – said the ECPA is “a patchwork of confusing standards that have been interpreted inconsistently by the courts”.

For example, law enforcement agencies can get access to some email information, instant messages, and other data stored online through simple subpoenas, not court-ordered warrants.

The coalition has recommended that a warrant be required before internet providers must hand over the online information – just as a warrant is required for a physical search of a suspect’s computer or filing cabinets.

It wants similar protection before mobile carriers turn over tracking information about customers.

It also want courts to ensure any real-time information like texts and instant messages are relevant to an investigation.

“The law needs to be clear that the same standard applies to email and documents stored with a service provider, while at the same time be flexible enough to meet law enforcement needs,” said Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Dialogue

Members of the coalition said that had had discussions with the White House, the FBI and the justice and commerce departments.

They acknowledged that law enforcement agencies were likely to resist any change and a long debate was almost certain before Congress would act.

“We are not expecting that these will be enacted this year, but it’s time to begin the dialogue,” the CDT’s Mr Dempsey told reporters.

Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he planned to hold hearings on “much-needed updates” to the US privacy act.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/8595775.stm

Published: 2010/03/31 04:58:53 GMT

© BBC MMX